‘Gretchen is not here in this place,’ he said mournfully, with a shake of his head.  ’She couldn’t rest there a moment, for she liked everything beautiful and bright, and this is like the Potter’s field.  But we’ll put up a monument for her, and make the place attractive; and by and by, when she is tired of wandering about, she may come back and rest when she sees what we have done, and knows that we have been here.  We will buy that house too, he said, as he walked away from the lonely grave; and the next day Harold found the owner of the place and commenced negotiations for the house, which soon changed hands and became the property of Arthur.

Just what he meant to do with it he did not know, until Jerrie suggested that he should make it an asylum for homeless children, who should receive the kindest and tenderest care from competent and trustworthy nurses, hired for the purpose.

‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ Arthur said, ’and will call it “The Gretchen Home.”  Maybe she will come there some time, and know what I have done.’

This idea once in his mind, Arthur never let go of it until the house was fitted up with school-rooms and dormitories, with the little white beds and chairs suggestive of the little ones rescued from want and misery and placed in the Gretchen home until it would hold no more.  The general supervision of this home was placed in the hands of the English rector, the Rev. James Dennis, whose many acts of kindness and humanity among the poor had won for him the sobriquet of St. James, and with whom the interests of the children were safe as with a loving father.

‘There is money enough—­money enough,’ said Arthur, when giving his instructions to the matron, a good-natured woman, who, he knew, would never abuse a child.  ’Money enough; to give them something besides bread and water for breakfast, and mush and molasses for supper.  Children like cookies and custard pie, and if there comes a circus to town let them go once in a while; it won’t hurt them to see a little of the world.’

Frau Hirch looked at him in some surprise, but promised compliance with his wishes; and when in the middle of December he left Wiesbaden for Italy he had the satisfaction of knowing that the inmates of the Gretchen home were enjoying a bill of fare not common in institutions of the kind.

Another odd fancy had entered his brain, upon which he acted with his usual promptness.  Every child not known to have been baptized, was to be christened with a new name, either Gretchen, or Jerrie, or Maude or Arthur, or Harold, or Frank.

‘Suppose you have Tom, and Ann Eliza, and Hilly,’ Jerrie suggested, and after a little demur Arthur consented, and the names of Tom, and Ann Eliza, and Billy were added to the list, which, in the course of time, created some little confusion in the Gretchen home, where Jerries, and Maudes, and Harolds, and Arthurs abounded in great profusion, these being the favorites of the children, who in most instances were allowed to choose for themselves.