Those of you who live where you can always look out on pleasant places, or who can travel at will into them, may find it hard to understand how wearisome and stupid it grows to be always in one room with an encompassing sky-line of roof-tops and chimneys, or may fail to sound the full depths of wonder and delight over the ride that Ward C took that memorable day.

The engineer pointed out everything—­meadows full of flowers, trees full of birds, gardens new planted, and corn-fields guarded by scarecrows.  She slowed up at the barnyards that the children might hear the crowing cocks and clucking hens with their new-hatched broods, and see the neighboring pastures with their flocks of sheep and tiny lambs.

“A ken them weel—­hoo the wee creepits bleeted hame i’ Aberdeen!” shouted Sandy, bleeting for the whole pastureful.

And when they came to the smallest of mountain brooks the engineer followed it, down, down, until it had grown into a stream with cowslipped banks; and on and on until it had grown into a river with little boats and sandy shore and leaping fish.  Here the engineer stopped the train; and every one who wanted to—­and there were none who did not—­went paddling; and some went splashing about just as if they could swim.

Back in the “special,” they climbed a hilltop, slowly, so that the engineer could point out each farm and pasture and stream in miniature that they had seen close by.

“That’s the wonder of a hilltop,” she explained; “you can see everything neighboring each other.”  And when they reached the crest she clapped her hands.  “Oh, children dear, wouldn’t it be beautiful to build a house on a hilltop just like this to live in always!”

Afterward they rode into deep woods, where the sunlight came down through the trees like splashes of gold; and here the engineer suggested they should have a picnic.

As Margaret MacLean stepped out into the hall to look up the dinner-trays she met the House Surgeon.

“Dreading it as much as usual?” he asked, in the teasing, big-brother tone; but he looked at her in quite another way.

She laughed.  “I’m hoping it isn’t going to be as bad as the time before—­and the time before that—­and the time before that.”  She pushed back some moist curls that had slipped out from under her cap—­engineering was hard work—­and the little-girl look came into her face.  She looked up mischievously at the House Surgeon.  “You couldn’t possibly guess what I’ve been doing all morning.”

The House Surgeon wrinkled his forehead in his most professional manner.  “Precautionary disinfecting?”

Margaret MacLean laughed again.  “That’s an awfully good guess, but it’s wrong.  I’ve been administering antitoxin for trusteria.”

In spite of her gay assurance before the House Surgeon, however, it was rather a sober nurse in charge of Ward C who sat down that afternoon with a book of faery-tales on her knee open to the story of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”  As for Ward C, it was supremely happy; its beloved “Miss Peggie” was on duty for the afternoon with the favorite book for company; moreover, no one had discovered as yet that this was Trustee Day and that the trustees themselves were already near at hand.