When he returned to the door-step he was greeted with the grateful intelligence that he might stay a bit and see how he got along as an errand-boy if he liked; and, of course, liking, he started in at once upon his new office.

That was the beginning.  It gave him occupation and, food, but scarcely more than that at first.  He had no time for dreaming now, but often when he had a brief moment to himself would take out of his pocket the piece of chalk with which he marked the trunks he carried, and sketch with it upon some rough box-lid or other the picture of a face or form which he saw in his fancy; so that after a time he was known among the men as “the artist feller,” and grew to have quite a little reputation among them.

How the rest came about even Larry himself found it hard to tell.  But by and by he was drawing with pencil and pen, and selling his sketches for what he could get, buying now a brush and then some paints with the scanty proceeds, and working upon his bits of canvas with all the ardor of a Raphael himself.

A man sat before an easel in a crowded studio one day, give the last touch to a painting that stood before him.  It pictured the figure of a lad, ragged and forlorn, lying asleep beneath some sheltering trees.  At first that seems all there was to be seen upon the canvas; but if one looked closer one was able to discover another figure amid the vaporous, soft glooms of the place.  It grew ever more distinct, until one had no difficulty in distinguishing the form of a maiden, fair and frail as a dream.  She was bending over the slumbering body of the boy, as if to arouse him to life by the whispered words she was breathing against his cheek.

The artist scrawled his signature in the corner of his completed work and set the canvas in its frame, and then stood before it, scrutinizing it closely.

“’The Waking Soul!’—­I wonder if that is a good name for it?” murmured he to himself.  And then, after a moment, he said to the pictured lad,—­

“Well, Larry, little fellow, the dream’s come true; and here we are, you and I,—­you, Larry, and I, Lawrence,—­with the ’wish grown strong to an endeavor, and the endeavor to an achievement.’  Are you glad, Boy?”

BETTY’S BY-AND-BY.

  “’One, two, three! 
  The humble-bee! 
  The rooster crows,
  And away she goes!’”

And down from the low railing of the piazza jumped Betty into the soft heap of new-mown grass that seemed to have been especially placed where it could tempt her and make her forget—­or, at least, “not remember”—­that she was wanted indoors to help amuse the baby for an hour.

It was a hot summer day, and Betty had been running and jumping and skipping and prancing all the morning, so she was now rather tired; and after she had jumped from the piazza-rail into the heap of grass she did not hop up nimbly at once, but lay quite still, burying her face in the sweet-smelling hay and fragrant clover, feeling very comfortable and contented.