The Squire was sitting at his old cherry desk.  He turned around and looked at Patience sharply from under his shaggy, overhanging brows.

Then he fumbled in his pocket and brought something out—­it was the sixpence.  Then he began talking.  Patience could not have told what he said.  Her mind was entirely full of what she had to say.  Somehow she stammered out the story:  how she had been afraid to go to Nancy Gookin’s, and how she had lost the sixpence her uncle had given her, and how Martha had said she told a fib.  Patience trembled and gasped out the words, and curtesied, once in a while, when the Squire said something.

“Come here,” said he, when he had sat for a minute or two, taking in the facts of the case.

To Patience’s utter astonishment, Squire Bean was laughing, and holding out the sixpence.

“Have you got the palm-leaf string?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Patience, curtesying.

“Well, you may take this home, and put in the palm-leaf string, and use it for a marker in your book—­but don’t you spend it again.”

“No, sir.”  Patience curtesied again.

“You did very wrong to spend it, very wrong.  Those sixpences are not given to you to spend.  But I will overlook it this once.”

The Squire extended the sixpence.  Patience took it, with another dip of her little skirt.  Then he turned around to his desk.

Patience waited a few minutes.  She did not know whether she was dismissed or not.  Finally the Squire begun to add aloud:  “Five and five are ten,” he said, “ought, and carry the one.”

He was adding a bill.  Then Patience stole out softly.  Mrs. Squire Bean was waiting in the kitchen.  She gave her a great piece of plum-cake and kissed her.

“He didn’t hurt you any, did he?” said she.

“No, ma’am,” said Patience, looking with a bewildered smile at the sixpence.

That night she tied in the palm-leaf strand again, and she put the sixpence in her Geography-book, and she kept it so safely all her life that her great-grandchildren have seen it.

A PLAIN CASE.

Willy had his own little bag packed—­indeed it had been packed for three whole days—­and now he stood gripping it tightly in one hand, and a small yellow cane which was the pride of his heart in the other.  Willy had a little harmless, childish dandyism about him which his mother rather encouraged.  “I’d rather he’d be this way than the other,” she said when people were inclined to smile at his little fussy habits.  “It won’t hurt him any to be nice and particular, if he doesn’t get conceited.”

Willy looked very dainty and sweet and gentle as he stood in the door this morning.  His straight fair hair was brushed very smooth, his white straw hat with its blue ribbon was set on exactly, there was not a speck on his best blue suit.

“Willy looks as if he had just come out of the band-box,” Grandma had said.  But she did not have time to admire him long; she was not nearly ready herself.  Grandma was always in a hurry at the last moment.  Now she had to pack her big valise, brush Grandpa’s hair, put on his “dicky” and cravat, and adjust her own bonnet and shawl.