She watched us out of sight.  As soon as we had turned a corner, Phil looked ruefully into Elsie’s empty cup.  “If I had known she was going to give us the milk and pie, I wouldn’t have bought the buns,” he said.  “We haven’t made much headway, and it gets dark so soon, these days.  I’m afraid the feather fooled us about the way to go.”

We wandered on and on all the rest of that long afternoon, sometimes playing before every door, and sometimes walking blocks before stopping for a performance.  Phil’s new shoes tired his feet until he could scarcely drag them, and little Elsie’s lips were blue with cold.  At last when the music-box struck up “Home, Sweet Home” for what seemed the ten hundreth time, her voice quavered through the first line and stopped short with a sob.

“Oh, Phil, I’m getting tireder and tireder!  Can’t you make that box skip that song?” she begged.  “If I hear it another time I just can’t stand it!  I’ll have to turn around and go back home.”

Phil glanced anxiously at the clouded sky.  The sun was so low it was hidden by the tall buildings, and the darkness was coming on rapidly.

“Well, come along!” he said, impatiently.  “I s’pose I’ll have to take you home, cry-baby, but I’m not going in myself.  We haven’t any money at all, hardly; not enough to take me even a tweety, weenty part of the way to that place I’m going to, let alone enough to buy you that doll.  But that’s the way with girls.  They always spoil everything.”

[Illustration:  “ALL WENT WELL UNTIL WE REACHED AN ALLEY CROSSING.”]

Little Elsie rubbed her sleeve across her eyes and swallowed hard.  “I wouldn’t ask to go back, brother, really and truly I wouldn’t, but I’m so cold and mizzible I feel most like I’m going to be sick.”

Phil looked at her little bare red hands and tear-stained face, and said, gruffly, “Well, then, get on the wheelbarrow.  You can sit on the music-box and hold Dago in your lap, and I’ll wheel you a piece until you get rested.”

Elsie very willingly climbed up and took me in her lap.  It was hard work for Phil.  He grew red in the face, and his arms ached, but he kept bravely on, although he was out of breath from the hard pushing.  All went well until we reached an alley crossing.  Phil, whose attention was all on the wheel of his barrow, which he was trying to steer safely between the cobblestones, did not see a long string of geese waddling down the alley on their way home from the commons, where they had been feeding all day.  They came silently along in an awkward, wavering line, as quietly as a procession of web-footed ghosts, until they were almost upon us.  Then the leader shot out his wings with a hoarse cry, every goose in the procession followed his example, and with a rush they flapped past us, half running, half flying.  It was done with such startling suddenness that it caused a general upsetting of our party.  Phil veered to one side, and over we went in a heap, music-box,