During the past week Mr. Elmer had resigned his position in the bank, sold the dear little house which had been a home to him and his wife ever since they were married, and in which their children had been born, and with a heavy heart made the preparations for departure.

With the willing aid of kind neighbors Mrs. Elmer had packed what furniture they were to take with them, and it had been sent to Bangor.  Mark and Ruth had not left school until Friday, and had been made young lions of all the week by the other children.  To all of her girl friends Ruth had promised to write every single thing that happened, and Mark had promised so many alligator teeth, and other trophies of the chase, that, if he kept all his promises, there would be a decided advance in the value of Florida curiosities that winter.

As the little house was stripped of all its furniture, except some few things that had been sold with it, they were all to go to Dr. Wing’s to sleep that night, and Mrs. Wing had almost felt hurt that they would not take tea with her; but both Mr. and Mrs. Elmer wanted to take this last meal in their own home, and persuaded her to let them have their way.  The good woman must have sent over most of the supper she had intended them to eat with her, and this, together with the good things sent in by other neighbors, so loaded the table that Mark declared it looked like a regular surprise-party supper.

A surprise-party it proved to be, sure enough, for early in the evening neighbors and friends began to drop in to say good-bye, until the lower rooms of the little house were filled.  As the chairs were all gone, they sat on trunks, boxes, and on the kitchen table, or stood up.

Mark and Ruth had their own party, too, right in among the grown people; for most of the boys and girls of the village had come with their parents to say good-bye, and many of them had brought little gifts that they urged the young Elmers to take with them as keepsakes.  Of all these none pleased Ruth so much as the album, filled with the pictures of her school-girl friends, that Edna May brought her.

Edna was the adopted daughter of Captain Bill May, who had brought her home from one of his voyages when she was a little baby, and placed her in his wife’s arms, saying that she was a bit of flotsam and jetsam that belonged to him by right of salvage.  His ship had been in a Southern port when a woman, with this child in her arms, had fallen from a pier into the river.  Springing into the water after them, Captain May had succeeded in saving the child, but the mother was drowned.  As nothing could be learned of its history, and as nobody claimed it, Captain May brought the baby home, and she was baptized Edna May.  She was now fourteen years old, and Ruth Elmer’s most intimate friend, and the first picture in the album was a good photograph of herself, taken in Bangor.  The others were only tin-types taken in the neighboring town of Skowhegan; but Ruth thought them all beautiful.