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badly frosted, and his usually thin face was swollen past recognition. As he had assured us, on our first coming, that he wished to be a "sister" to us, we put him in the warmest corner.

Our fifteen-mile-off neighbor, the young teacher at the next camp, stepped in one evening to ask if we could give him a bed for the night. He had been trying all day to get to his camp, and had consumed four hours in traveling one mile and a half. His plucky little Indian pony dragged the wagon through the heavy drifts by main force, the wheels not turning, and the horse waddling where he could not walk. The faithful creature was quite exhausted. A sheet of ice inclosed his nose, and an icicle more than a foot long hung from it. This gentle animal, during the blizzard of the twelfth, not only broke his halter, but pawed down a thick stabledoor, with hinges a foot long. His master went out into the storm to see how he was faring. He spent two hours looking for him, though he was only a few yards away. When found, he was a mass of ice, his eyes nearly closed by it, and a giant icicle hanging from his nose. Mr. Warner's own eyelashes froze every time he winked, and he had to hold his hand to his face and send the hot breath up to them before he could open them again. We hear that this is common enough in Dakota, but Lilia and I don't stay out long enough to wink.

MY REAL ESTATE

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

Most of us cherish a more or less concealed desire to own some one special object just beyond our financial reach. Perhaps you have always wanted a steam yacht; your neighbor confessed to me the other night that from boyhood he had longed to possess a locomotive. "What a king among pets that would be!" he exclaimed; then laughed, shamefacedly, to assure me that he was joking. But I had seen the gleam in his eyes, and knew he meant it. I have a friend whose modest salary barely suffices for the support of the family; and I happen to know that his dearest ambition for years has been to own a Kelmscott Chaucer. If the prices for the output of that celebrated press continue to fall, as they have fallen in recent auctions, his wish may yet be gratified. With this preamble, let me confess that my pet desire has long been to possess a piece of real estate; and that I am now actually a real-estate owner — in an odd kind

of way.

This is how it happened. At the foot of a certain slope of rough pasture-land, in one of the southern counties of Maine, is a brook where I often fished when a boy. So familiar to me are its banks, that on sleepless nights I have more than once fished the stream, in memory, for a mile or more, recalling every rapid, pool, and mimic cascade, and pausing now and then to

take a trout from the spots where in the old days I was surest of success. My father was my chosen companion for these little fishing excursions; and when at last we had wound up our lines, and shouldered or thrown away our rods (cut from some alders at the brookside), we made our way wearily but happily back, up the rising ground, through tangled thickets of pine and juniper and sweet-fern, fragrant in the hot forenoon sunshine, toward the old farmhouse, a mile away.

Half-way to the house, the path brought us to a huge pine, some six feet in diameter, standing by itself on a grassy hillock of the pasture. Here, in the grateful shade of the far-spreading green boughs, with their soft music above us, we always threw ourselves down on the grass and rested before resuming our journey homeward. It is many years since that dear and gentle comrade passed from my sight; but at long intervals I find time to fish the little trout-stream, to inhale the fragrance of the sweet-fern, and to pause under the old pine and listen to its songs of eternity.

Not long ago I heard that the owner of the pasture had decided to sell that tree to a lumber firm. My resolve was quickly taken. Would he accept - I named a small sum — and leave the tree standing, as my sole property? Well, he "reckoned he would. 'T was more 'n the lumber company offered." The money was paid down and the deed was solemnly drawn up, signed, sealed, and passed. The pine tree was, and is, my own, and constitutes my sole "real" possession. Just what my legal rights are in the premises, I am sure I do not know. Not an inch of the surrounding land is mine only the tree, above and below ground: the great,

knotty trunk; the far-spreading, singing boughs, tasseled with green, and the strong roots, an inverted tree underground.

Tenants I have, a-plenty. Never yet, I believe, have I looked up into the shining galleries and sun-lighted halls of my building not made with hands, but I have caught glimpses of a flitting wing, or heard a low, sweet warble from some hidden chamber high up in the topmost stories. Even in winter, a sable-plumed visitor pauses occasionally on its lofty window-ledges, ere he utters a single, startled "Caw!" and sails away across the snowy pasture, to a remoter covert beyond the marsh. Or, perchance, the stranger is decked in colors of the December sky and earth. He raises his saucy crest, and, by way of leaving his visiting-card, screams at me, "Jay! Jay!" To-day a flock of snow-birds, cloud-colored and wintry, drift through the lower branches like wind-swept leaves from the neighboring oak.

As darkness falls, the birds nestle in shadowed nooks, or seek more sheltered resting-places for their little feet. Then enters another tenant, even more constant than they. It is the night wind; and through the long hours when the moonlight is steel-bright on the crisp snow, and the stars are alight above, the sleepless wind murmurs and chants its surf-songs in the swaying branches, the mysterious depths of the great pine.

MY CHILDREN

BY JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND

HAVE you seen Annie and Kitty,
Two merry children of mine?
All that is winning and pretty
Their little persons combine.

Annie is kissing and clinging
Dozens of times in a day
Chattering, laughing, and singing,
Romping, and running away.

Annie knows all of her neighbors,

Dainty and dirty alike—

Learns all their talk, and, "Be jabers," Says she "adores little Mike!"

Annie goes mad for a flower,
Eager to pluck and destroy;
Cuts paper dolls by the hour;
Always her model - a boy!

Annie is full of her fancies,
Tells most remarkable lies
(Innocent little romances),
Startling in one of her size.

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