wise. Excitable, enthusiastic, very tender-hearted, she was always discovering crying wrongs and tragedies; and though in all the years she had been bringing them hither to be made right, none had proved really a tragedy, and not half a dozen, instances of real need, nevertheless her zeal had never abated. She went on discovering and reporting, recovering from one excitement to be plunged into another. For she always believed that Mr. Langley made the crooked straight, never doubting that it had been quite as crooked as she had believed.

At the time, Miss Penny was seventy years old, a little, thin, erect lady with a large nose and round, short-sighted grey eyes behind large spectacles with thick, powerful lenses, who reminded many of her friends of the birds she fed at her window throughout the year. Her motions were quick and rather jerky; she had a way of turning her head quickly from side to side, and walked with a spring that recalled the hopping of a robin. Her hair was grey, but her cheeks were rosy, with scarcely a wrinkle. She dressed always in rich black satin, with muslin collars for morning and real lace for afternoon.

After spending some time apologizing for troubling Mr. Langley on Saturday, repeating and emphasizing the fact that it was the day before Sunday, she endeavored to call to his memory a certain pine-tree that stood on the highest point of the

common at the South Hollow. He seemed to recol

lect it dimly.

"But, Mr. Langley, it's the only pine on the common, you know," she remonstrated. "Some people go so far as to say it's primeval. Why, you must remember-the Soldiers' Monument-oh, no, that was before your day, of course, for I was a girl -at least, I was young. It seems very young now, at any rate. Well, for some reason-I suppose because it was the highest point, for it isn't in the centre, though it's not so far out-anyhow, they gathered round it, the soldiers, or those who were going to be soldiers, just before they went to war. And so it seemed the place for the monument afterward. But they didn't want to cut down the tree because it had been there since the time of Christopher Columbus. My father was one that protested."

"I see, Miss Penny," he assented gravely, "and so we got the monument, and South Hollow kept the tree. Well, it was a fine thing to spare an old landmark like that. In itself it's a monument and a link with the far-away past."

Mr. Langley gazed absently out of the window. Then suddenly he turned to her.

"Nothing has happened to it, Miss Penny?" he asked anxiously.

"Oh, no, Mr. Langley, not to the tree," she re

plied, her words coming so fast that they fairly tripped each other up. "A cat couldn't hurt a tree, you know, and such a poor, scrawny thing as it is, too."

"A cat, Miss Penny?" he inquired patiently.

“Mr. Langley, it's absolutely the most harrowing thing I ever heard of!" she cried. "How those people have slept, I don't understand, for this is the third day. I offered to pay the telegraph people at Wenham, but they wouldn't send over, and I'm sure I don't know what's to be done unless we cut down the tree. That seems a pity, but we can't let the poor thing die before our very eyes, Mr. Langley ?"

The minister began to understand.

"Indeed, we cannot, Miss Penny," he declared. "Poor puss-in the topmost branch, I dare say?" "The very tip," she exclaimed, rising and wringing her hands. Then as the minister rose too, she sat down to save him.

"A dog chased her, I suppose, and she went too far," he opined. "She starts to go down the smooth trunk head first, is afraid, and turns back. Poor thing! And she's been up there three days?"

"Yes, oh, yes. And-oh, yes, she's white. That seems somehow to make it worse-like a white horse, Mr. Langley."

He understood.

"I suppose the tree only begins to branch thirty or forty feet from the ground?" he asked. Her eyes grew rounder than ever.

"Now, Mr. Langley, how in the world did you know that?"

"If there's reason for believing it primeval, it's the single survivor, most likely, of a grove of white pines. And growing close together as they did, they didn't branch out until they had reached a height where they would get the sun," he explained.

His fine dark-grey eyes grew dreamy. That seemed a foundation for a very good figure for a sermon. (He wrote few new ones, nowadays, but a new figure fitted nicely into an old one.) Then his warm heart remembered the helpless animal, and a youthful fire displaced the reverie. That in its turn died out. He was tall and slender and had played baseball at the theological seminary; but he wasn't sure that he could even get to the top of his own gate-post to-day.

Then, after he had thought of Ella May and decided that, though she would probably have been a bit of a tomboy, she would hardly have been of service in this case, he remembered Reuben. Of course! Reuben was the very one! He went to the door and called up the stair-softly, because of his wife. A voice answered him from the top of the apple-tree outside the window.

Reuben Cartwright had just settled himself comfortably in a crotch of the tree and was gazing up into the white clouds floating lazily across the bright blue September sky. He had been secretly glad of Miss Penny's otherwise inopportune call in that it gave him a chance to fill the wood-box in the study to overflowing; for the minister almost lived in his study and it was difficult for Reuben to accomplish this task outside of school-hours. And that being almost the only chore he could find to do about the place, he had to make the most of it.

The boy's father, who had been the organist at the village church, had taken to drink after the death of his wife, and presently had been forced to resign from his position. Thereafter he went from bad to worse. taken what care he could of him, keeping house in a faithful, crude fashion, going out at all hours of the night to search for him and bring him home, brushing his clothes, cleaning his shoes, and trying to preserve in him some semblance of his former gentlemanlike and perhaps even rather elegant self. But finally he had disappeared one night of the past summer, and all the efforts of Reuben and of others had been unavailing. And before word of his death had come to Farleigh, Mr. Langley, despite the protests of his invalid wife, had taken the boy in to keep him until some arrangement could be made for his future.

For three years his little boy had