the fever into which he had put himself, and it was then he had begun to
mind the baby instead of going to school. Praise was liberally bestowed
in the county paper on Mr. Ebenezer Rooke and his assistants, who by
their energy and forethought had saved the village from destruction but
no one had noticed the efforts of the tiny child, working beyond his
strength; and, indeed, he himself had had no idea of being noticed.

As he sat now on the stool in the sunny doorway, and looked up the
mountain-valley, to which he had been brought in his declining years to
share his married daughter's home, the detail in that tragedy of his
childhood, which pictured itself in his mind's eye more clearly than any
other, was the shadow of the spreading, coiling puffs of smoke, which
had first caught his childish attention, blurring the bars of sunlight
on the floor of the Dame's kitchen. Perhaps it was on account of the
likeness to the pattern now made by the sun, as it shone through the
casement between him and the baby's cradle. For the gentle, domestic old
man was often now, as in his docile childhood, charged to "mind the
baby," and one of the quiet pleasures of his latter days was the sight
of the little floweret, that grew so sweetly beside his sere and
withered life. An uncultured sense of beauty within him was appealed to
by the rounded limbs, the silent, dimpled laugh, the tottering feet
feeling their unknown way, and all the sweet curves and softnesses, the
innocent surprises and _naïve_ desires, which made up for him the image
of "the baby." He would have said she was "prutty," implying much by the
word.

As he gazed at his precious charge, and watched the sunlight pattern
slowly but surely creeping towards the foot of the cradle, he had an odd
feeling that school would soon be over. A moment after he rubbed his
eyes and looked again. Was it true, or was he dreaming? Were those