pills and bring me the pill-box."

Jem obeyed, and I sat down on the stairs and began to get the wood-lice
out again. There were twelve nice little black balls in my hand when Jem
came back with the pill-box.

"Hooray!" I cried; "but knock out all the powder, it might smother them.
Now, give it to me."

Jem danced with delight when I put the wood-lice in and put on the lid.

"I hope she'll shake the box before she opens it," I said, as we
replaced it on the dressing-table.

"I hope she will, or they won't be tight. Oh, Jack! Jack! _How many do
you suppose she takes at a time?_"

We never knew, and what is more, we never knew what became of the
wood-lice, for, for some reason, she kept our counsel as well as her own
about the pill-box.

One thing that helped to reconcile us to spending a good share of our
summer days in Walnut-tree Academy was that the school-mistress made us
very comfortable. Boys at our age are not very sensitive about matters
of taste and colour and so forth, but even we discovered that Mrs. Wood
had that knack of adapting rooms to their inhabitants, and making them
pleasant to the eye, which seems to be a trick at the end of some
people's fingers, and quite unlearnable by others. When she had made the
old miser's rooms to her mind, we might have understood, if we had
speculated about it, how it was that she had not profited by my mother's