and that some one must have gone all that way up there above the snow
line to pick it?" The children, taken aback by this unfair introduction
of a floral stranger, were silent. Cressy thoughtfully accepted botany
on those possibilities. A week later she laid on the master's desk a
limp-looking plant with a stalk like heavy frayed worsted yarn. "It
ain't much to look at after all, is it?" she said. "I reckon I could cut
a better one with scissors outer an old cloth jacket of mine."

"And you found it here?" asked the master in surprise.

"I got Masters to look for it when he was on the Summit. I described it
to him. I didn't allow he had the gumption to get it. But he did."

Although botany languished slightly after this vicarious effort, it
kept Cressy in fresh bouquets, and extending its gentle influence to her
friends and acquaintances became slightly confounded with horticulture,
led to the planting of one or two gardens, and was accepted in school
as an implied concession to berries, apples, and nuts. In reading and
writing Cressy greatly improved, with a marked decrease in grammatical
solecisms, although she still retained certain characteristic words, and
always her own slow Southwestern, half musical intonation. This languid
deliberation was particularly noticeable in her reading aloud, and
gave the studied and measured rhetoric a charm of which her careless
colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its
imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a
view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's
hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly
mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of
euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly
recognized his pupil. Whether or not she understood what she read he