into the Widow Brackett's Bible for information mundane or
spiritual, since the only result would have been showers of
pressed ferns and flowers upon the carpet, which was not
without well-pressed flowers and ferns of its own.

Very soon after the explosion of the wonderful lamp the Widow
Brackett had taken Aladdin and Jack and the cat into her house
and seen to it that they had a square meal. Early on the
second day she came to the conclusion that if it could in any
way be made worth her while, she would like to keep them until
they grew up. And when the ground upon which Aladdin's
father's house had stood was sold at auction for three hundred
and eight dollars, she let it be known that if she could get
that she would board the two little waifs until Aladdin was
old enough to work. The court appointed two guardians. The
guardians consulted for a few minutes over something brown in
a glass, and promptly turned over the three hundred and eight
dollars to the Widow Brackett; and the Widow Brackett almost
as promptly made a few alterations in the up-stairs of her
house the better to accommodate the orphans, tied a dirty
white ribbon about the yellow cat's neck, and bought a
derelict piano upon which her heart had been set for many
months. She was no musician, but she loved a tightly closed
piano with a scarf draped over the top, and thought that no
parlor should be without one. Up to middle C, as Aladdin in
time found out, the piano in question was not without musical
pretensions, but above that any chord sounded like a nest of
tin plates dropped on a wooden floor, and the intervals were
those of no known scale nor fragment thereof. But in time he
learned to draw pleasant things from the old piano and to