to the shop and set to work in the room behind.

"May I make a group of them?" he asked.

"Do them just as you like," the old man said.

After settling upon his subject, Frank set to work, and, except
that he went out for five minutes to buy and eat a penny loaf,
continued his work till nightfall. The old man came in several
times to look at him, but each time went out again without making
a remark. At six o'clock Frank laid down his tools.

"I will come again tomorrow, sir," he said.

The old man nodded, and Frank went home in high spirits. There was
a prospect at last of getting something to do, and that in a line
most congenial to his own tastes.

The old man looked up when he entered next morning.

"I shall not come in today," he remarked. "I will wait to see them
finished."

Working without interruption till the evening, Frank finished
them to his satisfaction, and enveloped them with many wrappings
of thread to keep them in precisely the attitudes in which he had
placed them.

"They are ready for drying now, sir," he said. "If I might place
them in an oven they would be dried by morning."