In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim. Frances Hodgson Burnett

two hours hand-running, because when I found it was sort of soothing me, I didn’t want her to break in on the effect by beginning another. Play it for Tom, Jenny, after you’ve sung awhile. There’s one thing I’ve made up my mind to—if I had fifty girls, I’d have ’em all learn music if they didn’t know anything—not the operatic kind, you know, but enough to teach them to sing to a man like Jenny does. Go on, Jenny.”

      The sustaining and cheering effects of Sophronia’s fried chicken and waffles probably added to his comfortable enjoyment, which was without limit. He leaned back in his armchair as far as the stiffly ornamented back would admit of his so doing and kept time with his head or his feet, occasionally joining in on a chorus with startling suddenness in an evidently subdued roar, which, though subdued, was still roaring enough, and, despite the excellence of its intention, quite out of tune enough to cause the wax flowers in their wax basket on the table (both done by Jenny at boarding-school) to shake under the glass shade until they tapped against its side with a delicate tinkle.

      It was while this was going on that Tom, sitting near a side table, picked up a book and almost unconsciously opened it and read its title. Having read its title, an expression of interest showed itself on his countenance and he turned over a leaf or so, and as he turned them over dipped into them here and there.

      He had the book in his hand when Jenny Rutherford ended her last chorus and came towards him.

      “Do you go much by this?” he asked.

      She took it from him and glanced at it.

      “I brought Tom Scott up on it,” she said. “Mother wasn’t with me then, and I was such a child I did not know what to do with him.”

      “Seems to be a good sort of book,” said Tom, and he turned over the leaves again.

      “It is,” she answered, smiling at him. “There are lots of things in it every doctor don’t know. It was written by a woman.”

      “That’s the reason, I reckon,” said Tom.

      He laid the book down and seemed to forget it, but about an hour after when his bedroom candle was brought and he was on the point of retiring for the night, he turned upon the threshold of the sitting-room and spoke to his hostess in the tone of one suddenly recollecting himself.

      “Where did you say you got that book?” he inquired, snuffing his candle with his thumb and forefinger.

      “I didn’t say at all,” answered Jenny. “I got it from Brough & Bros., Baltimore.”

      “Oh, there!” he remarked. “Good-night.”

      When he reached his room and shut himself in, he set his candlestick on a table and proceeded to draw from his pocket the memorandum-book, also producing the stump of a lead pencil.

      Then he made as he stood up before the looking-glass and in the flickering light of the candle, an entry which was as follows: “Advice to Young Mothers, Brough & Bros.” He made it with a grave countenance and a business-like manner, and somehow, owing it may be to the small size of the room, its low ceilings and many shadows, or the flickering of the candle, his colossal height and breadth of body and tremendous look of strength had never seemed so marked nor appeared so to overpower the objects surrounding him.

      Having completed the entry, he shut up the book and returned it to his pocket with a relieved air.

      “If a man ain’t a young mother,” he remarked, “I guess he can get the good of it, if he gives himself time. And what she wants”—rather hurriedly—“is to get as good a start as if she had a young mother.”

      And he sat down and pulled off his right boot in so absorbed a frame of mind, that he aroused presently with a start to find that he was holding it as if it had been made of much less tough material and required handling tenderly.