his Heart's Desire standing alone near the porch in his path under an apple-tree. The exhilaration of the chase had made him forget his trouble. He was so sure-footed in the race that he forgot to be abashed for the moment and came bounding down by the apple-tree. He was full of pride. When he stopped he was the King of Boyville and every inch a king. The king-not Piggy-should be blamed. It was all over in a secondalmost before he had stopped. He aimed at her cheek, but he got her ear. That was the first that he knew of it. Piggy seemed to return to life then. In his confusion he felt himself shriveling up to his normal size -shriveling and frying. In an instant he was gone, and Piggy Pennington ran into the group of girls on the sidewalk and let them catch him and hold him. The breathless youths went into the house telling their adventures in the race between gasps. But Piggy did not dare to look at his Heart's Desire for as much as five minutes a long, long time. No one had seen him beneath the apple-tree. He was not afraid of the teasing, but he was afraid of a withering look from his Heart's Desire-a look that he felt with a parching fear in his throat would throw the universe into an eclipse for him. He observed that she got up and changed her seat, to be rid of Mealy Jones. At first Piggy thought that was a good sign, but a moment later he reasoned that the avoidance of Mealy was inspired probably by a loathing for all boys. He dared not seek her eyes, but he mingled noisily in the crowd for a while, and then, on a desperate venture, carelessly snapped a peanut shell and hit his Heart's Desire on the chin. He seemed to be looking a thousand miles away in another direction than that which the missile took. He waited nearly a minute a long, uncertain minute-for a response.

Then the shell came back; it did not hit him-but it might have done so that was all he could ask. He snapped shells slyly for a quarter of an hour, and was happy. Once he looked-not exactly looked; perhaps peeked is the better word; took just the tiniest lightning peek out of the tail of his eye, and found a smile waiting for him. At supper, if anyone save Piggy had tried to take a chair by his Heart's Desire when the plates came around, there would have been a fight. Mealy Jones knew this, and he knew what Piggy did not know, that it would have been a fight of two against one. So Piggy sat bolt upright in his chair beside the blackand-red checked dress, and talked to the room

at large; but he spoke no word to the maiden at his side. She noticed that Piggy kept dropping his knife, and the solicitude of her sex prompted her to ask: "Are your hands cold, Winfield?”

And the instinct of his sex to hide a fault with a falsehood made Piggy nod his head. Then she answered: "Cold hands, a warm heart!"

At this important bit of repartee, the King of Boyville so forgot his royal dignity that he let an orange-peel drive at Jimmy Sears, and pretended not to hear her. His only reply was to joggle her arm when she reached for the cake. Piggy was so exuberant and in such high spirits that he put his plate on his chair and made Bud Perkins walk turkey fashion three times around the room. He forgot the disgrace which his note had brought to him in the school; he forgot the pretensions of Mealy Jones; he did not wish to forget the episode of the apple-tree, and for the time Piggy Pennington lived in a most peculiar world, made of hazel eyes and red-ribboned pig-tails, all circling around on a background of black-and-red checked flannel.

After that nothing mattered very much. It didn't matter that Piggy's shoes, which had bruised his feet in the race, began to sting like fire. It didn't matter much if Mealy Jones's mother did come for him with a lantern and break up the party. It didn't matter if Jimmy Sears did call out, "Hello, Roses Red," when the boys reached the bedroom where their hats were; for a voice that Piggy knew cried back from the adjoining room, "You think you're cute, don't you, old smarty?" Nothing in the world could matter then, for had not Piggy Pennington five minutes before handed a card to his Heart's Desire which read:

IF I MAY NOT CU HOME

MAY I NOT SIT ON THE FENCE
AND CU GO BY?

And had not she taken it, and said merrily, "I'm going to keep this." What could matter after that open avowal?

And so it came to pass in a little while that the goodly company, headed by the King of Boyville, filed gaily down the path. They walked two by two, and they started on a long, uneven way. But the King of Boyville was full of joy-a kind of joy so strange that wise men may not measure it; a joy so rare that even kings are proud of it.

attention to civil affairs, and is especially interested in the internal improvements, development, and commercial welfare of Russia.

My conversation with the Emperor touched first on military matters, and then drifted to the subject which appeared to be the one nearest his heart-the great Siberian railway, a work of vast commercial, political, and military importance to Russia. He himself passed over the zone that the railway is to penetrate, before he ascended the throne, and he is now president of the company which is rapidly constructing the work. In our talk, I referred to the great change that had been wrought in our own country by the construction of the trans-continental railroads, first definitely projected during the Civil War, for the purpose of holding the two sections of the country in closer union and more loyal sentiment. These railroads, I told the Emperor, had transformed a vast area of wild territory and mountain waste into settled, civilized, thriving, progressive communities in the space of a single genera

tion; and I added that I presumed a similar result would follow the opening of the great avenue of communication and commerce now being constructed across the enormous area of the Russian Empire. I asked if the land would be divided into subdivisions in a way similar to that we had adopted in our own country and found so beneficial. The Emperor said that this was his purpose and design, and that he hoped for gratifying results. I remarked that we had found that, by dividing our public lands into small subdivisions and parceling it out to colonists, they became our most intelligent, loyal citizens, wedded and anchored to the soil; and that a man who possessed a quarter section of land was a more loyal citizen than one who simply owned a knife. The use of the last word seemed to cause His Majesty an unhappy thought, as I judged from his expression, yet he instantly resumed his pleasant mood, and talked upon the subject of the development of that great section of his empire with much interest, and expressed great hope that the completion of