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"We have grown close to each other, have n't we?" mused Doris. "Do you know, I never dreamed I could make so dear a friend. in so short a time. I have plenty of acquaintances and good comrades, but usually it takes me years to make a real friend. How did you manage to make me care so much for you?"

"Just because you 're you'!" laughed Sally, quoting a popular song. "But do you realize, Doris Craig, what a different girl I 've become since I knew and cared for you?"

She was, indeed, a different girl, as Doris had to admit. To begin with, she looked different. The clothes she wore were neat, dainty, and appropriate, indicating taste and care both in choosing and wearing them. Her parents were comparatively well-to-do people in the village and could afford to dress her well and give her all that was necessary, within reason. It had been mainly lack of proper care, and the absence of any incentive to seem her best, that was to blame for the original careless Sally. And not only her looks, but her manners and English were now as irreproachable as they had once been provincial and faulty.

"Why, even my thoughts are different!" she suddenly exclaimed, following aloud the line they had both been unconsciously pursuing. "You've given me more that 's worth while to think about, Doris, in these three months, than I ever had before in all my life."

"I'm sure it was n't I that did it," modestly disclaimed Doris, "but the books I happened to bring along and that you wanted to read. If you had n't wanted different things yourself, Sally, I don't believe you would have changed any, so the credit is all yours.

"Do you remember the day you first quoted 'The Ancient Mariner' to me?" she went on. "I was so astonished I nearly tumbled out of the boat. It was the lines, 'We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea.""

"Yes, they are my favorite lines," replied Sally. "And with all the poems I 've read and learned since, I love that best, after all."

"My favorite is the lines, 'The moving moon went up the sky and nowhere did abide,'" said Doris; "and I love it all as much as you do." "And Miss Camilla," added Sally, "says her favorite is,

"The selfsame moment I could pray,
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off and sank
Like lead into the sea."

"She says that 's just the way she felt when we girls made that discovery about her brother's letter. Her 'albatross' had been the

weight of supposed disgrace she had been carrying about, all these fifty years."

"Oh, Miss Camilla!" sighed Doris, ecstatically. "What a darling she is! and what a wonderful, simply wonderful adventure we 've had, Sally! Sometimes, when I think of it, it seems too incredible to believe. It 's like something you'd read of in a book and say it was probably exaggerated. Did I tell you that my grandfather has decided to buy as much of her collection of porcelains as she is willing to sell, and the antique jewelry, too?"

"No," answered Sally, "but Miss Camilla told me. And I know how she hates to part with any of them. Even I shall feel a little sorry when they 're gone. I 've washed them and dusted them so often and Miss Camilla has told me so much about them. I've even learned how to know them by the strange little marks on the back of them. And I can tell English Spode from old Worcester, and French Faience from jeweled Sèvres-and a lot beside. And what 's more, I 've really come to admire and appreciate them. I never supposed I should.

"Miss Camilla will miss them all, for she 's been so happy with them since they were restored to her. But she says they 're as useless in her life now as a museum of mummies, and she needs the money for other things."

"I suppose she will restore the main part of her house and live in it and be very happy and comfortable," remarked Doris.

"That's just where you are entirely mistaken," answered Sally, with unexpected animation. "Don't you know what she is going to do with it?"

"Why, no!" said Doris in surprise. "I had n't heard."

"Well, she only told me to-day," replied Sally, "but it nearly bowled me over. She 's going to put the whole thing into Liberty Bonds, and go on living precisely as she has before. She says she has gotten along that way for nearly fifty years and she guesses she can go on to the end. She says that if her father and brother could sacrifice their safety and their money and their very lives, gladly, as they did when their country was in need, she guesses she ought n't to do very much less. If she were younger, she 'd go to France right now, and give herself in come capacity to help out in this horrible struggle. But as she can't do that, she is willing and delighted to make every other sacrifice within her power. And she 's taken out the bonds in my name and Genevieve's, because she says she 'll never live to see them mature, and we 're the only

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chick or child she cares enough about to leave them to. She wanted to leave some to you, too, but your father told her no, that he had already taken some for you."

Doris was quite overcome by this flood of unexpected information and by the wonderful attitude and generosity of Miss Camilla.

"I never dreamed of such a thing!" she murmured. "She insisted on giving me the little Sèvres vase, when I bade her good-by to-day. I did n't like to take it, but she said I must, and that it could form the beginning of a collection of my own, some day when I was older and times were less strenuous. I hardly realized what she meant then, but I do now, after what you 've told me."

"But that is n't all," said Sally. "I've managed to persuade my father that I 'm not learning enough at the village school and probably never will. He was going to take me out of it this year, anyway, and, when summer came again, have me wait on the ice-cream parlor and candy counter in the pavilion. I just hated the thought. Now I 've made him promise to send Genevieve and me every day to Miss Camilla to study with her, and he 's going to pay for it just the same as if I were going to a private school. I'm so happy over it, and so is Miss Camilla, only we had hard work persuading her that she must accept any money for it. And even Genevieve is delighted. She has promised to stop sucking her thumb if she can go to Miss Camilla and 'learn to wead 'bout picters,' as she says."

"It 's all turned out as wonderfully as a fairy-tale," mused Doris as they floated on. "I could n't wish a single thing any different. And I think what Miss Camilla has done iswell, it just makes a lump come in my throat even to speak of it. I feel like a selfish wretch beside her. I 'm just going to save every penny I have this winter and give it to the Red Cross and work like mad at the knitting and bandage-making. But even that is no real sacrifice. I wish I could do something such

as she has done. That's the kind of thing that counts!"

"We can only do the thing that lies within our power," said Sally, grasping the true philosophy of the situation, "and if we do all of that, we're giving the best we can."

They drifted on a little further in silence, and then Doris glanced at her wrist-watch by the light of the moon. "We 've got to go in," she mourned. "It 's after nine o'clock, and Mother warned me not to stay out later than that. Besides I must finish packing."

They dragged the canoe up on the shore, and turned it over in the grass. Then they wandered for a moment down to the edge of the water.

"Remember, it is n't so awfully bad as it seems," Doris tried to hearten Sally by reminding her. "Father and I are coming down again to stay over Columbus Day, and you and Genevieve are coming to New York to spend the Christmas holidays with us. We'll be seeing each other right along, at intervals."

Sally looked off up the river to where the dark pines on Slipper Point could be dimly discerned above the wagon bridge. Suddenly her thoughts took a curious twist.

"How funny-how awfully funny it seems now," she laughed, "to think we once were planning to dig for pirate treasure-up there!" she nodded toward Slipper Point.

"Well, we may not have found any pirate loot," Doris replied, "but you'll have to admit we discovered treasure of a very different nature and a good deal more valuable. And, when you come to think of it, we did discover buried treasure, at least Miss Camilla did, and we were nearly buried alive ourselves trying to unearth it, and what more of a thrilling adventure could you ask for than that?" But she ended seriously:

"Slipper Point will always mean to me the spot where I spent some of the happiest moments of my life."

THE END.

"And I say the same!" echoed Sally.

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..

FOR BOYS WHO DO THINGS

A NEW DEPARTMENT

772

BEGINNING with this October issue, ST. NICHOLAS is going to publish a Department for those boys who are not content to sit by and watch others do things but want to have a finger in the pie themselves. The "Do Things Editor" has a lot of brand new how-to-make ideas on hand that he is going to put into that department, but he is not going to fill it all himself. There will be plenty of space for the suggestions of Sr. NICHOLAS readers. Useful devices that can be rigged up out of odds and ends, home-made apparatus, shop kinks-these are what the Editor wants. If you have made anything yourself write to the Editor about it. Don't send him ideas that you have seen somewhere else, but plans that you have worked out yourself. Give him complete instructions with sketches that have dimensions on them so that others can follow out your plans, and by all means send a photograph of the work if you have a camera. The Editor will pay for all the material he uses.

The Department starts off this month with a most interesting "how-to-make" serial, by A. Russell Bond, called "Packing-box Village." It will tell just how to build houses out of big packing boxes. They will not be toy-houses nor doll-houses, but real, "honest-to-goodness" dwellings, big enough for boys to get inside of and live in. Being made of packing boxes they will cost practically nothing, and yet they won't look like boxes when they are finished. They will have gable roofs, chimneys and verandas, and they will be fitted with furniture made from smaller boxes. The plan is to have a number of boys club together and build a whole village, with cottages and barns and windmills, with stores, post office, fire-engine house, town hall, etc. Streets will be laid out, with mail boxes and fire-alarm boxes on the corners; and there will be a park with a summer house and a bandstand in it. How to construct all these buildings and the furniture and fittings will be told in detail so that any boy who knows how to handle a hammer and a saw can make them. Added to the pleasure of building the village there will be the joy of organizing a town government, with mayor and common council, police and fire department.

Be sure to keep your copies of ST. NICHOLAS because if you don't start building a Packingbox Village right away you will surely want to do so before the series is ended.

PACKING-BOX VILLAGE

By A. RUSSELL BOND

THERE comes a time in every boy's life when
he must belong to a special clan or club-per-
haps known nowadays in familiar slang as
"the bunch." The boy who goes it alone isn't
more than half a boy and doesn't begin to
know the joy of living. Of course, there are
all sorts of little groups and clubs, and far
too many of them that are not of the right
kind, but it is up to the boy himself to choose
the right kind. Usually a band with some
headquarters of its own is a better one than
a mere roving group with nothing much to
do but hunt up mischief; and if such a band
would build a place of its own, it would be
far more likely to be the sort of a set that
we should like to have our St. Nicholas boys
belong to; then it would become a real club.

Boys of today are very much like the
grownups of ancient times. As long as people

roamed around without any fixed homes of their own, they were always in trouble or making trouble, but when they settled down and began to build houses and cities, then they commenced to amount to something in the world. Now there is no reason why a group of boys should not become a worthwhile club-but why stop there? Why not build a whole village, and become a worthwhile community? I do not mean a toy village of mere doll houses, but a village of real houses, big enough to live in. This sounds like a big undertaking, but it is not beyond the reach of boys who like to do things. The materials can be picked up very cheaply; in some cases they can be had for the asking.

It will be no end of sport, building the village with its cottages, stores, town hall, postoffice, fire department, etc., and when it is

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completed the joy of living in a town of your own making will be well worth all the trouble you have taken. You can organize a city government, with a mayor and a common council, chief of police, street commissioner, and all the departments and bureaus of a fullfledged city.

A plan of such a village is shown in one of the accompanying drawings, and we are going to give details for the construction of the different buildings. We are going to call it "Packing-Box Village," and that let's out the secret of how the village is going to be built. The big boxes in which drygoods are packed are just the thing for our little town. Many of them will be found quite big enough to accommodate three or four boys.

The first thing to do is to go on a foraging expedition in search of boxes. Visit the boxpiles back of the stores and see what there is to be had. Pick up small boxes, as well as big ones, because there will be plenty of use for short boards, and you can always make use of the nails in them, if nothing else. Peach baskets are going to come in handy for shingles, so don't forget to lay in a stock of them. If you can get hold of a piano box or

an organ box, you are decidedly in luck. Of course you will have to buy the bigger boxes, unless you find some very kind-hearted merchant who is willing to give them away, but in these days it is not so difficult to earn the small amount of money they would cost, and with a number of boys banded together in the club the village should not lack for funds.

A hammer, a saw, a brace, and an assortment of auger-bits are the tools necessary. A key-hole saw will also be found almost indispensable. Other tools, such as a plane or two, a draw-knife, a chisel, etc., will come in very handy, but we can get along without them if we have to.

LAYING OUT THE VILLAGE.

After finding our boxes and getting our tools together we can safely proceed to lay out the village. The plan that is shown here is a mere suggestion; every club will have its own ideas as to the layout of the village. Some boy will have to be selected as Superintendent of Construction, who should make a sketch of the plot of ground on which the village is to be built, and lay out the streets.

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