DOLLY FRENCH'S HOUSEHOLD

CHAPTER I

HER SISTER AND BROTHER

To save us from the pit, no screen of roses
Would serve for our defense;

The hindrance that completely interposes
Strings back like thorny fence.

-Hugh Macmillan.

THE girls, Clara Ranesford and Mariah Hardenbergh, had been to the post office. Clara was a summer boarder in Westholt; Mariah was the daughter of her hostess.

Next week September was coming; September meant the class-room to the city girl; it meant peaches to the country girl, peaches to cut and dry, peaches to peel and can, peaches to pickle and preserve. John Wheatcroft had advised Mrs. Hardenbergh to "go into peaches"; one hot day, the previous week, Mariah told him she wished he had gone into a peach himself before he had persuaded her mother into such nonsense. On the way home from the post office was Mariah's garden. It was far in the rear of the "five-acre lot";

the cornfield came between her garden and the stone house.

"What a spot for a house!" exclaimed Miss Ranesford, as the two passed through the tangled gateway; "the slope down to the road would make a fine lawn, and this garden would give it the dignity of a century." "But it is mine," said Mariah. "Mother talks about selling it when I am cross about the peaches."

Down the road, coming toward them, they espied two gray horses, driven by a tall figure in a navy-blue flannel shirt and broad straw hat, and behind him in the long wagon, rows of canvas-covered baskets filled with peaches.

"John goes to market every day," said Mariah. "His peaches are doing well. I hope he'll fix up his house this year."

"Then it will be no longer the prettiest thing in the landscape," replied the city school-teacher.

"How you do think old and ugly things are pretty,' said the country girl, laughing.

"You would if you lived in a top-story room, and taught in a crowded class-room, with nothing but brick walls to be seen out of its big windows; and instead of riding on a log to the saw-mill, or bags of corn and wheat to the grist-mill, you had to ride in street cars, squeezed in among all sorts of people, and you had no moonrise and no sunset, nor sail on a beautiful little lake, with green boughs dipping into the water."

"I've had that all my life," said Mariah.

"Whoa!" said the voice under the broad straw

hat.

"Miss Ranesford, mother asked me to bring you home to stay with her to-night."

"I cannot spare her," exclaimed Mariah, clinging with both arms to the girl at her side.

"Neither can my mother," replied John Wheatcroft. "Can you ride on a load of peaches, Miss Ranesford?"

"I can ride on anything," said Clara.

"Then jump up."

"I said she couldn't go," said Mariah, frowning. "She did not say so, did you, Miss Ranesford?" "I say I will stay to supper and come home for the night. I must pack my trunk to-night."

"She has about a hundred letters to burn," declared Mariah.

"Is that what people write letters for?" questioned the young man, puzzled. "If I should write a letter I should hope it would never be burned."

He sprang to the ground and assisted the city girl to the seat, over the wheel. Mariah remembered resentfully that he would have given her his hand and asked her to jump in. She walked very slowly along the edge of the cornfield to the open Dutch door of the kitchen.

"Your mother has been very good to me," began Clara as John spoke to the horses and they started off