loftily.

"And besides," continued the inquisitor, "if you think boys are such bad ones, what you trying to be one for, and be Ben Blunt and all like that?"

"You're too young to understand if I told you," she replied with a snappish dignity.

The Merle twin was regretting these asperities. His eyes clung constantly to the lemon and candy.

"She can be Ben Blunt if she wants to," he now declared in a voice of authority. "I bet she'll have a better moustache than that old Miss Murphy's."

"Murtree," she corrected him, and spoke her thanks with a brightening glance. "Here," she added, proffering her treasure,   "take a good long suck if you want to."

He did want to. His brother beheld him with anguished eyes. As Merle demonstrated the problem in hydraulics the girl studied him more attentively, then gleamed with a sudden new radiance.

"Oh, I'll tell you what let's do!" she exclaimed. "We'll change clothes with each other, and then I'll be Ben Blunt without waiting till I get to the great city. Cousin Juliana could pass me right by on the street and never know me." She   clapped her small brown hands. "Goody!" she finished.

But the twins stiffened. The problem was not so simple.

"How do you mean—change clothes?" demanded Merle.

"Why, just change! I'll put on your clothes and look like a mere street urchin right away."

"But what am I going to—"

"Put on my clothes, of course. I explained that."

"Be dressed like a girl?"

"Only till you get home; then you can put on your Sunday clothes."

"But they wouldn't be Sunday clothes if I had to wear 'em every day, and then I wouldn't have any Sunday clothes."

"Stupid! You can buy new ones, can't you?"

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