Eliza more than methods in teaching first grade work. They were fully as old as Eliza herself; but they wore gowns which were quite up-to-date. They arranged their hair to bring out the very best of their features.

They talked about skating and literary clubs, and calls, and afternoon teas. One had even gone out with her pupils and coasted down hill, and not one was shocked or even thrilled when she related it.

Eliza listened. She was not a dullard. To use the vernacular of Shintown, “Eliza Wells was no one’s fool, in spite of her queer old ways.” Her queer old way was loving flowers, giving artistic touch to the dullest places.

She showed her best qualities now in listening and culling the best from these teachers whose opportunities were broader and whose lives were fuller than hers had been.

They found her enjoyable; for she had a quaint wit, and a refined, gentle manner.

That night when she went home to Beth, she cuddled her close in her arms.

“What story to-night, Adee dear?” was the first question.

“A make-believe story which is really true,” she said.

Beth gave a little sigh of satisfaction. The make-believe stories which were true were better even than fairy stories which never can be true. This was the story she told:

The Wood Baby.

The Wood Baby

Once upon a time, the angels brought from heaven a little child and placed her in a little house in the woods and gave her a plain old farmer and his wife as parents.

The hut in which they lived was small—only four bare walls, a door and a window. It was night when the angel carried the child to its new home. The child was asleep. It lay in slumber in the arms of its mother. The neighbor folk came and looked at it, and spoke dolefully of the cold, unpleasant world into which it had come.

The child awakened, but it did not open its eyes. It lay and listened.

“It’s only a poor bare hut with smoke-covered walls that I have to give as a home for my baby,” the mother was saying.

“It will find only work and trouble 

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