not make a presentable salad of the tomato and the dressing—salads are always made of leftovers and these things had been left over a long time, but I dared not make the suggestion for fear my first name would have to be changed to Claude if I did so.

Then came dessert. Snooflet had his maple syrup tin, and his mother the remnants of a pot of raspberry jam. Having eaten their dinner in well-bred seclusion and in the proper order, they went away together, apparently happy.

By this time I was hungry myself, so I climbed out and made my way to the Geyser House. Mrs. Kirsten was on the veranda, and at the sight of me she laughed the first hearty, unconscious laugh I had ever heard from her lips. “Hello, garbage pail,” she said, merrily, when the paroxysm had subsided somewhat, “why don’t you go around the back way?”

I looked at myself. A sardine box hung on my tie, a lobster tin protruded from my pocket, and I was covered from head to foot with melon seeds. A cabbage leaf and a melon rind adorned my hat.

Melancholy though I was, I was about to pass her in a frigid, dignified manner, and go up to my room, but the stony-hearted manager of the hotel interfered. “Here, you blamed old scavenger,” he cried, “this isn’t a dump heap. Go and bury your clothes! Why you look like a guy, sir!”

“Is not this the Geyser House?” I asked. The joke, which might have been sold to a funny paper for three dollars, was utterly lost upon him. He repeated his impolite suggestion about my clothes and said he would send a boy to me with more.

I had no choice but to obey. In my changed raiment I was allowed to go to my room, where a bath, clean linen, and a shave speedily set me right again. I had left my clothes in the woods for future expeditions of the same sort.

Elaborating my notes and developing my plates took me the better part of a week, and all the time, there was a decided coolness between Mrs. Kirsten and myself. Not so with Miranda. She loved me, if her mother did not, and pleaded with me at every meal to take her with me when I went to see the “pitty Bears.”

The next morning I was sitting on one corner of the veranda and Mrs. Kirsten on the other, with Miranda’s shoes and stockings in her lap. I knew where the child had gone and surmised that a tempest was raging in the mother’s heart, but she was too proud to turn to me for even a look of sympathy.Presently Miranda came toward us at the top of 

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