going without servants and dainties and fine clothes—just[35] as people have to do in war-time; and by doing things themselves, instead of having things done for them. Mrs. Corliss was a clever manager. She had learned how to cook and sew and do all kinds of things with her deft fingers; and Mary was a good assistant and pupil, while John did everything that a little boy could do to help. He ran errands and built the fires, and even set the table and helped wipe the dishes when his mother and sister were busy.

[35]

The neighbors were very friendly, and there were so many pleasant new things in Crowfield that the family did not miss the pleasures they used to enjoy in the city, nor the pretty clothes and luxuries which were now out of the question. And Mary did not spend much time worrying about college. There would be time enough for that.

After the finding of that hundred-dollar bill, Mary and John spent a great deal of time in opening and shutting the leaves of books in the library, hoping that they would come upon other bookmarks as valuable as that first one. But whether Aunt Nan had left the bill there by mistake, as Dr. Corliss imagined, or whether she had put it there on purpose, as Mary liked to think, apparently the old lady had not repeated[36] herself. The only foreign things they found in the musty old volumes were bits of pressed flowers and ferns, and now and then a flattened bug which had been crushed in its pursuit of knowledge.

[36]

John soon grew tired of this fruitless search. But Mary came upon so many interesting things in the books themselves that she often forgot what she was looking for. Many of the books had queer, old-fashioned pictures; some had names and dates of long ago written on the fly-leaf. In many Mary found that Aunt Nan had scrawled notes and comments—sometimes amusing and witty; sometimes very hard to understand.

Mary loved her library. She had never before had a corner all to herself, except her tiny bedroom. And to feel that this spacious room, with everything in it, was all hers, in which to do just as she pleased, was a very pleasant thing.

“Where’s Mary?” asked Katy Summers one afternoon, running into the Corliss house without knocking, as she had earned the right to do.

“I think she is in the library,” said Mrs. Corliss, who was busy sewing in the living-room. “That is a pretty likely place in which to look nowadays, when she 

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