But now a question occurred to him which he had not thought of before. How was he to get the knife to Jim? A gift from him would excite surprise, perhaps suspicion. It must not be known who had sent it. Ah, there was the post

   office! Going in, he pushed the little box through the barred window.

   "Say, Cyrus," he said to the postmaster, "kinder weigh up this consignment for me, will ye?"

   The postmaster weighed the box.

   "That will cost you six cents," he said.

   "Thank ye," returned Mr. Peaslee, and dropping the box into his deep pocket, departed. Half a dozen eggs more to get it to his next-door neighbor!

   "'T ain't right," he muttered, "'t ain't right."

   Uncertain what to do with his gift, but feeling, on the whole, pretty

   virtuous, Mr. Peaslee now started home. He thought that Jim would not be going to school, but would wait at home for the threatened coming of the constable; but still he was not sure, and he wanted to keep the boy under his eye.

   Suddenly he straightened. There was Judge Ames walking up the street, valise in hand, just from the early morning train. He had come a few days before the opening of court. Mr. Peaslee knew him slightly, and stood much in awe of him. He was greatly pleased when the judge stopped and shook hands with him.

   "I am glad to hear, Mr. Peaslee,"

   said the judge, in his precise, lawyer-like utterance, "that you are to be on the grand jury. We need men like you there."

   "Thank ye, judge, thank ye," said Mr. Peaslee, overcome. And he walked on home, quite convinced that a person of his importance in the community should not be sacrificed to the comfort of any small boy.

   "And I've done right by the little feller, I've done right," he assured himself, feeling the knife.

   As he turned into his own yard, he cast an anxious eye over to the Edwards house. There sat Jim,

   elbows on knees, chin on hands, staring into space. Jim was thinking that his father, had he been a pirate chief, would not have wiped a filial tear from his eye whenever he thought of his mother; and the boy's face showed it. 

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