Elder Concannon came in apparently in a cheerful mood. He was not a frequent caller at the Day house; he never had been, indeed. But he liked to play a game of checkers with Janice, whom he considered quite a scientific player for a young person.

"I drove around by Brother Middler's on an errand—church business," explained the elder; "but he wasn't at home. Gone over to Bowling to marry a couple."

"Who air they?" asked Aunt 'Mira, at once interested.

"Every married woman is deeply int'rested in ev'ry other woman's marriage," Uncle Jason declared. "Havin' got one poor man inter captivity she's hopin' all her sisters'll have as good luck. Who is the poor feller that's got to do penance for his sins, Elder?"

"I don't see but you are both equally int'rested, Brother Day," chuckled the elder. "It's Sam Holder and Susie Pickberry."

"Another of them Pickberry gals gittin' merried, eh?" ejaculated Aunt 'Mira.

"Well, there are a lot of them to get married," the elder said. "All the Pickberrys had big families."

"And none of 'em much good," growled Uncle Jason.

"That may be," agreed the elder. "It does seem as though 'bout the only command in the Scriptures that any of 'em knew, was that one about 'increase and multiply and fill the earth.' And they are given to marrying young," pursued the elder reflectively. "This Sue is a bouncing big gal; but she's barely sixteen year old."

"Hardly sixteen!" exclaimed Janice.

"Cricky!" was Marty's comment, he having come in after blanketing the elder's colt. "You're getting to be an old maid, Janice, 'cordin' to that. You'd better stir about and look yourself up a husband 'fore they put you on the shelf."

Janice looked into his freckled face reflectively. "I've sometimes thought it was too bad they won't let first cousins marry, Marty," she said.

"They do, Janice, except in a few of the States," observed Elder Concannon, looking at the girl until she blushed as rosily as had Marty.

As the laugh at this subsided, the elder went on:

"Those Pickberrys are intermarried so that they don't know the degrees of cousin any more. Why, this Susie's father and mother was closly related. I remember, for I married them."

"I suppose," put in Aunt 'Mira, "Mr. Middler must make quite a bit out o' his merriage fees. He's been havin' a string of 'em lately."

The elder fairly snorted and his beard seemed to bristle.

"That's the way with all you folks," he said, plain disgust in his tone. "Because a minister don't work with his hands you say he must make his livin' easy. And you calculate him makin' from five to twenty dollars ev'ry time a bridal couple raps on his door. Huh! I've had the groom borrow money of me before he got out o' the house."

Marty giggled. "That girl certain sure got a hot one, then. If he'd got the girl without money, I should think he'd calculated to keep her without money."

Elder Concannon was laughing reflectively.

"Do you remember old Deacon Blodgett, Jason?"

"Huh?" grunted Mr. Day. "Not very well. But I remember his darter—she't taught the school here. I went to school to her myself for a while. And a right se-vere old maid she was."

"Yes. Beulah Blodgett was severe," agreed the elder, his eyes still twinkling.

"She used to wallop the boys somethin' awful," added Uncle Jason, rubbing his horny palm on his trouser leg and then looking at it as though the sting of Miss Blodgett's ruler had not even at this late day entirely departed from his memory.

"I remember," agreed the elder. "Not many ever got the start of Beulah Blodgett."

"Only Cale Hotchkiss." Uncle Jason halted in his speech and a positive grimace of pain seized upon his features for the moment. "Oh, well! Caleb wasn't like his son turned out to be, ye know," he muttered.

"True enough," said the elder, with sympathy in his tone.

"Speakin' of Cale and Miss Blodgett," Mr. Day hurried to add, "you know Cale was a great feller for rhyming—makin' po'try, you know. Why, he had lots o' pieces printed in the 'Poet's Corner' of the Middletown Courier. Mostly about folks that had died, you know.

"Howsomever, Cale got cotched once in school writin' po'try. Miss Blodgett come up behind him, looked over his shoulder, and had him out 'on the line' purty prompt. She told him school was no place for sech as that. She had a fierce eye an' a arm like a blacksmith," Uncle Jason continued. "She'd stand on the aidge of her platform and how she would bring down her ruler on a feller's hand! Whew!

"Well, this pertic'lar time she says to Cale Hotchkiss: 'You're sech a smartie at makin' up rhymes, make one now b'fore I hit ye. Hold out your hand!' And by ginger!" chuckled Uncle Jason, "he done it."

"What did he say, Dad?" asked Marty, eager for the particulars of any mischief.

"Cale sings out:

"'Here I stand before Miss Blodgett;
She's goin' to strike an' I'm goin' to dodge it!'"

The elder joined in the laughter over this old joke quite as heartily as anybody; but he had not forgotten his own story that had been side-tracked by Uncle Jason's reminiscence.

"Her father, Deacon Hiram Blodgett, was my senior deacon when I first came to Polktown Church," Elder Concannon said. "He was a good man and a just. But like most folks outside the ministry he depreciated the work performed by the pastor of a church like this one at Polktown, considering that 'he made his money easy.'

"I—I had a growing family then, and increasing expenses," said the elder, with a little flutter in his voice that was something Janice had never heard before, and she looked at him with amazement. Elder Concannon was not at all given to timidity; but there seemed right here a hesitation in his manner and in his voice.

"Well, anyhow," he began again, "I thought I needed an increase in my salary of a hundred dollars a year and I talked to Deacon Blodgett about it. He hemmed and hawed. He hated to give up church money just as he hated to give up his own, if he could save it.

"He put up the same claim as Mrs. Day did just now, regarding marriage fees. I allow I had more marriages to perform and traveled farther and got less for them than any minister who ever came into these mountains," and the elder smiled grimly. "However, the deacon got quite warm about it.

"'I tell you,' he says to me, 'even if they don't amount but to two dollars a ceremony, you've made this year over and above your salary agreed upon, the hundred dollars you claim to need.'

"It made me angry. It r'iled me in a most worldly way, I do allow," sighed the elder. "I guess the old Adam was roused in me. I had this Jim Pickberry and 'Mandy Whipple to marry that very night and I knew about what sort of folks they were.

"'Deacon Blodgett,' I said, 'will you give me two dollars for my next marriage fee?'

"'Surely I will,' says he, for he was always on the lookout for a shrewd bargain.

"'Then you'd better drive me over to Bowling to-night to the wedding and I'll give you whatever I get—sight unseen.' He agreed," chuckled the elder, "never thinking that I didn't have a horse and would have had to pay a dollar for the hire of one to get to my appointment.

"Folks don't live so poor now in this neighborhood—not even the Pickberrys. The house we went to was mostly log cabin, built back in Revolutionary times, with newer additions built on from time to time to accommodate a growing family.

"Jim Pickberry was a great, raw-boned, black-haired, and bearded giant of a man, and he was more than half drunk before he stood up with the girl. He wore his work clothes—all he had, it's probable—flannel shirt, shoddy trousers, and high boots. He did take off his hat. And 'Mandy was in a clean gingham; but she was barefooted, it being warm weather.

"There was a crowd there—they oozed out into the yard and looked in through the big room windows where I married the couple, hard and fast. When the ceremony was over and everybody had kissed the bride, Jim took me aside.

"I knew what was coming," said the elder, his eyes twinkling again. "I had already had experience enough to know the symptoms.

"'Parson,' Jim said to me, 'I'm awful much obliged to you for coming 'way over here and splicin' me and 'Mandy. It's mighty nice of ye. I expect it's sort o' customary to pay ye somethin' for your trouble?'

"'Yes,' I said. '"The servant is worthy of his hire," Jim.'

"He hemmed and hawed a bit and finally he blurts out: 'Parson! I ain't got airy a penny. Ye know how 'tis—the licker an' the stuff to eat cleaned me out. But I got a mighty likely litter of pups out in the barn. Come out and take your pick, will you?'

"'No; let Deacon Blodgett do that,' I told him. 'He wants a dog,' and I collected my two dollars from the sorest man who ever passed the contribution plate," concluded the elder amid the hilarity of his listeners.

The caller indicated a desire to speak with Uncle Jason in private before he departed, and the two men went out of doors to unblanket the colt and discuss the subject the elder had come to talk about.

Later Janice learned that the old gentleman had come for the express purpose of offering Mr. Day financial assistance in straightening out the tangle of Tom Hotchkiss' affairs. Elder Concannon would take up the first note of a thousand dollars, which was almost due, and would accept Uncle Jason's signature for the debt without security. It was a friendly thing and the show of kindness on the elder's part delighted Janice as much as it surprised her relatives.

On this evening, however, and while Uncle Jason was at the stable with Elder Concannon, Janice and Marty had something else to think about. It was Marty who spied the flitting figure down by the lane gate as he looked out of the kitchen door after the departing elder and Uncle Jason.

"Hi tunket!" he drawled. "What's that, I want to know? 'Tisn't a dog—nor a calf. Something's got strayed, sure enough, and don't know whether to venture in here or not."

"What is it, Marty?" Janice asked idly, following him to the door.

The boy grabbed his cap without replying and ran toward the gate. When Janice came out upon the porch the figure had disappeared behind the hole of one of the great trees down by the fence. Marty's coming frightened it out of the shadow in a moment and they saw it going up the road.

"Hey, there! Stop!" Marty called. "It's only me—Marty Day. I won't hurt you."

He could run twice as fast as his quarry, and in a minute had the shaking, weeping figure by the arm.

"Hi tunket!" he gasped. "Lottie Drugg! What you doin' over here?"

"Oh! oh! oh!" sobbed the girl. "I want Janice. Take me to my Janice Day. Oh! do, Marty!"

"Sure," he told her. "There! there! don't cry no more. Were you lost? What brought you here, Lottie?"

"I—I can't tell you," she wailed. "I'll tell my Janice—I'll tell her."

"Come on, then," said Marty huskily. "Janice is just yonder. Don't you see her on the porch?"

He led the sobbing child into the yard of the Day house and Janice, hearing them coming, ran out to learn what it meant.

"Lottie!" she cried, amazed.

Lottie Drugg ran into the bigger girl's arms. "Oh, Janice! My Janice Day!" she sobbed. "You'll take me in, won't you? You'll let me live with you? You love me just the same, don't you?"

"Goodness! What's the matter with the child?" gasped Janice.

"You got me," her cousin said gruffly. "I dunno what it's all about."

"Does your father know where you are, Lottie? Or Mamma 'Rill?"

Lottie's weeping became more abandoned.

"They don't care nothing more about me. They're not going to want me any more pretty soon. No, they're not! If—if you won't—won't have me, Janice Day, I sha'n't have a—a place in this—this world to go to."