NOBODY could have started out with better intentions than did Teddy Brockway that bright spring morning. It is true it was only March, but Teddy lived so far South that the month of March meant spring; he was dressed in a neat spring suit, had his little sister Margaret by the hand, and Sally Amelia, her dollie, under his special care, and was started for a trip all by themselves to old Auntie Blaikslee’s, almost a half-mile away!

“Aren’t you afraid to let those two babies go off alone?” Grandmamma asked, looking up from her knitting with a somewhat troubled face.

Mrs. Brockway smiled as she answered: “O, no! what could harm them? Teddy knows every foot of the way as well as I do, and every neighbor along the road; and everybody knows him. Besides, he is seven years old, and I must begin to trust him.” However, she went to the door and called after them: “Remember, Teddy, I trust Margaret to you. It isn’t every little boy of your age who can be depended upon to take care of his sister. And, Teddy, remember you are not to ride with any strange person who may ask you.”

“Course not!” said Teddy, with dignity; “not unless he is Uncle Ben or Deacon West. I can ride with Deacon West—can’t we, muvver?”

“O, yes!” said Mrs. Brockway, smiling. “He is not much more likely to meet Deacon West on this road than he is to meet the man in the moon,” she said laughingly to grandma, “but he has to provide for all the possibilities.”

Two hours afterwards Teddy and Margaret, with Sally Amelia somewhat the worse for being handled by all the grandchildren of old Auntie Blaikslee, were trudging back in triumph. The errand entrusted to them had been carefully done, and Teddy had said over the message he was to give his mother until he knew it by heart, and had bravely resisted two invitations from good-natured teamsters to have a ride. He was almost within sight of the corner where they turned into their own grounds, and Margaret had been good and minded beautifully. Truth to tell, Teddy’s heart was swelling with importance; he had never before been sent on so long a trip with only Margaret for company. He felt at least ten years old. At the top of the hill he came to a halt. There, just in front of them, jogging comfortably along, was Jake Winchell, Judge Aker’s hired man. Everybody knew Jake and his old horse and cart, but nobody, or at least Teddy, had ever happened to meet him in that direction before; his road always lay the other way.

“Halloo!” he said, getting out to fix something about the harness, and spying the children as he did so, “here’s luck; an almost empty cart and two nice passengers to have a ride in it down the hill. Don’t you want to jump in?”

Teddy never wanted anything worse. For a small minute he hesitated. What was that “muvver” had said? “You are not to ride with any strange person who may ask you.” “Course not!” said Teddy again, indignant with himself; “just as though Jake was a strange person.” But even while his heart said the words, a voice away down deep contradicted it: “Teddy Brockway, don’t you know she meant anybody you are not used to riding with? And you never had a ride with Jake.”

“What of that?” said Teddy’s other thought, still impatiently; “that’s because he never comes the way we live; but I’ve talked with him, and muvver said she thought he was kind to boys, and patient with them, and everything. Just as if she would care for Margaret and me to ride down hill to the gate! We’re most there; and it is a bad hard hill for Margaret; and she has had a long walk.”

“Yes, sir, thank you,” he said aloud to Jake, smiling and bowing like a gentleman. “I should like to ride ever so much, for Margaret’s sake; she is tired.”

“All right,” said Jake, with a good-natured chuckle; “climb in and I’ll tuck her in after you, and take you a few miles on your road as well as not.”

Little Margaret, who paid small attention to cautions, and who expected that everybody in the world was bound to be kind to her and help take care of her, took this ride as a matter of course, and was soon seated beside Teddy, with Sally Amelia tucked safely under her arm. Jake decided to walk down the hill. “It’s a pretty steep pitch for this part of the world,” he explained, “and the harness ain’t none of the safest; I guess I better walk.”

Teddy looked at the harness and trembled. What would his mother say if she could hear that? Even now it was not too late to ask Jake to set them back again on the dusty road, but how he would laugh and call him a coward! Teddy couldn’t, and the down-hill ride began.

What made that poor old half-blind horse stumble on a hidden root that particular morning and pitch the crazy old cart forward with such a sudden lunge as to send Teddy rolling down the hill faster than the horse could have traveled? Above all, how did it happen that Margaret did not fall out, but lay flat in the bottom of the cart and screamed? Nobody knows how any of it happened. They only know that when the almost distracted Jake had succeeded in getting the horse on his feet, and lifting Margaret in his arms, and trying his best to hush her had stumbled with all speed to the spot where Teddy had stopped rolling, the poor little fellow had fainted, and had to be carried by Jake to the very door of his mother’s house, Margaret trudging solemnly along by his side, occasionally asking pitifully why Teddy went to “s’eep,” and why he didn’t wake up.

Poor Teddy “waked up” almost too soon for his comfort. It had been a terrible pain, when he tried to pick himself up from the road, which had made him faint.

Days afterwards, as he lay in his white bed with his leg done in “splints,” whatever they were, and watched the long, bright spring days full of Southern sunshine and sweet smells, and thought how long it would be before he could run about again, he would sigh out wearily, “O, muvver! if I only hadn’t!” Of course his mother tried to comfort him. Once she said: “But, Teddy dear, you did not mean to do wrong. You supposed of course that because Jake was considered an honest, clean-souled man, mother would be willing to have you ride with him. It was what we call an error in judgment. If I were you I would be glad that you escaped with only a broken leg, and that dear little Margaret was not hurt at all, and then try to forget about it.”

Teddy considered this for some minutes with a grave face, and in his eyes an earnest longing to take the comfort to his heart. But at last he spoke, in the slow, old-fashioned way he sometimes had: “No, muvver, it was an error in want-to! I knew ‘not to ride with any strange person’ meant with any person that you had not let me ride with before; and I knew I wasn’t doing real heart right; so if Margaret had been hurt it would have been my fault. O, muvver! if I only hadn’t!”

Pansy.