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Title: Two Little Pilgrims' Progress: A Story of the City Beautiful

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Illustrator: Reginald Bathurst Birch

Release date: November 17, 2015 [eBook #50471]
                Most recently updated: June 22, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWO LITTLE PILGRIMS' PROGRESS: A STORY OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL ***




[Illustration: THEIR DREAM HAD COME TRUE.]




                     TWO LITTLE PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS
                    _A Story of the City Beautiful_


                                   BY
                        FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

                                NEW YORK
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
                                  1916

                       Copyright, 1895, 1897, by
                        CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS




                         LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
                  _FROM DRAWINGS BY REGINALD B. BIRCH_


                                                                    PAGE
  Their dream had come true,                                Frontispiece
  “Everything in the world,” said Robin,                              15
  “Aunt Matilda,” she said, suddenly,                                 35
  Meg looked rather like a little witch,                              67
  “Is this the train to Chicago?” said Robin,                         79
  “You like a cup coffee?” she asked,                                 97
  “Now we are in Venice,”                                            111
  “Well, Jem!” she exclaimed,                                        121
  He was looking at her in an absent, miserable way,                 127
  “To—to—the Fair?” he said, tremulously,                            141
  “Take me with you,”                                                153
  “It’s a queer sight,” she said to John Holt,                       195




                     TWO LITTLE PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS




                                   I


The sun had set, and the shadows were deepening in the big barn. The
last red glow—the very last bit which reached the corner the children
called the Straw Parlor—had died away, and Meg drew her knees up higher,
so as to bring the pages of her book nearer to her eyes as the twilight
deepened, and it became harder to read. It was her bitterest grievance
that this was what always happened when she became most interested and
excited—the light began to fade away, and the shadows to fill all the
corners and close in about her.

She frowned as it happened now—a fierce little frown which knitted her
childish black brows as she pored over her book, devouring the page,
with the determination to seize on as much as was possible. It was like
running a desperate race with the darkness.

She was a determined child, and no one would have failed to guess as
much who could have watched her for a few moments as she sat on her
curious perch, her cheeks supported by her hands, her shock of straight
black hair tumbling over her forehead.

The Straw Parlor was the top of a straw stack in Aunt Matilda’s barn.
Robin had discovered it one day by climbing a ladder which had been left
leaning against the stack, and when he had found himself on the top of
it he had been enchanted by the feeling it gave him of being so high
above the world, and had called Meg up to share it with him.

She had been even more enchanted than he.

They both hated the world down below—Aunt Matilda’s world—which seemed
hideous and exasperating and sordid to them in its contrast to the world
they had lived in before their father and mother had died, and they had
been sent to their sole relation, who did not want them, and only took
them in from respect to public opinion. Three years they had been with
Aunt Matilda, and each week had seemed more unpleasant than the last.
Mrs. Matilda Jennings was a renowned female farmer of Illinois, and she
was far too energetic a manager and business woman to have time to spend
on children. She had an enormous farm, and managed it herself with a
success and ability which made her celebrated in agricultural papers. If
she had not given her dead brother’s children a home, they would have
starved or been sent to the poorhouse. Accordingly, she gave them food
to eat and beds to sleep in, but she scarcely ever had time to notice
them. If she had had time to talk to them, she had nothing to say. She
cared for nothing but crops and new threshing-machines and fertilizers,
and they knew nothing about such things.

“She never says anything but ‘Go to bed,’ ‘Keep out of the way.’ She’s
not like a woman at all,” Meg commented once, “she’s like a man in
woman’s clothes.”

Their father had been rather like a woman in man’s clothes. He was a
gentle, little, slender man, with a large head. He had always been poor,
and Mrs. Matilda Jennings had regarded him as a contemptible failure. He
had had no faculty for business or farming. He had taught school, and
married a school teacher. They had had a small house, but somehow it had
been as cosey as it was tiny. They had managed to surround themselves
with an atmosphere of books, by buying the cheap ones they could afford
and borrowing the expensive ones from friends and circulating libraries.
The twins—Meg and Robin—had heard stories and read books all the first
years of their lives, as they sat in their little seats by the small,
warm fireside. In Aunt Matilda’s bare, cold house there was not a book
to be seen. A few agricultural papers were scattered about. Meals were
hurried over as necessary evils. The few people who appeared on the
scene were farmers, who talked about agricultural implements and the
wheat market.

“It’s such a bare place,” Robin used to say, and he would drive his
hands into the depths of his pockets and set his square little jaw, and
stare before him.

Both the twins had that square little jaw. Neither of them looked like
their father and mother, except that from their mother they inherited
black hair. Robin’s eyes were black, but Meg’s were gray, with thick
black lashes. They were handsome little creatures, but their shocks of
straight black hair, their straight black brows and square little jaws,
made them look curiously unlike other children. They both remembered one
winter evening, when, as they sat on their seat by the fire, their
father, after looking at them with a half smile for a moment or so,
began to laugh.

“Margaret,” he said to their mother, “do you know who those two are
like? You have heard me speak of Matilda often enough.”

“Oh, Robert!” she exclaimed, “surely they are not like Matilda?”

“Well, perhaps it is too much to say they are like her,” he answered,
“but there is something in their faces that reminds me of her strongly.
I don’t know what it is exactly, but it is there. It is a good thing,
perhaps,” with a queer tone in his voice. “Matilda always did what she
made up her mind to do. Matilda was a success. I was always a failure.”

“Ah, no, Bob,” she said, “not a failure!”

She had put her hand on his shoulder, and he lifted it and pressed it
against his thin cheek.

“Wasn’t I, Maggie?” he said, gently, “wasn’t I? Well, I think these two
will be like Matilda in making up their minds and getting what they
want.”

Before the winter was over Robin and Meg were orphans, and were with
Aunt Matilda, and there they had been ever since.

Until the day they found the Straw Parlor it had seemed as if no corner
in the earth belonged to them. Meg slept on a cot in a woman servant’s
room, Robin shared a room with some one else. Nobody took any notice of
them.

“When any one meets us anywhere,” Meg said, “they always look surprised.
Dogs who are not allowed in the house are like us. The only difference
is that they don’t drive us out. But we are just as much in the way.”

“I know,” said Robin; “if it wasn’t for you, Meg, I should run away.”

“Where?” said Meg.

“Somewhere,” said Robin, setting his jaw; “I’d find a place.”

“If it wasn’t for you,” said Meg, “I should be so lonely that I should
walk into the river. I wouldn’t stand it.” It is worth noticing that she
did not say “I _could_ not stand it.”

But after the day they found the Straw Parlor they had an abiding-place.
It was Meg who preëmpted it before she had been on the top of the stack
five minutes. After she had stumbled around, looking about her, she
stopped short, and looked down into the barn.

“Robin,” she said, “this is another world. We are miles and miles away
from Aunt Matilda. Let us make this into our home—just yours and
mine—and live here.”

“We are in nobody’s way—nobody will even know where we are,” said Robin.
“Nobody ever asks, you know. Meg, it will be just like our own. We will
live here.” And so they did. On fine days, when they were tired of
playing, they climbed the ladder to rest on the heap of yellow straw; on
wet days they lay and told each other stories, or built caves, or read
their old favorite books over again. The stack was a very high one, and
the roof seemed like a sort of big tent above their heads, and the barn
floor a wonderful, exaggeratedly long, distance below. The birds who had
nests in the rafters became accustomed to them, and one of the
children’s chief entertainments was to lie and watch the mothers and
fathers carry on their domestic arrangements, feeding their young ones,
and quarrelling a little sometimes about the way to bring them up. The
twins invented a weird little cry, with which they called each other, if
one was in the Straw Parlor and the other one entered the barn, to find
out whether it was occupied or not. They never mounted to the Straw
Parlor, or descended from it, if any one was within sight. This was
their secret. They wanted to feel that it was very high, and far away
from Aunt Matilda’s world, and if any one had known where they were, or
had spoken to them from below, the charm would have been broken.

This afternoon, as Meg pored over her book, she was waiting for Robin.
He had been away all day. At twelve years old Robin was not of a light
mind. When he had been only six years old he had had serious plans. He
had decided that he would be a great inventor. He had also decided—a
little later—that he would not be poor, like his father, but would be
very rich. He had begun by having a savings bank, into which he put
rigorously every penny that was given to him. He had been so quaintly
systematic about it that people were amused, and gave him pennies
instead of candy and toys. He kept a little banking book of his own. If
he had been stingy he would have been a very unpleasant little boy, but
he was only strict with himself. He was capable of taking from his
capital to do the gentlemanly thing by Meg at Christmas.

“He has the spirit of the financier, that is all,” said his father.

Since he had been with Aunt Matilda he had found opportunities to earn a
trifle rather frequently. On the big place there were small, troublesome
duties the farm hands found he could be relied on to do, which they were
willing to pay for. They found out that he never failed them.

“Smart little chap,” they said; “always up to time when he undertakes a
thing.”

To-day he had been steadily at work under the head man. Aunt Matilda had
no objection to his odd jobs.

“He has his living to earn, and he may as well begin,” she said.

So Meg had been alone since morning. She had only one duty to perform,
and then she was free. The first spring they had been with Aunt Matilda
Robin had invested in a few chickens, and their rigorous care of them
had resulted in such success that the chickens had become a sort of
centre of existence to them. They could always have any dreams of the
future upon the fortune to be gained by chickens. You could calculate on
bits of paper about chickens and eggs until your head whirled at the
magnitude of your prospects. Meg’s duty was to feed them, and show them
scrupulous attentions when Robin was away.

After she had attended to them she went to the barn, and, finding it
empty, climbed up to the Straw Parlor with an old “Pilgrim’s Progress,”
to spend the day.


This afternoon, when the light began to redden and then to die away, she
and Christian were very near the gates. She longed so to go in with him,
and was yearning towards them with breathless eagerness, when she heard
Robin’s cry below, coming up from the barn floor.

She sprang up with a start, feeling bewildered a second, before she
answered. The City Beautiful was such millions—such millions of miles
away from Aunt Matilda’s barn. She found herself breathing quickly and
rubbing her eyes, as she heard Robin hurrying up the ladder.

Somehow she felt as if he was rather in a hurry, and when his small,
black shock head and wide-awake black eyes appeared above the straw she
had a vague feeling that he was excited, and that he had come from
another world. He clambered on to the stack and made his way to her, and
threw himself full length on the straw at her side.

“Meg!” he said—“Hallo, you look as if you were in a dream! Wake
up!—Jones and Jerry are coming to the barn—I hurried to get here before
them; they’re talking about something I want you to hear—something new!
Wake up!”

“Oh, Robin!” said Meg, clutching her book and coming back to earth with
a sigh, “I don’t want to hear Jones and Jerry. I don’t want to hear any
of the people down there. I’ve been reading the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’
and I do wish—I do so _wish_ there _was_ a City Beautiful.”

Robin gave a queer little laugh. He really was excited.

“There is going to be one,” he said. “Jones and Jerry don’t really know
it, but it is something like that they are talking about; a City
Beautiful—a real one—on this earth, and not a hundred miles away. Let’s
get near the edge and listen.”




                                   II


They drew as near to the edge as they could without being seen. They did
not understand in the least. Robin was not given to practical jokes, but
what he had said sounded rather as if there was a joke somewhere. But
she saw Jones and Jerry enter the barn, and saw, before they entered,
that they were deep in talk. It was Jones who was speaking. Jones was
Aunt Matilda’s head man, and was an authority on many things.

“There’s been exhibitions and fairs all over the world,” he was saying,
“but there’s been nothing like what this will be. It will be a city,
that’s what it will be, and all the world is going to be in it. They are
going to build it fronting on the water, and bank the water up into
lakes and canals, and build places like white palaces beside them, and
decorate the grounds with statues and palms and flowers and fountains,
and there’s not a country on earth that won’t send things to fill the
buildings. And there won’t be anything a man can’t see by going through
’em. It’ll be as good as a college course to spend a week there.”

Meg drew a little closer to Robin in the straw.

“What are they talking about?” she whispered.

“Listen,” said Bob.

Jerry, who was moving about at some work below, gave a chuckling laugh.

“Trust ’em to do the biggest thing yet, or bust, them Chicago people,”
he said. “It’s got to be the biggest thing—a Chicago Fair.”

“It’s not goin’ to be the Chicago Fair,” Jones said. “They’re not goin’
to put up with no such idea as that; it’s the World’s Fair. They’re
going to ring in the universe.”

“That’s Chicago out an’ out,” said Jerry. “Buildin’s twenty stories
high, an’ the thermometer twenty-five degrees below zero, an’ a World’s
Fair. Christopher Columbus! I’d like to see it!”

“I bet Christopher Columbus would like to see it,” said Jones. “It’s out
of compliment to him they’re getting it up—for discovering Chicago.”

“Well, I didn’t know he made his name that way partic’lar,” said Jerry.
“Thought what he prided hisself on was discoverin’ America.”

“Same thing,” said Jones, “same thing! Wouldn’t have had much to blow
about, and have statues set up, and comic operas written about him, if
it had only been America he’d discovered. Chicago does him full credit,
and she’s goin’ to give him a send-off that’ll be a credit to her.”

Robin smothered a little laugh in his coat-sleeve. He was quite used to
hearing jokes about Chicago. The people in the country round it were
enormously proud of it, and its great schemes and great buildings and
multi-millionaires, but those who were given to jokes had the habit of
being jocular about it, just as they had the habit of proclaiming and
dwelling upon its rush and wealth and enterprise. But Meg was not a
jocular person. She was too intense and easily excited. She gave Robin
an impatient nudge with her elbow, not in reproof, but as a sort of
irrepressible ejaculation.

“I wish they wouldn’t be funny,” she exclaimed. “I want them to tell
more about it. I wish they’d go on.”

But they did not go on; at least, not in any way that was satisfactory.
They only remained in the barn a short time longer, and they were busy
with the work they had come to do. Meg craned her neck and listened, but
they did not tell more, and she was glad when they went away, so that
she could turn to Robin.

“Don’t you know more than that?” she said. “Is it true? What have you
heard? Tell me yourself.”

“I’ve heard a lot to-day,” said Robin. “They were all talking about it
all the time, and I meant to tell you myself, only I saw Jones and Jerry
coming, and thought, perhaps, we should hear something more if we
listened.”

They clambered over to their corner and made themselves comfortable.
Robin lay on his back, but Meg leaned on her elbows, as usual, with her
cheeks resting on her hands. Her black elf-locks hung over her forehead,
and her big eyes shone.

“Rob,” she said, “go on. What’s the rest?”

“The rest!” he said. “It would take a week to tell it all, I should
think. But it’s going to be the most wonderful thing in the world. They
are going to build a place that will be like a white, beautiful city, on
the borders of the lake—that was why I called it the City Beautiful. It
won’t be on the top of a hill, of course——”

“But if it is on the edge of the lake, and the sun shines and the big
water is blue and there are shining white palaces, it will be better, I
believe,” said Meg. “What is going to be in the city?”

“Everything in the world,” said Robin. “Things from everywhere—from
every country.”

“There are a great many countries,” said Meg. “You know how it is in the
geography. Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as America. Spain and
Portugal and France and England—and Sweden and Norway and Russia and
Lapland—and India—and Italy—and Switzerland, and all the others.”

“There will be things—and people—brought from them all. I heard them say
so. They say there will be villages, with people walking about in them.”

[Illustration: “EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD,” SAID ROBIN.]

“Do they walk about when they are at home?” exclaimed Meg.

“Yes, in the queer clothes they wear in their own countries. There’s
going to be an Esquimaux village.”

“With dogs and sledges?” cried Meg, lifting her head.

“Yes; and you know that place in Italy where the streets are made of
water——”

“It’s Venice,” said Meg. “And they go about in boats called gondolas.”

“And the men who take them about are called gondoliers,” interrupted
Robin. “And they have scarfs and red caps, and push their boats along
with poles. There will be gondolas at the Fair, and people can get into
them and go about the canals.”

“Just as they do in Venice?” Meg gasped.

“Just as they do in Venice. And it will be the same with all the other
countries. It will be as if they were all brought there—Spanish places
and Egyptian places and German places—and French and Italian and Irish
and Scotch and English—and all the others.”

“To go there would be like travelling all over the world,” cried Meg.

“Yes,” said Rob, excitedly. “And all the trades will be there, and all
the machines—and inventions—and pictures—and books—and statues—and
scientific things—and wonderful things—and everything any one wants to
learn about in all the world!”

In his excitement, his words had become so rapid that they almost
tumbled over each other, and he said the last sentence in a rush. There
were red spots on his cheeks, and a queer look in his black eyes. He had
been listening to descriptions of this thing all day. A new hand, hot
from the excitement in Chicago, had been among the workers. Apparently
he had heard of nothing else, thought of nothing else, talked of nothing
else, and dreamed of nothing else but the World’s Fair for weeks.
Finding himself among people who had only bucolic and vague ideas about
it, he had poured forth all he knew, and being a rather good talker, had
aroused great excitement. Robin had listened with eyes and ears wide
open. He was a young human being, born so full of energy and enterprise
that the dull, prosaic emptiness of his life in Aunt Matilda’s world had
been more horrible than he had been old enough to realize. He could not
have explained why it had seemed so maddening to him, but the truth was
that in his small, boyish body was imprisoned the force and ability
which in manhood build great schemes, and not only build, but carry them
out. In him was imprisoned one of the great business men, inventors, or
political powers of the new century. But of this he knew nothing, and so
ate his young heart out in Aunt Matilda’s world, sought refuge with Meg
in the Straw Parlor, and was bitterly miserable and at a loss.

How he had drunk in every word the man from Chicago had uttered! How he
had edged near to him and tried not to lose him for a moment! How he had
longed for Meg to listen with him, and had hoarded up every sentence! If
he had not been a man in embryo, and a strong and clear-headed creature,
he would have done his work badly. But he never did his work badly. He
held on like a little bulldog, and thought of what Meg would say when
they sat in the straw together. Small wonder that he looked excited when
his black head appeared above the edge of the straw. He was wrought up
to the highest pitch. Small wonder that there were deep red spots on his
cheeks, and that there was a queer, intense look in his eyes, and about
his obstinate little mouth.

He threw up his arms with a desperate gesture.

“_Everything_,” he said again, staring straight before him, “that any
one could want to learn about—everything in all the world.”

“Oh, Robin!” said Meg, in quite a fierce little voice, “and we—_we_
shall never see it!”

She saw Robin clinch his hands, though he said nothing, and it made her
clinch her own hands. Robin’s were tough, little, square-fingered fists,
brown and muscular; Meg’s hands were long-fingered, flexible, and
slender, but they made good little fists when they doubled themselves
up.

“Rob,” she said, “we never see anything! We never hear anything! We
never learn anything! If something doesn’t happen we shall be
Nothings—that’s what we shall be—Nothings!” And she struck her fist upon
the straw.

Rob’s jaw began to look very square, but he did not speak.

“We are twelve years old,” Meg went on. “We’ve been here three years,
and we don’t know one thing we didn’t know when we came here. If we had
been with father and mother we should have been learning things all the
time. We haven’t one thing of our own, Rob, but the chickens and the
Straw Parlor—and the Straw Parlor might be taken away from us.”

Rob’s square jaw relaxed just sufficiently to allow of a grim little
grin.

“We’ve got the Treasure, Meg,” he said.

Meg’s laugh had rather a hysterical sound. That she should not have
mentioned the Treasure among their belongings was queer. They talked so
much about the Treasure. At this moment it was buried in an iron bank,
deep in the straw, about four feet from where they sat. It was the very
bank Robin had hoarded his savings in when he had begun at six years old
with pennies, and a ten-cent blank-book to keep his accounts in.
Everything they had owned since then had been pushed and dropped into
it—all the chicken and egg money, and all Robin had earned by doing odd
jobs for any one who would give him one. Nobody knew about the old iron
bank any more than they knew about the Straw Parlor, and the children,
having buried it in the straw, called it the Treasure. Meg’s stories
about it were numerous and wonderful. Sometimes magicians came, and
multiplied it a hundred-fold. Sometimes robbers stole it, and they
themselves gave chase, and sought it with wild adventure; but perhaps
the most satisfactory thing was to invent ways to spend it when it had
grown to enormous proportions. Sometimes they bought a house in New
York, and lived there together. Sometimes they traded in foreign lands
with it. Sometimes they bought land, which increased in value to such an
extent that they were millionaires in a month. Ah! it was a treasure
indeed.

After the little, low, over-strained laugh, Meg folded her arms on the
straw and hid her face in them. Robin looked at her with a troubled air
for about a minute. Then he spoke to her.

“It’s no use doing that,” he said.

“It’s no use doing anything,” Meg answered, her voice muffled in her
arms. “I don’t want to do this any more than you do. We’re so lonely!”

“Yes, we’re lonely,” said Robin, “that’s a fact.” And he stared up at
the dark rafters above him, and at some birds who were clinging to them
and twittering about a nest.

“I said I wished there was a City Beautiful,” Meg said, “but it seems to
make it worse that there is going to be something like it so near, and
that we should never get any nearer to it than a hundred miles.”

Rob sat up, and locked his hands together round his knees.

“How do you know?” he said.

“How do I know?” cried Meg, desperately, and she lifted her head,
turning her wet face sideways to look at him. He unlocked his hands to
give his forehead a hard rub, as if he were trying either to rub some
thought out of or into it.

“Just because we are lonely there _is_ use in doing things,” he said.
“There’s nobody to do them for us. At any rate, we’ve got as far on the
way to the City as the bottom of the Hill of Difficulty.”

And he gave his forehead another rub and looked straight before him, and
Meg drew a little closer to him on the straw, and the family of birds
filled the silence with domestic twitters.




                                  III


During the weeks that followed they spent more time than ever in their
hiding-place. They had an absorbing topic of conversation, a new and
wonderful thing, better than their old books, even better than the
stories Meg made when she lay on the straw, her elbows supporting her,
her cheeks on her hands, and her black-lashed gray eyes staring into
space. Hers were always good stories, full of palaces and knights and
robber chiefs and fairies. But this new thing had the thrill of being a
fairy story which was real—so real that one could read about it in the
newspapers, and everybody was talking about it, even Aunt Matilda, her
neighbors, and the work-hands on the farm. To the two lonely children,
in their high nest in the straw-stack, it seemed a curious thing to hear
these people in the world below talk about it in their ordinary,
everyday way, without excitement or awe, as if it was a new kind of big
ploughing or winnowing machine. To them it was a thing so beautiful that
they could scarcely find the words to express their thoughts and dreams
about it, and yet they were never alone together without trying to do
so.

On wet, cheerless days, in which they huddled close together in their
nest to keep from being chilled, it was their comfort to try to imagine
and paint pictures of the various wonders until, in their interest, they
forgot the dampness of the air, and felt the unending patter of the
rain-drops on the barn roof merely a pleasant sort of accompaniment to
the stories of their fancies.

Since the day when they had listened to Jones and Jerry joking, down
below them in the barn, Rob had formed the habit of collecting every
scrap of newspaper relating to the wonder. He cut paragraphs out of Aunt
Matilda’s cast-aside newspapers; he begged them from the farm-hands and
from the country store-keepers. Anything in the form of an illustration
he held as a treasure beyond price, and hoarded it to bring to Meg with
exultant joy.

How they pored over these things, reading the paragraphs again and
again, until they knew them almost by heart. How they studied the
pictures, trying to gather the proportions and color of every column and
dome and arch! What enthusiast, living in Chicago itself, knew the
marvel as they did, and so dwelt on and revelled in its beauties! No one
knew of their pleasure; like the Straw Parlor, it was their secret. The
strangeness of their lives lay in the fact that absolutely no one knew
anything about them at all, or asked anything, thinking it quite
sufficient that their friendlessness was supplied with enough animal
heat and nourishment to keep their bodies alive.

Of that other part of them—their restless, growing young brains and
naturally craving hearts, which in their own poor enough but still human
little home had at least been recognized and cared for—Aunt Matilda knew
nothing, and, indeed, had never given a thought to it. She had not
undertaken the care of intelligences and affections; her own were not of
an order to require supervision. She was too much occupied with her
thousand-acre farm, and the amazing things she was doing with it. That
the children could read and write and understood some arithmetic she
knew. She had learned no more herself, and had found it enough to build
her fortune upon. She had never known what it was to feel lonely and
neglected, because she was a person quite free from affections and quite
enough for herself. She never suspected that others could suffer from a
weakness of which she knew nothing, because it had never touched her.

If any one had told her that these two children, who ate her plentiful,
rough meals at her table, among field-hands and servants, were neglected
and lonely, and that their dim knowledge of it burned in their childish
minds, she would have thought the announcement a piece of idle,
sentimental folly; but that no solid detail of her farming was a fact
more real than this one was the grievous truth.

“When we were at home,” was Meg’s summing-up of the situation, “at least
we belonged to somebody. We were poor, and wore our clothes a long time,
and had shabby shoes, and couldn’t go on excursions, but we had our
little bench by the fire, and father and mother used to talk to us and
let us read their books and papers, and try to teach us things. I don’t
know what we were going to be when we grew up, but we were going to do
some sort of work, and know as much as father and mother did. I don’t
know whether that was a great deal or not, but it was something.”

“It was enough to teach school,” said Robin. “If we were not so far out
in the country now, I believe Aunt Matilda would let us go to school if
we asked her. It wouldn’t cost her anything if we went to the public
school.”

“She wouldn’t if we didn’t ask her,” said Meg. “She would never think of
it herself. Do you know what I was thinking yesterday? I was looking at
the pigs in their sty. Some of them were eating, and one was full, and
was lying down going to sleep. And I said to myself, ‘Robin and I are
just like you. We live just like you. We eat our food and go to bed, and
get up again and eat some more food. We don’t learn anything more than
you do, and we are not worth as much to anybody. We are not even worth
killing at Christmas.’”

If they had never known any other life, or if nature had not given them
the big, questioning eyes and square little jaws and strong, nervous
little fists, they might have been content to sink into careless
idleness and apathy. No one was actively unkind to them; they had their
Straw Parlor, and were free to amuse themselves as they chose. But they
had been made of the material of which the world’s workers are built,
and their young hearts were full of a restlessness and longing whose
full significance they themselves did not comprehend.

And this wonder working in the world beyond them—this huge, beautiful
marvel, planned by the human brain and carried out by mere human hands;
this great thing with which all the world seemed to them to be
throbbing, and which seemed to set no limit to itself and prove that
there was no limit to the power of human wills and minds—this filled
them with a passion of restlessness and yearning greater than they had
ever known before.

“It is an enchanted thing, you know, Robin—it’s an enchanted thing,” Meg
said one day, looking up from her study of some newspaper clippings and
a magazine with some pictures in it.

“It seems like it,” said Robin.

“I’m sure it’s enchanted,” Meg went on. “It seems so tremendous that
people should think they could do such huge things. As if they felt as
if they could do anything or bring anything from anywhere in the world.
It almost frightens me sometimes, because it reminds me of the Tower of
Babel. Don’t you remember how the people got so proud that they thought
they could do anything, and they began to build the tower that was to
reach to heaven; and then they all woke up one morning and found they
were all speaking different languages and could not understand each
other. Suppose everybody was suddenly struck like that some morning
now—I mean the Fair people!” widening her eyes with a little shiver.

“They won’t be,” said Rob. “Those things have stopped happening.”

“Yes, they have,” said Meg. “Sometimes I wish they hadn’t. If they
hadn’t, perhaps—perhaps if we made burnt offerings, we might be taken by
a miracle to see the World’s Fair.”

“We haven’t anything to burn,” said Rob, rather gloomily.

“We’ve got the chickens,” Meg answered as gloomily, “but it wouldn’t do
any good. Miracles are over.”

“The world is all different,” said Robin. “You have to do your miracle
yourself.”

“It will be a miracle,” Meg said, “if we ever get away from Aunt
Matilda’s world, and live like people instead of like pigs who are
comfortable—and we shall have to perform it ourselves.”

“There is no one else,” said Robin. “You see, there is no one else in
the world.”

He threw out his hand and it clutched Meg’s, which was lying in the
straw near him. He did not know why he clutched it—he did not in the
least know why; nor did she know why a queer sound in his voice suddenly
made her feel their unfriendedness in a way that overwhelmed her. She
found herself looking at him, with a hard lump rising in her throat. It
was one of the rainy days, and the hollow drumming and patter of the big
drops on the roof seemed somehow to shut them in with their loneliness
away from all the world.

“It’s a strange thing,” she said, almost under her breath, “to be two
children, only just twelve years old, and to be quite by ourselves in
such a big world, where there are such millions and millions of people
all busy doing things and making great plans, and none of them knowing
about us, or caring what we are going to do.”

“If we work our miracle ourselves,” said Rob, holding her hand quite
tight, “it will be better than having it worked for us. Meg!”—as if he
were beginning a new subject—“Meg!”

“What?” she answered, still feeling the hard lump in her throat.

“Do you think we are going to stay here always?”

“I—oh, Robin, I don’t know.”

“Well, I do, then. We are _not_—and that’s the first step up the Hill of
Difficulty.”




                                   IV


All their lives the children had acted in unison. When they had been
tiny creatures they had played the same games and used the same toys. It
had seemed of little importance that their belongings were those of a
boy and girl. When Robin had played with tops and marbles, Meg had
played with them too. When Meg had been in a domestic and maternal mood,
and had turned to dolls and dolls’ housekeeping, Robin had assumed some
masculine rôle connected with the amusement. It had entertained him as
much at times to be the dolls’ doctor, or the carpenter who repaired the
dolls’ furniture or made plans for the enlargement of the dolls’ house,
as it had entertained Meg to sew the flags and dress the sailors who
manned his miniature ships, and assist him with the tails of his kites.
They had had few playmates, and had pleased each other far better than
outsiders could have done.

“It’s because we are twins,” Meg said. “Twins are made alike, and so
they like the same things. I’m glad I’m a twin. If I had to be born
again and be an _un_-twin I’m sure I should be lonely.”

“I don’t think it matters whether you are a boy or a girl, if you are a
twin,” said Robin. “You are part of the other one, and so it’s as if you
were both.”

They had never had secrets from each other. They had read the same books
as they grew older, been thrilled by the same stories, and shared in
each other’s plans and imaginings or depressions. So it was a curious
thing that at this special time, when they were drawn nearest to one
another by an unusual interest and sympathy, there should have arrived a
morning when each rose with a thought unshared by the other.

Aunt Matilda was very busy that day. She was always busy, but this
morning seemed more actively occupied than usual. She never appeared to
sit down, unless to dispose of a hurried meal or go over some accounts.
She was a wonderful woman, and the twins knew that the most
objectionable thing they could do was not to remove themselves after a
repast was over; but this morning Meg walked over to a chair and firmly
sat down in it, and watched her as she vigorously moved things about,
rubbed dust off them, and put them in their right places.

Meg’s eyes were fixed on her very steadily. She wondered if it was true
that she and Robin were like her, and if they would be more like her
when they had reached her age, and what would have happened to them
before that time came. It was true that Aunt Matilda had a square jaw
also. It was not an encouraging thing to contemplate; in fact, as she
looked at her, Meg felt her heart begin a slow and steady thumping. But,
as it thumped, she was getting herself in hand with such determination
that when she at last spoke her chin looked very square indeed, and her
black-lashed eyes were as nearly stern as a child’s eyes can look.

“Aunt Matilda,” she said, suddenly.

“Well?” and a tablecloth was whisked off and shaken.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Talk in a hurry, then. I’ve no time to waste in talk.”

“How old were you when you began to work and make money?”

Aunt Matilda smiled grimly.

“I worked out for my board when I was ten years old,” she said. “Me and
your father were left orphans, and we had to work, or starve. When I was
twelve I got a place to wash dishes and look after children and run
errands, and I got a dollar a week because it was out in the country,
and girls wouldn’t stay there.”

“Do you know how old _I_ am?” asked Meg.

“I’ve forgotten.”

“I’m twelve years old.” She got up from her chair and walked across the
room and stood looking up at Aunt Matilda. “I’m an orphan too, and so is
Robin,” she said, “and we have to work. You give us a place to stay in;
but—there are other things. We have no one, and we have to do things
ourselves; and we are twelve, and twelve is a good age for people who
have to do things for themselves. Is there anything in this house or in
the dairy or on the farm that would be worth wages, that I could do? I
don’t care how hard it is if I can do it.”

If Aunt Matilda had been a woman of sentiment she might have been moved
by the odd, unchildish tenseness and sternness of the little figure, and
the straight-gazing eyes, which looked up at her from under the thick
black hair tumbling in short locks over the forehead. Twelve years old
was very young to stand and stare the world in the face with such eyes.
But she was not a woman of sentiment, and her life had been spent among
people who knew their right to live could only be won by hard work, and
who began the fight early. So she looked at the child without any
emotion whatever.

“Do you suppose you could more than earn your bread if I put you in the
dairy and let you help there?” she said.

“Yes,” answered Meg, unflinchingly, “I know I could. I’m strong for my
age, and I’ve watched them doing things there. I can wash pans and bowls
and cloths, and carry things about, and go anywhere I’m told. I know how
clean things have to be kept.”

[Illustration: “AUNT MATILDA,” SHE SAID, SUDDENLY.]

“Well,” said Aunt Matilda, looking her over sharply, “they’ve been
complaining about the work being too much for them, lately. You go in
there this morning and see what you can do. You shall have a dollar a
week if you’re worth it. You’re right about its being time that you
should begin earning something.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Meg, and she turned round and walked away in
the direction of the dairy, with two deep red spots on her cheeks and
her heart thumping again—though this time it thumped quickly.

She reached the scene of action in the midst of a rush of work, and
after their first rather exasperated surprise at so immature and
inexperienced a creature being supposed to be able to help them, the
women found plenty for her to do. She said so few words and looked so
little afraid that she made a sort of impression on them.

“See,” she said to the head woman, “Aunt Matilda didn’t send me to do
things that need teaching. Just tell me the little things, it does not
matter what, and I’ll do them. I can.”

How she worked that morning—how she ran on errands—how she carried this
and that—how she washed and scrubbed milk-pans—and how all her tasks
were menial and apparently trivial, though entirely necessary, and how
the activity and rapidity and unceasingness of them tried her
unaccustomed young body, and finally made her limbs ache and her back
feel as if it might break at some unexpected moment, Meg never forgot.
But such was the desperation of her indomitable little spirit and the
unconquerable will she had been born with, that when it was over she was
no more in the mood for giving up than she had been when she walked in
among the workers after her interview with Aunt Matilda.

When dinner-time came she walked up to Mrs. Macartney, the manager of
the dairy work, and asked her a question.

“Have I helped you?” she said.

“Yes, you have,” said the woman, who was by no means an ill-natured
creature for a hard-driven woman. “You’ve done first-rate.”

“Will you tell Aunt Matilda that?” said Meg.

“Yes,” was the answer.

Meg was standing with her hands clasped tightly behind her back, and she
looked at Mrs. Macartney very straight and hard from under her black
brows.

“Mrs. Macartney,” she said, “if I’m worth it, Aunt Matilda will give me
a dollar a week; and it’s time I began to work for my living. Am I worth
that much?”

“Yes, you are,” said Mrs. Macartney, “if you go on as you’ve begun.”

“I shall go on as I’ve begun,” said Meg. “Thank you, ma’am,” and she
walked back to the house.

After dinner she waited to speak to Aunt Matilda again.

“I went to the dairy,” she said.

“I know you did,” Aunt Matilda answered. “Mrs. Macartney told me about
it. You can go on. I’ll give you the dollar a week.”

She looked the child over again, as she had done in the morning, but
with a shade of expression which might have meant a touch of added
interest. Perhaps her mind paused just long enough to bring back to her
the time when she had been a worker at twelve years old, and also had
belonged to no one.

“She’ll make her living,” she said, as she watched Meg out of the room.
“She’s more like me than she is like her father. Robert wasn’t
worthless, but he had no push.”

Having made quite sure that she was not wanted in the dairy for the time
being, Meg made her way to the barn. She was glad to find it empty, so
that she could climb the ladder without waiting. When she reached the
top and clambered over the straw the scent of it seemed delightful to
her. It was like something welcoming her home. She threw herself down
full length in the Straw Parlor. Robin had not been at dinner. He had
gone out early and had not returned. As she lay, stretching her tired
limbs, and staring up at the nest in the dark, tent-like roof above her,
she hoped he would come. And he did. In about ten minutes she heard the
signal from the barn floor, and answered it. Robin came up the ladder
rather slowly. When he made his way over the straw to her corner, and
threw himself down beside her, she saw that he was tired too. They
talked a few minutes about ordinary things, and then Meg thought she
would tell him about the dairy. But it appeared that he had something to
tell himself, and he began first.

“I’ve been making a plan, Meg,” he said.

“Have you?” said Meg. “What is it?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for two or three days,” he went on, “but I
thought I wouldn’t say anything about it until—till I tried how it would
work.”

Meg raised herself on her elbow and looked at him curiously. It seemed
so queer that he should have had a plan too.

“Have you—tried?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, “I have been working for Jones this morning, and I
did quite a lot. I worked hard. I wanted him to see what I could do. And
then, Meg, I asked him if he would take me on—like the rest of the
hands—and pay me what I was worth.”

“And what did he say?” breathlessly.

“He looked at me a minute—all over—and half laughed, and I thought he
was going to say I wasn’t worth anything. It wouldn’t have been true,
but I thought he might, because I’m only twelve years old. It’s pretty
hard to be only twelve when you want to get work. But he didn’t, he
said, ‘Well, I’m darned if I won’t give you a show;’ and I’m to have a
dollar a week.”

“Robin,” Meg cried, with a little gasp of excitement, “so am I!”

“So are you!” cried Robin, and sat bolt upright. “_You!_”

“It’s—it’s because we are twins,” said Meg, her eyes shining like lamps.
“I told you twins did things alike because they couldn’t help it. We
have both thought of the same thing. I went to Aunt Matilda, asked her
to let me work somewhere and pay me, and she let me go into the dairy
and try, and Mrs. Macartney said I was a help, and I am to have a dollar
a week, if I go on as I’ve begun.”

Robin’s hand gave hers a clutch, just as it had done before, that day
when he had not known why.

“Meg, I believe,” he said, “I believe that we two will always go on as
we begin. I believe we were born that way. We have to, we can’t help it.
And two dollars a week, if they keep us, and we save it all—we could go
almost anywhere—sometime.”

Meg’s eyes were fixed on him with a searching, but half frightened
expression.

“Almost anywhere,” she said, quite in a whisper. “Anywhere not more than
a hundred miles away.”




                                   V


They did not tell each other of the strange and bold thought which had
leaped up in their minds that day. Each felt an unwonted shyness about
it, perhaps because it had been so bold; but it had been in each mind,
and hidden though it was, it remained furtively in both.

They went on exactly as they had begun. Each morning Meg went to her
drudgery in the dairy and Robin followed Jones whithersoever duty led.
If the elder people had imagined they would get tired and give up they
found out their mistake. That they were often tired was true, but that
in either there arose once the thought of giving up, never! And they
worked hard. The things they did to earn their weekly stipend would have
touched the heart of a mother of cared-for children, but on Mrs.
Jennings’s model farm people knew how much work a human being could do
when necessity drove. They were all driven by necessity, and it was
nothing new to know that muscles ached and feet swelled and burned. In
fact, they knew no one who did not suffer, as a rule, from these small
inconveniences. And these children, with their set little faces and
mature intelligence, were somehow so unsuggestive of the weakness and
limitations of childhood that they were often given work which was
usually intrusted only to elder people. Mrs. Macartney found that Meg
never slighted anything, never failed in a task, and never forgot one,
so she gave her plenty to do. Scrubbing and scouring that others were
glad to shirk fell to her share. She lifted and dragged things about
that grown-up girls grumbled over. What she lacked in muscle and size
she made up in indomitable will power that made her small face set
itself and her small body become rigid as iron. Her work ended by not
confining itself to the dairy, but extended to the house, the
kitchen—anywhere there were tiresome things to be done.

With Robin it was the same story. Jones was not afraid to give him any
order. He was of use in all quarters—in the huge fields, in the barn, in
the stables, and as a messenger to be trusted to trudge any distance
when transport was not available.

They both grew thin but sinewy looking, and their faces had a rather
strained look. Their always large black eyes seemed to grow bigger, and
their little square jaws looked more square every day; but on Saturday
nights they each were paid their dollar, and climbed to the Straw Parlor
and unburied the Treasure and added to it.

Those Saturday nights were wonderful things. To the end of life they
would never forget them. Through all the tired hours of labor they were
looked forward to. Then they lay in their nest of straw and talked
things over—there it seemed that they could relax and rest their limbs
as they could do it nowhere else. Mrs. Jennings was not given to sofas
and easy-chairs, and it is not safe to change position often when one
has a grown-up bedfellow. But in the straw they could roll at full
length, curl up or stretch out just as they pleased, and there they
could enlarge upon the one subject that filled their minds, and
fascinated and enraptured them.

Who could wonder that it was so! The City Beautiful was growing day by
day, and the development of its glories was the one thing they heard
talked of. Robin had established the habit of collecting every scrap of
newspaper referring to it. He cut them out of Aunt Matilda’s old papers,
he begged them from every one, neighbors, store-keepers, work hands.
When he was sent on errands he cast an all-embracing glance ’round every
place his orders took him to. The postmaster of the nearest village
discovered his weakness and saved paragraphs and whole papers for him.
Before very long there was buried near the Treasure a treasure even more
valuable of newspaper cuttings, and on the wonderful Saturday nights
they gave themselves up to revelling in them.

How they watched it and followed it and lived with it—this great human
scheme which somehow seemed to their young minds more like the scheme of
giants and genii! How they seized upon every new story of its wonders
and felt that there could be no limit to them! They knew every purpose
and plan connected with it—every arch and tower and hall and stone they
pleased themselves by fancying. Newspapers were liberal with
information, people talked of it, they heard of it on every side. To
them it seemed that the whole world must be thinking of nothing else.

“While we are lying here,” Meg said—“while you are doing chores, and I
am scouring pans and scrubbing things, it is all going on. People in
France and in England and in Italy are doing work to send to it—artists
are painting pictures, and machinery is whirling and making things, and
everything is pouring into that one wonderful place. And men and women
planned it, you know—just men and women. And if we live a few years we
shall be men and women, and they were once children like us—only, if
they had been quite like us they would never have known enough to do
anything.”

“But when they were children like us,” said Robin, “they did not know
what they would have learned by this time—and they never dreamed about
this.”

“That shows how wonderful men and women are,” said Meg. “I believe they
can do _anything_ if they set their minds to it.” And she said it
stubbornly.

“Perhaps they can,” said Robin, slowly. “Perhaps _we_ could do anything
we set our minds to.”

There was the suggestive tone in his voice which Meg had been thrilled
by more than once before. She had been thrilled by it most strongly when
he had said that if they saved their two dollars a week they might be
able to go almost anywhere. Unconsciously she responded to it now.

“If I could do anything I set my mind to,” she said, “do you know what I
would set my mind to first?”

“What?”

“I would set my mind to going to that wonderful place. I would set it to
seeing everything there, and remembering all I could hold, and learning
all there was to be learned—and I would _set it hard_.”

“So would I,” said Robin.

It was a more suggestive voice than before that he said the words in;
and suddenly he got up, and went and tore away the straw from the
burying-place of the Treasure. He took out the old iron bank, and
brought it back to their corner.

He did it so suddenly, and with such a determined air, that Meg rather
lost her breath.

“What are you going to do with the Treasure?” she asked.

“I am going to count it.”

“Why?”

He was opening the box, using the blade of a stout pocket-knife as a
screwdriver.

“A return ticket to Chicago costs fourteen dollars,” he said. “I asked
at the dépôt. That would be twenty-eight dollars for two people. Any one
who is careful can live on a very little for a while. I want to see if
we shall have money enough to _go_.”

“To _go_!” Meg cried out. “To the Fair, Robin?”

She could not believe the evidence of her ears—it sounded so daring.

“Nobody would take us!” she said. “Even if we had money enough to pay
for ourselves, nobody would take us.”

“Take!” answered Robin, working at his screws. “No, nobody would. What’s
the matter with taking ourselves?”

Meg sat up in the straw, conscious of a sort of shock.

“To go by ourselves, like grown-up people! To buy our tickets ourselves,
and get on the train, and go all the way—alone! And walk about the Fair
alone, Robin?”

“Who takes care of us here?” answered Robin. “Who has looked after us
ever since father and mother died? Ourselves! Just ourselves! Whose
business are we but our own? Who thinks of us, or asks if we are happy
or unhappy?”

“Nobody,” said Meg. And she hid her face in her arms on her knees.

Robin went on stubbornly.

“Nobody is ever going to do it,” he said, “if we live to be hundreds of
years old. I’ve thought of it when I’ve been working in the fields with
Jones, and I’ve thought of it when I’ve been lying awake at night. It’s
kept me awake many and many a time.”

“So it has me,” said Meg.

“And since this thing began to be talked about everywhere, I’ve thought
of it more and more,” said Rob. “It means more to people like us than it
does to any one else. It’s the people who never see things, who have no
chances, it means the most to. And the more I think of it, the more I—I
won’t let it go by me!” And all at once he threw himself face downward
on the straw, and hid his face in his arms.

Meg lifted hers. There was something in the woful desperation of his
movement that struck her to the heart. She had never known him do such a
thing in their lives before. That was not his way. Whatsoever hard thing
had happened—howsoever lonely and desolate they had felt—he had never
shown his feeling in this way. She put out her hand and touched his
shoulder.

“Robin!” she said. “Oh, Robin!”

“I don’t care,” he said, from the refuge of his sleeves. “We _are_
little when we are compared with grown-up people. They would call us
children; and children usually have some one to help them and tell them
what to do. I’m only like this because I’ve been thinking so much and
working so hard—and it does seem like an Enchanted City—but no one ever
thinks we could care about anything more than if we were cats and dogs.
It was not like that at home, even if we were poor.”

Then he sat up with as little warning as he had thrown himself down, and
gave his eyes a fierce rub. He returned to the Treasure again.

“I’ve been making up my mind to it for days,” he said. “If we have the
money we can buy our tickets and go some night without saying anything
to any one. We can leave a note for Aunt Matilda, and tell her we are
all right and we are coming back. She’ll be too busy to mind.”

“Do you remember that book of father’s we read?” said Meg. “That one
called ‘David Copperfield.’ David ran away from the bottle place when he
was younger than we are, and he had to walk all the way to Dover.”

“We shall not have to walk; and we won’t let any one take our money away
from us,” said Robin.

“Are we going, really?” said Meg. “You speak as if we were truly going;
and it _can’t_ be.”

“Do you know what you said just now about believing human beings could
do _anything_, if they set their minds to it? Let’s set our minds to
it.”

“Well,” Meg answered, rather slowly, as if weighing the matter, “let’s!”

And she fell to helping to count the Treasure.




                                   VI


Afterwards, when they looked back upon that day, they knew that the
thing had decided itself then, though neither of them had said so.

“The truth was,” Robin used to say, “we had both been thinking the same
thing, as we always do, but we had been thinking it in the back part of
our minds. We were afraid to let it come to the front at first, because
it seemed such a big thing. But it went on thinking by itself. That
time, when you said ‘We shall _never_ see it,’ and I said, ‘How do you
know?’ we were both thinking about it in one way; and I know I was
thinking about it when I said, ‘We are not going to stay here always.
That is the first step up the Hill of Difficulty.’”

“And that day when you said you would not let it go by you,” Meg would
answer, “that was the day we reached the Wicket Gate.”

It seemed very like it, for from that day their strange, unchildish
purpose grew and ripened, and never for an hour was absent from the mind
of either. If they had been like other children, living happy lives,
full of young interests and pleasures, it might have been crossed out by
other and newer things; if they had been of a slighter mental build, and
less strong, they might have forgotten it; but they never did. When they
had counted the Treasure, and had realized how small it was after all,
they had sat and gazed at each other for a while with grave eyes, but
they had only been grave, and not despairing.

“Twenty-five dollars,” said Robin. “Well, that’s not much after nearly
six years; but we saved it nearly all by cents, you know, Meg.”

“And it takes a hundred cents to make a dollar,” said Meg; “and we were
poor people’s children.”

“And we bought the chickens,” said Robin.

“And you have always given me a present at Christmas, Robin, even if it
_was_ only a little one. That’s six Christmases.”

“We have eight months to work in,” said Robin, calculating. “If you get
four dollars a month, and I get four, that will be sixty-four dollars by
next June. Twenty-five dollars and sixty-four dollars make eighty-nine.
Eighty-nine dollars for us to live on and go to see all the things;
because we must see them all, if we go. And I suppose we shall have to
come back”—with a long breath.

“Oh, dear!” cried Meg, “how _can_ we come back?”

“I don’t know,” said Robin. “We shall hate it, but we have nowhere else
to go.”

“Perhaps we are going to seek our fortunes, and perhaps we shall find
them,” said Meg; “or perhaps Aunt Matilda won’t let us come back. Rob,”
with some awe, “do you think she will be angry?”

“I’ve thought about that,” Robin answered contemplatively, “and I don’t
think she will. She would be too busy to care much even if we ran away
and said nothing. But I shall leave a letter, and tell her we have saved
our money and gone somewhere for a holiday, and we’re all right, and she
need not bother.”

“She won’t bother even if she is angry,” Meg said, with mournful eyes.
“She doesn’t care about us enough.”

“If she loved us,” Rob said, “and was too poor to take us herself, we
couldn’t go at all. We couldn’t run away, because it would worry her so.
You can’t do a thing, however much you want to do it, if it is going to
hurt somebody who is good to you, and cares.”

“Well, then, we needn’t stay here because of Aunt Matilda,” said Meggy.
“That’s one sure thing. It wouldn’t interfere with her ploughing if we
were both to die at once.”

“No,” said Rob, deliberately, “that’s just what it would _not_.” And he
threw himself back on the straw and clasped his hands under his head,
gazing up into the dark roof above him with very reflective eyes.

But they had reached the Wicket Gate, and from the hour they passed it
there was no looking back. That in their utter friendlessness and
loneliness they should take their twelve-year-old fates in their own
strong little hands was, perhaps, a pathetic thing; that once having
done so they moved towards their object as steadily as if they had been
of the maturest years was remarkable, but no one ever knew or even
suspected the first until the last.

The days went by, full of work, which left them little time to lie and
talk in the Straw Parlor. They could only see each other in the leisure
hours, which were so few, and only came when the day was waning. Finding
them faithful and ready, those about them fell into the natural, easy,
human unworthiness of imposing by no means infrequently on their
inexperienced willingness and youth. So they were hard enough worked,
but each felt that every day that passed brought them nearer to the end
in view; and there was always something to think of, some detail to be
worked out mentally, or to be discussed, in the valuable moments when
they were together.

“It’s a great deal better than it used to be,” Meg said, “at all events.
It’s better to feel tired by working than to be tired of doing nothing
but think and think dreary things.”

As the weather grew colder it was hard enough to keep warm in their
hiding-place. They used to sit and talk, huddled close together, bundled
in their heaviest clothing, and with the straw heaped close around them
and over them.

There were so many things to be thought of and talked over! Robin
collected facts more sedulously than ever—facts about entrance fees,
facts about prices of things to eat, facts about places to sleep.

“Going to the Fair yourself, sonny?” Jones said to him one day. Jones
was fond of his joke. “You’re right to be inquirin’ round. Them
hotel-keepers is given to tot up bills several stories higher than their
hotels is themselves.”

“But I suppose a person needn’t go to a hotel,” said Robin. “There must
be plenty of poor people who can’t go to hotels, and they’ll have to
sleep somewhere.”

“Ah, there’s plenty of poor people,” responded Jones, cheerfully,
“plenty of ’em. Always is. But they won’t go to Chicago while the Fair’s
on. They’ll sleep at home—that’s where they’ll sleep.”

“That’s the worst of it,” Rob said to Meg afterwards; “you see, we have
to sleep _somewhere_. We could live on bread and milk or crackers and
cheese—or oatmeal—but we have to _sleep_ somewhere.”

“It will be warm weather,” Meg said, reflectively. “Perhaps we could
sleep out of doors. Beggars do. We don’t mind.”

“I don’t think the police would let us,” Robin answered. “If they
would—perhaps we might have to, some night; but we are going to that
place, Meg—we are _going_.”

Yes, they believed they were going, and lived on the belief. This being
decided, howsoever difficult to attain, it was like them both that they
should dwell upon the dream, and revel in it in a way peculiarly their
own. It was Meg whose imagination was the stronger, and it is true that
it was always she who made pictures in words and told stories. But Robin
was always as ready to enter into the spirit of her imaginings as she
was to talk about them. There was a word he had once heard his father
use which had caught his fancy, in fact, it had attracted them both, and
they applied it to this favorite pleasure of theirs of romancing with
everyday things. The word was “philander.”

“Now we have finished adding up and making plans,” he would say, putting
his ten-cent account-book into his pocket, “let us philander about it.”

And then Meg would begin to talk about the City Beautiful—a City
Beautiful which was a wonderful and curious mixture of the enchanted one
the whole world was pouring its treasures into, one hundred miles away,
and that City Beautiful of her own which she had founded upon the one
towards which Christian had toiled through the Slough of Despond and up
the Hill of Difficulty and past Doubting Castle. Somehow one could
scarcely tell where one ended and the others began, they were so much
alike, these three cities—Christian’s, Meg’s, and the fair, ephemeral
one the ending of the nineteenth century had built upon the blue lake’s
side.

“They must look alike,” said Meg. “I am sure they must. See what it says
in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ‘Now just as the gates were opened to let
in the men, I looked in after them, and behold, the City shone like the
sun’—and then it says, ‘The talk they had with the Shining Ones was
about the glory of the place; who told them that the beauty and glory of
it were inexpressible.’ I always think of it, Robin, when I read about
those places like white palaces and temples and towers that are being
built. I am so glad they are white. Think how the City will ‘shine like
the sun’ when it stands under the blue sky and by the blue water, on a
sunshiny day.”

They had never read the dear old worn “Pilgrim’s Progress” as they did
in those days. They kept it in the straw near the Treasure, and always
had it at hand to refer to. In it they seemed to find parallels for
everything.

“Aunt Matilda’s world is the City of Destruction,” they would say. “And
our loneliness and poorness are like Christian’s ‘burden.’ We have to
carry it like a heavy weight, and it holds us back.”

“What was it that Goodwill said to Christian about it?” Robin asked.

Meg turned over the pages. She knew all the places by heart. It was easy
enough to find and read how “At last there came a grave person to the
gate, named Goodwill,” and in the end he said, “As to thy burden, be
content to bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance; for
there it will fall from thy back itself.”

“But out of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’” Robin said, with his reflecting
air, “burdens don’t fall off by themselves. If you are content with them
they stick on and get bigger. Ours would, I know. You have to do
something yourself to get them off. But—” with a little pause for
thought, “I like that part, Meg. And I like Goodwill, because he told it
to him. It encouraged him, you know. You see it says next, ‘Then
Christian began to gird up his loins and address himself to his
journey.’”

“Robin,” said Meg, suddenly shutting the book and giving it a little
thump on the back, “it’s not only Christian’s City that is like our
City. _We_ are like Christian. We are pilgrims, and our way to that
place is our Pilgrims’ Progress.”




                                  VII


And the cold days of hard work kept going by, and the City Beautiful
grew, and, huddled close together in the straw, the children planned and
dreamed, and read and re-read the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” following
Christian step by step. And Aunt Matilda became busier every day, it
seemed, and did not remember that they were alive except when she saw
them. And nobody guessed and nobody knew.

Days so quickly grow to weeks, and weeks slip by so easily until they
are months, and at last there came a time when Meg, going out in the
morning, felt a softer air, and stopped a moment by a bare tree to
breathe it in and feel its lovely touch upon her cheek. She turned her
face upward with a half-involuntary movement, and found herself looking
at such a limitless vault of tender blueness that her heart gave a quick
throb, seemed to spring up to it, and carry her with it. For a moment it
seemed as if she had left the earth far below, and was soaring in the
soft depths of blueness themselves. And suddenly, even as she felt it,
she heard on the topmost branch of the bare tree a brief little
rapturous trill, and her heart gave a leap again, and she felt her
cheeks grow warm.

“It is a bluebird,” she said; “it is a bluebird. And it is the spring,
and that means that the time is quite near.”

She had a queer little smile on her face all day as she worked. She did
not know it was there herself, but Mrs. Macartney saw it.

“What’s pleasing you so, Meggy, my girl?” she asked.

Meg wakened up with a sort of start.

“I don’t know—exactly,” she said.

“You don’t know,” said the woman, good-naturedly. “You look as if you
were thinking over a secret, and it was a pleasant one.”

That evening it was not cold when they sat in the Straw Parlor, and Meg
told Robin about the bluebird.

“It gave me a strange feeling to hear it,” she said. “It seemed as if it
was speaking to me. It said, ‘You must get ready. It is quite near.’”

They had made up their minds that they would go in June, before the
weather became so hot that they might suffer from it.

“Because we have to consider everything,” was Robin’s idea. “We shall be
walking about all the time, and we have no cool clothes, and we shall
have no money to buy cool things; and if we should be ill, it would be
worse for us than for children who have some one with them.”

In the little account-book they had calculated all they should own on
the day their pilgrimage began. They had apportioned it all out: so much
for the price of the railroad tickets, so much for entrance fees,
and—not so much, but so little—oh, so little!—for their food and
lodging.

“I have listened when Jones and the others were talking,” said Robin;
“and they say that everybody who has room to spare, and wants to make
money, is going to let every corner they have. So you see there will be
sure to be people who have quite poor places that they would be obliged
to rent cheap to people who are poor, like themselves. We will go
through the small side streets and look.”

The first bluebird came again, day after day, and others came with it,
until the swift dart of blue wings through the air and the delicious
ripple of joyous sound were no longer rare things. The days grew warmer,
and the men threw off their coats, and began to draw their shirt-sleeves
across their foreheads when they were at work.

One evening when Robin came up into the Straw Parlor he brought
something with him. It was a battered old tin coffee-pot.

“What is that for?” asked Meg; for he seemed to carry it as if it was of
some value.

“It’s old and rusty, but there are no holes in it,” Robin answered. “I
saw it lying in a fence corner, where some one had thrown it—perhaps a
tramp. And it put a new thought into my head. It will do to boil eggs
in.”

“Eggs!” said Meg.

“There’s nothing much nicer than hard-boiled eggs,” said Robin, “and you
can carry them about with you. It just came into my mind that we could
take some of our eggs, and go somewhere where no one would be likely to
see us, and build a fire of sticks, and boil some eggs, and carry them
with us to eat.”

“Robin,” cried Meg, with admiring ecstasy, “I wish I had thought of
that!”

“It doesn’t matter which of us thought of it,” said Rob, “it’s all the
same.”

So it was decided that when the time came they should boil their supply
of eggs very hard, and roll them up in pieces of paper and tuck them
away carefully in the one small bag which was to carry all their
necessary belongings. These belongings would be very few—just enough to
keep them decent and clean, and a brush and comb between them. They used
to lie in bed at night, with beating hearts, thinking it all over,
sometimes awakening in a cold perspiration from a dreadful dream, in
which Aunt Matilda or Jones or some of the hands had discovered their
secret and confronted them with it in all its daring. They were so full
of it night and day that Meg used to wonder that the people about them
did not see it in their faces.

“They are not thinking of us,” said Robin. “They are thinking about
crops. I dare say Aunt Matilda would like to see the Agricultural
Building, but she couldn’t waste the time to go through the others.”

Oh, what a day it was, what a thrilling, exciting, almost unbearably
joyful day, when Robin gathered sticks and dried bits of branches, and
piled them in a corner of a field far enough from the house and
outbuildings to be quite safe! He did it one noon hour, and as he passed
Meg on his way back to his work, he whispered:

“I have got the sticks for the fire all ready.”

And after supper they crept out to the place, with matches, and the
battered old coffee-pot, and the eggs.

As they made their preparations, they found themselves talking in
whispers, though there was not the least chance of any one’s hearing
them. Meg looked rather like a little witch as she stood over the
bubbling old pot, with her strange, little dark face and shining eyes
and black elf locks.

“It’s like making a kind of sacrifice on an altar,” she said.

“You always think queer things about everything, don’t you?” said Robin.
“But they’re all right; I don’t think of them myself, but I like them.”

When the eggs were boiled hard enough they carried them to the barn and
hid them in the Straw Parlor, near the Treasure. Then they sat and
talked, in whispers still, almost trembling with joy.

“Somehow, do you know,” Meg said, “it feels as if we were going to do
something more than just go to the Fair. When people in stories go to
seek their fortunes, I’m sure they feel like this. Does it give you a
kind of creeping in your stomach whenever you think of it, Rob?”

“Yes, it does,” Robin whispered back; “and when it comes into my mind
suddenly something gives a queer jump inside me.”

“That’s your heart,” said Meg. “Robin, if anything should stop us, I
believe I should drop _dead_.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” was Rob’s answer, “but it’s better not to let
ourselves think about it. And I don’t believe anything as bad as that
_could_ happen. We’ve worked so hard, and we have nobody but ourselves,
and it can’t do any one any harm—and we don’t _want_ to do any one any
harm. No, there must be _something_ that wouldn’t let it be.”

[Illustration: MEG LOOKED RATHER LIKE A LITTLE WITCH.]

“I believe that too,” said Meg, and this time it was she who clutched at
Robin’s hand; but he seemed glad she did, and held as close as she.

And then, after the bluebirds had sung a few times more, there came a
night when Meg crept out of her cot after she was sure that the woman in
the other bed was sleeping heavily enough. Every one went to bed early,
and every one slept through the night in heavy, tired sleep. Too much
work was done on the place to allow people to waste time in
sleeplessness. Meg knew no one would waken as she crept down stairs to
the lower part of the house and softly opened the back door.

Robin was standing outside, with the little leather satchel in his hand.
It was a soft, warm night, and the dark blue sky was full of the glitter
of stars.

Both he and Meg stood still a moment, and looked up. “I’m glad it’s like
this,” Meg said; “it doesn’t seem so lonely. Is your heart thumping,
Robin?”

“Yes, rather,” whispered Robin. “I left the letter in a place where Aunt
Matilda will be likely to find it some time to-morrow.”

“What did you say?” Meg whispered back.

“What I told you I was going to. There wasn’t much to say. Just told her
we had saved our money, and gone away for a few days; and we were all
right, and she needn’t worry.”

Everything was very still about them. There was no moon, and, but for
the stars, it would have been very dark. As it was, the stillness of
night and sleep, and the sombreness of the hour, might have made less
strong little creatures feel timid and alone.

“Let us take hold of each other’s hands as we walk along,” said Meg. “It
will make us feel nearer, and—and _twinner_.”

And so, hand in hand, they went out on the road together.




                                  VIII


It was four miles to the dépôt, but they were good walkers. Robin hung
the satchel on a stick over his shoulder; they kept in the middle of the
road and walked smartly. There were not many trees, but there were a
few, occasionally, and it was pleasanter to walk where the way before
them was quite clear. And somehow they found themselves still talking in
whispers, though there was certainly no one to overhear them.

“Let us talk about Christian,” said Meg. “It will not seem so lonely if
we are talking. I wish we could meet Evangelist.”

“If we knew he was Evangelist when we met him,” said Robin. “If we
didn’t know him, we should think he was some one who would stop us. And
after all, you see, he only showed Christian the shining light, and told
him to go to it. And we are farther on than that. We have passed the
Wicket Gate.”

“The thing we want,” said Meg, “is the Roll to read as we go on, and
find out what we are to do.”

And then they talked of what was before them. They wondered who would be
at the little dépôt and if they would be noticed, and of what the
ticket-agent would think when Robin bought the tickets.

“Perhaps he won’t notice me at all,” said Rob. “And he does not know me.
Somebody might be sending us alone, you know. We are not _little_
children.”

“That’s true,” responded Meg, courageously. “If we were six years old it
would be different. But we are twelve!”

It did make it seem less lonely to be talking, and so they did not stop.
And there was so much to say.

“Robin,” broke forth Meg once, giving his hand a sudden clutch, “we are
on the way—we are _going_. Soon we shall be in the train and it will be
carrying us nearer and nearer. Suppose it was a dream, and we should
wake up!”

“It isn’t a dream!” said Rob, stoutly. “It’s real—it’s as real as Aunt
Matilda!” He was always more practical-minded than Meg.

“We needn’t philander any more,” Meg said.

“It isn’t philandering to talk about a real thing.”

“Oh, Rob, just think of it—waiting for us under the stars, this very
moment—the City Beautiful!”

And then, walking close to each other in the dimness, they told each
other how they saw it in imagination, and what its wonders would be to
them, and which they would see first, and how they would remember it all
their lives afterwards, and have things to talk of and think of. Very
few people would see it as they would, but they did not know that. It
was not a gigantic enterprise to them, a great scheme fought for and
struggled over for the divers reasons poor humanity makes for itself;
that it would either make or lose money was not a side of the question
that reached them. They only dwelt on the beauty and wonder of it, which
made it seem like an enchanted thing.

“I keep thinking of the white palaces, and that it is like a fairy
story,” Meg said, “and that it will melt away like those cities
travellers sometimes see in the desert. And I wish it wouldn’t. But it
will have been real for a while, and everybody will remember it. I am so
glad it is beautiful—and white. I am _so_ glad it is white, Robin!”

“And I keep thinking,” said Robin, “of all the people who have made the
things to go in it, and how they have worked and invented. There have
been some people, perhaps, who have worked months and months making one
single thing—just as we have worked to go to see it. And perhaps, at
first they were afraid they couldn’t do it, and they set their minds to
it as we did, and tried and tried, and then did it at last. I like to
think of those men and women, Meg, because, when the City has melted
away, the things won’t melt. They will last after the people. And we are
_people_ too. I’m a man, and you are a woman, you know, though we are
only twelve, and it gives me a strong feeling to think of those others.”

“It makes you think that perhaps men and women _can_ do anything if they
set their minds to it,” said Meg, quite solemnly. “Oh, I do like that!”

“I like it better than anything else in the world,” said Rob. “Stop a
minute, Meg. Come here in the shade.”

He said the last words quickly, and pulled her to the roadside, where a
big tree grew which threw a deep shadow. He stood listening.

“It’s wheels!” he whispered. “There is a buggy coming. We mustn’t let
any one see us.”

It was a buggy, they could tell that by the lightness of the wheels, and
it was coming rapidly. They could hear voices—men’s voices—and they drew
back and stood very close to each other.

“Do you think they have found out, and sent some one after us?”
whispered Meg, breathlessly.

“No,” answered Robin, though his heart beat like a triphammer. “No, no,
no.”

The wheels drew nearer, and they heard one of the men speaking.

“Chicago by sunrise,” he was saying, “and what I don’t see of it won’t
be worth seeing.”

The next minute the fast-trotting horse spun swiftly down the road, and
carried the voices out of hearing. Meg and Robin drew twin sighs of
relief. Robin spoke first.

“It is some one who is going to the Fair,” he said.

“Perhaps we shall see him in the train,” said Meg.

“I dare say we shall,” said Robin. “It was nobody who knows us. I didn’t
know his voice. Meg, let’s take hands again, and walk quickly; we might
lose the train.”

They did not talk much more, but walked briskly. They had done a good
day’s work before they set out, and were rather tired, but they did not
lag on that account. Sometimes Meg took a turn at carrying the satchel,
so that Robin might rest his arm. It was not heavy, and she was as
strong for a girl as he was for a boy.

At last they reached the dépôt. There were a number of people waiting on
the platform to catch the train to Chicago, and there were several
vehicles outside. They passed one which was a buggy, and Meg gave Robin
a nudge with her elbow.

“Perhaps that belongs to our man,” she said.

There were people enough before the office to give the ticket-agent
plenty to do. Robin’s heart quickened a little as he passed by with the
group of maturer people, but no one seemed to observe him particularly,
and he returned to Meg with the precious bits of pasteboard held very
tight in his hand.

Meg had waited alone in an unlighted corner, and when she saw him coming
she came forward to meet him.

“Have you got them?” she said. “Did any one look at you or say
anything?”

“Yes, I got them,” Robin answered. “And, I’ll tell you what, Meg, these
people are nearly all going just where we are going, and they are so
busy thinking about it, and attending to themselves, that they haven’t
any time to watch any one else. That’s one good thing.”

“And the nearer we get to Chicago,” Meg said, “the more people there
will be, and the more they will have to think of. And at that beautiful
place, where there is so much to see, who will look at two children? I
don’t believe we shall have any trouble at all.”

It really did not seem likely that they would, but it happened, by a
curious coincidence, that within a very few minutes they saw somebody
looking at them.

The train was not due for ten minutes, and there were a few people who,
being too restless to sit in the waiting-rooms, walked up and down on
the platform. Most of these were men, and there were two men who walked
farther than the others did, and so neared the place where Robin and Meg
stood in the shadow. One was a young man, and seemed to be listening to
instructions his companion, who was older, was giving him, in a rapid,
abrupt sort of voice. This companion, who might have been his employer,
was a man of middle age. He was robust of figure and had a clean-cut
face, with a certain effect of strong good looks. It was, perhaps,
rather a hard face, but it was a face one would look at more than once;
and he too, oddly enough, had a square jaw and straight black brows. But
it was his voice which first attracted Robin and Meg as he neared them,
talking.

“It’s the man in the buggy,” whispered Robin. “Don’t you know his voice
again?” and they watched him with deep interest.

He passed them once, without seeming to see them at all. He was
explaining something to his companion. The second time he drew near he
chanced to look up, and his eye fell on them. It did not rest on them
more than a second, and he went on speaking. The next time he neared
their part of the platform he turned his glance towards them, as they
stood close together. It was as if involuntarily he glanced to see if
they were still where they had been before.

“A pair of children,” they heard him say, as if the fleeting impression
of their presence arrested his train of thought for a second. “Look as
if no one was with them.”

He merely made the comment in passing, and returned to his subject the
next second; but Meg and Robin heard him, and drew farther back into the
shadow.

But it was not necessary to stand there much longer. They heard a
familiar sound in the distance, the shrill cry of the incoming train—the
beloved giant who was to carry them to fairyland; the people began to
flock out of the waiting-rooms with packages and valises and umbrellas
in hand; the porters suddenly became alert, and hurried about attending
to their duties; the delightful roar drew nearer and louder, and began
to shake the earth; it grew louder still, a bell began to make a
cheerful tolling, people were rushing to and fro; Meg and Robin rushed
with them, and the train was panting in the dépôt.

It was even more thrilling than the children had thought it would be.
They had travelled so very little, and did not know exactly where to go.
It might not be the right train even. They did not know how long it
would wait. It might rush away again before they could get on. People
seemed in such a hurry and so excited. As they hurried along they found
themselves being pushed and jostled, before the steps of one of the cars
a conductor stood, whom people kept showing tickets to. There were
several persons round him when Robin and Meg reached the place where he
stood. People kept asking him things, and sometimes he passed them on,
and sometimes let them go into his car.

[Illustration: “IS THIS THE TRAIN TO CHICAGO?” SAID ROBIN.]

“Is this the train to Chicago?” said Robin, breathlessly.

But he was so much less than the other people, and the man was so busy,
he did not hear him.

Robin tried to get nearer.

“Is this the Chicago train, sir?” he said, a little louder.

He had had to press by a man whom he had been too excited to see, and
the man looked down, and spoke to him.

“Chicago train?” he said, in a voice which was abrupt, without being
ill-natured. “Yes, you’re all right. Got your sleeping tickets?”

Robin looked up at him quickly. He knew the voice, and was vaguely glad
to hear it. He and Meg had never been in a sleeping-car in their lives,
and he did not quite understand. He held out his tickets.

“We are going to sleep on the train,” he said; “but we have nothing but
these.”

“Next car but two, then,” he said; “and you’d better hurry.”

And when both voices thanked him at once, and the two caught each
other’s hands and ran towards their car, he looked after them and
laughed.

“I’m blessed if they’re not by themselves,” he said, watching them as
they scrambled up the steps. “And they’re going to the Fair, I’ll bet a
dollar. _That’s Young America_, and no mistake!”




                                   IX


The car was quite crowded. There were more people than themselves who
were going to the Fair and were obliged to economize. When the children
entered, and looked about them in the dim light, they thought at first
that all the seats were full. People seemed to be huddled up asleep or
sitting up awake in all of them. Everybody had been trying to get to
sleep, at least, and the twins found themselves making their whispers
even lower than before.

“I think there is a seat empty just behind that very fat lady,” Meg
whispered.

It was at the end of the car, and they went to it, and found she was
right. They took possession of it quietly, putting their satchel under
the seat.

“It seems so still,” said Meg, “I feel as if I was in somebody’s
bedroom. The sound of the wheels makes it seem all the quieter. It’s as
if we were shut in by the noise.”

“We mustn’t talk,” said Robin, “or we shall waken the people. Can you go
to sleep, Meg?”

“I can if I can stop thinking,” she answered, with a joyful sigh. “I’m
very tired; but the wheels keep saying, over and over again, ‘We’re
going—we’re going—we’re going.’ It’s just as if they were talking. Don’t
you hear them?”

“Yes, I do. Do they say that to you, too? But we mustn’t listen,” Robin
whispered back. “If we do we shall not go to sleep, and then we shall be
too tired to walk about. Let’s put our heads down, and shut our eyes,
Meg.”

“Well, let’s,” said Meg.

She curled herself up on the seat, and put her head into the corner.

“If you lean against me, Rob,” she said, “it will be softer. We can take
turns.”

They changed position a little two or three times, but they were worn
out with the day’s work, and their walk, and the excitement, and the
motion of the train seemed like a sort of rocking which lulled them.
Gradually their muscles relaxed and they settled down, though, after
they had done so, Meg spoke once, drowsily.

“Rob,” she said, “did you see that was our man?”

“Yes,” answered Rob, very sleepily indeed, “and he looked as if he knew
us.”

                            * * * * * * * *

If they had been less young, or if they had been less tired, they might
have found themselves awake a good many times during the night. But they
were such children, and, now that the great step was taken, were so
happy, that the soft, deep sleepiness of youth descended upon and
overpowered them. Once or twice during the night they stirred, wakened
for a dreamy, blissful moment by some sound of a door shutting, or a
conductor passing through. But they were only conscious of a delicious
sense of strangeness, of the stillness of the car full of sleepers, of
the half-realized delight of feeling themselves carried along through
the unknown country, and of the rattle of the wheels, which never ceased
saying rhythmically, “We’re going—we’re going—we’re going!”

Ah! what a night of dreams and new, vague sensations, to be remembered
always! Ah! that heavenly sense of joy to come, and adventure, and young
hopefulness and imagining! Were there many others carried towards the
City Beautiful that night who bore with them the same rapture of longing
and belief; who saw with such innocent clearness only the fair and
splendid thought which had created it, and were so innocently blind to
any shadow of sordidness or mere worldly interest touching its white
walls? And after the passing of this wonderful night, what a wakening in
the morning, at the first rosiness of dawn, when all the other occupants
of the car were still asleep, or restlessly trying to be at ease!

It was as if they both wakened at almost the same moment. The first
shaft of early sunlight streaming in the window touched Meg’s eyelids,
and she slowly opened them. Then something joyous and exultant rushed in
upon her heart, and she sat upright. And Robin sat up too, and they
looked at each other.

“It’s the Day, Meg!” said Robin. “It’s the Day!” Meg caught her breath.

“And nothing has stopped us,” she said. “And we are getting nearer and
nearer. Rob, let us look out of the window.”

For a while they looked out, pressed close together, and full of such
ecstasy of delight in the strangeness of everything that at first they
did not exchange even their whispers.

It is rather a good thing to see—rather well worth while even for a man
or woman—the day waking, and waking the world, as one is borne swiftly
through the morning light, and one looks out of a car window. What it
was to these two children only those who remember the children who were
themselves long ago can realize at all. The country went hurrying past
them, making curious sudden revelations and giving half-hints in its
haste; prairie and field, farmhouse and wood and village all wore a
strange, exciting, vanishing aspect.

“It seems,” Meg said, “as if it was all going somewhere—in a great
hurry—as if it couldn’t wait to let us see it.”

“But we are the ones that are going,” said Rob. “Listen to the
wheels—and we shall soon be there.”

After a while the people who were asleep began to stir and stretch
themselves. Some of them looked cross, and some looked tired. The very
fat lady in the seat before them had a coal smut on her nose.

“Robin,” said Meg, after looking at her seriously a moment, “let’s get
our towel out of the bag and wet it and wash our faces.”

They had taken the liberty of borrowing a towel from Aunt Matilda. It
was Meg who had thought of it, and it had, indeed, been an inspiration.
Robin wetted two corners of it, and they made a rigorous if limited
toilet. At least they had no smuts on their noses, and after a little
touching up with the mutual comb and brush, they looked none the worse
for wear. Their plain and substantial garments were not of the order
which has any special charm to lose.

“And it’s not our clothes that are going to the Fair,” said Meg, “it’s
_us_!”

And by the time they were in good order, the farms and villages they
were flying past had grown nearer together. The platforms at the dépôts
were full of people who wore a less provincial look; the houses grew
larger and so did the towns; they found themselves flashing past
advertisements of all sorts of things, and especially of things
connected with the Fair.

“You know how we used to play ‘hunt the thimble,’” said Robin, “and how,
when any one came near the place where it was hidden, we said,
‘Warm—warmer—warmer still—hot!’ It’s like that now. We have been getting
warmer and warmer every minute, and now we are getting——”

“We shall be in in a minute,” said a big man at the end of the car, and
he stood up and began to take down his things.

“Hot,” said Robin, with an excited little laugh. “Meg, we’re not
going—going—going any more. Look out of the window.”

“We are steaming into the big dépôt,” cried Meg. “How big it is! What
crowds of people! Robin, we are there!”

Robin bent down to pick up their satchel; the people all rose in their
seats and began to move in a mass down the aisle toward the door.
Everybody seemed suddenly to become eager and in a hurry, as if they
thought the train would begin to move again and carry them away. Some
were expecting friends to meet them, some were anxious about finding
accommodations. Those who knew each other talked, asked questions over
people’s shoulders, and there was a general anxiety about valises,
parcels, and umbrellas. Robin and Meg were pressed back into their
section by the crowd, against which they were too young to make headway.

“We shall have to wait until the grown-up people have passed by,” Rob
said.

But the crowd in the aisle soon lost its compactness, and they were able
to get out. The porter, who stood on the platform near the steps, looked
at them curiously, and glanced behind them to see who was with them, but
he said nothing.

It seemed to the two as if all the world must have poured itself into
the big dépôt or be passing through it. People were rushing about;
friends were searching for one another, pushing their way through the
surging crowd; some were greeting each other with exclamations and
hand-shaking, and stopping up the way; there was a Babel of voices, a
clamor of shouts within the covered place, and from outside came a roar
of sound rising from the city.

For a few moments Robin and Meg were overwhelmed. They did not quite
know what to do; everybody pushed past and jostled them. No one was
ill-natured, but no one had time to be polite. They were so young and so
strange to all such worlds of excitement and rush, involuntarily they
clutched each other’s hands after their time-honored fashion, when they
were near each other and overpowered. The human vortex caught them up
and carried them along, not knowing where they were going.

“We seem so little!” gasped Meg. “There—there are so many people! Rob,
Rob, where are we going?”

Robin had lost his breath too. Suddenly the world seemed so huge—so
huge! Just for a moment he felt himself turn pale, and he looked at Meg
and saw that she was pale too.

“Everybody is going out of the dépôt,” he said.

“Hold on to me tight, Meg. It will be all right. We shall get out.”

And so they did. The crowd surged and swayed and struggled, and before
long they saw that it was surging towards the entrance gate, and it took
them with it. Just as they thrust through they found themselves pushed
against a man, who good-naturedly drew a little back to save Meg from
striking against his valise, which was a very substantial one. She
looked up to thank him, and gave a little start. It was the man she had
called “our man” the night before, when she spoke of him to Robin. And
he gave them a sharp but friendly nod.

“Hallo!” he exclaimed, “it’s you two again. You _are_ going to the
Fair!”

Robin looked up at his shrewd face with a civil little grin.

“Yes, sir; we are,” he answered.

“Hope you’ll enjoy it,” said the man. “Big thing.” And he was pushed
past them and soon lost in the crowd.




                                   X


The crowd in the dépôt surged into the streets, and melted into and
became an addition to the world of people there. The pavements were
moving masses of human beings, the centres of the streets were
pandemoniums of wagons and vans, street cars, hotel omnibuses, and
carriages. The brilliant morning sunlight dazzled the children’s eyes;
the roar of wheels and the clamor of car bells, of clattering horses’
feet, of cries and shouts and passing voices, mingled in a volume of
sound that deafened them. The great tidal wave of human life and work
and pleasure almost took them off their feet.

They knew too little of cities to have had beforehand any idea of what
the overwhelming rush and roar would be, and what slight straws they
would feel themselves upon the current. If they had been quite ordinary
children, they might well have been frightened. But they were not
ordinary children, little as they were aware of that important factor in
their young lives. They were awed for this first moment, but, somehow,
they were fascinated as much as they were awed, while they stood for a
brief breathing-space looking on. They did not know—no child of their
ages can possibly know such things of him or herself—that Nature had
made them of the metal out of which she moulds strong things and great
ones. As they had not comprehended the restless sense of wrong and
misery the careless, unlearning, and ungrowing life in Aunt Matilda’s
world filled them with, so they did not understand that, because they
had been born creatures who belong to the great moving, working,
venturing world, they were not afraid of it, and felt their first young
face-to-face encounter with it a thing which thrilled them with an
exultant emotion they could not have explained.

“This is not Aunt Matilda’s world,” said Rob. “It—I believe it is ours,
Meg. Don’t you?”

Meg was staring with entranced eyes at the passing multitude.

“‘More pilgrims are come to town,’” she said, quoting the “Pilgrim’s
Progress” with a far-off look in her intense little black-browed face.
“You remember what it said, Rob, ‘Here also all the noise of them that
walked in the streets was, More pilgrims are come to town.’ Oh, isn’t it
like it!”

It was. And the exaltation and thrill of it got into their young blood
and made them feel as if they walked on air, and that every passing
human thing meant, somehow, life and strength to them.

Their appetites were sharpened by the morning air, and they consulted as
to what their breakfast should be. They had no money to spend at
restaurants, and every penny must be weighed and calculated.

“Let’s walk on,” said Meg, “until we see a bakery that looks as if it
was kept by poor people. Then we can buy some bread, and eat it with our
eggs somewhere.”

“All right,” said Robin.

They marched boldly on. The crowd jostled them, and there was so much
noise that they could hardly hear each other speak; but ah! how the sun
shone, and how the pennons fluttered and streamed on every side, and how
excited and full of living the people’s faces looked! It seemed
splendid, only to be alive in such a world on such a morning. The sense
of the practical which had suggested that they should go to a small
place led them into the side streets. They passed all the big shops
without a glance, but at last Meg stooped before a small one.

“There’s a woman in there,” she said; “I just saw her for a minute. She
has a nice face. She looked as if she might be good-natured. Let’s go in
there, Robin. It’s quite a small place.”

They went in. It was a small place but a clean one, and the woman had a
good-natured face. She was a German, and was broad and placid and
comfortable. They bought some fresh rolls from her, and as she served
them, and was making the change, Meg watched her anxiously. She was
thinking that she did look very peaceable, indeed. So, instead of
turning away from the counter, she planted herself directly before her
and asked her a question.

“If you please,” she said, “we have some hard-boiled eggs to eat with
our bread, and we are not going home. If we are very careful, would you
mind if we ate our breakfast in here, instead of outside? We won’t let
any of the crumbs or shells drop on the floor.”

“You not going home?” said the woman. “You from out town?”

“Yes,” answered Meg.

“You look like you wass goun to der Fair,” said the woman, with a
good-tempered smile. “Who wass with you?”

“No one,” said Robin. “We are going alone. But we’re all right.”

“My crayshious!” said the woman. “But you wass young for that. But your
’Merican childrens is queer ones. Yes! You can sit down an’ eat your
bregfast. That make no matter to me if you is careful. You can sit
down.”

There were two chairs near a little table, where, perhaps, occasional
customers ate buns, and they sat down to their rolls and eggs and salt,
as to a feast.

“I was hungry,” said Rob, cracking his fourth egg.

“So was I!” said Meg, feeling that her fresh roll was very delicious.

It was a delightful breakfast. The German woman watched them with placid
curiosity as they ate it. She had been a peasant in her own country, and
had lived in a village among rosy, stout, and bucolic little Peters and
Gretchens, who were not given to enterprise, and the American child was
a revelation to her. And somehow, also, these two had an attraction all
American children had not. They looked so well able to take care of
themselves, and yet had such good manners and no air of self-importance
at all. They ate their rolls and hard-boiled eggs with all the gusto of
very young appetite, but they evidently meant to keep their part of the
bargain, and leave her no crumbs and shells to sweep up. The truth was
that they were perfectly honorable little souls, and had a sense of
justice. They were in the midst of their breakfast, when they were
rather startled by hearing her voice from the end of the counter where
she had been standing, leaning against the wall, her arms folded.

“You like a cup coffee?” she asked.

[Illustration: “YOU LIKE A CUP COFFEE?” SHE ASKED.]

They both looked round, uncertain what to say, not knowing whether or
not that she meant that she sold coffee. They exchanged rather disturbed
glances, and then Robin answered.

“We can’t afford it, thank you, ma’am,” he said, “we’ve got so little
money.”

“Never mind,” she astonished them by answering, “that cost me nothing.
There some coffee left on the back of the stove from my man’s bregfast.
I give you each a cup.” And she actually went into the little back room,
and presently brought back two good cups of hot coffee.

“There, you drink that,” she said, setting them down on the little
table. “If you children goun to der Fair in that crowd by yourselves,
you want something in your stomachs.”

It was so good—it was so unexpected—it seemed such luck! They looked at
each other with beaming eyes, and at her with quite disproportionate
gratitude. It was much more than two cups of coffee to them.

“Oh, thank you,” they both exclaimed. “We’re so much obliged to you,
ma’am!”

Their feast seemed to become quite a royal thing. They never had felt so
splendidly fed in their lives. It seemed as if they had never tasted
such coffee.

When the meal was finished, they rose refreshed enough to feel ready for
anything. They went up to the counter and thanked the German woman
again. It was Meg who spoke to her.

“We want to say thank you again,” she said. “We are very much obliged to
you for letting us eat our breakfast in here. It was so nice to sit
down, and the coffee was so splendid. I dare say we do seem rather young
to be by ourselves, but that makes us all the more thankful.”

“That’s all right,” said the woman. “I hope you don’t get lost by der
Fair—and have good time!”

And then they went forth on their pilgrimage, into the glorious morning,
into the rushing world that seemed so splendid and so gay—into the
fairy-land that only themselves and those like them could see.

“Isn’t it nice when some one’s kind to you, Rob?” Meg exclaimed
joyfully, when they got into the sunshine. “Doesn’t it make you feel
happy, somehow, not because they’ve done something, but just because
they’ve been kind?”

“Yes, it does,” answered Rob, stepping out bravely. “And I’ll tell you
what I believe—I believe there are a lot of kind people in the world.”

“So do I,” said Meg. “I believe they’re in it even when we don’t see
them.”

And all the more, with springing steps and brave young faces, they
walked on their way to fairy-land.

They had talked it all over—how they would enter their City Beautiful.
It would be no light thing to them, their entrance into it. They were
innocently epicurean about it, and wanted to see it at the very first in
all its loveliness. They knew that there were gates of entrance here and
there, through which thousands poured each day; but Meg had a fancy of
her own, founded, of course, upon that other progress of the Pilgrim’s.

“Robin,” she said, “oh, we must go in by the water, just like those
other pilgrims who came to town. You know that part at the last where it
says, ‘And so many went over the water and were let in at the golden
gates to-day.’ Let us go over the water and be let in at the golden
gates. But the water we shall go over won’t be dark and bitter; it will
be blue and splendid, and the sun will be shining everywhere. Ah, Rob,
how _can_ it be true that we are here!”

They knew all about the great arch of entrance and stately peristyle.
They had read in the newspapers all about its height and the height of
the statues adorning it; they knew how many columns formed the
peristyle, but it was not height or breadth or depth or width they
remembered. The picture which remained with them and haunted them like a
fair dream was of a white and splendid archway, crowned with one of the
great stories of the world in marble—the triumph of the man in whom the
god was so strong that his dreams, the working of his mind, his
strength, his courage, his suffering, wrested from the silence of the
Unknown a new and splendid world. It was this great white arch they
always thought of, with this precious marble story crowning it, the
blue, blue water spread before the stately columns at its side, and the
City Beautiful within the courts it guarded. And it was to this they
were going when they found their way to the boat which would take them
to it.

It was such a heavenly day of June! The water was so amethystine, the
sky such a vault of rapture! What did it matter to them that they were
jostled and crowded, and counted for nothing among those about them?
What did it matter that there were often near them common faces,
speaking of nothing but common, stupid pleasure or common sharpness and
greed? What did it matter that scarcely any one saw what they saw, or,
seeing it, realized its splendid, hopeful meaning? Little recked they of
anything but the entrancement of blue sky and water, and the City
Beautiful they were drawing near to.

When first out of the blueness there rose the fair shadow of the
whiteness, they sprang from their seats, and, hand in hand, made their
way to the side, and there stood watching, as silent as if they did not
dare to speak lest it should melt away; and from a fair white spirit it
grew to a real thing—more white, more fair, more stately, and more an
enchanted thing than even they had believed or hoped.

And the crowd surged about them, and women exclaimed and men talked, and
there was a rushing to and fro, and the ringing of a bell, and movement
and action and excitement were on every side. But somehow these two
children stood hand in hand and only looked.

And their dream had come true, though it had been a child’s dream of an
enchanted thing.




                                   XI


They passed beneath the snow-white stateliness of the great arch, still
hand in hand, and silent. They walked softly, almost as if they felt
themselves treading upon holy ground. To their youth and unworn souls it
_was_ like holy ground, they had so dreamed of it, they had so longed
for it, it had been so mingled in their minds with the story of a city
not of this world.

And they stood within the court beyond the archway, the fair and noble
colonnade, its sweep of columns, statue-crowned, behind them, the wonder
of the City Beautiful spread before. The water of blue lagoons lapped
the bases of white palaces, as if with a caress of homage to their
beauty. On every side these marvels stood; everywhere there was the
green of sward and broad-leaved plants, the sapphire of water, the flood
of color and human life passing by, and above it all and enclosing it,
the warm, deep, splendid blueness of the summer sky.

It was so white—it was so full of the marvel of color—it was so
strange—it was so radiant and unearthly in its beauty.

The two children only stood still and gazed and gazed, with widening
eyes and parted lips. They could not have moved about at first; they
only stood and lost themselves as in a dream.

Meg was still for so long that Robin, turning slowly to look at her at
last, was rather awed.

“Meg!” he said; “Meg!”

“Yes,” she answered, in a voice only half awake.

“Meg! Meg! We are _there_!”

“I know,” said Meg. “Only it is so like—that other City—that it seems as
if——” She gave a queer little laugh, and turned to look at him. “Rob,”
she said, “perhaps we are _dead_, and have just wakened up.”

That brought them back to earth. They laughed together. No, they were
not dead. They were breathless and uplifted by an ecstasy, but they had
never been so fully _alive_ before. It seemed as if they were in the
centre of the world, and the world was such a bright and radiant and
beautiful place as they had never dreamed of.

“Where shall we go first?” said Meg. “What shall we do?”

But it was so difficult to decide that. It did not seem possible to make
a plan and follow it. It was not possible for them, at least. They were
too happy and too young. Surely visitors to fairy-land could not make
plans! They gave themselves up to the spell, and went where fancy led
them. And it led them far, and through strange beauties, which seemed
like dreams come true. They wandered down broad pathways, past green
sward, waving palms, glowing masses of flowers, white balustrades
bordering lagoons lightly ruffled by a moment’s wind. Wonderful statues
stood on silent guard, sometimes in groups, sometimes majestic colossal
figures.

“They look as if they were all watching the thousands and thousands go
by,” said Robin.

“It seems as if they must be thinking something about it all,” Meg
answered. “It could not be that they could stand there and look like
that and not know.”

It was she who soon after built up for them the only scheme they made
during those enchanted days. It could scarcely be called a plan of
action, it was so much an outcome of imagination and part of a vision,
but it was a great joy to them through every hour of their pilgrimage.

Standing upon a fairy bridge, looking over shining canals crossed by
these fairy bridges again and again, the gold sun lighting snow-white
columns, archways, towers, and minarets, statues and rushing fountains,
flowers and palms, her child eyes filled with a deep, strange glow of
joy and dreaming.

She leaned upon the balustrade in her favorite fashion, her chin upon
her hands.

“We need not _pretend_ it is a fairy story, Robin,” she said. “It _is_ a
fairy story, but it is real. Who ever thought a fairy story could come
true? I’ve made up how it came to be like this.”

“Tell us how,” said Robin, looking over the jewelled water almost as she
did.

“It was like this,” she said. “There was a great Magician who was the
ruler of all the Genii in all the world. They were all powerful and rich
and wonderful magicians, but he could make them obey him, and give him
what they stored away. And he said: ‘I will build a splendid City, that
all the world shall flock to and wonder at and remember forever. And in
it some of all the things in the world shall be seen, so that the people
who see it shall learn what the world is like—how huge it is, and what
wisdom it has in it, and what wonders! And it will make them know what
_they_ are like themselves, because the wonders will be made by hands
and feet and brains just like their own. And so they will understand how
strong they are—if they only knew it—and it will give them courage and
fill them with thoughts.”

She stopped a moment, and Rob pushed her gently with his elbow.

“Go on,” he said, “I like it. It sounds quite true. What else?”

“And he called all the Genii together and called them by their names.
There was one who was the king of all the pictures and statues, and the
people who worked at making them. They did not know they had a Genius,
but they had, and he put visions into their heads, and made them feel
restless until they had worked them out into statues and paintings. And
the Great Genius said to him: ‘You must build a palace for _your_
people, and make them pour their finest work into it; and all the people
who are made to be your workers, whether they know it or not, will look
at your palace and see what other ones have done, and wonder if they
cannot do it themselves.’ And there was a huge, huge Genius who was made
of steel and iron and gold and silver and wheels, and the Magician said
to him: ‘Build a great palace, and make your workers fill it with all
the machines and marvels they have made, and all who see will know what
wonders can be done, and feel that there is no wonder that isn’t done
that is too great for human beings to plan.’ And there was a Genius of
the strange countries, and one who knew all the plants and flowers and
trees that grew, and one who lived at the bottom of the sea and knew the
fishes by name and strode about among them. And each one was commanded
to build a palace or to make his people work, and they grew so
interested that in the end each one wanted his palace and his people to
be the most wonderful of all. And so the City was built, and we are in
it, Robin, though we are only twelve years old, and nobody cares about
us.”

“Yes,” said Robin, “and the City is as much ours as if we were the
Magician himself. Meg, who was the Magician? _What_ was he?”

“I don’t know,” said Meg. “Nobody knows. He is that—that——” She gave a
sudden, queer little touch to her forehead and one to her side. “_That_,
you know, Rob! The thing that _thinks_—and makes us want to do things
and be things. Don’t you suppose so, Rob?”

“The thing that made us want so to come here that we could not bear
_not_ to come?” said Robin. “The thing that makes you make up stories
about everything, and always have queer thoughts?”

“Yes—that!” said Meg. “And every one has some of it; and there are such
millions of people, and so there is enough to make the Great Magician.
Robin, come along; let us go to the palace the picture Genius built, and
see what his people put in it. Let us be part of the fairy story when we
go anywhere. It will make it beautiful.”

They took their fairy story with them and went their way. They made it
as much the way of a fairy story as possible. They found a gondola with
a rich-hued, gay-scarfed gondolier, and took their places.

“Now we are in Venice,” Meg said, as they shot smoothly out upon the
lagoon. “We can be in any country we like. Now we are in Venice.”

Their gondola stopped, and lay rocking on the lagoon before the palace’s
broad white steps. They mounted them, and entered into a rich, glowing
world, all unknown.

They knew little of pictures, they knew nothing of statuary, but they
went from room to room, throbbing with enjoyment. They stopped before
beautiful faces and happy scenes, and vaguely smiled, though they did
not know they were smiling; they lingered before faces and figures that
were sad, and their own dark little faces grew soft and grave. They
could not afford to buy a catalogue, so they could only look and pity
and delight or wonder.

“We must make up the stories and thoughts of them ourselves,” Robin
said. “Let’s take it in turns, Meg. Yours will be the best ones, of
course.”

[Illustration: “NOW WE ARE IN VENICE.”]

And this was what they did. As they passed from picture to picture, each
took turns at building up explanations. Some of them might have been at
once surprising and instructive to the artist concerned, but some were
very vivid, and all were full of young directness and clear sight, and
the fresh imagining and coloring of the unworn mind. They were so
interested that it became like a sort of exciting game. They forgot all
about the people around them; they did not know that their two small,
unchaperoned figures attracted more glances than one. They were so
accustomed to being alone, that they never exactly counted themselves in
with other people. And now, it was as if they were at a banquet,
feasting upon strange viands, and the new flavors were like wine to
them. They went from side to side of the rooms, drawn sometimes by a
glow of color, sometimes by a hinted story.

“We don’t know anything about pictures, I suppose,” said Meg, “but we
can see everything is in them. There are the poor, working in the fields
and the mills, being glad or sorry; and there are the rich ones, dancing
at balls and standing in splendid places.”

“And there are the good ones and the bad ones. You can see it in their
faces,” Rob went on, for her.

“Yes,” said Meg; “richness and poorness and goodness and badness and
happiness and gladness. The Genius who made this palace was a very proud
one, and he said he would put all the world in it, even if his workers
could only make pictures and statues.”

“Was he the strongest of all?” asked Robin, taking up the story again
with interest.

“I don’t know,” Meg answered; “sometimes I think he was. He was
strong—he was very strong.”

They had been too deeply plunged into their mood to notice a man who
stood near them, looking at a large picture. In fact, the man himself
had not at first noticed them, but when Meg began to speak her voice
attracted him. He turned his head, and looked at her odd little
reflecting face, and, after having looked at it, he stood listening to
her. An expression of recognition came into his strong, clean-shaven
face.

“You two again!” he said, when she had finished. “And you have got
here.” It was their man again.

“Yes,” answered Meg, her gray eyes revealing, as she lifted them to his
face, that she came back to earth with some difficulty.

“How do you like it, as far as you’ve gone?” he asked.

“We are making believe that it is a fairy story,” Meg answered; “and
it’s very easy.”

And then a group of people came between and separated them.




                                  XII


How tired they were when they came out from the world of pictures into
the world of thronging people! How their limbs ached and they were
brought back to the realization that they were creatures with human
bodies, which somehow they seemed to have forgotten!

When they stood in the sunshine again Robin drew a long breath.

“It is like coming out of one dream into another,” he said. “We must
have been there a long time. I didn’t know I was tired and I didn’t know
I was hungry, but I am both. Are you?”

She was as tired and hungry as he was.

“Dare we buy a sandwich to eat with our eggs?” she said.

“Yes, I think we dare,” Robin answered. “Where shall we go and eat
them?”

There was no difficulty in deciding. She had planned it all out, and
they so knew the place by heart that they did not need to ask their way.
It was over one of the fairy bridges which led to a fairy island. It was
softly wooded, and among the trees were winding paths and flowers and
rustic seats, and quaint roofs peering above the greenness of branches.
And it was full of the warm scent of roses, growing together in
sumptuous thousands, their heavy, sweet heads uplifted to the sun, or
nodding and leaning towards their neighbors’ clusters.

The fairy bridge linked it to the wonderful world beyond, but by
comparison its bowers were almost quiet. The crowd did not jostle there.

“And we shall be eating our lunch near thousands and thousands of roses.
It will be like the ‘Arabian Nights.’ Let us pretend that the rose who
is queen of them all invited us, because we belong to nobody,” Meg said.

They bought the modest addition to their meal, and carried the
necessary, ever-present satchel to their bower. They were tired of
dragging the satchel about, but they were afraid to lose sight of it.

“It’s very well that it is such a small one, and that we have so little
in it,” Robin said. They chose the most secluded corner they could find,
as near to the rose garden as possible, and sat down and fell upon their
scant lunch as they had fallen upon their breakfast.

It was very scant for two ravenously hungry children, and they tried to
make it last as long as possible. But scant as it was, and tired as they
were, their spirits did not fail them.

“Perhaps, if we eat it slowly, it will seem more,” said Meg, peeling an
egg with deliberation, but with a very undeliberate feeling in her small
stomach. “Robin, did you notice our man?”

“I saw him, of course,” answered Robin; “he’s too big not to see.”

“I _noticed_ him,” continued Meg. “Robin, there’s something the matter
with that man. He’s a gloomy man.”

“Well, you noticed him quickly,” Robin responded, with a shade of
fraternal incredulity. “What’s happened to him?”

Meg’s eyes fixed themselves on a glimpse of blue water she saw through
the trees. She looked as if she were thinking the matter over.

“How do I know?” she said; “I couldn’t. But, somehow, he has a dreary
face, as if he had been thinking of dreary things. I don’t know why I
thought that all in a minute, but I did, and I believe it’s true.”

“Well, if we should see him again,” Robin said, “I’ll look and see.”

“I believe we shall see him again,” said Meg. “How many eggs have we
left, Robin?”

“We only brought three dozen,” he answered, looking into the satchel;
“and we ate seven this morning.”

“When you have nothing but eggs, you eat a good many,” said Meg,
reflectively. “They won’t last very long. But we couldn’t have carried a
thousand eggs, even if we had had them”—which was a sage remark.

“We shall have to buy some cheap things,” was Robin’s calculation.
“They’ll have to be very cheap, though. We have to pay a dollar, you
know, every day, to come in; and if we have no money we can’t go into
the places that are not free; and we want to go into everything.”

“I’d rather go in hungry than stay outside and have real dinners,
wouldn’t you?” Meg put it to him.

“Yes, I would,” he answered, “though it’s pretty hard to be hungry.”

They had chosen a secluded corner to sit in, but it was not so secluded
that they had it entirely to themselves. At a short distance from them,
in the nearest bowery nook, a young man and woman were eating something
out of a basket. They looked like a young country pair, plain and
awkward, and enjoying themselves immensely. Their clothes were common
and their faces were tanned, as if from working out of doors. But their
basket evidently contained good, home-made things to eat. Meg caught
glimpses of ham and chicken, and something that looked like cake. Just
at that moment they looked so desperately good that she turned away her
eyes, because she did not want to stare at them rudely. And as she
averted them, she saw that Robin had seen, too.

“Those people have plenty to eat,” he said, with a short, awkward laugh.

“Yes,” she answered. “Don’t let us look. We are _here_, Robin, anyway,
and we knew we couldn’t come as other people do.”

“Yes,” he said, “we are _here_.”

The man and his wife finished their lunch, and began putting things in
order in their basket. As they did it, they talked together in a low
voice, and seemed to be discussing something. Somehow, in spite of her
averted eyes, Meg suddenly felt as if they were discussing Robin and
herself, and she wondered if they had caught her involuntary look.

“I think, Robin,” said Meg—“I think that woman is going to speak to us.”

It was evident that she was. She got up and came towards them, her
husband following her rather awkwardly.

She stopped before them, and the two pairs of dark eyes lifted
themselves to her face.

“I’ve just been talking to my man about you two,” she said. “We couldn’t
help looking at you. Have you lost your friends?”

“No, ma’am,” said Robin, “we haven’t got any; I mean, we’re not with any
one.”

The woman turned and looked at her husband.

“Well, Jem!” she exclaimed.

The man drew near and looked them over.

He was a raw-boned, big young man, with a countrified, good-natured
face.

“You haven’t come here alone?” he said.

“Yes,” said Robin. “We couldn’t have come, if we hadn’t come alone.
We’re not afraid, thank you. We’re getting along very well.”

“Well, Jem!” said the woman again.

She seemed quite stirred. There was something in her ordinary,
good-natured face that was quite like a sort of rough emotion.

“Have you plenty of money?” she asked.

“No,” said Robin, “not plenty, but we have a little.”

She put her basket down and opened it. She took out some pieces of brown
fried chicken; then she took out some big slices of cake, with raisins
in it. She even added some biscuits and slices of ham. Then she put them
in a coarse, clean napkin.

“Now, look here,” she said, “don’t you go filling up with candy and
peanuts, just because you are by yourselves. You put this in your bag,
and eat it when you’re ready. ’T any rate, it’s good, home-made
victuals, and won’t harm you.”

And in the midst of their shy thanks, she shut the basket again and went
off with her husband, and they heard her say again, before she
disappeared,

“Well, Jem!”

[Illustration: “WELL, JEM!” SHE EXCLAIMED.]




                                  XIII


Yes, there were plenty of kind people in the world, and one of the best
proofs of it was that, in that busy, wonderful place through which all
the world seemed passing, and where, on every side, were a thousand
things to attract attention, and so fill eyes and mind that
forgetfulness and carelessness of small things might not have been quite
unnatural, these two small things, utterly insignificant and unknown to
the crowds they threaded, met many a passing friend of the moment, and
found themselves made happier by many a kindly and helpful word or look.
Officials were good-natured to them, guides were good-humored, motherly
women and fatherly men protected them in awkward crowds. They always saw
that those who noticed them glanced about for their chaperons, and again
and again they were asked who was taking care of them; but Robin’s
straightforward, civil little answer, “We’re taking care of ourselves,”
never failed to waken as much friendly interest as surprise.

They kept up their fairy story of the Great Genius, and called things by
fairy-story names, and talked to each other of their fairy-story fancies
about them. It was so much more delightful to say: “Let us go to the
Palace of the Genius of the Sea,” than to say, “Let us go to the
Fisheries’ building.” And once in the palace, standing among great rocks
and pools and fountains, with water splashing and tumbling over strange
sea-plants, and strange sea-monsters swimming beneath their eyes in
green sea-water, it was easy to believe in the Genius who had brought
them all together.

“He was very huge,” Meg said, making a picture of him. “He had monstrous
eyes, that looked like the sea when it is blue; he had great, white
coral teeth, and he had silver, scaly fishskin wound round him, and his
hair was long sea-grass and green and brown weeds.”

They stood in grottoes and looked down into clear pools, at
swift-darting things of gold and silver and strange prismatic colors.
Meg made up stories of tropical rivers, with palms and jungle cane
fringing them, and tigers and lions coming to lap at the brink. She
invented rushing mountain streams and lakes, with speckled trout
leaping; and deep, deep seas, where whales lay rocking far below, and
porpoises rolled, and devil-fish spread hideous, far-reaching tentacles
for prey.

Oh, what a day it was! What wonders they saw and hung over, and dwelt on
with passions of young delight! The great sea gave up its deep to them;
great forests and trackless jungles their wonderful growths; kings’
palaces and queens’ coffers their rarest treasures; the ages of long ago
their relics and strange legends, in stone and wood and brass and gold.

They did not know how often people turned and stopped to look at their
two little, close-leaning figures and vivid, dark, ecstatic-eyed faces.
They certainly never chanced to see that one figure was often behind
them at a safe distance, and seemed rather to have fallen into the habit
of going where they went and listening to what they said. It was their
man, curiously enough, and it was true that he was rather a
gloomy-looking man, when one observed him well. His keen, business-like,
well-cut face had a cloud resting upon it; he looked listless and
unsmiling, even in the palaces that most stirred the children’s souls;
and, in fact, it seemed to be their odd enthusiasm which had attracted
him a little, because he was in the mood to feel none himself. He had
been within hearing distance when Meg had been telling her stories of
the Genius of the Palace of the Sea, and a faint smile had played about
his mouth for a moment. Then he had drawn a trifle nearer, still keeping
out of sight, and when they had moved he had followed them. He had been
a hard, ambitious, wealth-gaining man all his life. A few years before
he had found a new happiness, which softened him for a while, and made
his world seem a brighter thing. Then a black sorrow had come upon him,
and everything had changed. He had come to the Enchanted City, not as
the children had come, because it shone before them, a radiant joy, but
because he wondered if it would distract him at all. All other things
had failed; his old habits of work and scheme, his successes, his
ever-growing fortune, they were all as nothing. The world was empty to
him, and he walked about it feeling like a ghost. The little dark, vivid
faces had attracted him, he did not know why, and when he heard the
story of the Palace of the Sea, he was led on by a vague interest.

He was near them often during the day, but it was not until late in the
afternoon that they saw him themselves, when he did not see them. They
came upon him in a quiet spot where he was sitting alone. On a seat near
him sat a young woman, resting, with a baby asleep in her arms. The
young woman was absorbed in her child, and was apparently unconscious of
him. His arms were folded and his head bent, but he was looking at her
in an absent, miserable way. It was as if she made him think of
something bitter and sad.

Meg and Robin passed him quietly.

[Illustration: HE WAS LOOKING AT HER IN AN ABSENT, MISERABLE WAY.]

“I see what you meant, Meg,” Robin said. “He does look as if something
was the matter with him. I wonder what it is?”

When they passed out of the gates at dusk, it was with worn-out bodies,
but enraptured souls. In the street-car, which they indulged in the
extravagance of taking, the tired people, sitting exhaustedly in the
seats and hanging on to straps, looked with a sort of wonder at them,
their faces shone so like stars. They did not know where they were going
to sleep, and they were more than ready for lying down, but they were
happy beyond words.

They went with the car until it reached the city’s heart, and then they
got out and walked. The streets were lighted, and the thoroughfares were
a riot of life and sound. People were going to theatres, restaurants,
and hotels, which were a blaze of electric radiance. They found
themselves limping a little, but they kept stoutly on, holding firmly to
the satchel.

“We needn’t be afraid of going anywhere, however poor it looks,” Robin
said, with a grave little elderly air. He was curiously grave for his
years, sometimes. “Anybody can see we have nothing to steal. I think any
one would know that we only want to go to bed.”

It was a queer place they finally hit upon. It was up a side street,
which was poorly lighted, and where the houses were all shabby and
small. On the steps of one of them a tired-looking woman was sitting,
with a pale, old-faced boy beside her. Robin stopped before her.

“Have you a room where my sister could sleep, and I could have a
mattress on the floor, or lie down on anything?” he said. “We can’t
afford to go anywhere where it will cost more than fifty cents each.”

The woman looked at them indifferently. She was evidently very much worn
out with her day’s work, and discouraged by things generally.

“I haven’t anything worth more than fifty cents, goodness knows,” she
answered. “You must be short of money to come here. I’ve never thought
of having roomers.”

“We’re poor,” said Robin, “and we know we can’t have anything but a poor
room. If we can lie down, we are so tired we shall go to sleep anywhere.
We’ve been at the Fair all day.”

The pale little old-faced boy leaned forward, resting his arm on his
mother’s knee. They saw that he was a very poor little fellow, indeed,
with a hunch back.

“Mother,” he said, “let ’em stay; I’ll sleep on the floor.”

The woman gave a dreary half laugh, and got up from the step. “He’s
crazy about the Fair,” she said. “We hain’t no money to spend on Fairs,
and he’s most wild about it. You can stay here to-night, if you want
to.”

She made a sign to them to follow her. The hunchback boy rose too, and
went into the dark passage after them. He seemed to regard them with a
kind of hunger in his look.

They went up the narrow, steep staircase. It was only lighted by a dim
gleam from a room below, whose door was open. The balustrades were
rickety, and some of them were broken out. It was a forlorn enough
place. The hunchback boy came up the steps, awkwardly, behind them. It
was as if he wanted to see what would happen.

They went up two flights of the crooked, crazy stairs, and at the top of
the second flight the woman opened a door.

“That’s all the place there is,” she said. “It isn’t anything more than
a place to lie down in, you see. I can put a mattress on the floor for
you, and your sister can sleep in the cot.”

“That’s all we want,” replied Robin.

But it was a poor place. A room, both small and bare, and with broken
windows. There was nothing in it but the cot and a chair.

“Ben sleeps here,” the woman said. “If I couldn’t make him a place on
the floor, near me, I couldn’t let it to you.” Meg turned and looked at
Ben. He was gazing at her with a nervous interest.

“We’re much obliged to you,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he said, with eager shyness. “Do you want some water
to wash yourselves with? I can bring you up a tin basin and a jug. You
can set it on the chair.”

“Thank you,” they both said at once. And Robin added, “We want washing
pretty badly.”

Ben turned about and went down-stairs for the water as if he felt a sort
of excitement in doing the service. These two children, who looked as
poor as himself, set stirring strange thoughts in his small, unnourished
brain.

He brought back the tin basin and water, a piece of yellow soap, and
even a coarse, rather dingy, towel. He had been so eager that he was out
of breath when he returned, but he put the basin on the chair and the
tin jug beside it, with a sort of exultant look in his poor face.

“Thank you,” said Meg again; “thank you, Ben.”

She could not help watching him as his mother prepared the rather
wretched mattress for Robin. Once he caught the look of her big,
childish, gray eyes as it rested upon him with questioning sympathy, and
he flushed up so that even by the light of the little smoky lamp she saw
it. When the woman had finished she and the boy went away and left them,
and they stood a moment looking at each other. They were both thinking
of the same thing, but somehow they did not put it into words.

“We’ll wash off the dust first,” said Robin, “and then we’ll eat some of
the things we have left from what the woman gave us. And then we’ll go
to bed, and we shall drop just like logs.”

And this they did, and it was certainly a very short time before the
smoky little lamp was out, and each had dropped like a log and lay
stretched in the darkness, with a sense of actual ecstasy in limbs laid
down to rest and muscles relaxed for sleeping.

“Robin,” said Meg, drowsily, through the dark that divided them,
“everybody in the world has something to give to somebody else.”

“I’m thinking that, too,” Robin answered, just as sleepily; “nobody is
so poor—that—he—hasn’t anything. That—boy——”

“He let us have his hard bed,” Meg murmured, “and he—hasn’t seen——”

But her voice died away, and Robin would not have heard her if she had
said more. And they were both fast, fast asleep.




                                  XIV


It would have been a loud sound which would have awakened them during
those deep sleeping hours of the night. They did not even stir on their
poor pillows when, long after midnight, there was the noise of heavy
drunken footsteps and heavy drunken stumbling in the passage below, and
then the raising of a man’s rough voice, and the upsetting of chairs and
the slamming of doors, mingled with the expostulations of the woman,
whose husband had come home in something worse than his frequent
ill-fashion. They slept sweetly through it all, but when the morning
came, and hours of unbroken rest had made their slumbers lighter, and
the sunshine streamed in through the broken windows, they were called
back to the world by loud and angry sounds.

“What is it?” said Meg, sitting bolt upright and rubbing her eyes;
“somebody’s shouting.”

“And somebody’s crying,” said Robin, sitting up too, but more slowly.

It was quite clear to them, as soon as they were fully awake, that both
these things were happening. A man seemed to be quarrelling below. They
could hear him stamping about and swearing savagely. And they could hear
the woman’s voice, which sounded as if she were trying to persuade him
to do or leave undone something. They could not hear her words, but she
was crying, and somebody else was crying, too, and they knew it was the
boy with the little old face and the hump-back.

“I suppose it’s the woman’s husband,” said Meg. “I’m glad he wasn’t here
last night.”

“I wonder if he knows we are here,” said Robin, listening anxiously.

It was plain that he did know. They heard him stumbling up the
staircase, grumbling and swearing as he came, and he was coming up to
their room, it was evident.

“What shall we do?” exclaimed Meg, in a whisper.

“Wait,” Robin answered, breathlessly. “We can’t do anything.”

The heavy feet blundered up the short second flight and blundered to
their door. It seemed that the man had not slept off his drunken fit. He
struck the door with his fist.

“Hand out that dollar,” he shouted. “When my wife takes roomers I’m
going to be paid. Hand it out.”

They heard the woman hurrying up the stairs after him. She was out of
breath with crying, and there was a choking sound in her voice when she
spoke to them through the door.

“You’d better let him have it,” she said.

“I guess they’d better,” said the man, roughly. “Who’d’ they suppose
owns the house?”

Robin got up and took a dollar from their very small store, which was
hidden in the lining of his trousers. He went to the door and opened it
a little, and held the money out.

“Here it is,” he said.

The man snatched it out of his hand and turned away, and went stumbling
down stairs, still growling. The woman stood a minute on the landing,
and they heard her make a pitiful sort of sound, half sob, half sniff.

Meg sat up in bed, with her chin on her hands, and glared like a little
lioness.

“What do you think of _that_?” she said.

“He’s a devil!” said Robin, with terseness. And he was conscious of no
impropriety. “I wanted that boy to have it, and _go_.” It was not
necessary to say where.

“So did I,” answered Meg. “And I believe his mother would have given it
to him, too.”

They heard the man leave the house a few minutes later, and then it did
not take them long to dress and go down the narrow, broken-balustraded
stairs again. As they descended the first flight they saw the woman
cooking something over the stove in her kitchen, and as she moved about
they saw her brush her apron across her eyes.

The squalid street was golden with the early morning sunshine, which is
such a joyful thing, and, in the full, happy flood of it, a miserable
little figure sat crouched on the steps. It was the boy Ben, and they
saw that he looked paler than he had looked the night before, and his
little face looked older. His elbow was on his knee and his cheek on his
hand, and there were wet marks on his cheeks.

A large lump rose up in Meg’s throat.

“I know what’s the matter,” she whispered to Robin.

“So—so do I,” Robin answered, rather unsteadily. “And he’s poorer than
anybody else. It _ought_ not to go by him.”

“No, no,” said Meg. “It oughtn’t.”

She walked straight to the threshold and sat down on the step beside
him. She was a straightforward child, and she was too much moved to
stand on ceremony. She sat down quite close by the poor little fellow,
and put her hand on his arm.

“Never you mind,” she said. “Never you mind.” And her throat felt so
full that for a few seconds she could say nothing more.

Robin stood against the door post. The effect of this was to make his
small jaw square itself.

“Don’t mind us at all,” he said. “We—we know.”

The little fellow looked at Meg and then up at him. In that look he saw
that they did know.

“Mother was going to give that dollar to me,” he said, brokenly. “I was
going to the Fair on it. _Everybody_ is going, everybody is talking
about it, and thinking about it! Nobody’s been talking of nothing else
for months and months! The streets are full of people on their way! And
they all pass me by.”

He rubbed his sleeve across his forlorn face and swallowed hard.

“There’s pictures in the shops,” he went on, “and flags flying. And
everything’s going that way, and me staying behind!”

Two of the large, splendid drops, which had sometimes gathered on Meg’s
eyelashes and fallen on the straw, when she had been telling stories in
the barn, fell now upon her lap.

“Robin!” she said.

Robin stood and stared very straight before him for a minute, and then
his eyes turned and met hers.

“We’re very poor,” he said to her, “but _everybody_ has—has something.”

“We couldn’t leave him behind,” Meg said, “we _couldn’t_! Let’s think.”
And she put her head down, resting her elbows on her knee and clutching
her forehead with her supple, strong little hands.

“What can we do without?” said Robin. “Let’s do without something.”

Meg lifted her head.

“We will eat nothing but the eggs for breakfast,” she said, “and go
without lunch—if we can. Perhaps we can’t—but we’ll try. And we will not
go into some of the places we have to pay to go into. I will make up
stories about them for you. And, Robin, it _is_ true—everybody has
something to give. That’s what I have—the stories I make up. It’s
_something_—just a little.”

“It isn’t so little,” Robin answered; “it fills in the empty place,
Meg?” with a question in his voice.

She answered with a little nod, and then put her hand on Ben’s arm
again. During their rapid interchange of words he had been gazing at
them in a dazed, uncomprehending way. To his poor little starved nature
they seemed so strong and different from himself that there was
something wonderful about them. Meg’s glowing, dark little face quite
made his weak heart beat as she turned it upon him.

“We are not much better off than you are,” she said, “but we think we’ve
got enough to take you into the grounds. You let us have your bed. Come
along with us.”

“To—to—the Fair?” he said, tremulously.

“Yes,” she answered, “and when we get in I’ll try and think up things to
tell you and Robin, about the places we can’t afford to go into. We can
go into the Palaces for nothing.”

“Palaces!” he gasped, his wide eyes on her face.

She laughed.

“That’s what we call them,” she said; “that’s what they are. It’s part
of a story. I’ll tell it to you as we go.”

“Oh!” he breathed out, with a sort of gasp, again.

He evidently did not know how to express himself. His hands trembled,
and he looked half frightened.

“If you’ll do it,” he said, “I’ll remember you all my life! I’ll—I’ll—if
it wasn’t for father I know mother would let you sleep here every night
for nothing. And I’d give you my bed and be glad to do it, I would. I’ll
be so thankful to you. I hain’t got nothin’—nothin’—but I’ll be that
thankful—I”—there was a kind of hysterical break in his voice—“let me go
and tell mother,” he said, and he got up stumblingly and rushed into the
house.

Meg and Robin followed him to the kitchen, as excited as he was. The
woman had just put a cracked bowl of something hot on the table, and as
he came in she spoke to him.

[Illustration: “TO—TO—THE FAIR?” HE SAID, TREMULOUSLY.]

“Your mush is ready,” she said. “Come and eat while it’s hot.”

“Mother,” he cried out, “they are going to take me in. I’m going!
They’re going to take me!”

The woman stopped short and looked at the twins, who stood in the
doorway. It seemed as if her chin rather trembled.

“You’re going—” she began, and broke off. “You’re as poor as he is,” she
ended. “You must be, or you wouldn’t have come here to room.”

“We’re as poor in one way,” said Meg, “but we worked, and saved money to
come. It isn’t much, but we can do without something that would cost
fifty cents, and that will pay for his ticket.”

The woman’s chin trembled more still.

“Well,” she said, ”I—I—O Lord!” And she threw her apron over her head
and sat down suddenly.

Meg went over to her, not exactly knowing why.

“We could not bear to go ourselves,” she said. “And he is like us.”

She was thinking, as she spoke, that this woman and her boy were very
fond of each other. The hands holding the apron were trembling as his
had done. They dropped as suddenly as they had been thrown up. The woman
lifted her face eagerly.

“What were you thinking of going without?” she asked. “Was it things to
eat?”

“We—we’ve got some hard-boiled eggs,” faltered Meg, a little guiltily.

“There’s hot mush in the pan,” said the woman. “There’s nothing to eat
with it, but it’s healthier than cold eggs. Sit down and eat some.”

And they did, and in half an hour they left the poor house, feeling
full-fed and fresh. With them went Ben—his mother standing on the steps
looking after him—his pale old face almost flushed and young, as it set
itself toward the City Beautiful.




                                   XV


Before they entered the Court of Honor Meg stopped them both. She was
palpitating with excitement.

“Robin,” she said, “let us make him shut his eyes. Then you can take one
of his hands and I can take the other, and we will lead him. And when we
have taken him to the most heavenly place, he shall look—suddenly!”

“I should like that,” said Ben, tremulous with anticipation.

“All right,” said Robin.

By this time it was as if they had been friends all their lives. They
knew each other. They had not ceased talking a moment since they set
out, but it had not been about the Fair. Meg had decided that nothing
should be described beforehand; that all the entrancement of beauty
should burst upon Ben’s hungry soul, as Paradise bursts upon translated
spirits.

“I don’t want it to be gradual,” she said, anxiously. “I want it to be
_sudden_! It can be gradual after.”

She was an artist and an epicure in embryo, this child. She tasted her
joys with a delicate palate, and lost no flavor of them. The rapture of
yesterday was intensified ten-fold to-day, because she felt it throbbing
anew in this frail body beside her, in which Nature had imprisoned a
soul as full of longings as her own, but not so full of power.

They took Ben by either hand, and led him with the greatest care. He
shut his eyes tight, and walked between them. People who glanced at them
smiled, recognizing the time-honored and familiar child trick. They did
not know that this time it was something more than that.

“The trouble is,” Meg said in a low voice to Robin, “I don’t know which
is the most heavenly place to stand. Sometimes I think it is at one end,
and sometimes at the other, and sometimes at the side.”

They led their charge for some minutes indefinitely. Sometimes they
paused and looked about them, speaking in undertones. Ben was rigidly
faithful, and kept his eyes shut. As they hesitated for a moment near
one of the buildings, a man who was descending the steps looked in their
direction, and his look was one of recognition. It was the man who had
watched them the day before, and he paused upon the steps, interested
again, and conscious of being curious.

“What are they going to do?” he said to himself. “They are going to do
something. Where did they pick up the other one—poor little chap!”

Meg had been looking very thoughtful during that moment of hesitancy.
She spoke, and he was near enough to hear her.

“He shall open them where he can hear the water splashing in the
fountain,” she said. “I think that’s the best.”

It seemed that Robin thought so, too. They turned and took their way to
the end of the Court, where the dome lifted itself, wonderful, against
the sky, and a splendor of rushing water, from which magnificent
sea-monsters rose, stood grand before.

Their man followed them. He had had a bad night, and had come out into a
dark world. The streams of pleasure-seekers, the gayly fluttering flags,
the exhilaration in the very air seemed to make his world blacker and
more empty. A year before he had planned to see this wonder, with the
one soul on earth who would have been most thrilled, and who would have
made him most thrill, to its deepest and highest meaning. Green grass
and summer roses were waving over the earth that had shut in all dreams
like these, for him. As he wandered about, he had told himself that he
had been mad to come and see it all, so alone. Sometimes he turned away
from the crowd, and sat in some quiet corner of palace or fairy garden;
and it was because he was forced to do it, for it was at times when he
was in no condition to be looked at by careless passers-by.

He had never been particularly fond of children; but somehow these two
waifs, with their alert faces and odd independence, had wakened his
interest. He was conscious of rather wanting to know where they had come
from and what they would do next. The bit of the story of the Genius of
the Palace of the Sea had attracted him. He had learned to love stories
from the one who should have seen with him the Enchanted City. She had
been a story lover, and full of fancies.

He followed the trio to the end of the great Court. When they reached
there, three pairs of cheeks were flushed, and the eyes that were open
were glowing. Meg and Robin chose a spot of ground, and stopped.

“Now,” said Meg, “open them—suddenly!”

The boy opened them. The man saw the look that flashed into his face. It
was a strange, quivering look. Palaces, which seemed of pure marble,
surrounded him. He had never even dreamed of palaces. White stairways
rose from the lagoon, leading to fair, open portals the wondering world
passed through to splendors held within. A great statue of gold towered
noble and marvellous, with uplifted arms holding high the emblems of its
spirit and power, and at the end of this vista, through the archway, and
between the line of columns, bearing statues poised against the
background of sky, he caught glimpses of the lake’s scintillating blue.

He uttered a weird little sound. It was part exclamation, and a bit of a
laugh, cut short by something like a nervous sob, which did not know
what to do with itself.

“Oh!” he said. And then, “Oh!” again. And then “I—I don’t know—what
it’s—like!” And he cleared his throat and stared, and Meg saw his narrow
chest heave up and down.

“It isn’t _like_ anything, but—but something we’ve dreamed of, perhaps,”
said Meg, gazing in ecstasy with him.

“No—no!” answered Ben. “But I’ve never dreamed like it.”

Meg put her hand on his shoulder.

“But you will now,” she said. “You will now.”

And their man had been near enough to hear, and he came to them.

“Good morning,” he said. “You’re having another day of it, I see.”

Meg and Robin looked up at him, radiant. They were both in good enough
mood to make friends. They felt friends with everybody.

“Good morning,” they answered; and Robin added, “We’re going to come
every day as long as we can make our money last.”

“That’s a good enough idea,” said their man. “Where are your father and
mother?”

Meg lifted her solemn, black-lashed eyes to his. She was noticing again
about the dreary look in his face.

“They died nearly four years ago,” she answered, for Robin.

“Who is with you?” asked the man, meeting her questioning gaze with a
feeling that her great eyes were oddly thoughtful for a child’s, and
that there was a look in them he had seen before in a pair of eyes
closed a year ago. It gave him an almost startled feeling.

“Nobody is with us,” Meg said, “except Ben.”

“You came alone?” said the man.

“Yes.”

He looked at her for a moment in silence, and then turned away and
looked across the Court to where the lake gleamed through the colonnade.

“So did I,” he said, reflectively. “So did I. Quite alone.”

Meg and Robin glanced at each other.

“Yesterday Rob and I came by ourselves,” said Meg next, and she said it
gently. “But we were not lonely; and to-day we have Ben.”

The man turned his eyes on the boy.

“You’re Ben, are you?” he said.

“Yes,” Ben answered. “And but for them I couldn’t never have seen
it—never!”

“Why?” the man asked. “Almost everybody can see it.”

“But not me,” said Ben. “And I wanted to more than any one—seemed like
to me. And when they roomed at our house last night, mother was going to
give me the fifty cents, but—but father—father, he took it away from us.
And they brought me.”

Then the man turned on Robin.

“Have you plenty of money?” he asked, unceremoniously.

“No,” said Rob.

“They’re as poor as I am,” put in Ben. “They couldn’t afford to room
anywhere but with poor people.”

“But everybody—” Meg began impulsively, and then stopped, remembering
that it was not Robin she was talking to.

“But everybody—what?” said the man.

It was Robin who answered for her this time.

“She said that last night,” he explained, with a half shy laugh, “that
everybody had something they could give to somebody else.”

“Oh, well, it isn’t always money, of course, or anything big,” said Meg,
hurriedly. “It might be something that is ever so little.”

The man laughed, but his eyes seemed to be remembering something as he
looked over the lagoon again.

“That’s a pretty good thing to think,” he said. “Now,” turning on Meg
rather suddenly, “I wonder what you have to give to _me_.”

“I don’t know,” she answered, perhaps a trifle wistfully. “The thing I
give to Rob and Ben is a very little one.”

“She makes up things to tell us about the places we can’t pay to go
into, or don’t understand,” said Robin. “It’s not as little as she
thinks it is.”

“Well,” said the man, “look here! Perhaps that’s what you have to give
to me. You came to this place alone and so did I. I believe you’re
enjoying yourselves more than I am. You’re going to take Ben about and
tell him stories. Suppose you take me!”

“You!” Meg exclaimed. “But you’re a man, and you know all about it, I
dare say; and I only tell things I make up—fairy stories, and other
things. A man wouldn’t care for them. He—he knows.”

“He knows too much, perhaps—that’s the trouble,” said the man. “A fairy
or so might do me good. I’m not acquainted enough with them. And if I
know things you don’t—perhaps that’s what I have to give to _you_.”

“Why,” said Meg, her eyes growing as she looked up at his odd, clever
face, “do you want to go about with us?”

[Illustration: “TAKE ME WITH YOU.”]

“Yes,” said the man, with a quick, decided nod, “I believe that’s just
what I want to do. I’m lonelier than you two. At least, you are
together. Come on, children,” but it was to Meg he held out his hand.
“Take me with you.”

And, bewildered as she was, Meg found herself giving her hand to him and
being led away, Robin and Ben close beside them.




                                  XVI


It was such a strange thing—so unlike the things of every day, and so
totally an unexpected thing, that for a little while they all three had
a sense of scarcely knowing what to do with themselves. If Robin and Meg
had not somehow rather liked the man, and vaguely felt him friendly, and
if there had not been in their impressionable minds that fancy about his
being far from as happy as the other people of the crowds looked, it is
more than probable that they would not have liked their position, and
would have felt that it might spoil their pleasure.

But they were sympathetic children, and they had been lonely and sad
enough themselves to be moved by a sadness in others, even if it was an
uncomprehended one.

As she walked by the man’s side, still letting her hand remain in his,
Meg kept giving him scrutinizing looks aside, and trying in her way to
read him. He was a man just past middle life, he was powerful and
well-built, and had keen, and at the same time rather unhappy-looking,
blue eyes, with brows and lashes as black as Rob’s and her own. There
was something strong in his fine-looking, clean-shaven face, and the
hand which held hers had a good, firm grasp, and felt like a hand which
had worked in its time.

As for the man himself, he was trying an experiment. He had been
suddenly seized with a desire to try it, and see how it would result. He
was not sure that it would be a success, but if it proved one it might
help to rid him of gloom he would be glad to be relieved of. He felt it
rather promising when Meg went at once to the point and asked him a
practical question.

“You don’t know our names?” she said.

“You don’t know mine,” he answered. “It’s John Holt. You can call me
that.”

“John Holt,” said Meg. “Mr. John Holt.”

The man laughed. Her grave, practical little air pleased him.

“Say John Holt, without the handle to it,” he said. “It sounds well.”

Meg looked at him inquiringly. Though he had laughed, he seemed to mean
what he said.

“It’s queer, of course,” she said, “because we don’t know each other
well; but I can do it, if you like.”

“I do like,” he said, and he laughed again.

“Very well,” said Meg. “My name’s Margaret Macleod, I’m called Meg for
short. My brother’s name is Robin, and Ben’s is Ben Nowell. Where shall
we go first?”

“You are the leader of the party,” he answered, his face beginning to
brighten a little. “Where shall it be?”

“The Palace of the Genius of the Flowers,” she said.

“Is that what it is called?” he asked.

“That’s what we call it,” she explained. “That’s part of the fairy
story. _We_ are part of a fairy story, and all these are palaces that
the Genii built for the Great Magician.”

“That’s first-rate,” he said. “Just tell us about it. Ben and I have not
heard.”

At first she had wondered if she could tell her stories to a grown-up
person, but there was something in his voice and face that gave her the
feeling that she could. She laughed a little when she began; but he
listened with enjoyment that was so plain, and Ben, walking by her side,
looked up with such eager, enraptured, and wondering eyes, that she went
on bravely. It grew, as stories will, in being told, and it was better
than it had been the day before. Robin himself saw that, and leaned
towards her as eagerly as Ben.

By the time they entered the Palace of the Flowers and stood among the
flame of colors, and beneath the great palm fronds swaying under the
crystal globe that was its dome, she had warmed until she was all aglow,
and as full of fancies as the pavilions were of blossoms.

As she dived into the story of the Genius who strode through tropical
forests and deep jungles, over purple moors and up mountain sides, where
strange-hued pale or vivid things grew in tangles, or stood in the sun
alone, John Holt became of the opinion that his experiment would be a
success. It was here that he began to find he had gifts to give. She
asked him questions; Robin and Ben asked him questions; the three drew
close to him, and hung on his every word.

“You know the things and the places where they grow,” Meg said. “We have
never seen anything. We can only try to imagine. You can tell us.” And
he did tell them; and as they went from court to pavilion, surrounded by
sumptuous bloom and sumptuous leafage and sumptuous fragrance, the three
beginning to cling to him, to turn to him with every new discovery, and
to forget he was a stranger, he knew that he was less gloomy than he had
been before, and that somehow this thing seemed worth doing.

And in this way they went from place to place. As they had seen beauties
and wonders the day before, they saw wonders and beauties to-day, but
to-day their pleasure had a flavor new to them. For the first time in
years, since they had left their little seat at their own fireside, they
were not alone, and some one seemed to mean to look after them. John
Holt was an eminently practical person, and when they left the Palace of
the Flowers they began vaguely to realize that, stranger or not, he had
taken charge of them. It was evident that he was in the habit of taking
charge of people and things. He took charge of the satchel. It appeared
that he knew where it was safe to leave it.

“Can we get it at lunch time?” Robin asked, with some anxiety.

“You can get it when you want it,” said John Holt.

A little later he looked at Ben’s pale, small face scrutinizingly.

“Look here,” he said, “you’re tired.” And without any further question
he called up a rolling-chair.

“Get into that,” he said.

“Me?” said Ben, a little alarmed.

“Yes.”

And, almost a shade paler at the thought of such grandeur, Ben got in,
and fell back with a luxurious sigh.

And at midday, when they were beginning to feel ravenous, though no one
mentioned the subject, he asked Meg a blunt question.

“Where did you eat your lunch yesterday?” he asked.

Meg flushed a little, feeling that hospitality demanded that they should
share the remaining eggs with such a companion, and she was afraid there
would be very few to offer, when Ben was taken into consideration.

“We went to a quiet place on the Wooded Island,” she said, “and ate it
with the roses. We pretended they invited us. We had only hard-boiled
eggs and a sandwich each; but a kind woman gave us something of her
own.”

“We brought the eggs from home,” explained Rob. “We have some chickens
of our own, who laid them. We thought that would be cheaper than buying
things.”

“Oh!” said John Holt. “So you’ve been living on hard-boiled eggs. Got
any left?”

“A few,” Meg answered. “They’re in the satchel. We shall have to go and
get it.”

“Come along, then,” said John Holt. “Pretty hungry by this time, aren’t
you?”

“Yes,” said Meg, with heartfelt frankness, “we are!”

It was astonishing how much John Holt had found out about them during
this one morning. They did not know themselves how much their answers to
his occasional questions had told him. He had not known himself, when he
asked the questions, how much their straightforward, practical replies
would reveal. They had not sentimentalized over their friendless
loneliness, but he had found himself realizing what desolate, unnoticed,
and uncared-for things their lives were. They had not told him how they
had tired their young bodies with work too heavy for them, but he had
realized it. In his mind there had risen a picture of the Straw Parlor,
under the tent-like roof of the barn, with these two huddled together in
the cold, buried in the straw, while they talked over their desperate
plans. They had never thought of calling themselves strong and
determined, and clear of wit, but he knew how strong and firm of purpose
and endurance two creatures so young and unfriended, and so poor, must
have been to form a plan so bold, and carry it out in the face of the
obstacles of youth and inexperience, and empty pockets and hands. He had
laughed at the story of the Treasure saved in pennies, and hidden deep
in the straw; but as he had laughed he had thought, with a quick, soft
throb of his heart, that the woman he had loved and lost would have
laughed with him, with tears in the eyes which Meg’s reminded him of. He
somehow felt as if she might be wandering about with them in their City
Beautiful this morning, they were so entirely creatures she would have
been drawn to, and longed to make happier.

He liked their fancy of making their poor little feast within scent of
the roses. It was just such a fancy as She might have had herself. And
he wanted to see what they had to depend on. He knew it must be little,
and it touched him to know that, little as they had, they meant to share
it with their poorer friend.

They went for the satchel, and when they did so they began to calculate
as to what they could add to its contents. They were few things, and
poor ones.

He did not sit down, but stood by and watched them for a moment, when,
having reached their sequestered nook, they began to spread out their
banquet. It was composed of the remnant eggs, some bread, and a slice of
cheese. It looked painfully scant, and Meg had an anxious eye.

“Is that all?” asked John Holt, abruptly.

“Yes,” said Meg. “We shall have to make it do.”

“My Lord!” ejaculated John Holt, suddenly, in his blunt fashion. And he
turned round and walked away.

“Where’s he gone?” exclaimed Ben, timidly.

But they none of them could guess. Nice as he had been, he had a brusque
way, and, perhaps, he meant to leave them.

But by the time they had divided the eggs, and the bread and cheese, and
had fairly begun, he came marching back. He had a basket on his arm, and
two bottles stuck out of one coat pocket, while a parcel protruded from
the other. He came and threw himself down on the grass beside them, and
opened the basket. It was full of good things.

“I’m going to have lunch with you,” he said, “and I have a pretty big
appetite, so I’ve brought you something to eat. You can’t tramp about on
that sort of thing.”

The basket they had seen the day before had been a poor thing compared
to this. The contents of this would have been a feast for much more
fastidious creatures than three ravenous children. There were chickens
and sandwiches and fruit; the bottles held lemonade, and the package in
the coat pocket was a box of candy.

“We—never had such good things in our lives,” Meg gasped, amazed.

“Hadn’t you?” said John Holt, with a kind, and even a happy, grin.
“Well, pitch in.”




                                  XVII


What a feast it was—what a feast! They were so hungry, they were so
happy, they were so rejoiced! And John Holt watched them as if he had
never enjoyed himself so much before. He laughed, he made jokes, he
handed out good things, he poured out lemonade.

“Let’s drink to the Great Magician!” he said, filling the little glasses
he had brought; and he made them drink it standing, as a toast. In all
the grounds that day there was no such a party, it was so exhilarated
and amazed at itself. Little Ben looked and ate and laughed as if the
lemonade had gone to his head.

“Oh, my!” he said, “if mother could see me!”

“We’ll bring her to-morrow,” said John Holt.

“Are you—” faltered Meg, looking at him with wide eyes, “are you coming
again to-morrow?”

“Yes,” John Holt answered, “and you are coming with me; and we’ll come
every day until you’ve seen it all—if you three will pilot me around.”

“You must be very rich, John Holt,” said Meg. She had found out that it
was his whim to want her to call him so.

“I have plenty of money,” he said, “if that’s being rich. Oh, yes, I’ve
got money enough! I’ve more land than Aunt Matilda.”

And then it was that suddenly Robin remembered something.

“I believe,” he said, “that I’ve heard Aunt Matilda speak about you to
Jones. I seem to remember your name. You have the biggest farm in
Illinois, and you have houses and houses in town. Meg, don’t you
remember—when he got married, and everybody talked about how rich he
was?”

And Meg did remember. She looked at him softly, and thought she knew why
he had seemed gloomy, for she remembered that this rich and envied man’s
wife had had a little child and died suddenly. And she had even heard
once that it had almost driven him mad, because he had been fond of her.

“Are you—that one?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, “I’m the one who got married.” And the cloud fell on
his face again, and for a minute or so rested there. For he thought this
thing which had happened to him was cruel and hideous, and he had never
ceased to rebel against it bitterly.

Meg drew a little closer to him, but she said no more about what she
knew he was thinking of. She was a clever little thing, and knew this
was not the time.

And after they had eaten of the good things, until hunger seemed a thing
of the past, the afternoon began as a fairy story, indeed. Little by
little they began to realize that John Holt was their good and powerful
giant, for it seemed that he was not only ready to do everything for
them, but was rich enough.

“Have you been to the Midway Plaisance?” he asked them. He felt very
sure, however, that they had not, or that, if they had, with that scant
purse, they had not seen what they longed to see.

“No, we haven’t,” said Meg. “We thought we would save it until we had
seen so many other things that we should not mind so _very_ much only
seeing the outsides of places. We knew we should have to make up stories
all the time.”

“We won’t save it,” said John Holt. “We’ll go now. We will hobnob with
Bedouins and Japanese and Turks, and shake hands with Amazons and
Indians; we’ll ride on camels and go to the Chinese Theatre. Come
along.”

And to this Arabian Nights’ Entertainment he took them all. They felt as
if he were a prince. And oh, the exciting strangeness of it! To be in
such a place and amid such marvels, with a man who seemed to set no
limit to the resources of his purse. They never had been even near a
person who spent money as if it were made for spending, and the good
things of life were made to be bought by it. What John Holt spent was
only what other people with full purses spent in the Midway Plaisance,
but to Meg and Robin and Ben it seemed that he poured forth money in
torrents. They looked at him with timorous wonder and marvelling
gratitude. It seemed that he meant them to see everything and to do
everything. They rode on camels down a street in Cairo, they talked to
chiefs of the desert, they listened to strange music, they heard strange
tongues, and tasted strange confections. Robin and Ben went about like
creatures in a delightful dream. Every few minutes during the first hour
Robin would sidle close to Meg, and clutch her dress or her hand with a
gasp of rapture.

“Oh, Meg!” he would say, “and yesterday we were so poor! And now we are
seeing _everything_!”

And when John Holt heard him, he would laugh half to himself; a laugh
with a touch of pleasant exultation in it, and no gloom at all. He had
found something to distract him at last.

He liked to watch Meg’s face, as they went from one weirdly foreign
place to another. Her eyes were immense with delight, and her face had
the flush of an Indian peach. Once she stopped suddenly, in such a glow
of strange delight that her eyes were full of other brightness than the
shining of her pleasure.

“Fairy stories _do_ happen!” she said. “You have made one! It was a
fairy story yesterday—but _now_—oh! just think how like a fairy king you
are, and what you are giving to us! It will be enough to make stories of
forever!”

He laughed again. She found out in time that he often laughed that short
half-laugh when he was moved by something. He had had a rough sort of
life, successful as it had been, and it was not easy for him to express
all he felt.

“That’s all right,” he said, “that’s just as it should be. But you are
giving something to me, too—you three.”

And so they were, and it was not a little thing.

Their afternoon was a thing of which they could never have dreamed and
for which they could never have hoped. Before it was half over they
began to feel that not only John Holt was a prince, but that by some
magic metamorphosis they had become princes themselves. It seemed that
nothing in that City Beautiful was to be closed to them. It was John
Holt’s habit to do things in a thorough, business-like way, and he did
this thing in a manner which was a credit to his wit and good sense.

Ben, who had never been taken care of in his life, was taken about in a
chair, and looked after in a way that made him wonder if he were not
dreaming, and if he should not be wakened presently by the sound of his
father’s drunken voice.

Robin found himself more than once rubbing his forehead in a puzzled
fashion.

Meg felt rather as if she had become a princess. Somehow, she and John
Holt seemed to have known each other a long time. He seemed to like to
keep her near him, and always kept his eye on her, to see if she was
enjoying herself, and was comfortable, or tired. She found herself being
wheeled by Ben, when John Holt decided it was time for her to rest. He
walked by her and talked to her, answering all her questions. More than
once it flashed into her mind that it would be very awful when all this
joy was over, and they parted, as they would. But they were going to see
him to-morrow, he had said.

It seemed as if they marched from one climax of new experience to
another.

“You’re going to dine with me,” he announced. “You’ve had enough
hard-boiled eggs. And we’ll see the illuminations afterwards.”

He took them to what seemed to them a dining-place for creatures of
another world, it was so brilliant with light, so decorated, so
gorgeous. Servants moved to and fro, electric globes gleamed, palms and
flowers added to the splendor of color and brightness. John Holt gave
them an excellent dinner; they thought it was a banquet. Ben kept his
eyes on John Holt’s face at every mouthful—he felt as if he might vanish
away. He looked as if he had done this every day of his life. He called
the waiters as if he knew no awe of any human being, and the waiters
flew to obey him.

In the evening he took them to see the City Beautiful as it looked at
night. It was set, it seemed to them, with myriads of diamonds, all
alight. Endless chains of jewels seemed strung and wound about it. The
Palace of the Flowers held up a great crystal of light glowing against
the dark blue of the sky, towers and domes were crowned and diademed,
thousands of jewels hung among the masses of leaves, or reflected
themselves, sparkling, in the darkness of the lagoons, fountains of
molten jewels sprung up, and flamed and changed. The City Beautiful
stood out whiter and more spirit-like than ever, in the pure radiance of
these garlands of clearest flame.

When first they came out upon it Robin involuntarily pressed close to
Meg, and their twin hands clasped each other.

“Oh, Meg!” cried Robin.

“Oh, Robin!” breathed Meg, and she turned to John Holt and caught his
hand too.

“Oh, John Holt!” she said; “John Holt!”

Very primitive and brief exclamations of joy, but somehow human beings
have uttered them just as simply in all great moments through centuries.

John Holt knew just the degree of rapturous feeling they expressed, and
he held Meg’s hand close and with a warm grasp.

They saw the marvellous fairy spectacle from all points and from all
sides. Led by John Holt, they lost no view and no beauty. They feasted
full of all the delight of it; and at last he took them to a quiet
corner, where, through the trees, sparkled lights and dancing water, and
let them talk it out.

The day had been such an incredible one, with its succession of
excitements and almost unreal pleasures, that they had actually
forgotten that the night must come. They were young enough for that
indiscretion, and when they sat down and began to realize how tired they
were, they also began to realize a number of other things.

A little silence fell upon them. Ben’s head began to droop slightly upon
his shoulder, and John Holt’s quick eye saw it.

“Have you had a good day?” he asked.

“Rob,” said Meg, “when we sat in the Straw Parlor and talked about the
City Beautiful, and the people who would come to it—when we thought we
could never see it ourselves—did we ever dream that anybody—even if they
were kings and queens—could have such a day?”

“Never,” answered Robin; “never! We didn’t know such a day was in the
world.”

“That’s right,” said John Holt. “I’m glad it’s seemed as good as that.
Now, where did you think of spending the night?”

Meg and Rob looked at each other. Since Rob had suggested to her in the
morning a bold thought, they had had no time to discuss the matter, but
now each one remembered the bold idea. Rob got up and came close to John
Holt.

“This morning I thought of something,” he said, “and once again this
afternoon I thought of it. I don’t know whether we could do it, but you
could tell us. Do you think—this is such a big place and there are so
many corners we could creep into, and it’s such a fine night—do you
think we could wait until all the people are gone and then find a place
to sleep without going out of the grounds? It would save us buying the
tickets in the morning, and Ben could stay with us—I told his mother
that perhaps he might not come home—and he could have another day.”

John Holt laughed his short laugh.

“Were you thinking of doing that?” he said. “Well, you have plenty of
sand, anyway.”

“Do you think we could do it?” asked Meg. “Would they find us and drive
us out?”

John Holt laughed again.

“Great Cæsar!” he said, “no; I don’t think they’d find you two. Luck
would be with you. But I know a plan worth two of that. I’m going to
take you all three to my hotel.”

“A hotel?” said Meg.

Ben lifted his sleepy head from his shoulder.

“Yes,” said John Holt. “I can make them find corners for you, though
they’re pretty crowded. I’m not going to lose sight of you. This has
begun to be _my_ tea-party.”

Meg looked at him with large and solemn eyes.

“Well,” she said, “it’s a fairy story, and it’s getting fairyer and
fairyer every minute.”

She leaned forward, with her heart quite throbbing. Because it was he
who did this splendid thing—he to whom all things seemed possible—it
actually seemed a thing to be accepted as if a magician had done it.

“Oh, how good you are to us!” she said. “How good, and how good! And
what is the use of saying only ‘Thank you?’ I should not be surprised,”
with a touch of awe, “if you took us to a hotel built of _gold_.”

How heartily John Holt laughed then.

“Well, some of them ought to be, by the time this thing’s over,” he
said. “But the lights will soon be out; the people are going, and Ben’s
nearly dead. Let’s go and find a carriage.”




                                 XVIII


Yes, they went home in a carriage! John Holt put them into it, and
settled back into it himself, as if comfortable cushions were only what
belonged to tired people. And he took them to one of the hotels whose
brilliantly-lighted fronts they had trudged wearily by the night before.
And they had a good supper and warm baths and delicious beds, and Meg
went to sleep with actual tears of wonder and gratitude on her lashes,
and they all three slept the sleep of Eden and dreamed the dreams of
Paradise. And in the morning they had breakfast with John Holt, in the
hotel dining-room, and a breakfast as good as the princely dinner he had
given them; and after it they all went back with him to the City
Beautiful, and the fairy story began again. For near the entrance where
they went in they actually found Ben’s mother, in a state of wonder
beyond words; for, by the use of some magic messenger, that wonderful
John Holt had sent word to her that Ben was in safe hands, and that she
must come and join him, and the money to make this possible had been in
the letter.

Poor, tired, discouraged, down-trodden woman, how she lost her breath
when Ben threw himself upon her and poured forth his story! And what a
face she wore through all that followed! How Ben led her from triumph to
triumph, with the exultant air of one to whom the City Beautiful almost
belonged, and who, consequently, had it to bestow as a rich gift on
those who did not know it as he did. What wondering glances his mother
kept casting on his face, which had grown younger with each hour! She
had never seen him look like this before. And what glances she cast
aside at John Holt! This was one of the rich men poor people heard of.
She had never been near one of them. She had, often, rather hated them.

Before the day was over Robin and Meg realized that this wonder was to
go on as long as there was anything of the City Beautiful they had not
seen. They were to drink deep draughts of delight as long as they were
thirsty for more. John Holt made this plain to them in his blunt,
humorous way. He was going to show them everything and share all their
pleasures, and they were to stay at the golden hotel every night.

And John Holt was getting almost as much out of it as they were. He
wandered about alone no more; he did not feel as if he were only a
ghost, with nothing in common with the human beings passing by. In the
interest and excitement of generalship and management, and the amusement
of seeing this unspoiled freshness of his charges’ delight in all
things, the gloomy look faded out of his face, and he looked like a
different man. Once they came upon two men who seemed to know him, and
the first one who spoke to him glanced at the children in some surprise.

“Hallo, John!” he said, “set up a family?”

“Just what I’ve done,” answered John Holt. “Set up a family. A man’s no
right to be going around a place like this without one.”

“How do you get on with it?” asked the other. “Find it pay?”

“Pay!” said John Holt, with a big laugh. “Great Scott! I should say so!
It’s worth twice the price of admission!”

“Glad of it,” said his friend, giving him a curious look.

And as he went away Meg heard him say to his companion,

“It was time he found something that paid—John Holt. He was in a pretty
bad way—a _pretty_ bad way.”

As they became more and more intimate, and spoke more to each other, Meg
understood how bad a “way” he had been in. She was an observing,
old-fashioned child, and she saw many things a less sympathetic creature
might have passed by; and when John Holt discovered this—which he was
quite shrewd enough to do rather soon—he gradually began to say things
to her he would not have said to other people. She understood, somehow,
that, though the black look passed away from his face, and he laughed
and made them laugh, there was a thing that was never quite out of his
mind. She saw that pictures brought it back to him, that strains of
music did, that pretty mothers with children hurt him when they passed,
and that every now and then he would cast a broad glance over all the
whiteness and blueness and beauty and grace, and draw a long, quick
sigh—as if he were homesick for something.

“You know,” he said once, when he did this and looked round, and found
Meg’s eyes resting yearningly upon him, “you know She was coming with
me! We planned it all. Lord! how She liked to talk of it! She said it
would be an Enchanted City—just as you did, Meg. That was one of the
first things that made me stop to listen—when I heard you say that. An
Enchanted City!” he repeated, pondering. “Lord, Lord!”

“Well,” said Meg, with a little catch in her breath, “well, you know,
John Holt, she’s got to an Enchanted City that won’t vanish away, hasn’t
she?”

She did not say it with any sanctified little air. Out of their own
loneliness, and the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and her ardent fancies, the
place she and Robin had built to take refuge in was a very real thing.
It had many modern improvements upon the vagueness of harps and crowns.
There were good souls who might have been astounded and rather shocked
by it, but the children believed in it very implicitly, and found great
comfort in their confidence in its joyfulness. They thought of
themselves as walking about its streets exactly as rapturously as they
walked about this earthly City Beautiful. And because it was so real
there was a note in Meg’s voice which gave John Holt a sudden touch of
new feeling, as he looked back at her.

“Do you suppose she is?” he said. “You believe in that, don’t you—you
believe in it?”

Meg looked a little troubled for a moment.

“Why,” she said, “Rob and I talk to each other and invent things about
it, just as we talked about this. We just _have_ to, you see. Perhaps we
say things that would seem very funny to religious people—I don’t think
we’re religious but—but we do _like_ it.”

“Do you?” said John Holt. “Perhaps I should, too. You shall tell me some
stories about it, and you shall put Her there. If I could feel as if she
were somewhere!”

“Oh,” said Meg, “she must be somewhere, you know. She couldn’t _go out_,
John Holt.”

He cast his broad glance all around, and caught his breath, as if
remembering.

“Lord, Lord!” he said. “No! _She_ couldn’t go out!”

Meg knew afterwards why he said this with such force. “She” had been a
creature who was so full of life, and of the joy of living. She had been
gay, and full of laughter and humor. She had had a wonderful, vivid
mind, which found color and feeling and story in the commonest things.
She had been so clever and so witty, and such a bright and warm thing in
her house. When she had gone away from earth so suddenly, people had
said, with wonder, “But it seemed as if she _could_ not die!” But she
had died, and her child had died too, scarcely an hour after it was
born, and John Holt had been left stunned and aghast, and almost
stricken into gloomy madness. And in some way Meg was like her, with her
vivid little face and her black-lashed eyes, her City Beautiful and her
dreams and stories, which made the realities of her life. It was a
strange chance, a marvellously kind chance, which had thrown them
together; these two, who were of such different worlds, and yet, who
needed each other so much.

During the afternoon, seeing that Meg looked a little tired, and also
realizing, in his practical fashion, that Ben’s mother would be more at
ease in the society she was used to, John Holt sent her to ramble about
with her boy, and Robin went with them; and Meg and John went to rest
with the thousands of roses among the bowers of the fairy island, and
there they said a good deal to each other. John Holt seemed to get a
kind of comfort in finding words for some of the thoughts he had been
silent about in the past.

“It’s a queer thing,” he said, “but when I talk to you about her I feel
as if she were somewhere near.”

“Perhaps she is,” said Meg, in her matter-of-fact little way. “We don’t
know what they are doing. But if you had gone into another world, and
she had stayed here, you know you would have come to take care of her.”

“That’s true,” said John Holt. “I took care of her when she was here,
the Lord knows. There wasn’t anything on earth she liked that I wouldn’t
have broken my neck to get at. When I built that house for her—I built a
big house to take her to when we were married—she said I hadn’t left out
a thing she cared for. And she _knew_ what things ought to be. She
wasn’t like me, Meg. I’d spent my life trying to make a fortune. I began
when I was a boy, and I worked hard. She belonged to people with money,
and she’d read books and travelled and seen things. She knew it all. I
didn’t, when first I knew her, but I learned fast enough afterwards. I
couldn’t help it while I was with her. We planned the house together. It
was one of the best in the country—architecture, furniture, pictures,
and all the rest. The first evening we spent there——” He stopped and
cleared his throat, and was silent a few seconds. Then he added, in a
rather unsteady voice, “We were pretty happy people that evening.”

Later he showed Meg her miniature. He carried it in an oval case in his
inside pocket. It was the picture of a young woman with a brilliant
face, lovely laughing eyes, and a bright, curving red mouth.

“No,” he said, as he looked at it, “She _couldn’t_ go out. She’s
somewhere.”

Then he told Meg about the rooms they had made ready for “John Holt,
Junior,” as they had called the little child who died so quickly.

“It was her idea,” he said. “There was a nursery, with picture paper on
the walls. There was a bathroom, with tiles that told stories about
little mermen and mermaids, that she had made up herself. There was a
bedroom, with a swinging cot, frilled with lace and tied with ribbons.
And there were picture-books and toys. The doors never were opened. John
Holt, Junior, never slept in his cot. He slept with his mother.”

There he broke off a moment again.

“She used to be sorry he wouldn’t be old enough to appreciate all this,”
he said next. “She used to laugh about him, and say, he was going to be
cheated out of it. But she said he should come with us, so that he could
say he had been. She said he had to see it, if he only stared at it and
said ‘goo.’”

“Perhaps he does see it,” said Meg. “I should think those who have got
away from here, and know more what being alive really means, would want
to see what earth people are _trying_ to do—though they know so little.”

“That sounds pretty good,” said John Holt; “I like that.”

They had been seated long enough to feel rested, and they rose and went
on their way, to begin their pilgrimage again. Just as they were
crossing the bridge they saw Robin coming tearing towards them. He
evidently had left Ben and his mother somewhere. He was alone. His hat
was on the back of his head, and he was hot with running.

“Something has happened,” said Meg, “and I believe I know——”

But Robin had reached them.

“Meg,” he said, panting for breath, “Aunt Matilda’s here! She didn’t see
me, but I saw her. She’s in the Agricultural Building, standing before a
new steam plough, and she’s chewing a sample of wheat.”




                                  XIX


The two children did not know exactly whether they were frightened or
not. If it had not seemed impossible that anything should go entirely
wrong while John Holt was near them, they would have felt rather queer.
But John Holt was evidently not the least alarmed.

“Look here,” he said, “I’m glad of it. I want to see that woman.”

“Do you?” exclaimed Robin and Meg together.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Come along, and let’s go and find her.” And he
strode out towards the Agricultural Building as if he were going towards
something interesting.

It is true that the Agricultural Building had been too nearly connected
with Aunt Matilda’s world to hold the greatest attractions for the
little Pilgrims. It had, indeed, gone rather hard with them to find a
name for it with a beautiful sound.

“But it _is_ something,” Meg had said, “and it’s a great, huge thing,
whether we care for it or not. That it isn’t the thing we care for
doesn’t make it any less. We should be fools if we thought that, of
course. And you know we’re not fools, Rob.”

“No,” Rob had said, standing gazing at rakes and harrows with his brows
knit and his legs pretty wide apart. “And if there’s one thing that
shows human beings _can_ do what they set their minds to, it’s this
place. Why, they used to thresh wheat with flails—two pieces of wood
hooked together. They banged the wheat on the barn floor with things
like that! I’ll tell you what, as soon as a man gets any sense, he
begins to make machines. He bangs at things with his brain, instead of
with his arms and legs.”

And in the end they had called it the Palace of the Genius of the Earth,
and the Seasons, and the Sun. They walked manfully by John Holt through
the place, Robin leading the way, until they came to the particular
exhibit where he had caught sight of Aunt Matilda. Being a business-like
and thorough person, she was still there, though she had left the steam
plough and directed her attention to a side-delivery hay rake, which she
seemed to find very well worth study.

If the children and John Holt had not walked up and planted themselves
immediately in her path, she would not have seen them. It gave Meg a
little shudder to see how like her world she looked, with her hard,
strong-featured face, her straight skirt, and her square shoulders. They
waited until she moved, and then she looked up and saw them. She did not
start or look nervous in the least. She stared at them.

“Well,” she said. “So this was the place you came to.”

“Yes, Aunt Matilda,” said Robin. “We couldn’t let it go by us—and we
took our own money.”

“And we knew you wouldn’t be anxious about us,” said Meg, looking up at
her with a shade of curiosity.

Aunt Matilda gave a dry laugh.

“No,” she said, “I’ve no time to be anxious about children. I took care
of myself when I was your age; and I had a sort of notion you’d come
here. Who are you with?”

John Holt lifted his hat, but without too much ceremony. He knew Mrs.
Matilda Jennings’s principles were opposed to the ceremonious.

“I’m a sort of neighbor of yours, Mrs. Jennings,” he explained. “I have
some land near your farm, though I don’t live on the place. My name is
John Holt.”

Aunt Matilda glanced from him to Robin.

She knew all about John Holt, and was quite sufficiently business-like
to realize that it would be considered good luck to have him for a
friend.

“Well,” she said to them, “you’ve got into good hands.”

John Holt laughed.

“By this time we all three think we’ve got into good hands,” he said;
“and we’re going to see this thing through.”

“They haven’t money enough to see much of it,” said Mrs. Jennings.

“No,” said John Holt, “but I have, and it’s to be my treat.”

“Well,” said Aunt Matilda, “I suppose you can afford it. I couldn’t.
I’ve come here on business.”

“You’d better let us help you to combine a little pleasure with it,”
said John Holt. “This won’t happen twice in your life or mine.”

“There’s been a lot of money wasted in decorations,” said Mrs. Jennings.
“I don’t believe it will pay them.”

“Oh, yes; it will pay them,” said John Holt. “It would pay them if they
didn’t make a cent out of it. It would have paid _me_, if I’d done it,
and lost money.”

“Now, see here,” said Mrs. Matilda Jennings, with a shrewd air, “the
people that built this didn’t do it for their health—they did it for
what they’d make out of it.”

“Perhaps they did,” said John Holt, “and perhaps all of them didn’t. And
even those that did have made a bigger thing than they knew, by
Jupiter!”

They were all sauntering along together, as they spoke. Meg and Robin
wondered what John Holt was going to do. It looked rather as if he
wanted to see more of Aunt Matilda. And it proved that he did. He had a
reason of his own, and, combined with this, a certain keen sense of
humor made her entertaining to him. He wanted to see how the place
affected her, as he had wanted to look on at its effect on Meg and
Robin. But he knew that Aunt Matilda had come to accumulate new ideas on
agriculture, and that she must be first allowed to satisfy herself on
that point; and he knew the children were not specially happy in the
society of ploughs and threshing-machines, and he did not think Aunt
Matilda’s presence would add to their pleasure in the Palace of the
Earth, the Seasons, and the Sun. Besides, he wanted to talk to Mrs.
Jennings a little alone.

“You know where Ben and his mother are?” he said to Robin, after a few
minutes.

“Yes,” Robin answered.

“Then take Meg and go to them for a while. Mrs. Jennings wants to stay
here about an hour more, and I want to walk round with her. In an hour
come back to the entrance here and I will meet you.”

Meg and Robin went away as he told them. It was in one sense rather a
relief.

“I wonder what she’ll say to him,” said Meg.

“There’s no knowing,” Robin answered. “But whatever it is, he will make
it all right. He’s one of those who have found out human beings can do
things if they try hard enough. He was as lonely and poor as we are when
he was twelve. He told me so.”

What Aunt Matilda said was very matter-of-fact.

“I must say,” she said, as the children walked off, “you seem to have
been pretty good to them.”

“They’ve been pretty good to me,” said John Holt. “They’ve been pretty
good _for_ me, though they’re not old enough to know it.”

“They’re older than their age,” said Aunt Matilda. “If they’d been like
other children the Lord knows what I should have done with them. They’ve
been no trouble in particular.”

“I should imagine not,” said John Holt.

“It was pretty business-like of them,” said Mrs. Jennings, with another
dry laugh, “to make up their minds without saying a word to any one, and
just hustle around and make their money to come here. They both worked
pretty steady, I can tell you, and it wasn’t easy work, either. Most
young ones would have given in. But they were bound to get here.”

“They’ll be bound to get pretty much where they make up their minds to,
as life goes on,” remarked John Holt. “That’s their build.”

“Thank goodness, they’re not like their father,” Mrs. Jennings
commented. “Robert hadn’t any particular fault, but he never made
anything.”

“He and his wife seem to have made a home that was a pretty good start
for these children,” was what John Holt said.

“Well,” said Mrs. Jennings, “they’ve got to do the rest themselves. He
left them nothing.”

“No other relations but you?” John Holt asked.

“Not a soul. I shall keep them and let them work on the farm, I
suppose.”

“It would pay to educate them well and let them see the world,” said
John Holt.

“I dare say it would pay _them_,” replied Aunt Matilda, “but I’ve got
all I can do, and my husband’s family have a sort of claim on me. Half
the farm belonged to him.”

They spent their remaining hours in the Agricultural Building very
profitably. Mrs. Jennings found John Holt an excellent companion. He
knew things very thoroughly, and had far-seeing ideas of how far things
would work, and how much they would pay. He did not expect Mrs. Jennings
to tell him fairy stories, and he told her none, but before they left
the place they had talked a good deal. John Holt had found out all he
wanted to know about the two children, and he had made a proposition
which certainly gave Aunt Matilda something new to think of.

She was giving some thought to it when they went out to meet the party
of four at the entrance. She looked as if she had been rather surprised
by some occurrence, but she did not look displeased, and the glances she
gave to Meg and Robin expressed a new sense of appreciation of their
practical value.

“I’ve promised Mr. Holt that I’ll let him take me through the Midway
Plaisance,” she said. “I’ve seen the things I came to see, and I may as
well get my ticket’s worth.”

Meg and Robin regarded her with interest. Aunt Matilda and the Midway
Plaisance, taken together, would be such a startling contrast that they
must be interesting. And as she looked at John Holt’s face, as they went
on their way, Meg knew he was thinking the same thing. And it was a
strange experience. Mrs. Jennings strode through the curious places
rather as if she were following a plough down a furrow. She looked at
Samoan beauties, Arab chiefs, and Persian Jersey Lilies with unmovedly
scrutinizing eyes. She did not waste time anywhere, but she took all in
as if it were a matter of business. Camel drivers and donkey boys seemed
to strike her merely as samples of slow travelling; she ascended, as it
were into mid-heaven, on the Ferris Wheel, with a grim air of
determination. Being so lifted from earth and poised above in the clear
air, Meg had thrilled with a strange, exultant feeling of being a bird,
and it had seemed to her that, with a moment’s flutter of wings, she
could soar higher and higher, and lose herself in the pure sea of blue
above. Aunt Matilda looked down with cool interest.

“Pretty big power this,” she said to John Holt. “I guess it’s made one
man’s fortune.”

John Holt was a generous host. He took her from place to place—to
Lapland villages, Cannibal huts, and Moorish palaces. She tramped about,
and inspected them all with a sharp, unenthusiastic eye. She looked at
the men and women, and their strange costumes, plainly thinking them
rather mad.

“It’s a queer sight,” she said to John Holt; “but I don’t see what good
all this is going to do any one.”

“It saves travelling expenses,” answered John Holt, laughing. His
shrewd, humorous face was very full of expression all the time they were
walking about together. She had only come for the day, and she was going
back by a night train. When she left them, she gave them both one of
those newly appreciative looks.

“Well,” she said, “Mr. Holt’s going to look after you, he says. He’s got
something to tell you when I’m gone. We’ve talked it over, and it’s all
right. There’s one thing sure, you’re two of the luckiest young ones
_I_’ve heard of.” And she marched away briskly.

Meg and Robin looked at each other and at John Holt. What was he going
to tell them? But he told them nothing until they had all dined, and Ben
and his mother had gone home, prepared to come again the next day.

By that time the City Beautiful was wreathed with its enchanted jewels
of light again, and in the lagoon’s depths they trembled and blazed.
John Holt called a gondola with a brilliant gondolier, and they got into
it and shot out into the radiant night.

The sight was so unearthly in its beauty that for a few moments they
were quite still. Meg sat in her Straw Parlor attitude, with her elbows
on her knees, and her chin on her hands. Her eyes looked very big, and
as lustrous as the jewels in the lagoon.

“I’m going to ask you something,” said John Holt, in a quiet sort of
voice, at last.

“Yes,” said Meg, dreamily.

“Would you two like to belong to _me_?”

Meg’s hands dropped, and she turned her shining eyes.

“I’ve been talking to your Aunt Matilda about that big house of mine,”
he went on. “It’s empty. There’s too much room in it. I want to take you
two, and see if you can fill it up. Will you come?”

[Illustration: “IT’S A QUEER SIGHT,” SHE SAID TO JOHN HOLT.]

Meg and Robin turned their eyes upon each other in a dazed way.

“Will we come?” they stammered.

“Mrs. Jennings is willing,” said John Holt. “You two have things to do
in the world. I’ll help you to learn to do them. You,” with the short
laugh—“you shall tell me fairy stories.”

Fairy stories! What was this? Their hearts beat in their breasts like
little hammers. The gondola moved smoothly over the scintillating water,
and the jewel-strung towers and domes rose white against the lovely
night. Meg looked around her, and uttered a little cry.

“Oh, Rob!” she said. “Oh, dear John Holt. We have got _into_ the City
Beautiful, and you are going to let us live there always.”

And John Holt knew that the big house would seem empty no more.




                                   XX


It would have seemed that this was the climax of wonders and delights—to
know that they had escaped forever from Aunt Matilda’s world, that they
were not to be parted from John Holt, that they were to be like his
children, living with him, sharing his great house, and learning all
they could want to learn. All this, even when it was spoken of as
possible, seemed more than could be believed, but it seemed almost more
unbelievable day by day, as the truth began to realize itself in detail.
What a marvellous thing it was to find out that they were not lonely,
uncared-for creatures any more, but that they belonged to a man who
seemed to hold all power in his hands! When John Holt took them to the
big stores and bought them all they needed, new clothes and new trunks
and new comforts, and luxuries such as they had never thought of as
belonging to them, they felt almost aghast. He was so practical, and
seemed to know so well how to do everything, that each hour convinced
them more and more that everything was possible to him. And he seemed to
like so much to be with them. Day after day he took them to their City
Beautiful, and enjoyed with them every treasure in it. And they had so
much time before them, they could see it all at rapturous leisure and
ease. No more hungry hours, no more straining of tired bodies and
spurring of weary feet, because there was so much to see and so little
time to see it in, because there was so little money to be spent. There
was time to loiter through palaces and linger before pictures and
marvellous things. And John Holt could explain them all. No more limited
and vague imaginings. There was time to hear everything, and Meg could
tell fairy stories by the hour if she was in the mood. She told them in
tropical bowers; she told them as they floated on the lagoon; she read
them in strange, savage, or oriental faces.

“I shall have enough to last all my life, John Holt,” she would say. “I
see a new one every half-hour. If you like, I will tell them all to you
and Robin when you have nothing else to do.”

“It will be like the ‘Arabian Nights,’” said Robin. “Meg, do you
remember that old book we had where all the leaves we wanted most were
torn out, and we had to make the rest up ourselves?”

There was one story Meg found John Holt liked better than all the rest.
It was the one about the City Beautiful, into which she used to follow
Christian in the days when she and Robin lay in the Straw Parlor. It had
grown so real to her that she made it very real and near in the telling.
John Holt liked the way she had of filling it with people and things she
knew quite well. Meg was very simple about it all, but she told that
story well and often, when they were resting in some beautiful place
alone. John Holt would lead her back to it, and sit beside her,
listening, with a singular expression in his eyes. Ah, those were
wonderful days!

Ben and his mother shared them, though they were not always with John
Holt and Robin and Meg. John Holt made comfortable plans for them, and
let them wander about and look their fill.

“It’s a great thing for _him_, Mr. Holt,” said the poor woman once, with
a side glance at Ben. “Seems like he’s been born over again. The way he
talks, when we go home at night, is as if he’d never be tired again as
long as he lives. And a month ago I used to think he’d wear himself out,
fretting. Seemed like I could see him getting thinner and peakeder every
day. My, it’s a wonderful thing!”

And John Holt’s kindness did not end there, though it was some time
before Meg and Robin heard all he had done. One day, when they had left
the grounds earlier than usual, because they were tired, he spent the
evening in searching out Ben’s disreputable father, and giving him what
he called “a straight talk.”

“Look here,” he said, “I’m going to keep my eye on that boy of yours and
your wife. I intend to make the house decent, and see that the boy has a
chance to learn something, and take care they’re not too hard run. But
I’m going to keep my eye on you too—at least, I shall see that some one
else does—and if you make things uncomfortable you’ll be made pretty
uncomfortable yourself, that’s all. I’d advise you to try the new
recreation of going to work. It’ll be good for your health. Sort of
athletics.”

And he kept his word.

It was a marvel of a holiday. It is not possible that among all the
holiday-makers there were two others who were nearer the rapture of
Paradise than these two little Pilgrims.

When it was at an end they went home with John Holt. It was a wonderful
home-going. The house was a wonderful house. It was one of the
remarkable places that some self-made western men have built and
furnished, with the aid of unlimited fortunes and the unlimited shrewd
good sense which has taught most of those of them whose lives have been
spent in work and bold ventures that it is more practical to buy taste
and experience than to spend money without it. John Holt had also had
the aid and taste of a wonderful little woman, whose life had been
easier and whose world had been broader than his own. Together they had
built a beautiful and lovable home to live in. It contained things from
many countries, and its charm and luxury might well have been the result
of a far older civilization.

“Don’t you think, Robin,” said Meg, in a low voice, the first evening,
as they sat in a deep-cushioned window-seat in the library together,
“don’t you think you know what She was like?”

They had spoken together of her often, and somehow it was always in a
rather low voice, and they always called her “She.”

Robin looked up from the book he held on his knee. It was a beautiful
volume She had been fond of.

“I know why you say that,” he said. “You mean that somehow the house is
like her. Yes, I’m sure it is, just as Aunt Matilda’s house is like her.
People’s houses are always like them.”

“This one is full of her,” said Meg. “I should think John Holt would
feel as if she must be in it, and she might speak to him any moment. I
feel as if she might speak to me. And it isn’t only the pictures of her
everywhere, with her eyes laughing at you from the wall and the tables
and the mantels. It’s _herself_. Perhaps it is because she helped John
Holt to choose things, and was so happy here.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Robin; and he added, softly, “this was her book.”

They went once more to Aunt Matilda’s world. They did it because John
Holt wanted to see the Straw Parlor, and they wanted to show it to him
and bid it good-by.

Aunt Matilda treated them with curious consideration. It almost seemed
as if she had begun to regard them with respect. It seemed to her that
any business-like person would respect two penniless children who had
made themselves attractive to a man with the biggest farm in Illinois,
and other resources still larger. They went out to the barn in their old
way, when no one knew where they were going, and when no one was about
to see them place their ladder against the stack, and climb up to the
top. The roof seemed more like a dark tent than ever, and they saw the
old birds’ nests, which by this time were empty.

“Meg,” said Robin, “do you remember the day we lay in the straw and told
each other we had got work? And do you remember the afternoon I climbed
up with the old coffee-pot, to boil the eggs in?”

“And when we counted the Treasure?” said Meg.

“And when we talked about miracles?” said Robin.

“And when it made me think human beings could do anything if they tried
hard enough?” said Meg.

“And when you read the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’?” said John Holt.

“And the first afternoon when we listened to Jones and Jerry, and you
said there _was_ a City Beautiful?” said Meg.

“And there _was_,” said Robin, “and we’ve been there.”

“It was just this time in the afternoon,” said Meg, looking about her;
“the red light was dying away, for I could not see to read any more.”

And for a little while they sat in the Straw Parlor, while the red light
waned; and afterwards, when they spoke of it, they found they were all
thinking of the same thing, and it was of the last day they had spent at
the Enchanted City, when they had gone about together in a strange,
tender, half-sad mood, loitering through the white palaces, lingering
about the clear pools of green sea water, where strange creatures swam
lazily or darted to and fro, looking their last at pictures and stories
in marble, and listening to the tinkle of water plashing under great
tropical leaves and over strange mosses, strolling through temples and
past savage huts, and gazing in final questioning at mysterious,
barbarous faces; and at last passing through the stately archway and
being borne away on the waters of the great lake.

As they had been carried away farther and farther, and the white wonder
had begun to lose itself and fade into a white spirit of a strange and
lovely thing, Meg had felt the familiar throb at her heart and the
familiar lump in her throat. And she had broken into a piteous little
cry.

“Oh, John Holt,” she said, “it is going, it is going, and we shall never
see it again! For it will vanish away, it will vanish away!” And the
tears rushed down her cheeks, and she hid her face on his arm.

But though he had laughed his short laugh, John Holt had made her lift
up her head.

“No,” he said, “it won’t vanish away. It’s not one of the things that
vanish. Things don’t vanish away that a million or so of people have
seen as they’ve seen this. They stay where they’re not forgotten, and
time doesn’t change them. They’re put where they can be passed on, and
passed on again. And thoughts that grow out of them bring other ones.
And what things may grow out of it that never would have been, and where
the end is, the Lord only knows, for no human being can tell. It won’t
vanish away.”

Dear little children and big ones, this is a Fairy Story. And why not?
There are not many people who believe it, but fairy stories are
happening every day. There are beautiful things in the world; there are
many people with kind and generous hearts; there are those who do their
work well, giving what is theirs to give, and being glad in the giving;
there are birds in the skies, and flowers and leaves in the woods—and
Spring comes every year. These make the fairy stories. Every fairy story
has a moral, and this one has two. They are these:

The human creature is a strong thing—when it is a brave one.

Nature never made a human hand without putting into it _something_ to
give.




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