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ND so one day a fairy came-for who but a fairy brings

Mascots and charms to little maids who are yearning to have fine things? Well, anyhow, a box was left out under the old fox-grape,.

And a note was tied to it hard and fast with a piece of yellowed tape. The note ran thus: "All charms work best when guarded and held by locks. Take heed, I pray, to what I say, and do not open this box,

But each day carry it round with you, some time 'twixt morn and night, All over the house and the garden too, and see if everything 's right,

And if anything needs attending to, of course you'll see it is done!

As the years go by, you will find, my dear, that your heart's desire is won;
You will prosper well, and will get, methinks, the house with the gabled roof,
And the porch where great round pillars are, and the garden set aloof,
With hedges trimmed to a proper line,-

Not a hollyhock or a columbine

Allowed to enter there!

And maybe a lion of stately mien,

Carved from marble and white and clean,
Guarding the entrance stair."

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HEN morning came, the little maid woke with feelings akin to awe,

But she took up the box and made her rounds, for the word of a fairy was law.
She searched with care and found some things she hardly was looking for:
In the very first room a mouse had built a nest in a bureau drawer!
Down cellar, the jar of strawberry jam was foaming over the top;
Up garret, a window had to be closed a driving shower to stop;

In the garden was trouble enough indeed, for bugs were eating the vines;
Of a prowling fox at the chickens' coop, she thought she detected signs.
That night she was tired, oh, very tired, and a little cross no doubt;
The ways of a fairy, she must confess, were past all finding out!

But still on her rounds she went next day, and the next, and the next day too,
Till into a well-formed habit, it seems, her daily engagement grew.
And I was told, as the years went by (as it sometimes does occur),
That, from doing the little things so well, the great things. came to her.
If ever she opened the wee brown box to see what the charm might be,
I do not know; and 't will long remain a baffling mystery.
But I am convinced that all went well-and have n't we ample proof?
For, the last I heard, the maiden dwelt in a house with a gabled roof.
Her hedges were trimmed to a proper line,-

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Not a hollyhock or a columbine

Ran reckless riot there!

And two splendid lions of stately mien,

Carved from marble and white and clean,
Guarded the entrance stair!

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THE FIND

By ORVILLE W. MOSHER, JR.

THE story I am about to tell is of Indians, a battle and hidden treasure. The battle and the Indians are real, and as for the treasure-that may be real, too, for all I know, and some of the things that I tell about did happen and others might have happened.

As long as there are boys in New Richmond, St. Croix County, Wisconsin, they will tell the story of the great Find to succeeding generations of boys, and they, in turn, will pass it on again to other generations as long as there are boys in New Richmond; and I reckon that will be a long time, judging from the large crop of boys there now. You see, things just like this don't happen every day in the week, and, when they do come, they simply stagger the imagination, and I am going to tell it to you all so that you can see for yourself. But first I must begin a long way back.

IN 1842 two families, working northward from Ohio in their canvas-covered wagons, halted their journey on the shore of what is now called Bass Lake, some eight miles south of New Richmond. They constructed log cabins on the prairie and proceeded to wrest a living from the wilderness. Of that little settlement of people by the lake, only one is now living, a white-haired old lady by the name of Greenborough. We boys used to gather on her back porch after she had supplied our internal cravings with a plentiful supply of ginger cookies, and then she would tell us about a battle that took place between the Chippewas and Sioux, right over there where her field of corn was waving in the breeze. She told how she, as a frightened little girl, peered between the logs of the cabin garret late one afternoon and saw a band of Chippewas, some seventy in number, sorely pressed, plunge their panting ponies into the lake from the opposite shore and swim them for a landing near her house. I remember she said some of the Indians hung by their horses' tails and let the horses pull them through the water. She told how, almost immediately following them, there appeared a band of some two hundred Sioux, on war ponies, pursuing them.

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like coyotes," as Grandma Greenborough expressed it. They carried with them the bodies of their own dead and a great mass of plunder taken from the Chippewas.

Why the Sioux did not stop to massacre the few whites crouched fearfully in the two homes set alone on the prairie, it is hard to say, but they did not; and that night, when the moon came out and lit up the wide, level plain, the men of the family loaded their wives and children into their wagons and hurried away to Fort Snelling, near Minneapolis, to be under the protection of the United States soldiers. There they stayed through the long, terrible, anxious weeks, during which each day brought news of the massacre of settlers and destruction of emigrant trains, until the Sioux were at last corralled on their reservation and it was safe to return.

Nearly seventy years had passed away since that time, and now we boys sat at the feet of the white-haired, kind old lady, looked out over the battle-field, and listened. Instead of prairie and woods dotting the landscape, there were well-kept farms. It seemed as though nothing could have happened there, so calm and peaceful it looked. How little did we think or know that soon the reality of that battle would be brought home to us! You can't always tell-a mighty quiet time may contain within it the seeds of genuine excitement, for Jimmy Warrick-or, to be more exact and to give him the name read out at the Sunday-school, James Montgomery Warrick, Jr. was there. He sat there and listened to Grandma Greenborough's stories and tucked away dozens of perfectly good cookies. was just the same sort of boy as any of the rest of us; but he had an imagination that his mother said was like a "house afire," and that imagination ran to Indians. He was fond of Indians. He collected "Injun" arrow-heads and chummed with every Indian or half-breed who stuck his nose into New Richmond. He was so good at shooting with the bow and arrows that his Indian friends had made him that he could kill squirrels and rabbits with them, and sometimes shot the glass insulators of the telegraph-poles when the railroad men were n't looking. I was a little younger than Warrick, but I was in his "gang," and he let me go with him once in a while to hunt arrowpoints or cornelians, so I know all about him

He

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If you want to see some real Indians, come out and visit your aunt and me during fair week. We are going to let them kill a few beeves in the oldfashioned way-riding bareback, one rawhide strand held in their teeth to guide the horse, and bow and arrows to kill the beeves with. I will have Red Horse meet you at the Lame Deer Station and drive you over to the agency.

Did Jimmy want to go! Did he? Well, would n't you?

So we all said good-by to him as he went away on the train, carrying his bow and arrows, and some colored handkerchiefs and gewgaws that he said he was going to trade. My, he looked happy!

We were most awfully lonesome after Jimmy had gone, because he was always stirring up something new, and all we did was just go swimming and wish he would hurry up and come back and tell us all about it. It was two whole months before he came back; and when he did, my, but he was loaded down with curios! He had a whole Indian suitbeaded vest, feathers, leggings, and all. We boys just looked up to him; and if he put on a few airs, we did n't mind, because anybody who had been chumming around with chiefs has a right to put on airs. He would talk about Charging Eagle, Wahitika, and Waupoose just as though he had known them for years. We boys stood around and listened with our mouths open. But most of all Jimmy talked about his friend Powless, the son of one of the Santee Sioux chiefs there, and Jimmy hinted at a visit and spoke mysteriously about something big that Powless knew. How we boys wished we could see him and tag along with him and Jimmy when they went exploring! But Jimmy said that it was something mighty important, and only they two should go together.

I was with Jimmy when he came-Powless, I mean. The boys of New Richmond know where Honey Hole and Fox Hole are, on Willow River, where we all used to go swimming. The river takes a wide bend down below Wearses, and flows smoothly on for about a mile, where it is a little broken by rocks and the bank on the right-hand side rises tall and steep. We boys liked to roll rocks down the sides and hear them splash. Beyond this, the forest thickens and boys don't go there so much, because it is marshy. Along the banks of the river are the lower fringes of the forest that, following these shores, sweeps northward to the great woods of Northern Wisconsin, with all their mysteries of lake and stream. As I was saying, the boys did n't go much beyond the high cliffs; for it was marshy and

the willows lay thick and close. But Jimmy and I went there, and we knew where a break in the cliff, the entrance covered with brush, led to a small cañon where the water had washed, and there we would set up targets and shoot and cook our dinner sometimes. Nobody but just us two knew the place. We never told anybody for fear the East Enders would jump it; and I guess you know that would mean war between the east and west ends of town, sure enough.

About a month after Jimmy got back from his trip to his uncle, Jimmy and I were in there and were getting a fire ready and stopping once in a while to shoot an arrow through a barrel-hoop that we would roll across the stone ground, when, from somewhere, a dropped at our feet.

"That did n't roll down the cliff, did it?" asked Jimmy.

"I dunno," said I; "it might have; nobody knows this place; it must have just got loose and rolled down."

We did n't say anything more about it, thinking it was nothing; but about five minutes later another stone landed where the first one had fallen, and Jimmy said, "I 'm going to see about this." And he slipped through the brush. A half-hour later he came back, saying he could n't find anybody, but he was sure some one was around, for stones had dropped near him and he had heard some one calling like a screech-owl behind him. He had n't more than said this when from behind a rock, not ten feet from us, stepped an Indian boy.

"Powless!" yelled Jimmy, as he sprang toward his friend.

"How, how," said Powless, making a sign across Jimmy's right arm. My, were n't my eyes just sticking out, though! for he was dressed all up in sure-enough Indian clotheshair tied with strips of fur and two feathers, and moccasins and fringed leggings and everything.

Jimmy and Powless talked together for a moment, making signs with their hands, and then Jimmy came to me and said: "Powless and me are going into the woods now; you go home and don't tell anybody. Promise, 'Cross your heart I hope to die.""

So I said, "Cross my heart I hope to die," and then I went home and did n't say a thing. I hated like the dickens to go home; but I knew if I tried to tag along, they 'd run away from me and Jimmy would n't let me go with him again-I guess you know what that would

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mean.

The first thing we knew anything big had

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