At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern. Reed Myrtle

we get some more? There are plenty.”

      “Let’s not take all our pleasure at once,” he suggested, with rare tact. “One mattress a day—how’ll that do?”

      “We’ll have it at night,” cried Dorothy, clapping her hands, “and when the mattresses are all gone, we’ll do the beds and bureaus and the haircloth furniture in the parlour. Oh, I do so love a bonfire!”

      Harlan’s heart grew strangely tender, for it had been this underlying childishness in her that he had loved the most. She was stirring the ashes now, with as much real pleasure as though she were five instead of twenty-five.

      As it happened, Harlan would have been saved a great deal of trouble if he had followed out her suggestion and burned all of the beds in the house except two or three, but the balance between foresight and retrospection has seldom been exact.

      “Beast of a smudge you’re making,” he commented, choking.

      “Get around to the other side, then. Why, Harlan, what’s that?”

      “What’s what?”

      She pointed to a small metal box in the midst of the ashes.

      “Poem on Spring, probably, put into the corner-stone by the builder of the mattress.”

      “Don’t be foolish,” she said, with assumed severity. “Get me a pail of water.”

      With two sticks they lifted it into the water and waited, impatiently enough, until they were sure it was cool. Then Dorothy, asserting her right of discovery, opened it with trembling fingers.

      “Why-ee!” she gasped.

      Upon a bed of wet cotton lay a large brooch, made wholly of clustered diamonds, and a coral necklace, somewhat injured by the fire.

      “Whose is it?” demanded Dorothy, when she recovered the faculty of speech.

      “I should say,” returned Harlan, after due deliberation, “that it belonged to you.”

      “After this,” she said, slowly, her eyes wide with wonder, “we’ll take everything apart before we burn it.”

      Harlan was turning the brooch over in his hand and roughly estimating its value at two thousand dollars. “Here’s something on the back,” he said. “ ‘R. from E., March 12, 1865.’ ”

      “Rebecca from Ebeneezer,” cried Dorothy. “Oh, Harlan, it’s ours! Don’t you remember the letter said: ‘my house and all its contents to my beloved nephew, James Harlan Carr’?”

      “I remember,” said Harlan. But his conscience was uneasy, none the less.