THE TREASURE MYRTLE FOUND

THE

HERE is not much amiss. Only tension and fatigue. Entire rest for four months," said the great doctor positively. "That is at present my only prescription for you, Miss Myrtle."

The young girl looked dismayed.

"Do you mean, Dr. Ellison," she exclaimed, "that I am not to use my eyes at all, not the least little bit, neither to read, nor to sew, nor to write a letter, nor even to play my scales? Why, what shall I find to do? I thought you would fit me with glasses, and that I should go on just the same as ever, always busy. I haven't the gift of being idle and happy. Doctor Ellison, I shall be wretched, and so will be everybody else around me.”

"Miss Myrtle," the doctor answered gravely, "I think I can enter into your feeling of surprise and distress. To a young woman four months seems like a large section of eternity. But we live just one day at a time, and the weeks will slip by before you know it. I advise you to go to the country, to some quiet place in the mountains, some little farmstead or other, where you can walk through fields and lanes, and sit down under trees, and gaze into depths of green leaves and over velvet carpets of green grass. Go to such a place as your father and I were raised in, away back in Vermont, and spend one summer of your life in silence and dreaming. The defect of the education of the period, Miss Myrtle, is that it is robbing our girls of repose, one of the finest and sweetest elements of character. You will have a splendid opportunity to acquire it, my dear."

Myrtle Bennett's dark eyes had filled with tears as she listened to the doctor, but she bravely brushed them away,

and even smiled faintly as she laid her shining gold piece on the table, and took his hand to say good-bye.

"I am not to be afraid of losing my sight permanently?" she asked, pausing in the doorway of the office.

"You are to be afraid of nothing, Miss Myrtle. As the old prophet said ages ago, you are to trust and not be afraid. I will stake my reputation against your recovery, my child, if you have the strength of will to obey my orders literally for the period I have named. Remember, too, that the case might have been far worse. You are not ordered to lie still in a darkened room; you may go about freely. You must only refrain from anything like use of those tired-out eyes. I wouldn't be sorry to hear that you had taken to the nursery hours of bedtime and rising, by the way. Keep up your courage, Myrtle; you come of a stiff stock which has never shown the white feather. And, one word more, you are not to put a veil on, not once, all summer."

Myrtle passed out into the clear sunshine and down the street, a disappointed girl. She had so many plans for the season before her; plans of study, of practice, of enjoyment. It seemed to her as if four idle months stretched on and on, an interminable desert waste; how should she adjust her life to such a period of inaction. As she went slowly up the white marble steps of her father's house, and turned the latch-key, there came over her as never before a sense of the inadequacy of money. There was plenty of that in her purse and in her home, but millions would not rest her eyes. The doctor would have given precisely the same prescription to Jennie Wells, at that moment stitching in her mother's sewing-room.

Myrtle paused on the way to her mother, to say goodmorning to Jennie, who was a favorite in the family. She noticed that Jennie was pale and haggard, but the wan face brightened as Myrtle spoke pleasantly.

"Jennie, do you know that Doctor Ellison is sending

me off to be hidden in the country all summer long, and he has forbidden my reading and my embroidery, and everything I shall have to look at; I'm to be a drone for four months."

"That doesn't sound so dreadful, Miss Myrtle," said the weary little seamstress. "Besides, you can afford it. If a doctor told me that, I couldn't mind him, yet I'm sometimes so tired I'd almost like to lie down and die.”

"You are a good deal too tired to sit at that machine another minute," was Myrtle's unexpected reply. "Shut it right up, and fold that work away until tomorrow. Now sit back in the rocking-chair and put your feet up and take Yes, you shall do as I say, Jennie, and I'll make it right with mamma. If I am to be forbidden to use my eyes in my own service, I must make it my business to do what I can with my mind's eyes, and they show me that you need a bit of Doctor Ellison's wisdom."

a nap.

Cheered already by this demonstration of kindness to another, Myrtle went on to her mother, who put down her book and looked wistfully at her daughter as she pushed aside the heavy silken portiere, and coming forward, knelt down and laid her head in Mrs. Bennett's lap. The mother had not been quite unprepared for the oculist's opinion, and she had dreaded its effect on her impetuous child.

It was natural that Myrtle should cry a little, as she began to talk to Mrs. Bennett, but she pulled herself together resolutely before many minutes passed, and told her mother what she had to expect.

"My dear," said Mrs. Bennett, as the doctor and Jennie had said already, "it might be worse. You have no suffering to endure-you are merely condemned to partial inactivity, which is a cross for one of your temperament, but really, my darling, it may be a blessing to you in the end." Myrtle laughed.

"That's what the doctor said, mamma. Well, where shall I go?"

"To Aunt Lanissa's at Woolscombe Hollow, of course." Mrs. Bennett considered a moment, "I wish I could spend the summer there with you, Myrtle, but your father must go abroad, and Milly and I must go, too. I wonder whether Doctor Ellison would not recommend travel for you. That would pass the time agreeably, and I could look after my girlie myself."

To people like the Bennetts, going abroad is one of the incidents of every-day experience; they cross the ocean as if it was an inland ferry, and Myrtle already knew Paris and London as she did New York. So she said very naturally:

"It would be more of a change, mother dear, and I fancy more nearly what my eyes need, to go to Vermont. Could I not take Jennie Wells along?"

"As your maid?"

"Not precisely. As my friend and companion. She could read to me, keep me mended up, and write my letters from dictation. Jennie has been with us all so much and is so refined and gentle that I would not mind her reading your letters and father's to me, when they came. I could pay her enough to let her leave home without loss to the people there, and such a summer would do her a world of good. Jennie looks very thin and peaked."

"Well, we'll think it over. It would be a boon to Jennie, and all the more so that she would be doing you a real service and paying her way. I think, on the whole, I would prefer to send Jennie to Aunt Lanissa's with you rather than a servant. The dear old lady is afraid of what she calls the upsetting ways of city servants."

In the sunny south chamber at Aunt Lanissa's old homestead Myrtle found herself before long, comfortably established for her rest-cure. Her room had six windows, whitecurtained and ribbon-looped; a cool, gray matting covered the floor, and the old-fashioned four-poster and the solid

mahogany furniture were not put out of countenance by the divan, with its dozen soft cushions, the pretty modern desk, and book-shelves, and the low willow rocker, which Mrs. Bennett had sent up from town for Myrtle's especial comfort. Although she might not read, there was no prohibition against her listening to reading, and Jennie Wells, who had been famishing for books her whole life, was more than happy to read aloud every day. The two girls wandered about in the woods, went to the meadow where the men were plowing or sowing as it might be, and grew strong and rosy in the fresh mountain air.

"There'll be nobody to play the organ in church this morning," said Aunt Lanissa, sorrowfully, one Sunday, as they sat at the breakfast table. "Eben Piper's ill, and our singing is poor enough even when he's there to play. "The minister'll be discouraged. We've got some city folks around town now, and it's too bad; they'll not want to come again. City folks, anyway, like to take a vacation when they come to the country, so far as church going's concerned. That wouldn't matter if our own girls and boys weren't so ready to follow their example."

"You haven't many young people in this community, anyway, Mrs. Birkett," said Jennie. "Folks seem to me. to be mostly gray-headed men and women and middle-aged ones who look as if they had settled down to a day's work, and children growing up. And there are a good many houses all locked and barred and deserted, and places with weeds rioting up to the front doors around this countryside. My! When I think of the crowds on our Avenue on hot summer nights, and the little tenement rooms swarming with children, three and five and seven sleeping in one little bit of a cell, and then see these empty houses, it puzzles me. Things seem misfits somehow."

"Our young people go to town," said Aunt Lanissa, "as soon as they are their own masters. And as for those shut-up houses, it's this way: The young people have all