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“Is it, honey?” inquired the old man, easily. “Oh, I guess I wouldn’t worry about ’em. Remember that we don’t ever butcher ’em, nor even brand ’em.”

“That’s part of the sadness,” Hilda maintained, shaking her head. “It’s just like I used to want to cry when I saw the little dwarfed people in the shows, that aren’t children, and never will be grown up.”

Into the long talks which the two held together of an evening, Hilda often introduced that hero who never had any other name than The-Boy-On-The-Train.

“He knew most everything, Uncle Hank,” she once declared.

“I reckon so, honey,” assented Pearsall; but he seemed to Hilda not sufficiently impressed. She sought in her recollection for definite marvels to attribute to this favorite, and came hard up against that trying fact we all meet, that you cannot communicate to another the fascination you have experienced. It is something to be felt, not put into words. Pressed thus, Hilda stated one day to Uncle Hank that her hero could understand the language of birds. He accepted it with much too great facility, reconciled thereto by the fact that a person in Hilda’s book of fairy tales, which she had shown him earlier in the evening, could do the same. But the statement kept its author awake the greater part of the night, and a penitent, small Hilda climbed up into his arms as soon as he sat down after supper next evening and explained: