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TO ABNER TEEFTALLOW the effect of his new life was sheer legerdemain. Here he was lodged with the Sandages again, but instead of the bare poverty of the old poor farm, the young man found himself in a bungalow so garishly new that it still smelled of paint and plaster. A low piazza surrounded three sides of the building with heavy square-cut columns. the lawn, bare as Abner's palm, had been levelled, manured, and seeded, and cement strips were laid down for Beatrice's car to cross to a garage in the rear.

To Abner the most extraordinary feature of the building was the bathroom. Sandages had installed a private light and water system run by a little gasoline engine. It always amazed Abner to hear the engine burst into a feverish pumping on its own accord, and a few minutes later give a gasp and stop when the compression tank was full or the batteries charged. It was an oddly human sort of thing, a little entity which knew how to do perfectly just two things, but all else was excluded from its queer electric intelligence.

When Abner moved into his room Jim took him covertly to the bathroom and explained in a low tone the manipulation of the bowl, bath, and commode. He turned the water on and off with a naïve delight in seeing it work.

"All the modern improvements, Ab," he boasted in a whisper, "right here in the house, too. I don't come here much myse'f; seems to me like it's more for women an' the sick."

All these conveniences in the Sandage ménage did not originate with Jim or his wife, but came through Beatrice Belle under the inspiration of Adelaide Jones. Adelaide was just returned from a girls' seminary in Nashville and possessed a girl's memory for house furnishings. Mrs. Sandage