What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine bargain basement hours of hairpins and darning-balls to the downy business of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's slippers before the fire of imagination.

At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew à la White Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and-week-out days of hair-pins and darning-balls, and then, at a heliotrope dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and the papered walls of a dun-colored evening.

" Of further plants related to his Satanic majesty is the clematis, termed "devil's thread," the toad-flax is his ribbon, the indigo his dye, while the scandix forms his darning-needles.

His Ina was darning.

"Those are his socks I've been darning for him," she said.

Then she staggered to Avery who was darning the family stockings by the window and flung ecstatic arms about her neck.

"Don't you hate darning?

He cast a daring glance across the room at Avery who was darning stockings under the lamp.

THE GUINEA-HEN The Darning-needle!

" "If it 'ad been a darning-needle now" began Mrs. Kybird.

Don't you remember the two handsome young men whom we saw five years ago in Douglas' store, and how they winked at each other when grandma ran down their goods and said there were not any darning needles fit to use this side of the water?"

Beginning ½ inch from the end, bore a row of small holes only large enough for a darning needle to pass through and half an inch apart.

These slender spears were a dozen feet of light, tough wood, two of them with single iron points two feet long, and a third fitted with ten fine-pointed darning-needles.

And then the fault is not mended neitherfor next time I shall only have twice the inclination to go: so that all this mending and mending, you see, is but darning an old ruffle, to make it worse than it was before.

Nyoda finally came to the rescue and diverted his attention by giving him her darning egg to chew.

Every evening found Mr. Whitelaw a punctual visitor in the snug panelled parlour, and at such times the bailiff insisted upon his daughter's presence; she was obliged to sit there night after night, stitching monotonously at some unknown calico garmentwhich might well from the state of mind of the worker have been her winding-sheet; or darning one of an inexhaustible basket of woollen stockings belonging to her father.

Yet she has only a beak for a shuttle or darning-needlewhichever you please to call it.

"Why," she replied, "I have never purchased a darning needle, to put the case strongly, without consulting Mr. S., and he does not think a new stove necessary."

I amused myself darning stockings and drawing plans for an addition to his house.

She died there the next June: but Holmes never, somehow, could realize a martyr in the cheery, freckled-faced woman whom he always remembered darning stockings in the quiet fire-light.

Buttons and hooks were lacking; a heap of darning lay untouched; Lena's veil, with which she attempted to hide the ruin of her hat, was crumpled into the semblance of a rain-soaked cobweb; and her shoes had gone long without the reassurance of a good blacking.

I sewed him up with a piece of deer-sinew and a darning-needle.

He spent every day ten hours in his closet, in reading his courses, dozing, clipping papers, or darning his stockings; which last he performed to admiration.

They fancied the Yankees would sit down on the fences and begin to whittle white-oak toothpicks, darning the rebels, through their noses, meanwhile.

Mrs. Somers was by the fire, darning fine napkins, winking over her task, maintaining in her aspect the determination to avert any danger of a midnight interview with Desmond.