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But here they were fallen upon by scores of wrappers, stalwart young men, working against time, as everyone works in a packing house, who grabbed them up, swaddled them in tissue paper, and packed them in a crate. This packing was done with such geometrical accuracy that the fruit could and did travel a thousand miles without shifting the thousandth of an inch, and done with such twinkling rapidity that the whole crate was filled in the actual time that it would take a tyro to swaddle a single orange. This Mr. Hopkins proved by his watch which he held open in his hand, inciting the stalwart young men to smiling but grim rivalry.

After being bulgingly filled, the open crates were shoved to other stalwart youths who nailed lids to them, banded them twice with heavy wire, and pushed them aside completely finished before you yourself could have picked up a hammer and a nail.

Evidently the first requirement about the packing house was speed, and the second requirement was more speed. No hammerer was allowed to waste time in picking up a handful of nails. Such a careless practice would of course result in nails being picked up with heads to points and vice versa, necessitating an awful squandering of moments while the workman turned them right side up. So he was furnished with a "stripper," which is a machine in the shape of a huge gridiron, upon whose bars the nails are poured and between which they dangle pathetically, caught by the heads. The hammerer had nothing to do but to snatch them out and drive them in.

Away up near the roof was another partial platform where one man made boxes so quickly that he could keep three men busy filling them. To Laurie he

seemed to make these boxes by baking them in an oven. Into the oven he slid five slabs of wood, then he pressed a lever with his foot, and the finished box hopped out from a rear door, some fifty odd nails having been driven into it by the one pressure.

Below, on the main floor, crates on trucks journeyed, apparently of themselves, into waiting refrigerator cars.

"It's magic. I never saw quicker work in my life," Laurie gasped in weak epitome of the wonderful whole. "And your little girl friend in the middle earns more than the other two put together," commented Mr. Hopkins, his eyes happening to be upon the sorters.

"Little girl friend in the middle'?" she asked, looking around for an explanation of this rebus. Chancing to glance at the raised platform where the three young girls were madly working she found it. "Why, Osceola Carter!" she cried yearningly. She had not realized how terribly she had missed the discontented, pretty little cracker, until thus suddenly seeing her.

Hearing the voice even through the grunt of the blast furnace, the purr of the belt, and the swish of tissue paper, Osceola peeped down from her conspicuous eminence, then she reddened and smiled constrainedly. Next she was forced to reach out hurriedly to sidetrack a spotted tramp-orange that hoped it had hopped gayly by as an A.

Plainly this was no time for a resumption of either friendship or hostility, and Laurie was obliged to go home without being able to discover exactly how matters now stood between them. She only saw that Osceola was trimmer and pinker than ever, and was working like a Trojan in a place where editions of Gray's "Elegy" and "Locksley Hall" would be welcomed merely as food for the blast furnace.

O

CHAPTER XIV

N the morrow, true to his faithful black promise, Balaam's master brought Christianity on a towline behind him.

Christianity was a beast with so many welts on him that he looked like a raised map. He was hitched to a finely rattling farm wagon, the hitching being mostly

rope.

"Contribution plate must have been empty for months," advanced Laurie, who, hatted and gloved for her adventurous ride, was down at her gate to meet the outfit.

"Dat's so," said the mailman, shaking his head in sorry retrospect. "De pahson preached a summon las' fall entitle 'De angels callin' de buzzards to supper.'"

"I'd like to have heard it."

"Not if yo'd been one o' de buzzards. Pahson he describe de buzzards so perfect dat all de angels in de congregation reckonized 'em, an' dere's been trouble ever since. For buzzards mostly has de money."

"Now about the turpentine camp-can you direct me?"

"Yo' want Mr. Tandy's or turrer gel'man?" "Turrer gel'man," she chose promptly.

"Well, lady, yo' drive back a 'siderable piece o' road 'twill yo' come to de sulphur spring, den yo' turns off to de lef'-hand side an' keeps on a-goin'."

"But how do I know when I come to the sulphur spring?" she asked, clambering into the wagon.

"Yo' knows it by de mighty specifyin' combinement o' color an' smell," he answered. "De color's yellow an' locates itse'f at de hole whar de watter comes out, an' de smell 'pears to be all colors an' don' locate to no one spot but perambulates around wide."

"Doesn't sound as if I could miss it," she said, turning Christianity with difficulty. Having come so far with Balaam, he hated to say good-by to that motheaten guide.

After being turned, however, he realized that he was headed back home and he hit out beautifully. His gait was a peculiar one and appeared to be the result of a single-minded desire to cast all four legs from him and be done with them. But it covered the ground very acceptably, at least to the sulphur spring.

Wrinkling her nose to shut out some of the smell of all colors, Laurie drove to the left as directed, in peaceful ignorance of the fact that the mail carrier had described the turn from a coming point of view instead of a going, and that she was on the wrong road, traveling farther and farther from the "turrer gelman" with every revolution of the iron-banded wheels.

Nor did Christianity revolve those wheels as heretofore. When he made the discovery that his stall was not to be his immediate haven, he lost heart and speed, and commenced to walk with the melancholy, high-stepping, disjointed slow dignity of a camel.

She let him. The day was a lovely one, and an outing in a cart is not the despicable affair it may sound to the wealthy. An automobile obliterates scenery by hopping right over it. A person who rides in a buggy might as well travel in a coffin for all the view that's

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obtainable. But one who rides on a wagon seat sees all-the far sky, the near earth, and the beautiful lands of fancy that lie between.

And to be able to look down upon the back of such a thin horse as Christianity was instructive as a whole course in anatomy. After every deep stretch of sand Christianity would rest himself by smelling his knees for five minutes. In any other horse but a parson's horse it would have been called balking.

To the present driver these rests were as pleasant as was the journeying, for they gave her many a glimpse of wood life that she otherwise would have missed. During one of them she witnessed a fight between two of Mrs. Carter's "gophers." These mandolin-shaped warriors stood up on their hind legs, drew in their heads, and ferociously clashed their shells together. The tortoises manufactured a terrifying amount of noise, but no more damage was done than if two kitchen frying pans had bumped, and at the conclusion of the combat neither party seemed to miss it: they both crawled on their way apparently arm in arm.

During another knee-smelling period Laurie first heard and then saw a full-grown alligator. He was taking one of his floundering land-trips from lake to lake, and was a great deal more disturbed by her than she by him. Wheeling with the agility of a lizard, he went back the way he had come, and tumbled into the first swamp that would hide him.

His appearance, though brief, was of benefit, for it started Christianity off on a much-needed spurt. Even without these entertaining wild beasts the woods would have been lively enough. Once a mother skunk with a charming family of kittens crossed the path, a skulking weasel ran in and out of a fallen log, and the birds

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