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Rh town!" thought the girl, as she hurried into the street. "Oh, dear, dear! whatever shall I do?"

For the cupboard at the Morse cottage was very bare indeed. Mrs. Mary Morse had some little standing as a contributor to the more popular magazines; but the returns from her penwork being her entire means of income, there were sometimes weary waitings for checks. Jess had been used to these unpleasant occasions ever since she was a very little girl. Her mother was of a nervous temperament and easily disturbed; and as Jess had grown she had tried to shield her mother, at these times of famine, from its most unpleasant features.

As witness her passage-at-arms with the grocer, Mr. Closewick. No money in the house, an empty pantry, their credit cut off at the store where they had always traded, and no credit established at any other grocer's shop! The situation looked desperate, indeed, to Jess Morse.

Jess shrank from trying the butcher's and the dairy store, too. At each shop an unpaid bill would stare her in the face and to-night she felt as though each proprietor would demand a "payment on account." It was a black night indeed. November was going out in its very mournfullest and dismallest manner.

And for Jess Morse there was an added bur-