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148 "My fifteen dollars took root and sprouted. That's all," she said. "I just told the boys one day when I got down close to the bottom of my first barrel of flour, that I was sorry I wa'n't an heiress in disguise, but I wa'n't, and so next Wednesday I'd be obliged to serve 'em cottage cheese and apples ('twas in the fall), 'stead of cottage cheese and doughnuts. And after the apples from our orchard were all et up, it would have to be cottage cheese and snow-balls, far as I could see. One of 'em at that, took out a little tin box he carried in his pocket to keep tobacco in, and cut a slot in the top of it and hollered out to the others that he was goin' to stick it up on the mantel. That's all there was said about it, as far as I know. It's all there's ever been said. The box is always up there, and if anybody wants to drop anythin' in it, they do; and if they don't then they don't. I've got an overflow box upstairs full of those boys' pennies and nickels and dimes."

"Good for you, Isabel!" I said. "Must be quite a payin' enterprise." And I wondered just a little mite why she had offered me her mother's cameos, 'stead of money which is usually a little more useful to me.

"Payin'!" she repeated scornful. "That money ain't mine! Every cent belongs to those