Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/58

 ten on by the donor, "For Edward, with the affection of Bruce Armitage."

All the children and grown-ups had watched while Edward unwrapped the Armitage present. And when, having dropped the white paper on the floor, he dropped the green paper after it and began to fumble with the pasteboard box, some of them began to laugh, and some to cry out with excitement.

It was Edward's mother who picked up the piece of green paper and smoothed it out and said:

"Oh, my little son—what riches!"

The piece of green paper was a ten-dollar bill. The knowledge excited Edward, but not so much as the discovery that the four blades of his knife were of Sheffield steel. He has three of them left—worn very slender with much sharpening. He does his nails with them to this day. But the real wonder was not in the knife or in the ten-dollar bill.

On this his eleventh birthday he had begged his mother for a knife, and she had said that he was too young to have one, that he was too young and unformed in character to be trusted with a sharp instrument of any kind.

Well, now here she was facing right about and saying that a knife was just what her little boy had always wanted, but it had taken Mr. Armitage,