Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/282

272 the stockings might happen to hit him," said Sarah. reaching out her hand for the paper, and looking at it curiously. "Is n't it odd? Who knows, now, but the man she meant that for may be in this very hospital!"

"I guess not," said Netty. "There is n't a single Massachusetts man here. They 're mostly from New York, and Maine, and Connecticut, so far as I have found out. I suppose I'd better put it back," she said, folding the paper up, and holding the stocking open. "Yes, indeed," said Sarah. "Put it back, by all means. Who knows what 'll come of it. It 's something like a letter in a bottle at sea!"

"What!" exclaimed Netty, in unutterable amazement; "like a bottle at sea! What 's the matter with you? What do you mean?"

Sarah colored: hidden very deep in her heart she had a vein of romance which did not show on the surface of her shrewd, active nature, and which never took form in words.

"Why, I mean," she replied, "that it is trusting a thing to just as blind chance to stick it in a stocking and send it to the Sanitary Commission to be allotted to any hospital between Maine and Mississippi, as it is to cork it in a bottle and toss it out in the Atlantic Ocean. Of course that girl put that name in that stocking to reach somebody, and I just hope it will reach him. I don't suppose it ever will, though, and yet, I imagine stranger things have happened."