IT happened in the Isle of Wight, far back in the days of the Crimean War, and it is a true story, for I have heard my mother tell it many times.

The Little Girl was only three years old; in fact she was celebrating her third birthday. Her mother was with her, and her brother, a beautiful five-year-old, in a holland blouse. The picture of the children, as they looked all those long years ago, hangs in the home of the writer's parents, so that it is easy for her to describe their appearance. They were slender children, with blue eyes, pink cheeks, and bright curls.

On that August day in the far past the Little Girl's curls were snooded with a blue ribbon and crowned with a wreath of blue speedwells and forget-me-nots, because it was her birthday, and because the young mother thought the flowers matched her eyes. She wore a blue frock and a pinafore of fine white lawn.

The birthday feast was spread on the top of a low haystack in the barn-yard of the farmhouse in which the children and their parents were spending the summer. There was a birthday cake and other goodies-"Isle o' Wight doughnuts," of course, and "Isle o' Wight junket." You have never tasted junket as these islanders make it. It is a glorified clabber, covered an inch deep with thick, yellow cream, and scattered with "Hundreds and Thousands." These wonderful little red and blue pellets, so tiny that you cannot count them, do not grow on this side of the ocean, but on the other side they were the sweet delight of the children of the long ago.

The snowy table-cloth was strewn with wild flowers, because the feast took place in the Island of Flowers. A blue awning protected the heads of the revelers from the old-fashioned August sun; and beyond the green of the rab

bit-warren and the rush-grown common they could see the rolling downs and the white cliffs and the blue and shining sea.

There was only one drawback to the children's enjoyment, and that was a flock of geese that jabbered and stretched their long necks at them. The children did not like geese. They had run away from them, hand in hand, too often-running for their lives, as they almost believed in those days. However, their mother was with them this time; and, after all, though the neck of a goose is terribly long, it cannot quite reach to the top of a stack.

Suddenly there appeared in the barn-yard a tall man with flowing black hair. He wore a black sombrero, and a blue cloak with a velvet collar. His eyes were certainly of the near-sighted kind, but they were dark and lustrous, and his clean-shaven, beautiful mouth was curved with one of the sweetest of smiles.

The mother of the children had never seen the poet before, although her husband had met him; but she knew Alfred Tennyson at once. A voice gruff but not unattractive accosted her thus:

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Pray who are you? And how did you get up there?"

"I am GB's wife, and these are our children. We climbed up here, and we are having a feast because it is our little girl's third birthday."

He laughed and said, "Hold up the child that I may see her.”

The proud young mother obeyed, and then he stretched out his arms and cried, "Drop her down! Don't be afraid! Mrs. Tennyson and the babies are in the carriage. She can't get out, so come down and see her."

So the Little Girl was dropped into the poet's arms, and he said:

"Little maid, how old are you to-day?"

"Thwee," quoth she.

"Then you and I have a birthday between us. I am forty-five to-day, and you are three. Perhaps when you are a woman and I am an old man you will remember that we had one birthday once."

Meantime the mother had slipped down the other side of the stack with "Wa-Wa," as the little boy was sometimes called.

At the yard gate was a carriage, and in it a lovely lady. She was fair-skinned and dressed all in white; her large dark eyes beamed kindly, as she received us with a welcoming smile. There were two boys with her, one a baby on his nurse's lap.

After a while the poet said, "Now, Emily, you have talked enough. Come, Hallam, take the Little Girl's hand, and walk together. We will go indoors and see if we cannot find her father."

father walked home to Farringford over the Beacon Down, one of the poet's favorite walks. In the forty years to come of intimacy between the two families he often read his poems aloud to his friends; and in the earlier days "Maud" especially, begging that they would never hear his "pet bantling abused without defending her." In later days he constantly alluded to the abuse the poem received on its first publication, since amply atoned for.

Once, when Lear, the artist and musician, known to many children as the author of the celebrated "Book of Nonsense," was at Farringford, he went to the piano and began improvising a musical setting to "Maud," singing most of the poem through. This delighted Mr. Tennyson, and he marched up and down the drawing-room, occasionally adding his voice to that of the singer, and exclaiming, Lear, you have revealed more of my 'Maud'

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Hallam Tennyson was a striking child, with long, fair curls and solemn brown eyesgrave, self-possessed boy, picturesquely attired in a velvet blouse with a wide lace collar.

This was the son of whom the poet wrote to Mr. Gladstone many years later: "I do not think any man ever had a better son than I have in him."

Some lady tried to improve on Lear's improvisation, and write out the music, but the formal setting fell short of the original, and the poet was never satisfied with it.

From

Then the poet went into the tiny sitting-room occupied by the children's parents. The table was littered with books, volumes of his own poems among them. He took up some of the military books, and "Maud," and talked about the war, and about the poem, which had just come out. Later he and the children's

III. HOW THE BLOOD CARRIES SUPPLIES.

WHY do you eat and drink? What an easy question this seems to answer. I suppose that almost every one of you will feel sure you can answer it, and will say, "Of course we eat and drink because we are hungry and thirsty." Yes, that is quite true, but I want to go a little further than that and tell you why it is that you feel hungry and thirsty, and help you to understand what your food does for your body. First, let us see why you feel hungry and thirsty. You do not always feel hungry and thirsty, do you? For some time after your breakfast you feel comfortable, and then, perhaps, you learn your lessons; or, if it is holiday time, you run about and play or take a long walk, and after some hours you begin to feel those curious and uncomfortable feelings which we call hunger and thirst, and you are very glad when you sit down to dinner. In all your running and walking you have been using your muscles, and in doing your lessons you have been using your brain, and other parts of your body have been used without your knowing anything about it; some things in your body have, in fact, been used up, and you have, without knowing it, lost something from your body, and so you need to take something into your body to mend it, as it were, and to make up for what you have lost.

Let me give you an example of how you are always using up the material of your body without knowing it. When you breathe upon a looking-glass, as you no doubt have often done, the glass does not remain as clear as before; it soon becomes cloudy, and if you touch it you find that it is wet. Why? Because there is moisture in your breath; and it is known that some water always is breathed out with the air. Then again, when you run, in hot weather, you perspire a great deal, that is, your skin.

gets wet with water which is squeezed out through tiny holes in the skin. Your face may even get so wet with perspiration that the water will roll down it in streams. Here, again, water is used up. This kind of loss is always going on; even when you are fast asleep, your gentle breathing carries out some moisture with it to the air around you.

So it is with food also; you need supplies to make up for what has been used up and lost; you need fresh air for the same reason, but of that we shall talk another time.

Your body is like a steam engine which, after working a long time and using up all its coal, has to take in a fresh supply. You will learn later, that the food and drink you take into your body are really a kind of fuel; without them the body could no more work than a locomotive could keep running without coal to replace what is burned in its fire.

We next have to see what becomes of the food and drink you take in, so that you may understand how it takes the place of what has been lost.

What do you do with the food you put into your mouth? You bite it, of course, and cut it up with your teeth into very small pieces, the moisture in the mouth helping you by mixing with it and making it soft. When it is bitten up, you swallow it, sending it down from your throat through a tube, called the gullet, into your stomach.

By a process called digestion, the stomach. and other internal organs prepare the food so that it may be taken up by the blood, and conveyed to whatever part of the body may need new supplies. For your feet and hands, which are far away from the interior, need feeding as much as any other part of your body; and the food material has to get to them.

There are some special things which your

body needs to feed it. Meat contains something that is needful, bread something else, milk and sugar contain other things; and you eat a number of kinds of food, so as to make the right mixture needed for keeping you well. Sometimes you do not take the right kinds of food, or you take too much of one kind, and then you may feel ill.

Now, remembering that the useful part of your food passes into your blood, let us find out how it is carried about to all parts of the body.

Well, the heart which lies in the chest, and is no bigger than your own fist, is powerful pumping-machine. It is like an elastic bag divided into four parts. All the blood in the two divisions of the one side is red, and all that in the other side is blue. You must think of the red blood as the good, pure sort, and of the blue as the used up portion. The muscles in the walls of your heart are very strong, and when they draw together—that is, contract, they drive the red blood with a great rush into a large blood-vessel, which soon divides into two, one going to the upper part of your body and one going to the lower part. These large vessels give off rather smaller branches to different parts of your body, and these smaller vessels at last break up into the very fine hair-like vessels which make up the fine network which supplies every part of your body with blood. Each of the tiny islands of flesh surrounded by blood-vessels takes through their thin walls all that it needs of the blood to feed it, and also empties into the vessels all the used material it no longer needs.

These fine hair-like veins soon join others and so form larger ones, and still larger ones, till all join in one great vessel, which, however, returns to the pumping-machine, running into that half of the heart which contains blue blood. In our next talk we shall see how the blue or used blood is cleaned and changed into red blood, and then returns to the other side of the heart.

blood round and round that is going on inside you without your perceiving anything of it! Is it not wonderful? You can feel something of it, if you like. Put the finger of one hand on the wrist of the other, just below the thumb; then you can feel the beating of a pulse — that is, you can feel a blood-vessel swelling up with the rush of blood that is sent out of the heart in great jerks every time the muscles squeeze it up so tight as to empty the side that contains the red blood. You can feel your heart beat — that is, you can feel its pointed end tap against the inner wall of your chest when those same muscles contract and draw it up out of its lower place. You can feel pulses in other parts of your body besides your wrist; as in the neck, for instance; and you may try to find out for yourselves how many times in a minute your pulse or your heart beats, if some one will start you counting when a minute begins on the clock, and tell you when it is over.

In each one of you, then, this rushing blood is carrying good food through the body, and every part of the body is drinking in this food through the thin walls of the vessels; and so every part is being fed. So the tired and used up parts are freshened and strengthened, and the food replaces what has been lost.

But besides carrying food to all parts of the body, your blood has, as we saw a little while ago, to carry something away from all the parts it visits. All the used-up stuff, which has no more goodness in it, and is not wanted any more, and which would only make you feel ill, if it were not carried away, oozes through the walls of the vessels into the blood, and is taken by it to special parts of your body which are like machines arranged for cleaning the blood, such as the lungs and the skin. You have already heard how the skin gets rid of water, which, as perspiration, carries other things we cannot see with it, and we shall see in our next talk how the lungs do their work.

So your blood takes away what is used from the body at the same time that it carries the supplies furnished by your food and drink.

But most of you boys and girls eat and drink far more than is needed to make up for what gets used up and lost in your bodies. You ought to eat more, and all healthy children do; for your