10 Flistory of Gutta-Percha Willie,

merely for what she gave him, which would have
been greedy. But the fact was, he liked hér stories
better than her sugar-candy and liquorice ; while
above all things he delighted in. watching the
wonderful wheel go round and round:so fast that
he could not find out whether her foot was making
it spin, or it was making her foot dance up and
down in that curious way. After she had explained
it to him as well as she could, and he thought he
understood it, it seemed to him only the more
wonderful. and mysterious; and ever as it went
whirring round, it sung a song of its own, which
was also the song of the story, whatever it was,
that the old woman was telling him, as he sat
listening in her high soft chair, covered with long-
faded chintz, and cushioned like a nest. For Mrs
‘Wilson had had a better house to live in once, and
this chair, as well as the chest of drawers of dark
mahogany, with brass handles, that stood opposite
the window, was part of the furniture she saved
when she had to sell the rest; and well it was, she
used to say, for her old rheumatic bones that she
had saved the chair at least. In that chair, then,
the little boy would sit coiled up as nearly into a
ball as might be, like a young bird or a rabbit in its
nest, staring at the wheel, and listening with two
‘ears and one heart to its song and the old woman’s
tale both at once.

One sultry summer afternoon, his mother not
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