should prefer a baby pelican."

Our trip down the St. John's met with no obstacles except those
occasioned by the Paying Teller's return tickets. He had provided
himself and his group with all sorts of return tickets from the various
points he had expected to visit in Florida. These were good only on
particular steamboats, and could be used only to go from one particular
point to another. Fortunately he had lost several of them, but there
were enough left to give us a good deal of trouble. We did not wish to
break up the party, and consequently we embarked and disembarked
whenever the Paying Teller's group did so; and thus, in time, we all
reached that widespread and sandy city which serves for the gate of
Florida.

From here, the Paying Teller and his group, with complicated tickets,
the determinate scope and purpose of which no one man living could be
expected to understand, hurried wildly toward the far Northwest; while
we, in slower fashion, returned to Rudder Grange.

There, in a place of honor over the dining-room door, stands the baby
pelican, its little flippers wide outstretched.

"How often I think," Euphemia sometimes says, "of that moment of peril,
when the only actual bond of union between us was that little pelican!"




THE RUDDER GRANGERS IN ENGLAND.