IN WHICH MARGARET MACLEAN REVIEWS A MEMORY

As Margaret MacLean climbed the stairs to Ward C--she rarely took the
lift, it was too remindful of the time when she could not climb
stairs--her mind thought back a step for each step she mounted. When
she had reached the top of the first flight she was a child again, back
in one of the little white iron cribs in her own ward; and it was the
day when the first stringent consciousness came to her that she hated
Trustee Day.

The Old Senior Surgeon--the present one, of whom Saint Margaret's felt
inordinately proud, was house surgeon then--had come into Ward C for a
peep at her, and had called out, according to a firmly established
custom, "Hello, Thumbkin! What's the news?"

She had been "Thumbkin" to him ever since the night he had carried her
into the hospital, a tiny mite of a baby; and he had woven out of her
coming a marvelous story--fancy-fashioned. This he had told her at
least twice a week, from the time she was old enough to ask for it,
because it had popped into his head quite suddenly that this morsel of
humanity would some day insist on being accounted for.

The bare facts concerning her were rather shabby ones. She had been
unceremoniously dumped into his arms by a delegate from the Foundling
Asylum, who had found him the most convenient receptacle nearest the
door; and he had been offered the meager information that she belonged
to no one, was wrong somehow, and a hospital was the place for her.

One hardly likes to pass on shabby garments, much less shabby facts, to