Up hobbled a very old and very tiny woman.

“McLeod, Jean,” she cried, “your gracious and noble qualities of mind and soul merit a happier New Year’s Day than this. Wang Hom Hing’s words cannot deceive old Sien Tau.”

Ah! The Scotch woman grasped gratefully the old Chinese woman’s hand. She could not speak for the tickle in her throat.

Then spake A Tae: “Teacher, forgive me,” besought she.

And the teacher smiled her answer.

A number of men and women came forward, looked into the teacher’s face, thanked her for past kindnesses, and expressed their confidence in her.

“McLeod, Jean,” declared an old man, “you are a hundred women good.”

Which was the highest compliment that Jean McLeod had ever received.

“You are wrong, mother!” said she, turning with a beaming face to old Sien Tau. “This is the happiest day I have known.”

Explained the father of the babe: “The gods, seeing my unworthiness, took from me to give to you.”

And Little Me, straggling to the teacher’s side, piped in the language she herself had taught him:

“I have one brother. I love him all over. You say baby boy best gift, so I give him to you when my father and mother not see. Little Me give better than Lee Chu and Hom Hing.”

It was some time before the tumult occasioned by Little Me’s boastful but sweet confession subsided. It had been heard by all, but was understood wholly by none save the teacher.

THAT WHEN NO WATCHFUL EYE was there to see, the baby had been carried in Little Me’s sturdy arms from under the home roof to the teacher’s tenement room, was made plain to everyone by the child himself. But it devolved upon Miss McLeod, in order to save her little scholar from obviously justifiable paternal wrath, to explain his reason for the kidnapping, and this she did so clearly and eloquently that the father, raising his first born to his knee, declared in English: “I proud of him. He Number One scholar,” while the mother fondly smiled.

Little Me looked at the baby in his mother’s lap, and then at the teacher. His eyes filled with tears.

“You not like what I give you well enough to keep him,” he sobbed.

“Yes, yes,” consoled Miss McLeod. “I like him so well that I put him away in my heart where I keep the baby of my story. Don’t you remember? That was what the Father of the story gave the baby for. To be kept in the people’s hearts after he had gone back to Him!”

“Ah, yes,” responded the child, his face brightening. “You keep my brother in your heart and I keep him in the house with me and my father and mother. That best of all!”