A most impressive occurrence has transpired, as Mrs. Paton would say. Just as I was coming out of Mrs. Yet's house this afternoon who should be passing but Professor Ballington!

I had not yet dropped my black chiffon veil, and glancing down from his great height of six feet, he looked me full in the face.

At the same instant he saw the word, "Diphtheria," in the great black letters on a scarlet ground, and stopping he exclaimed:

"Why, Miss Pearl! This is a surprise! Do you know where you are—what risk you are running? Diphtheria is contagious—very!"

"I know," I replied, "but some one has to mind a little Chinese baby in there. Its father is in the hospital, and its mother is shut in a room upstairs with diphtheria, and there is no one to stay all afternoon with the baby if I do not. He's a Chinese baby, and of no account in America," I added. (I came within one of telling him that I was the only one who could call him pet names in the language he could understand; wouldn't Aunt Gwendolin have taken a fit?) "I just had to come," I pleaded, seeing his look of disapproval. "Each man and woman is born with an aptitude to do something impossible to any other, an aptitude that the world has no match for, Mrs. Paton says; and I have just found out that my aptitude, impossible to any other, is to mind this Chinese baby; no one else can match me in this!"

He looked less severe, almost kind, and half as if he could scarcely keep from laughing. Then he said, "Have you disinfectants? They are very necessary."

I shook my head, and he said:
 
"Come with me to a drug store and I will supply you with a stock."

And I, decked in my grandmother's cast-off clothes, walked along the street, and into the "Palace Drug Store" with the elegantly dressed and caned professor.

He didn't seem the least ashamed of me; indeed, he was so polite that I forgot for the moment that my dress was anything odd—forgot it until I saw a young man clerk looking at me in an amused way; then I dropped my thick veil.

The professor insisted on my taking a certain kind of lozenge to hold in my mouth while I was in the infected house, and ordered quantities and quantities of disinfectants carried there, giving me instruction as to how they should be used.

When we were walking back to the house of Mrs. Yet, the professor remarked that the Chinese were a people worth studying.

"Have you heard any of their poetry, Miss Pearl?" he questioned. And before I had time to reply—perhaps he thought he had no right to make me give an answer to that question, he is a "great philologist"—he continued: "Could anything be more exquisite than those lines to a plum blossom?
"'One flower hath in itself the charms of two;
Draw nearer! and she breaks to wonders new;
And you would call her beauty of the rose—
She, too, is folded in a fleece of snow............