It was Ronny-On, who had skulked forward with twopence, but Gavinia answered his knock, so he just said, "Ay, Gavinia, it's yoursel'.

Well, I'll be stepping," and would have retired had not Miss Ailie caught him.

Even then he said, "Three bawbees is to you to lay by, and one bawbee to Gavinia no to tell." To next Monday evening Miss Ailie now looked with apprehension, but Tommy lay awake that night until, to use a favorite crow of his, he "found a way." He borrowed the school-mistress's blue-and-red pencil and sought the houses of the sensitive poor with the following effect.

One sample will suffice; take him at the door of Meggy Robbie in the West Muir, which he flung open with the effrontery of a tax-collector.
"You're a three P," he said, with a wave of his pencil.
"I'm no sic thing!" cried the old lady.
"It winna do, woman," Tommy said sternly.

"Miss Ailie telled me you paid in your first penny on the chap of ten." He wetted the pencil on his tongue to show that it was vain to trifle with him, and Meggy bowed her head.
"It'll be through the town that I've joined," she moaned, but Tommy explained that he was there to save her.
"I'm willing to come to your house," he said, "and collect the money every week, and not a soul will I tell except the committee." "Kitty Elshioner would see you coming," said Meggy.
"No, no, I'll creep yont the hedge and climb the hen-house." "But it would be a' found out at any rate," she remembered, "when I go for the peats and things at Hogmanay." "It needna be," eagerly replied Tommy.