of ground, including a small front and a small back yard, upon which it stood, and she spent with some splendor a certain income of three hundred and eighty-two dollars a year.  Every picture, every chair, every mantelpiece in the Widow Brackett’s house was draped with a silk scarf.  The parlor lamp had a glass shade upon which, painted in oils, by hand, were crimson moss-roses and scarlet poppies.  A crushed plush spring rocker had goldenrod painted on back and seat, while two white-and-gold vases in precise positions on the mantel were filled with tight round bunches of immortelles, stained pink.  Upon the marble-topped, carved-by-machine-walnut-legged table in the bay-window were things to be taken up by a visitor and examined.  A white plate with a spreading of foreign postage-stamps, such as any boy collector has in quantities for exchange, was the first surprise:  you were supposed to discover that the stamps were not real, but painted on the plate, and exclaim about it.  A china basket contained most edible-looking fruit of the same material, and a huge album, not to be confounded with the family Bible upon which it rested, was filled with speaking likenesses of the Widow Brackett’s relatives.  The Bible beneath could have told when each was born, when many had died, and where many were buried.  But nobody was ever allowed to look into the Widow Brackett’s Bible for information mundane or spiritual, since the only result would have been showers of pressed ferns and flowers upon the carpet, which was not without well-pressed flowers and ferns of its own.

Very soon after the explosion of the wonderful lamp the Widow Brackett had taken Aladdin and Jack and the cat into her house and seen to it that they had a square meal.  Early on the second day she came to the conclusion that if it could in any way be made worth her while, she would like to keep them until they grew up.  And when the ground upon which Aladdin’s father’s house had stood was sold at auction for three hundred and eight dollars, she let it be known that if she could get that she would board the two little waifs until Aladdin was old enough to work.  The court appointed two guardians.  The guardians consulted for a few minutes over something brown in a glass, and promptly turned over the three hundred and eight dollars to the Widow Brackett; and the Widow Brackett almost as promptly made a few alterations in the up-stairs of her house the better to accommodate the orphans, tied a dirty white ribbon about the yellow cat’s neck, and bought a derelict piano upon which her heart had been set for many months.  She was no musician, but she loved a tightly closed piano with a scarf draped over the top, and thought that no parlor should be without one.  Up to middle C, as Aladdin in time found out, the piano in question was not without musical pretensions, but above that any chord sounded like a nest of tin plates dropped on a wooden floor, and the intervals were those of no known scale nor fragment thereof.  But in time he learned to draw pleasant things from the old piano and to accompany his shrill voice in song.  As a matter of fact, he had no voice and never would have, but almost from the first he knew how to sing.  It so happened that he was drawn to the piano by a singular thing:  a note from his beloved.