"Come, let's see!" and Winch impatiently made a snatch to get at it.
Atwater coolly took him by the arm, and pulled him back. Then Frank, carefully as a young mother uncovered the face of her sleeping baby, removed the tinsel paper, which now alone intervened between the object and his hand, and revealed to the astonished eyes of his comrades a tiny, beautiful, smiling-faced silver watch.
"O, isn't it a beauty?" said Frank, almost beside himself with delight; for a watch was a thing of which he had greatly felt the need in beating his calls, and wished for in vain. "Who could have sent it? Don't you know, boys, any of you?" he asked, the mystery that came with the gift filling him with strange, perplexed gladness.
"All I know is," said Tucket, "I'd be willing to have six candles, all lit, knocked down my throat, and eat taller for a fortnight, ef such a kind of a football, infernal machine,—watch you call it,—would only come to me."
"Frank'll feel bigger 'n ever now, with a watch in his pocket," said the envious Jack Winch, with a bitter grin.
All had some remark to make except Atwater, who stood with his arms drawn up under his cape, and smiled down upon Frank well pleased.
Frank in the mean time was busily engaged in trying to discover, among all the papers, some scrap of writing by which the unknown donor might be traced. But writing there was none. And the mystery remained unsolved.
FRANK'S PROGRESS.
So passed Thanksgiving in camp.