The Meeker Herald

Aladdin's Lamp
By Genevieve Ulmar

(© 1920, Western Newspaper Union.)

A bit of rare good fortune had come Ned Burton's way. His father's farm ran down to the river and at the little inlet one morning Ned came across an old house boat. It lay in shallow water, the hold had been staved in, but its cabin was intact, although the deck had been stripped of everything of value.

"It has been abandoned," Ned told his sister Arline, "and it's ours, isn't it? I have a famous idea. I'm going to get our crowd of boys to haul it clear ashore, prop it up, paint and repair it and we'll use it as a sort of river club house."

The young friends of Ned Burton entered with a vim and spirit into the project. Within a few days they had the old craft hauled free of the water line and set solidly on the sandy soil. It was a pretty spot, lined with trees and bushes, and for two weeks there was constant work on the interior of the cabin.

Arline assisted in this. She wielded a paintbrush quite as effectively as her brother and placed some old carpeting in the home garret to make a rug for the cabin floor. She coaxed some old pieces of broken furniture from her mother, looped some curtains at the windows and felt almost as much interested in this shore palace as Ned himself.

Arline came into the cabin one afternoon to find Ned seated at its table with the parts of a hanging lamp before him. It had been a gorgeous article in its primitive perfectness. It had a globe with dangling crystals, pulled up and down on a chain and pulleys, and promised to become the principal ornament of the now cozy and neat appearing cabin.

"Why, where did you get it, Ned?" she questioned in wonderment.

"Pushed way back in that cubby hole behind the closet," explained Ned. "The chain is broken and the globe has a piece out of it. It's a famous lamp and holds lots of oil. I'll bet it makes a great light," and he rubbed briskly at the tarnished metal. "Say, it reminds me of Aladdin's lamp. Maybe this is going to mend all our bad luck."

They had known bad luck, or called it that, in the past. Crops had been poor, an uninsured barn on the home place had burned down with some farming machinery it contained, and Ned had to stay away from school to help out. There were no parties or village festivities for charming Arline that year, but she cheerfully did her share of the work and hoped for better times.

The lamp was set in place, everything ready for a celebration of the event arranged, and Arline was alone in the cabin tidying it up for the expected guests who were to arrive in an hour. Ned had gone after them. Her work completed, Arline sat looking over a portfolio that Ned had found in the woods the day previous. He had come across it under a tree where some one had camped, for there was evidence of this fact in scattered food and the ashes of a fire. Ned had brought the article to Arline, explaining all this.

The portfolio was made of fine leather and was apparently costly, and there in gilt letters on its exterior the initials V. D. Inside were some 30 pencil sketches, and one of them was that of Arline standing at the well of the old home. She was pleased, yet mystified at this, and more so at several roughly penciled sketches in which the same face and figure were canvases.

"The portfolio belongs to some artist on his summering jaunt," decided Arline. "He must have been near the house when I did not see him, and made that hurried sketch of me. Why has he been using it as a model for more ambitious pictures? Certainly I have no such beauty and grace as these exacting artists require for their canvases."

Just at that moment, although she was unaware of it, some one was viewing her through the open cabin window, attributing to her indeed just those characteristics of perfection. She made a perfect picture for painter, poet or lover at that moment. The bright light fell across her fair golden hair, setting it all a glimmer with radiance, her unique environment served to brighten the effect of her daintiness and loveliness by contrast with her somewhat unusual surroundings. It was the eye of a painter that took all this in, that of Vane Darrell and he reveled in the fascinating element of the scene.

She was his girl of the well whom he had sketched from a covert near the house a week agone in his casual summering stroll. The impression of that moment was lasting with him, and now it was intensified with gladness as he recognized his sketch portfolio on the table before this charming young lady.

A meeting was inevitable, and after a few words of explanation Darrell was an invited guest for the occasion.

In the cabin of the renovated boat house he had met her. There he wooed and won her. There, too, on an occasion when the happy Arline first wore her engagement ring, Ned laid it all to his treasured "Aladdin's Lamp."