Over in the house opposite the Ripwinkley's, at the second story
windows, sat two busy young persons. Hazel, sitting at her window,
in "mother's room," where each had a corner, could see across; and
had got into the way of innocent watching. Up in Homesworth, she had
used to watch the robins in the elm-trees; here, there was human
life, in little human nests, all about her.

"It's the same thing, mother," she would say, "isn't it, now? Don't
you remember in that book of the 'New England Housekeeper,' that you
used to have, what the woman said about the human nature of the
beans? It's in beans, and birds, and bird's nests; and folks, and
folks' nests. It don't make much difference. It's just snugness, and
getting along. And it's so nice to see!"

Hazel put her elbows up on the window-sill, and looked straight over
into that opposite room, undisguisedly.

The young man, in one window, said to his sister in the other, at
the same moment,--

"Our company's come! There's that bright little girl again!"

And the sister said, "Well, it's pretty much all the company we can
take in! She brings her own seat and her own window; and she doesn't
interrupt. It's just the kind for us, Kentie!"

"She's writing,--copying something,--music, it looks like; see it
there, set up against the shutter. She always goes out with a music
roll in her hand. I wonder whether she gives or takes?" said Diana,
stopping on her way to her own seat to look out over Hazel's
shoulder.

"Both, I guess," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "Most people do. Why don't
you put your flowers in the window, Hazel?"

"Why, so I will!"

They were a great bunch of snowy white and deep crimson asters, with
green ivy leaves, in a tall gray glass vase. Rachel Froke had just
brought them in from Miss Craydocke's garden.

"They're looking, mother! Only I do think it's half too bad! That
girl seems as if she would almost reach across after them. Perhaps
they came from the country, and haven't had any flowers."

"Thee might take them over some," said Mrs. Froke, simply.

"O, I shouldn't dare! There are other people in the house, and I
don't know their names, or anything. I wish I could, though."

"I can," said Rachel Froke. "Thee'll grow tall enough to step over
pebbles one of these days. Never mind; I'll fetch thee more
to-morrow; and thee'll let the vase go for a while? Likely they've
nothing better than a tumbler."

Rachel Froke went down the stairs, and out along the paved walk,
into the street. She stopped an instant on the curb-stone before she
crossed, and looked up at those second story windows. Hazel watched
her. She held up the vase slightly with one hand, nodding her little
gray bonnet kindly, and beckoned with the other.

The young girl started from her seat.

In another minute Hazel saw them together in the doorway.

There was a blush and a smile, and an eager brightness in the face,
and a quick speaking thanks, that one could read without hearing,
from the parted lips, on the one side, and the quiet, unflutterable
gray bonnet calmly horizontal on the other; and then the door was
shut, and Rachel Froke was crossing the damp pavement again.

"I'm so glad Aspen Street is narrow!" said Hazel. "I should hate to
be way off out of sight of people. What did you say to her, Mrs.
Froke?" she asked, as the Friend reentered. Hazel could by no means
take the awful liberty of "Rachel."

"I said the young girl, Hazel Ripwinkley, being from the country,
knew how good flowers were to strangers in the town, and that she
thought they might be strange, and might like some."

Hazel flushed all up. At that same instant, a gentle nod and smile
came across from window to window, and she flushed more, till the
tears sprung with the shy, glad excitement, as she returned it and
then shrunk away.

"And she said, 'Thank her, with Dorris Kincaid's love,'" proceeded
Rachel Froke.

"O, _mother_!" exclaimed Hazel. "And you did it all, right off so,
Mrs. Froke. I don't see how grown up people dare, and know how!"

Up the stairs ran quick feet in little clattering heeled boots.
Desire Ledwith, with a purple waterproof on, came in.

"I couldn't stay at home to-day," she said, "I wanted to be where
it was all-togetherish. It never is at our house. Now it's set up,
they don't do anything with it."

"That's because it '_looks_'--so elegant," said Hazel, catching
herself up in dismay.

"It's because it's the crust, I think," said Desire. "Puff paste,
like an oyster patty; and they haven't got anything cooked yet for
the middle. I wonder when they will. I had a call yesterday, all to
myself," she went on, with a sudden change of tone and topic.
"Agatha was hopping and I wouldn't tell her what I said, or how I
behaved. That new parlor girl of ours thinks we're all or any of us
'Miss Ledwith,' mamma included, and so she let him in. He had on
lavender pantaloons and a waxed moustache."

"The rain is just pouring down!" said Diana, at the garden window.

"Yes; I'm caught. That's what I meant," said Desire. "You've got to
keep me all day, now. How will you get home, Mrs. Froke? Or won't
you have to stay, too?"

"Thee may call me Rachel, Desire Ledwith, if thee pleases. I like it
better. I am no mistress. And for getting home, it is but just round
the corner. But there is no need yet. I came for an hour, to sit
here with friend Frances. And my hour is not yet up."

"I'm glad of that, for there is something I want you to tell me. I
haven't quite got at it myself, yet; so as to ask, I mean. Wait a
minute!" And she put her elbows up on her knees, and held her thumbs
against her ears, and her fingers across her forehead; sitting
squarely opposite the window to which she had drawn up her chair
beside Diane, and looking intently at the driving streams that
rushed and ran down against the glass.

"I was sitting in the bay-window at home, when it began this
morning; that made me think. All the world dripping wet, and I just
put there dry and safe in the middle of the storm, shut up behind
those great clear panes and tight sashes. How they did have to
contrive, and work, before there were such places made for people!
What if they had got into their first scratchy little houses, and
sat behind the logs as we do behind glass windows and thought, as I
was thinking, how nice it was just to be covered up from the rain?
Is it all finished now? Hasn't anybody got to contrive anything
more? And who's going to do it--and everything. And what are we good
for,--just _we_,--to come and expect it all, modern-improved! I
don't think much of our place among things, do you, Mrs.
Froke?--There, I believe that's it, as near as I can!'"

"Why does thee ask me, Desire?"

"I don't know. I don't know any whys or what fors. 'Behold we know
not anything,'--Tennyson and I! But you seem so--pacified--I suppose
I thought you must have settled most things in your mind."

"Every builder--every little joiner--did his piece,--thought his
thought out, I think likely. There's no little groove or moulding or
fitting or finish, but is a bit of somebody's living; and life
grows, going on. We've all got our piece to do," said Rachel.

"I asked Mrs. Mig," Desire pursued, "and she said some people's part
was to buy and employ and encourage; and that spending money helps
all the world; and then she put another cushion to her back, and
went on tatting."

"Perhaps it does--in spite of the world," said Rachel Froke,
quietly.

"But I guess nobody is to sit by and _only_ encourage; God has
given out no such portion as that, I do believe. We can encourage
each other, and every one do his own piece too."

"I didn't really suppose Mrs. Mig knew," said Desire, demurely. "She
never began at the bottom of anything. She only finishes off. She
buys pattern worsted work, and fills it in. That's what she's doing
now, when she don't tat; a great bunch of white lilies, grounding it
with olive. It's lovely; but I'd rather have made the lilies. She'll
give it to mother, and then Glossy will come and spend the winter
with us. Mrs. Mig is going to Nassau with a sick friend; she's
awfully useful--for little overseeings and general touchings up,
after all the hard part is done. Mrs. Mig's sick friends always have
nurses and waiting maids--Mrs. F---- Rachel! Do you know, I haven't
got any piece!"

"No, I don't know; nor does thee either, yet," said Rachel Froke.

"It's all such bosh!" said Kenneth Kincaid, flinging down a handful
of papers. "I've no right, I solemnly think, to help such stuff out
into the world! A man can't take hold anywhere, it seems, without
smutting his fingers!"

Kenneth Kincaid was correcting proof for a publisher. What he had to
work on this morning was the first chapters of a flimsy novel.

"It isn't even confectionery," said he. "It's terra alba and
cochineal. And when it comes to the sensation, it will be benzine
for whiskey. Real things are bad enough, for the most part, in this
world; but when it comes to sham fictions and adulterated poisons,
Dorris, I'd rather help bake bread, if it were an honest loaf, or
make strong shoes for laboring men!"

"You don't always get things like that," said Dorris. "And you know
you're not responsible. Why will you torment yourself so?"

"I was so determined not to do anything but genuine work; work that
the world wanted; and to have it come down to this!"

"Only for a time, while you are waiting."

"Yes; people must eat while they are waiting; that's the--devil of
it! I'm not swearing, Dorris, dear; it came truly into my head, that
minute, about the Temptation in the Wilderness." Kenneth's voice was
reverent, saying this; and there was an earnest thought in his face.

"You'll never like anything heartily but your Sunday work."

"That's what keeps me here. My week-day work might be wanted
somewhere else. And perhaps I ought to go. There's Sunday work
everywhere."

"If you've found one half, hold on to it;" said Dorris. "The other
can't be far off."

"I suppose there are a score or two of young architects in this
city, waiting for a name or a chance to make one, as I am. If it
isn't here for all of them, somebody has got to quit."

"And somebody has got to hold on," repeated Dorris. "You are morbid,
Kent, about this 'work of the world.'"

"It's overdone, everywhere. Fifth wheels trying to hitch on to every
coach. I'd rather be the one wheel of a barrow."

"The Lord is Wheelwright, and Builder," said Dorris, very simply.
"You _are_ a wheel, and He has made you; He'll find an axle for you
and put you on; and you shall go about his business, so that you
shall wonder to remember that you were ever leaning up against a
wall. Do you know, Kentie, life seems to me like the game we used
to play at home in the twilight. When we shut our eyes and let each
other lead us, until we did not know where we were going, or in what
place we should come out. I should not care to walk up a broad path
with my eyes wide open, now. I'd rather feel the leading. To-morrow
always makes a turn. It's beautiful! People don't know, who _never_
shut their eyes!"

Kenneth had taken up a newspaper.

"The pretenses at doing! The dodges and go-betweens that make a sham
work between every two real ones! There's hardly a true business
carried on, and if there is, you don't know where or which. Look at
the advertisements. Why, they cheat with their very tops and faces!
See this man who puts in big capitals: 'Lost! $5,000! $1,000
reward!' and then tells you, in small type, that five thousand
dollars are lost every year by breaking glass and china, that his
cement will mend! What business has he to cry 'Wolf!' to the
hindrance of the next man who may have a real wolf to catch? And
what business has the printer, whom the next man will pay to
advertise his loss, to help on a lie like this beforehand? I'm only
twenty-six years old, Dorris, and I'm getting ashamed of the world!"

"Don't grow hard, Kenneth. 'The Son of Man came not to condemn the
world, but to save it.' Let's each try to save our little piece!"

We are listening across the street, you see; between the windows in
the rain; it is strange what chords one catches that do not catch
each other, and were never planned to be played together,--by the
_players_.

Kenneth Kincaid's father Robert had been a ship-builder. When
shipping went down in the whirlpool of 1857, Robert Kincaid's
building had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children
little beside their education, which he thanked God was secured, and
a good repute that belonged to their name, but was easily forgotten
in the crowd of young and forward ones, and in the strife and
scramble of a new business growth.

Between college and technical studies Kenneth had been to the war.
After that he had a chance to make a fortune in Wall Street. His
father's brother, James, offered to take him in with him to buy and
sell stocks and gold, to watch the market, to touch little unseen
springs, to put the difference into his own pocket every time the
tide of value shifted, or could be made to seem to shift. He might
have been one of James R. Kincaid and Company. He would have none of
it. He told his uncle plainly that he wanted real work; that he had
not come back from fighting to--well, there he stopped, for he could
not fling the truth in his uncle's face; he said there were things
he meant to finish learning, and would try to do; and if nobody
wanted them of him he would learn something else that was needed. So
with what was left to his share from his father's little remnant of
property, he had two years at the Technological School, and here he
was in Boston waiting. You can see what he meant by real work, and
how deep his theories and distinctions lay. You can see that it
might be a hard thing for one young man, here or there, to take up
the world on these terms now, in this year of our Lord eighteen
hundred and sixty-nine.

Over the way Desire Ledwith was beginning again, after a pause in
which we have made our little chassée.

"I know a girl," she said, "who has got a studio. And she talks
about art, and she knows styles, and who has done what, and she runs
about to see pictures, and she copies things, and she has little
plaster legs and toes and things hanging round everywhere. She
thinks it is something great; but it's only Mig, after all.
Everything is. Florence Migs into music. And I won't Mig, if I never
do anything. I'm come here this morning to darn stockings." And she
pulled out of her big waterproof pocket a bundle of stockings and a
great white ball of darning cotton and a wooden egg.

"There is always one thing that is real," said Mrs. Ripwinkley,
gently, "and that shows the way surely to all the rest."

"I know what you mean," said Desire, "of course; but they've mixed
that all up too, like everything else, so that you don't know where
it is. Glossy Megilp has a velvet prayer-book, and she blacks her
eyelashes and goes to church. We've all been baptized, and we've
learned the Lord's Prayer, and we're all Christians. What is there
more about it? I wish, sometimes, they had let it all alone. I think
they vaccinated us with religion, Aunt Frank, for fear we should
take it the natural way."

"Thee is restless," said Rachel Froke, tying on her gray cloak. "And
to make us so is oftentimes the first thing the Lord does for us. It
was the first thing He did for the world. Then He said, 'Let there
be light!' In the meantime, thee is right; just darn thy stockings."
And Rachel went.

They had a nice morning, after that, "leaving frets alone," as Diana
said. Diana Ripwinkley was happy in things just as they were. If the
sun shone, she rejoiced in the glory; if the rain fell, it shut her
in sweetly to the heart of home, and the outside world grew fragrant
for her breathing. There was never anything in her day that she
could spare out of it, and there were no holes in the hours either.
"Whether she was most bird or bee, it was hard to tell," her mother
said of her; from the time she used to sweep and dust her garret
baby-house along the big beams in the old house at Homesworth, and
make little cheeses, and set them to press in wooden pill-boxes from
which she had punched the bottoms out, till now, that she began to
take upon herself the daily freshening of the new parlors in Aspen
Street, and had long lessons of geometry to learn, whose dry
demonstrations she set to odd little improvised recitatives of
music, and chanted over while she ran up and down putting away clean
linen for her mother, that Luclarion brought up from the wash.

As for Hazel, she was only another variation upon the same sweet
nature. There was more of outgo and enterprise with her. Diana made
the thing or the place pleasant that she was in or doing. Hazel
sought out new and blessed inventions. "There was always something
coming to the child that wouldn't ever have come to no one else,"
Luclarion said. "And besides that, she was a real 'Witch Hazel;' she
could tell where the springs were, and what's more, where they
warn't."

Luclarion Grapp would never have pleaded guilty to "dropping into
poetry" in any light whatsoever; but what she meant by this was not
exactly according to the letter, as one may easily see.

IX.

HAZEL'S INSPIRATION.

What was the use of "looking," unless things were looked at? Mrs.
Ledwith found at the end of the winter that she ought to give a
party. Not a general one; Mrs. Ledwith always said "not a general
one," as if it were an exception, whereas she knew better than ever
to undertake a general party; her list would be _too_ general, and
heterogeneous. It would simply be a physical, as well as a social,
impossibility. She knew quantities of people separately and very
cordially, in her easy have-a-good-time-when-you-can style, that she
could by no means mix, or even gather together. She picked up
acquaintances on summer journeys, she accepted civilities wherever
she might be, she asked everybody to her house who took a fancy to
her, or would admire her establishment, and if she had had a spring
cleaning or a new carpeting, or a furbishing up in any way, the next
thing was always to light up and play it off,--to try it on to
somebody. What were houses for? And there was always somebody who
ought to be paid attention to; somebody staying with a friend, or a
couple just engaged, or if nothing else, it was her turn to have the
sewing-society; and so her rooms got aired. Of course she had to air
them now! The drawing-room, with its apricot and coffee-brown
furnishings, was lovely in the evening, and the crimson and garnet
in the dining-room was rich and cozy, and set off brilliantly her
show of silver and cut-glass; and then, there was the new, real,
sea-green China.

So the party was had. There were some people in town from New York;
she invited them and about a hundred more. The house lit up
beautifully; the only pity was that Mrs. Ledwith could not wear her
favorite and most becoming colors, buff and chestnut, because she
had taken that family of tints for her furniture; but she found a
lovely shade of violet that would hold by gas-light, and she wore
black Fayal lace with it, and white roses upon her hair. Mrs.
Treweek was enchanted with the brown and apricot drawing-room, and
wondered where on earth they had got that particular shade, for "my
dear! she had ransacked Paris for hangings in just that perfect,
soft, ripe color that she had in her mind and never could hit upon."
Mrs. MacMichael had pushed the grapes back upon her plate to examine
the pattern of the bit of china, and had said how lovely the
coloring was, with the purple and pale green of the fruit. And these
things, and a few more like them, were the residuum of the whole,
and Laura Ledwith was satisfied.

Afterward, "while they were in the way of it," Florence had a little
_musicale_; and the first season in Shubarton Place was over.

It turned out, however, as it did in the old rhyme,--they shod the
horse, and shod the mare, and let the little colt go bare. Helena
was disgusted because she could not have a "German."

"We shall have to be careful, now that we have fairly settled down,"
said Laura to her sister; "for every bit of Grant's salary will have
been taken up with this winter's expenses. But one wants to begin
right, and after that one can go on moderately. I'm good at
contriving, Frank; only give me something to contrive with."

"Isn't it a responsibility," Frank ventured, "to think what we shall
contrive _for_?"

"Of course," returned Mrs. Ledwith, glibly. "And my first duty is
to my children. I don't mean to encourage them to reckless
extravagance; as Mrs. Megilp says, there's always a limit; but it's
one's duty to make life beautiful, and one can't do too much for
home. I want my children to be satisfied with theirs, and I want to
cultivate their tastes and accustom them to society. I can't do
_everything_ for them; they will dress on three hundred a year
apiece, Agatha and Florence; and I can assure you it needs
management to accomplish that, in these days!"

Mrs. Ripwinkley laughed, gently.

"It would require management with us to get rid of that, upon
ourselves."

"O, my dear, don't I tell you continually, you haven't waked up yet?
Just rub your eyes a while longer,--or let the girls do it for
you,--and you'll see! Why, I know of girls,--girls whose mothers
have limited incomes, too,--who have been kept plain, actually
_plain_, all their school days, but who must have now six and eight
hundred a year to go into society with. And really I wouldn't
undertake it for less, myself, if I expected to keep up with
everything. But I must treat mine all alike, and we must be
contented with what we have. There's Helena, now, crazy for a young
party; but I couldn't think of it. Young parties are ten times worse
than old ones; there's really no _end_ to the expense, with the
German, and everything. Helena will have to wait; and yet,--of
course, if I could, it is desirable, almost necessary; acquaintances
begin in the school-room,--society, indeed; and a great deal would
depend upon it. The truth is, you're no sooner born, now-a-days,
than you have to begin to keep up; or else--you're dropped out."

"O, Laura! do you remember the dear little parties our mother used
to make for us? From four till half-past eight, with games, and tea
at six, and the fathers looking in?"

"And cockles, and mottoes, and printed cambric dresses, and milk and
water! Where are the children, do you suppose, you dear old Frau Van
Winkle, that would come to such a party now?"

"Children must be born simple, as they were then. There's nothing my
girls would like better, even at their age, than to help at just
such a party. It is a dream of theirs. Why shouldn't somebody do it,
just to show how good it is?"

"You can lead a horse to water, you know, Frank, but you can't make
him drink. And the colts are forty times worse. I believe you might
get some of the mothers together for an ancient tea-drink, just in
the name of old association; but the _babies_ would all turn up
their new-fashioned little noses."

"O, dear!" sighed Frau Van Winkle. "I wish I knew people!"

"By the time you do, you'll know the reason why, and be like all the
rest."

Hazel Ripwinkley went to Mrs. Hilman's school, with her cousin
Helena. That was because the school was a thoroughly good one; the
best her mother could learn of; not because it was kept in parlors
in Dorset Street, and there were girls there who came from palaces
west of the Common, in the grand avenues and the ABC streets; nor
did Hazel wear her best gray and black velvet suit for every day,
though the rich colored poplins with their over-skirts and sashes,
and the gay ribbons for hair and neck made the long green baize
covered tables look like gardenplots with beds of bloom, and quite
extinguished with their brilliancy the quiet, one skirted brown
merino that she brushed and folded every night, and put on with
fresh linen cuffs and collar every morning.

"It is an idiosyncrasy of Aunt Frances," Helena explained, with the
grandest phrase she could pick out of her "Synonymes," to cow down
those who "wondered."

Privately, Helena held long lamentations with Hazel, going to and
fro, about the party that she could not have.

"I'm actually ashamed to go to school. There isn't a girl there, who
can pretend to have anything, that hasn't had some kind of a company
this winter. I've been to them all, and I feel real mean,--sneaky.
What's 'next year?' Mamma puts me off with that. Poh? Next year
they'll all begin again. You can't skip birthdays."

"I'll tell you what!" said Hazel, suddenly, inspired by much the
same idea that had occurred to Mrs. Ripwinkley; "I mean to ask my
mother to let _me_ have a party!"

"You! Down in Aspen Street! Don't, for pity's sake, Hazel!"

"I don't believe but what it could be done over again!" said Hazel,
irrelevantly, intent upon her own thought.

"It couldn't be done _once_! For gracious grandmother's sake, don't
think of it!" cried the little world-woman of thirteen.

"It's gracious grandmother's sake that made me think of it," said
Hazel, laughing. "The way she used to do."

"Why don't you ask them to help you hunt up old Noah, and all get
back into the ark, pigeons and all?"

"Well, I guess they had pretty nice times there, any how; and if
another big rain comes, perhaps they'll have to!"

Hazel did not intend her full meaning; but there is many a faint,
small prophecy hid under a clover-leaf.

Hazel did not let go things; her little witch-wand, once pointed,
held its divining angle with the might of magic until somebody broke
ground.

"It's awful!" Helena declared to her mother and sisters, with tears
of consternation. "And she wants me to go round with her and carry
'compliments!' It'll never be got over,--never! I wish I could go
away to boarding-school!"

For Mrs. Ripwinkley had made up her unsophisticated mind to try this
thing; to put this grain of a pure, potent salt, right into the
seethe and glitter of little Boston, and find out what it would
decompose or precipitate. For was not she a mother, testing the
world's chalice for her children? What did she care for the hiss and
the bubble, if they came?

She was wider awake than Mrs. Ledwith knew; perhaps they who come
down from the mountain heights of long seclusion can measure the
world's paces and changes better than they who have been hurried in
the midst of them, on and on, or round and round.

Worst of all, old Uncle Titus took it up.

It was funny,--or it would have been funny, reader, if anybody but
you and I and Rachel Froke knew exactly how,--to watch Uncle Titus
as he kept his quiet eye on all these things,--the things that he
had set going,--and read their revelations; sheltered, disguised,
under a character that the world had chosen to put upon him, like
Haroun Alraschid in the merchant's cloak.

They took their tea with him,--the two families,--every Sunday
night. Agatha Ledwith "filled him in" a pair of slippers that very
first Christmas; he sat there in the corner with his old leather
ones on, when they came, and left them, for the most part, to their
own mutual entertainment, until the tea was ready. It was a sort of
family exchange; all the plans and topics came up, particularly on
the Ledwith side, for Mrs. Ripwinkley was a good listener, and Laura
a good talker; and the fun,--that you and I and Rachel Froke could
guess,--yes, and a good deal of unsuspected earnest, also,--was all
there behind the old gentleman's "Christian Age," as over brief
mentions of sermons, or words about books, or little brevities of
family inquiries and household news, broke small floods of
excitement like water over pebbles, as Laura and her daughters
discussed and argued volubly the matching and the flouncing of a
silk, or the new flowering and higher pitching of a bonnet,--since
"they are wearing everything all on the top, you know, and mine
looks terribly meek;" or else descanted diffusely on the
unaccountableness of the somebodies not having called, or the bother
and forwardness of the some-other-bodies who had, and the
eighty-three visits that were left on the list to be paid, and
"never being able to take a day to sit down for anything."

"What is it all for?" Mrs. Ripwinkley would ask, over again, the
same old burden of the world's weariness falling upon her from her
sister's life, and making her feel as if it were her business to
clear it away somehow.

"Why, to live!" Mrs. Ledwith would reply. "You've got it all to do,
you see."

"But I don't really see, Laura, where the living comes in."

Laura opens her eyes.

"_Slang_?" says she. "Where did you get hold of that?"

"Is it slang? I'm sure I don't know. I mean it."

"Well, you _are_ the funniest! You don't _catch_ anything. Even a
by-word must come first-hand from you, and mean something!"

"It seems to me such a hard-working, getting-ready-to-be, and then
not being. There's no place left for it,--because it's all place."

"Gracious me, Frank! If you are going to sift everything so, and get
back of everything! I can't live in metaphysics: I have to live in
the things themselves, amongst other people."

"But isn't it scene and costume, a good deal of it, without the
play? It may be that I don't understand, because I have not got into
the heart of your city life; but what comes of the parties, for
instance? The grand question, beforehand, is about wearing, and then
there's a retrospection of what was worn, and how people looked. It
seems to be all surface. I should think they might almost send in
their best gowns, or perhaps a photograph,--if photographs ever were
becoming,--as they do visiting cards."

"Aunt Frank," said Desire, "I don't believe the 'heart of city life'
is in the parties, or the parlors. I believe there's a great lot of
us knocking round amongst the dry goods and the furniture that never
get any further. People must be _living_, somewhere, _behind_ the
fixings. But there are so many people, nowadays, that have never
quite got fixed!"

"You might live all your days here," said Mrs. Ledwith to her
sister, passing over Desire, "and never get into the heart of it,
for that matter, unless you were born into it. I don't care so much,
for my part. I know plenty of nice people, and I like to have things
nice about me, and to have a pleasant time, and to let my children
enjoy themselves. The 'heart,' if the truth was known, is a
dreadful still place. I'm satisfied."

Uncle Titus's paper was folded across the middle; just then he
reversed the lower half; that brought the printing upside down; but
he went on reading all the same.

"_I_'m going to have a real party," said Hazel, "a real,
gracious-grandmother party; just such as you and mother had, Aunt
Laura, when you were little."

Her Aunt Laura laughed good-naturedly.

"I guess you'll have to go round and knock up the grandmothers to
come to it, then," said she. "You'd better make it a fancy dress
affair at once, and then it will be accounted for."

"No; I'm going round to invite; and they are to come at four, and
take tea at six; and they're just to wear their afternoon dresses;
and Miss Craydocke is coming at any rate; and she knows all the old
plays, and lots of new ones; and she is going to show how."

"I'm coming, too," said Uncle Titus, over his newspaper, with his
eyes over his glasses.

"That's good," said Hazel, simply, least surprised of any of the
conclave.

"And you'll have to play the muffin man. 'O, don't you know,'"--she
began to sing, and danced two little steps toward Mr. Oldways. "O, I
forgot it was Sunday!" she said, suddenly stopping.

"Not much wonder," said Uncle Titus. "And not much matter. _Your_
Sunday's good enough."

And then he turned his paper right side up; but, before he began
really to read again, he swung half round toward them in his
swivel-chair, and said,--

"Leave the sugar-plums to me, Hazel; I'll come early and bring 'em
in my pocket."

"It's the first thing he's taken the slightest notice of, or
interest in, that any one of us has been doing," said Agatha
Ledwith, with a spice of momentary indignation, as they walked along
Bridgeley Street to take the car.

For Uncle Titus had not come to the Ledwith party. "He never went
visiting, and he hadn't any best coat," he told Laura, in verbal
reply to the invitation that had come written on a square satin
sheet, once folded, in an envelope with a big monogram.

"It's of no consequence," said Mrs. Ledwith, "any way. Only a
child's play."

"But it will be, mother; you don't know," said Helena. "She's going
right in everywhere, with that ridiculous little invitation; to the
Ashburnes and the Geoffreys, and all! She hasn't the least idea of
any difference; and just think what the girls will say, and how they
will stare, and laugh! I wish she wasn't my cousin!"

"Helena!"

Mrs. Ledwith spoke with real displeasure; for she was good-natured
and affectionate in her way; and her worldly ambitions were rather
wide than high, as we have seen.

"Well, I can't help it; you don't know, mother," Helena repeated.
"It's horrid to go to school with all those stiffies, that don't
care a snap for you, and only laugh."

"Laughing is vulgar," said Agatha. If any indirect question were
ever thrown upon the family position, Agatha immediately began
expounding the ethics of high breeding, as one who had attained.

"It is only half-way people who laugh," she said. "Ada Geoffrey and
Lilian Ashburne never laugh--_at_ anybody--I am sure."

"No, they don't; not right out. They're awfully polite. But you can
feel it, underneath. They have a way of keeping so still, when you
know they would laugh if they did anything."

"Well, they'll neither laugh nor keep still, about this. You need
not be concerned. They'll just not go, and that will be the end of
it."

Agatha Ledwith was mistaken. She had been mistaken about two things
to-night. The other was when she had said that this was the first
time Uncle Oldways had noticed or been interested in anything they
did.

X.

COCKLES AND CRAMBO.

Hazel Ripwinkley put on her nankeen sack and skirt, and her little
round, brown straw hat. For May had come, and almost gone, and it
was a day of early summer warmth.

Hazel's dress was not a "suit;" it had been made and worn two
summers before suits were thought of; yet it suited very well, as
people's things are apt to do, after all, who do not trouble
themselves about minutiæ of fashion, and so get no particular
antediluvian marks upon them that show when the flood subsides.

Her mother knew some things that Hazel did not. Mrs. Ripwinkley, if
she had been asleep for five and twenty years, had lost none of her
perceptive faculties in the trance. But she did not hamper her child
with any doubts; she let her go on her simple way, under the shield
of her simplicity, to test this world that she had come into, for
herself.

Hazel had written down her little list of the girls' names that she
would like to ask; and Mrs. Ripwinkley looked at it with a smile.
There was Ada Geoffrey, the banker's daughter, and Lilian Ashburne,
the professor's,--heiresses each, of double lines of birth and
wealth. She could remember how, in her childhood, the old names
sounded, with the respect that was in men's tones when they were
spoken; and underneath were Lois James and Katie Kilburnie, children
of a printer and a hatter. They had all been chosen for their purely
personal qualities. A child, let alone, chooses as an angel chooses.

It remained to be seen how they would come together.

At the very head, in large, fair letters, was,--

          "MISS CRAYDOCKE."

Down at the bottom, she had just added,--

          "MR. KINCAID AND DORRIS."

"For, if I have _some_ grown folks, mother, perhaps I ought to have
_other_ grown folks,--'to keep the balance true.' Besides, Mr.
Kincaid and Dorris always like the _little_ nice times."

From the day when Dorris Kincaid had come over with the gray glass
vase and her repeated thanks, when the flowers had done their
ministry and faded, there had been little simple courtesies, each
way, between the opposite houses; and once Kenneth and his sister
had taken tea with the Ripwinkleys, and they had played "crambo"
and "consequences" in the evening. The real little game of
"consequences," of which this present friendliness was a link, was
going on all the time, though they did not stop to read the lines as
they folded them down, and "what the world said" was not one of the
items in their scheme of it at all.

It would have been something worth while to have followed Hazel as
she went her rounds, asking quietly at each house to see Mrs. This
or That, "as she had a message;" and being shown, like a little
representative of an almost extinct period, up into the parlor, or
the dressing-room of each lady, and giving her quaint errand.

"I am Hazel Ripwinkley," she would say, "and my mother sends her
compliments, and would like to have Lilian,"--or whoever
else,--"come at four o'clock to-day, and spend the afternoon and
take tea. I'm to have a little party such as she used to have, and
nobody is to be much dressed up, and we are only to play games."

"Why, that is charming!" cried Mrs. Ashburne; for the feeling of
her own sweet early days, and the old B---- Square house, came over
her as she heard the words. "It is Lilian's music afternoon; but
never mind; give my kind compliments to your mother, and she will be
very happy to come."

And Mrs. Ashburne stooped down and kissed Hazel, when she went away.

She stood in the deep carved stone entrance-way to Mrs. Geoffrey's
house, in the same fearless, Red Riding Hood fashion, just as she
would have waited in any little country porch up in Homesworth,
where she had need indeed to knock.

Not a whit dismayed was she either, when the tall manservant opened
to her, and admitted her into the square, high, marble-paved hall,
out of which great doors were set wide into rooms rich and quiet
with noble adorning and soft shading,--where pictures made such a
magic upon the walls, and books were piled from floor to ceiling;
and where her little figure was lost as she went in, and she
hesitated to take a seat anywhere, lest she should be quite hidden
in some great arm-chair or sofa corner, and Mrs. Geoffrey should not
see her when she came down.

So, as the lady entered, there she was, upright and waiting, on her
two feet, in her nankeen dress, just within the library doors, with
her face turned toward the staircase.

"I am Hazel Ripwinkley," she began; as if she had said, I am
Pease-blossom or Mustard-seed; "I go to school with Ada." And went
on, then, with her compliments and her party. And at the end she
said, very simply,--

"Miss Craydocke is coming, and she knows the games."

"Miss Craydocke, of Orchard Street? And where do you live?"

"In Aspen Street, close by, in Uncle Oldways' house. We haven't
lived there very long,--only this winter; before that we always
lived in Homesworth."

"And Homesworth is in the country? Don't you miss that?"

"Yes; but Aspen Street isn't very bad; we've got a garden. Besides,
we like streets and neighbors."

Then she added,--for her little witch-stick felt spiritually the
quality of what she spoke to,--"Wouldn't Mr. Geoffrey come for Ada
in the evening?"

"I haven't the least doubt he would!" said Mrs. Geoffrey, her face
all alive with exquisite and kindly amusement, and catching the
spirit of the thing from the inimitable simplicity before her, such
as never, she did believe, had walked into anybody's house before,
in this place and generation, and was no more to be snubbed than a
flower or a breeze or an angel.

It was a piece of Witch Hazel's witchery, or inspiration, that she
named Miss Craydocke; for Miss Craydocke was an old, dear friend of
Mrs. Geoffrey's, in that "heart of things" behind the fashions,
where the kingdom is growing up. But of course Hazel could not have
known that; something in the lady's face just made her think of the
same thing in Miss Craydocke's, and so she spoke, forgetting to
explain, nor wondering in the very least, when she was met with
knowledge.

It was all divining, though, from the beginning to the end. That was
what took her into these homes, rather than to a score of other
places up and down the self-same streets, where, if she had got in
at all, she would have met strange, lofty stares, and freezing
"thank you's," and "engagements."

"I've found the real folks, mother, and they're all coming!" she
cried, joyfully, running in where Mrs. Ripwinkley was setting little
vases and baskets about on shelf and table, between the white,
plain, muslin draperies of the long parlor windows. In vases and
baskets were sweet May flowers; bunches of deep-hued, rich-scented
violets, stars of blue and white periwinkle, and Miss Craydocke's
lilies of the valley in their tall, cool leaves; each kind gathered
by itself in clusters and handfuls. Inside the wide, open fireplace,
behind the high brass fender and the shining andirons, was a
"chimney flower pot," country fashion, of green lilac boughs,--not
blossoms,--and woodbine sprays, and crimson and white tulips. The
room was fair and fragrant, and the windows were wide open upon
vines and grass.

"It looks like you, mother, just as Mrs. Geoffrey's house looks like
her. Houses ought to look like people, I think."

"There's your surprise, children. We shouldn't be doing it right
without a surprise, you know."

And the surprise was not dolls' pelerines, but books. "Little Women"
was one, which sent Diana and Hazel off for a delicious two hours'
read up in their own room until dinner.

After dinner, Miss Craydocke came, in her purple and white striped
mohair and her white lace neckerchief; and at three o'clock Uncle
Titus walked in, with his coat pockets so bulgy and rustling and
odorous of peppermint and sassafras, that it was no use to pretend
to wait and be unconscious, but a pure mercy to unload him so that
he might be able to sit down.

Nobody knows to this day where he got them; he must have ordered
them somewhere, one would think, long enough before to have special
moulds and implements made; but there were large, beautiful
cockles,--not of the old flour-paste sort, but of clear, sparkling
sugar, rose-color, and amber, and white, with little slips of tinted
paper tucked within, and these printed delicately with pretty rhymes
and couplets, from real poets; things to be truly treasured, yet
simple, for children's apprehension, and fancy, and fun. And there
were "Salem gibraltars," such as we only get out of Essex County now
and then, for a big charitable Fair, when Salem and everywhere else
gets its spirit up to send its best and most especial; and there
were toys and devices in sugar--flowers and animals, hats, bonnets,
and boots, apples, and cucumbers,--such as Diana and Hazel, and even
Desire and Helena had never seen before.

"It isn't quite fair," said good Miss Craydocke. "We were to go back
to the old, simple fashions of things; and here you are beginning
over again already with sumptuous inventions. It's the very way it
came about before, till it was all spoilt."

"No," said Uncle Titus, stoutly. "It's only 'Old _and_ New,'--the
very selfsame good old notions brought to a little modern
perfection. They're not French flummery, either; and there's not a
drop of gin, or a flavor of prussic acid, or any other abominable
chemical, in one of those contrivances. They're as innocent as they
look; good honest mint and spice and checkerberry and lemon and
rose. I know the man that made 'em!"

Helena Ledwith began to think that the first person, singular or
plural, might have a good time; but that awful third! Helena's
"they" was as potent and tremendous as her mother's.

"It's nice," she said to Hazel; "but they don't have inch things. I
never saw them at a party. And they don't play games; they always
dance. And it's broad, hot daylight; and--you haven't asked a single
boy!"

"Why, I don't know any! Only Jimmy Scarup; and I guess he'd rather
play ball, and break windows!"

"Jimmy Scarup!" And Helena turned away, hopeless of Hazel's
comprehending.

But "they" came; and "they" turned right into "we."

It was not a party; it was something altogether fresh and new; the
house was a new, beautiful place; it was like the country. And Aspen
Street, when you got down there, was so still and shady and sweet
smelling and pleasant. They experienced the delight of finding out
something.

Miss Craydocke and Hazel set them at it,--their good time; they had
planned it all out, and there was no stiff, shy waiting. They began,
right off, with the "Muffin Man." Hazel danced up to Desire:--

          "O, _do_ you know the Muffin Man,
            The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man?
          O, _do_ you know the Muffin Man
            That lives in Drury Lane?"

          "O, yes, I know the Muffin Man,
            The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man,
          O, yes, I know the Muffin Man
            That lives in Drury Lane."

And so they danced off together:--

          "Two of us know the Muffin Man,
            The Muffin Man, the Muffin Man,
          Two of us know the Muffin Man
            That lives in Drury Lane."

And then they besieged Miss Craydocke; and then the three met Ada
Geoffrey, just as she had come in and spoken to Diana and Mrs.
Ripwinkley; and Ada had caught the refrain, and responded instantly;
and _four_ of them knew the Muffin Man.

"I know they'll think it's common and queer, and they'll laugh
to-morrow," whispered Helena to Diana, as Hazel drew the lengthening
string to Dorris Kincaid's corner and caught her up; but the next
minute they were around Helena in her turn, and they were laughing
already, with pure glee; and five faces bent toward her, and five
voices sang,--

          "O, _don't_ you know the Muffin Man?"

And Helena had to sing back that she did; and then the six made a
perfect snarl around Mrs. Ripwinkley herself, and drew her in; and
then they all swept off and came down across the room upon Mr.
Oldways, who muttered, under the singing, "seven women! Well, the
Bible says so, and I suppose it's come!" and then he held out both
hands, while his hard face unbent in every wrinkle, with a smile
that overflowed through all their furrowed channels, up to his very
eyes; like some sparkling water that must find its level; and there
were eight that knew the Muffin Man.

So nine, and ten, and up to fifteen; and then, as their line broke
away into fragments, still breathless with fun, Miss Craydocke
said,--her eyes brimming over with laughing tears, that always came
when she was gay,--

"There, now! we all know the 'Muffin Man;' therefore it follows,
mathematically, I believe, that we must all know each other. I think
we'll try a sitting-down game next. I'll give you all something.
Desire, you can tell them what to do with it, and Miss Ashburne
shall predict me consequences."

So they had the "Presentation Game;" and the gifts, and the
dispositions, and the consequences, when the whispers were over, and
they were all declared aloud, were such hits and jumbles of sense
and nonsense as were almost too queer to have been believed.

"Miss Craydocke gave me a butter firkin," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "I
was to put it in the parlor and plant vanilla beans in it; and the
consequence would be that Birnam Wood would come to Dunsinane."

"She gave me a wax doll," said Helena. "I was to buy it a pair of
high-heeled boots and a chignon; and the consequence would be that
she would have to stand on her head."

"She gave me," said Mr. Oldways, "an iron spoon. I was to deal out
sugar-plums with it; and the consequence would be that you would all
go home."

"She gave me," said Lois James, "Woman's Rights. I shouldn't know
what to do with them; and the consequence would be a terrible
mortification to all my friends."

"She gave me," said Hazel, "a real good time. I was to pass it
round; and the consequence would be an earthquake."

Then they had "Scandal;" a whisper, repeated rapidly from ear to
ear. It began with, "Luclarion is in the kitchen making
tea-biscuits;" and it ended with the horrible announcement that
there were "two hundred gallons of hot pitch ready, and that
everybody was to be tipped into it."

"Characters," and "Twenty Questions," and "How, When, and Where,"
followed; and then they were ready for a run again, and they played
"Boston," in which Mr. Oldways, being "Sceattle," was continually
being left out, whereupon he declared at last, that he didn't
believe there was any place for him, or even that he was down
anywhere on the map, and it wasn't fair, and he was going to secede;
and that broke up the play; for the groat fun of all the games had
come to be Miss Craydocke and Uncle Titus, as it always is the great
fun to the young ones when the elders join in,--the older and the
soberer, the better sport; there is always something in the "fathers
looking on;" that is the way I think it is among them who always do
behold the Face of the Father in heaven,--smiling upon their smiles,
glowing upon their gladness.

In the tea-room, it was all even more delightful yet; it was further
out into the garden, shaded at the back by the deep leafiness of
grape-vines, and a trellis work with arches in it that ran up at the
side, and would be gay by and by with scarlet runners, and
morning-glories, and nasturtiums, that were shooting up strong and
swift already, from the neatly weeded beds.

Inside, was the tall old semicircular sideboard, with gingerbread
grooves carved all over it; and the real brass "dogs," with heads on
their fore-paws, were lying in the fire-place, under the lilac
boughs; and the square, plain table stood in the midst, with its
glossy white cloth that touched the floor at the corners, and on it
were the identical pink mugs, and a tall glass pitcher of milk, and
plates of the thinnest and sweetest bread and butter, and early
strawberries in a white basket lined with leaves, and the
traditional round frosted cakes upon a silver plate with a network
rim.

And Luclarion and Mrs. Ripwinkley waited upon them all, and it was
still no party, to be compared or thought of with any salad and
ice-pudding and Germania-band affair, such as they had had all
winter; but something utterly fresh and new and by itself,--place,
and entertainment, and people, and all.

After tea, they went out into the garden; and there, under the shady
horse-chestnuts, was a swing; and there were balls with which Hazel
showed them how to play "class;" tossing in turn against the high
brick wall, and taking their places up and down, according to the
number of their catches. It was only Miss Craydocke's "Thread the
Needle" that got them in again; and after that, she showed them
another simple old dancing game, the "Winding Circle," from which
they were all merrily and mysteriously untwisting themselves with
Miss Craydocke's bright little thin face and her fluttering cap
ribbons, and her spry little trot leading them successfully off,
when the door opened, and the grand Mr. Geoffrey walked in; the man
who could manage State Street, and who had stood at the right hand
of Governor and President, with his clear brain, and big purse, and
generous hand, through the years of the long, terrible war; the man
whom it was something for great people to get to their dinners, or
to have walk late into an evening drawing-room and dignify an
occasion for the last half hour.

Mrs. Ripwinkley was just simply glad to see him; so she was to see
Kenneth Kincaid, who came a few minutes after, just as Luclarion
brought the tray of sweetmeats in, which Mrs. Ripwinkley had so far
innovated upon the gracious-grandmother plan as to have after tea,
instead of before.

The beautiful cockles and their rhymes got their heads all together
around the large table, for the eating and the reading. Mr. Geoffrey
and Uncle Titus sat talking European politics together, a little
aside. The sugar-plums lasted a good while, with the chatter over
them; and then, before they quite knew what it was all for, they had
got slips of paper and lead pencils before them, and there was to be
a round of "Crambo" to wind up.

"O, I don't know how!" and "I never can!" were the first words, as
they always are, when it was explained to the uninitiated; but Miss
Craydocke assured them that "everybody could;" and Hazel said that
"nobody expected real poetry; it needn't be more than two lines, and
those might be blank verse, if they were _very_ hard, but jingles
were better;" and so the questions and the wards were written and
folded, and the papers were shuffled and opened amid outcries of,
"O, this is awful!" "_What_ a word to get in!" "Why, they haven't
the least thing to do with each other!"

"That's the beauty of it," said Miss Craydocke, unrelentingly; "to
_make_ them have; and it is funny how much things do have to do with
each other when they once happen to come across."

Then there were knit brows, and desperate scratchings, and such
silence that Mr. Geoffrey and Uncle Titus stopped short on the
Alabama question, and looked round to see what the matter was.

Kenneth Kincaid had been modestly listening to the older gentlemen,
and now and then venturing to inquire or remark something, with an
intelligence that attracted Mr. Geoffrey; and presently it came out
that he had been south with the army; and then Mr. Geoffrey asked
questions of him, and they got upon Reconstruction business, and
comparing facts and exchanging conclusions, quite as if one was not
a mere youth with only his eyes and his brains and his conscience to
help him in his first grapple with the world in the tangle and
crisis at which he found it, and the other a grave, practiced,
keen-judging man, the counsellor of national leaders.

After all, they had no business to bring the great, troublesome,
heavy-weighted world into a child's party. I wish man never would;
though it did not happen badly, as it all turned out, that they did
a little of it in this instance. If they had thought of it,
"Crambo" was good for them too, for a change; and presently they did
think of it; for Dorris called out in distress, real or pretended,
from the table,--

"Kentie, here's something you must really take off my hands! I
haven't the least idea what to do with it."

And then came a cry from Hazel,--

"No fair! We're all just as badly off, and there isn't one of us
that has got a brother to turn to. Here's another for Mr. Kincaid."

"There are plenty more. Come, Mr. Oldways, Mr. Geoffrey, won't you
try 'Crambo?' There's a good deal in it, as there is in most
nonsense."

"We'll come and see what it is," said Mr. Geoffrey; and so the
chairs were drawn up, and the gray, grave heads looked on over the
young ones.

"Why, Hazel's got through!" said Lois, scratching violently at her
paper, and obliterating three obstinate lines.

"O, I didn't bother, you see! I just stuck the word right in, like a
pin into a pincushion, and let it go. There wasn't anything else to
do with it."

"I've got to make my pincushion," said Dorris.

"I should think you had! Look at her! She's writing her paper all
over! O, my gracious, she must have done it before!"

"Mother and Mr. Geoffrey are doing heaps, too! We shall have to
publish a book," said Diana, biting the end of her pencil, and
taking it easy. Diana hardly ever got the rhymes made in time; but
then she always admired everybody's else, which was a good thing for
somebody to be at leisure to do.

"Uncle Oldways and Lilian are folding up," said Hazel.

"Five minutes more," said Miss Craydocke, keeping the time with her
watch before her. "Hush!"

When the five minutes were rapped out, there were seven papers to be
read. People who had not finished this time might go on when the
others took fresh questions.

Hazel began reading, because she had been ready first.

"'What is the difference between sponge-cake and doughnuts?'
'Hallelujah.'"

          "Airiness, lightness, and insipidity;
           Twistiness, spiciness, and solidity.
           Hallelujah! I've got through!
           That is the best that I can do!'"

There was a shout at Hazel's pinsticking.

"Now, Uncle Titus! You finished next."

"My question is a very comprehensive one," said Uncle Titus, "with a
very concise and suggestive word. 'How wags the world?' 'Slambang.'"

          "'The world wags on
            With lies and slang;
            With show and vanity,
            Pride and inanity,
            Greed and insanity,
            And a great slambang!'"

"That's only _one_ verse," said Miss Craydocke. "There's another;
but he didn't write it down."

Uncle Titus laughed, and tossed his Crambo on the table. "It's true,
so far, anyway," said he.

"_So far_ is hardly ever quite true," said Miss Craydocke

Lilian Ashburne had to answer the question whether she had ever read
"Young's Night Thoughts;" and her word was "Comet."

          "'Pray might I be allowed a pun,
            To help me through with just this one?
            I've tried to read Young's Thoughts of Night,
            But never yet could come it, quite.'"

"O, O, O! That's just like Lilian, with her soft little 'prays' and
'allow me's,' and her little pussy-cat ways of sliding through tight
places, just touching her whiskers!"

"It's quite fair," said Lilian, smiling, "to slide through if you
can."

"Now, Mr. Geoffrey."

And Mr. Geoffrey read,--

"'What is your favorite color?' 'One-hoss.'"

          "'Do you mean, my friend, for a one-hoss shay,
            Or the horse himself,--black, roan, or bay?
            In truth, I think I can hardly say;
            I believe, for a nag, "I bet on the gray."

          "'For a shay, I would rather not have yellow,
            Or any outright, staring color,
            That makes the crowd look after a fellow,
            And the little _gamins_ hoot and bellow.

          "'Do you mean for ribbons? or gowns? or eyes?
            Or flowers? or gems? or in sunset skies?
            For many questions, as many replies,
            Drops of a rainbow take rainbow dyes.

          "'The world is full, and the world is bright;
            Each thing to its nature parts the light;
            And each for its own to the Perfect sight
            Wears that which is comely, and sweet, and right.'"

"O, Mr. Geoffrey! That's lovely!" cried the girl voices, all around
him. And Ada made a pair of great eyes at her father, and said,--

"What an awful humbug you have been, papa! To have kept the other
side up with care all your life! Who ever suspected _that_ of you?"

Diana and Hazel were not taken so much by surprise, their mother
had improvised little nursery jingles for them all their baby days,
and had played Crambo with them since; so they were very confident
with their "Now, mother:" and looked calmly for something
creditable.

"'What is your favorite name?'" read Mrs. Ripwinkley. "And the word
is 'Stuff.'"

          "'When I was a little child,
            Looking very meek and mild,
            I liked grand, heroic names,--
            Of warriors, or stately dames:
            Zenobia, and Cleopatra;
            (No rhyme for that this side Sumatra;)
            Wallace, and Helen Mar,--Clotilda,
            Berengaria, and Brunhilda;
            Maximilian; Alexandra;
            Hector, Juno, and Cassandra;
            Charlemagne and Britomarte,
            Washington and Bonaparte;
            Victoria and Guinevere,
            And Lady Clara Vere de Vere.
            --Shall I go on with all this stuff,
            Or do you think it is enough?
            I cannot tell you what dear name
            I love the best; I play a game;
            And tender earnest doth belong
            To quiet speech, not silly song.'"

"That's just like mother; I should have stopped as soon as I'd got
the 'stuff' in; but she always shapes off with a little morriowl,"
said Hazel. "Now, Desire!"

Desire frantically scribbled a long line at the end of what she had
written; below, that is, a great black morass of scratches that
represented significantly the "Slough of Despond" she had got into
over the winding up, and then gave,--

"'Which way would you rather travel,--north or south?'
'Goosey-gander.'"

          "'O, goosey-gander!
                If I might wander,
            It should be toward the sun;
                The blessed South
                Should fill my mouth
            With ripeness just begun.
                For bleak hills, bare,
                With stunted, spare,
            And scrubby, piney trees,
                Her gardens rare,
                And vineyards fair,
            And her rose-scented breeze.
                For fearful blast,
                Skies overcast,
            And sudden blare and scare
                Long, stormless moons,
                And placid noons,
            And--all sorts of comfortablenesses,--there!'"

"That makes me think of father's horse running away with him once,"
said Helena, "when he had to head him right up against a brick wall,
and knock everything all to smash before he could stop!"

"Anybody else?"

"Miss Kincaid, I think," said Mr. Geoffrey. He had been watching
Dorris's face through the play, flashing and smiling with the
excitement of her rhyming, and the slender, nervous fingers twisting
tremulously the penciled slip while she had listened to the others.

"If it isn't all rubbed out," said Dorris, coloring and laughing to
find how badly she had been treating her own effusion.

"You see it _was_ rather an awful question,--'What do you want
most?' And the word is, 'Thirteen.'"

She caught her breath a little quickly as she began:--

          "'Between yourself, dear, myself, and the post,
            There are the thirteen things that I want the most.
            I want to be, sometimes, a little stronger;
            I want the days to be a little longer;
            I'd like to have a few less things to do;
            I'd better like to better do the few:
            I want--and this might almost lead my wishes,--
            A bigger place to keep my mops and dishes.
            I want a horse; I want a little buggy,
            To ride in when the days grow hot and muggy;
            I want a garden; and,--perhaps it's funny,--
            But now and then I want a little money.
            I want an easy way to do my hair;
            I want an extra dress or two to wear;
            I want more patience; and when all is given,
            I think I want to die and go to heaven!'"

"I never saw such bright people in all my life!" said Ada Geoffrey,
when the outcry of applause for Dorris had subsided, and they began
to rise to go. "But the _worst_ of all is papa! I'll never get over
it of you, see if I do! Such a cheat! Why, it's like playing dumb
all your life, and then just speaking up suddenly in a quiet way,
some day, as if it was nothing particular, and nobody cared!"

With Hazel's little divining-rod, Mrs. Ripwinkley had reached out,
testing the world for her, to see what some of it might be really
made of. Mrs. Geoffrey, from her side, had reached out in turn,
also, into this fresh and simple opportunity, to see what might be
there worth while.

"How was it, Aleck?" she asked of her husband, as they sat together
in her dressing-room, while she brushed out her beautiful hair.

"Brightest people I have been among for a long time--and nicest,"
said the banker, concisely. "A real, fresh little home, with a
mother in it. Good place for Ada to go, and good girls for her to
know; like the ones I fell in love with a hundred years ago."

"That rhymed oracle,--to say nothing of the _fraction_ of a
compliment,--ought to settle it," said Mrs. Geoffrey, laughing.

"Rhymes have been the order of the evening. I expect to talk in
verse for a week at least."

And then he told her about the "Crambo."

A week after, Mrs. Ledwith was astonished to find, lying on the
mantel in her sister's room, a card that had been sent up the day
before,--

          "MRS. ALEXANDER H. GEOFFREY."

XI.

MORE WITCH-WORK.

Hazel was asked to the Geoffreys' to dinner.

Before this, she and Diana had both been asked to take tea, and
spend an evening, but this was Hazel's little especial "invite," as
she called it, because she and Ada were writing a dialogue together
for a composition at school.

The Geoffreys dined at the good old-fashioned hour of half past two,
except when they had formal dinner company; and Hazel was to come
right home from school with Ada, and stay and spend the afternoon.

"What intimacy!" Florence Ledwith had exclaimed, when she heard of
it.

"But it isn't at all on the grand style side; people like the
Geoffreys do such things quite apart from their regular connection;
it is a sort of 'behind the scenes;'" said Glossy Megilp, who was
standing at Florence's dressing-glass, touching up the little heap
of "friz" across her forehead.

"Where's my poker?" she asked, suddenly, breaking off from the
Geoffrey subject, and rummaging in a dressing box, intent upon
tutoring some little obstinate loop of hair that would be _too_
frizzy.

"I should think a 'blower' might be a good thing to add to your
tools, Glossy," said Desire. "You have brush, poker, and tongs, now,
to say nothing of coal-hod," she added, glancing at the little open
japanned box that held some kind of black powder which had to do
with the shadow of Glossy's eyelashes upon occasion, and the
emphasis upon the delicate line of her brows.

"No secret," said Glossy, magnanimously. "There it is! It is no
greater sin than violet powder, or false tails, for that matter; and
the little gap in my left eyebrow was never deliberately designed.
It was a 'lapsus naturæ;' I only follow out the hint, and complete
the intention. Something _is_ left to ourselves; as the child said
about the Lord curling her hair for her when she was a baby and
letting her do it herself after she grew big enough. What are our
artistic perceptions given to us for, unless we're to make the best
of ourselves in the first place?"

"But it isn't all eyebrows," said Desire, half aloud.

"Of course not," said Glossy Megilp. "Twice a day I have to do
myself up somehow, and why shouldn't it be as well as I can? Other
things come in their turn, and I do them."

"But, you see, the friz and the fix has to be, anyhow, whether or
no. Everything isn't done, whether or no. I guess it's the 'first
place,' that's the matter."

"I think you have a very theoretical mind, Des, and a slightly
obscure style. You can't be satisfied till everything is all mapped
out, and organized, and justified, and you get into horrible snarls
trying to do it. If I were you, I would take things a little more as
they come."

"I can't," said Desire. "They come hind side before and upside
down."

"Well, if everybody is upside down, there's a view of it that makes
it all right side up, isn't there? It seems to be an established
fact that we must dress and undress, and that the first duty of the
day is to get up and put on our clothes. We aren't ready for much
until we do. And one person's dressing may require one thing, and
another's another. Some people have a cork leg to put on, and some
people have false teeth; and they wouldn't any of them come hobbling
or mumbling out without them, unless there was a fire or an
earthquake, I suppose."

Glossy Megilp's arguments and analogies perplexed Desire, always.
They sometimes silenced her; but they did not always answer her. She
went back to what they had been discussing before.

"To 'lay down the shubbel and the hoe,'--here's your poker, under
the table-flounce, Glossy,--and to 'take up the fiddle and the bow,'
again,--I think it's real nice and beautiful for Hazel--"

"To 'go where the good darkies go'?"

"Yes. It's the _good_ of her that's got her in. And I believe you
and Florence both would give your best boots to be there too, if it
_is_ behind. Behind the fixings and the fashions is where people
_live_; 'dere's vat I za-ay!'" she ended, quoting herself and Rip
Van Winkle.

"Maybe," said Florence, carelessly; "but I'd as lief be _in_ the
fashion, after all. And that's where Hazel Ripwinkley never will
get, with all her taking little novelties."

Meanwhile, Hazel Ripwinkley was deep in the delights of a great
portfolio of rare engravings; prints of glorious frescoes in old
churches, and designs of splendid architecture; and Mrs. Geoffrey,
seeing her real pleasure, was sitting beside her, turning over the
large sheets, and explaining them; telling her, as she gazed into
the wonderful faces of the Saints and the Evangelists in Correggio's
frescoes of the church of San Giovanni at Parma, how the whole dome
was one radiant vision of heavenly glory, with clouds and angel
faces, and adoring apostles, and Christ the Lord high over all; and
that these were but the filling in between the springing curves of
the magnificent arches; describing to her the Abbess's room in San
Paolo, with its strange, beautiful heathen picture over the mantel,
of Diana mounting her stag-drawn car, and its circular walls painted
with trellis-work and medallioned with windows, where the heads of
little laughing children, and graceful, gentle animals peeped in
from among vines and flowers.

Mrs. Geoffrey did not wonder that Hazel lingered with delight over
these or over the groups by Raphael in the Sistine Chapel,--the
quiet pendentives, where the waiting of the world for its salvation
was typified in the dream-like, reclining forms upon the still,
desert sand; or the wonderful scenes from the "Creation,"--the
majestic "Let there be Light!" and the Breathing of the breath of
life into Man. She watched the surprise and awe with which the child
beheld for the first time the daring of inspiration in the
tremendous embodiment of the Almighty, and waited while she could
hardly take her eyes away. But when, afterward, they turned to a
portfolio of Architecture, and she found her eager to examine spires
and arches and capitals, rich reliefs and stately facades and
sculptured gates, and exclaiming with pleasure at the colored
drawings of Florentine ornamentation, she wondered, and questioned
her,--

"Have you ever seen such things before? Do you draw? I should hardly
think you would care so much, at your age."

"I like the prettiness," said Hazel, simply, "and the grandness; but
I don't suppose I should care so much if it wasn't for Dorris and
Mr. Kincaid. Mr. Kincaid draws buildings; he's an architect; only he
hasn't architected much yet, because the people that build things
don't know him. Dorris was so glad to give him a Christmas present
of 'Daguerreotypes de Paris,' with the churches and arches and
bridges and things; she got it at a sale; I wonder what they would
say to all these beauties!"

Then Mrs. Geoffrey found what still more greatly enchanted her, a
volume of engravings, of English Home Architecture; interiors of old
Halls, magnificent staircases, lofty libraries and galleries dim
with space; exteriors, gabled, turreted and towered; long, rambling
piles of manor houses, with mixed styles of many centuries.

"They look as if they were brimfull of stories!" Hazel cried. "O, if
I could only carry it home to show to the Kincaids!"

"You may," said Mrs. Geoffrey, as simply, in her turn, as if she
were lending a copy of "Robinson Crusoe;' never letting the child
guess by a breath of hesitation the value of what she had asked.

"And tell me more about these Kincaids. They are friends of yours?"

"Yes; we've known them all winter. They live right opposite, and sit
in the windows, drawing and writing. Dorris keeps house up there in
two rooms. The little one is her bedroom; and Mr. Kincaid sleeps on
the big sofa. Dorris makes crackle-cakes, and asks us over. She
cooks with a little gas-stove. I think it is beautiful to keep house
with not very much money. She goes out with a cunning white basket
and buys her things; and she does all her work up in a corner on a
white table, with a piece of oil-cloth on the floor; and then she
comes over into her parlor, she says, and sits by the window. It's a
kind of a play all the time."

"And Mr. Kincaid?"

"Dorris says he might have been rich by this time, if he had gone
into his Uncle James's office in New York. Mr. James Kincaid is a
broker, and buys gold. But Kenneth says gold stands for work, and if
he ever has any he'll buy it with work. He wants to do some real
thing. Don't you think that's nice of him?"

"Yes, I do," said Mrs. Geoffrey. "And Dorris is that bright girl
who wanted thirteen things, and rhymed them into 'Crambo?' Mr.
Geoffrey told me."

"Yes, ma'am; Dorris can do almost anything."

"I should like to see Dorris, sometime. Will you bring her here,
Hazel?"

Hazel's little witch-rod felt the almost impassible something in the
way.

"I don't know as she would be _brought_," she said.

Mrs. Geoffrey laughed.

"You have an instinct for the fine proprieties, without a bit of
respect for any conventional fences," she said. "I'll _ask_ Dorris."

"Then I'm sure she'll come," said Hazel, understanding quite well
and gladly the last three words, and passing over the first phrase
as if it had been a Greek motto, put there to be skipped.

"Ada has stopped practicing," said Mrs. Geoffrey, who had undertaken
the entertainment of her little guest during her daughter's half
hour of music. "She will be waiting for you now."

Hazel instantly jumped up.

But she paused after three steps toward the door, to say gently,
looking back over her shoulder with a shy glance out of her timidly
clear eyes,--

"Perhaps,--I hope I haven't,--stayed too long!"

"Come back, you little hazel-sprite!" cried Mrs. Geoffrey; and when
she got her within reach again, she put her hands one each side of
the little blushing, gleaming face, and kissed it, saying,--

"I don't _think_,--I'm slow, usually, in making up my mind about
people, big or little,--but I don't think you can stay too long,--or
come too often, dear!"

"I've found another for you, Aleck," she said, that night at the
hair-brushing, to her husband.

He always came to sit in her dressing-room, then; and it was at this
quiet time that they gave each other, out of the day they had lived
in their partly separate ways and duties, that which made it for
each like a day lived twice, so that the years of their life counted
up double.

"He is a young architect, who hasn't architected much, because he
doesn't know the people who build things; and he wouldn't be a gold
broker with his uncle in New York, because he believes in doing
money's worth in the world for the world's money. Isn't he one?"

"Sounds like it," said Mr. Geoffrey. "What is his name?"

"Kincaid."

"Nephew of James R. Kincaid?" said Mr. Geoffrey, with an
interrogation that was also an exclamation. "And wouldn't go in with
him! Why, it was just to have picked up dollars!"

"Exactly," replied his wife. "That was what he objected to."

"I should like to see the fellow."

"Don't you remember? You have seen him! The night you went for Ada
to the Aspen Street party, and got into 'Crambo.' He was there; and
it was his sister who wanted thirteen things. I guess they do!"

"Ask them here," said the banker.

"I mean to," Mrs. Geoffrey answered. "That is, after I've seen
Hapsie Craydocke. She knows everything. I'll go there to-morrow
morning."

"'Behind' is a pretty good way to get in--to some places," said
Desire Ledwith, coming into the rose-pink room with news.
"Especially an omnibus. And the Ripwinkleys, and the Kincaids, and
old Miss Craydocke, and for all I know, Mrs. Scarup and Luclarion
Grapp are going to Summit Street to tea to-night. Boston is
topsy-turvey; Holmes was a prophet; and 'Brattle Street and Temple
Place are interchanging cards!' Mother, we ought to get intimate
with the family over the grocer's shop. Who knows what would come of
it? There are fairies about in disguise, I'm sure; or else it's the
millennium. Whichever it is, it's all right for Hazel, though; she's
ready. Don't you feel like foolish virgins, Flo and Nag? I do."

I am afraid it was when Desire felt a little inclination to "nag"
her elder sister, that she called her by that reprehensible name.
Agatha only looked lofty, and vouchsafed no reply; but Florence
said,--

"There's no need of any little triumphs or mortifications. Nobody
crows, and nobody cries. _I_'m glad. Diana's a dear, and Hazel's a
duck, besides being my cousins; why shouldn't I? Only there _is_ a
large hole for the cats, and a little hole for the kittens; and I'd
as lief, myself, go in with the cats."

"The Marchbankses are staying there, and Professor Gregory. I don't
know about cats," said Desire, demurely.

"It's a reason-why party, for all that," said Agatha, carelessly,
recovering her good humor.

"Well, when any nice people ask me, I hope there _will_ be a 'reason
why.' It's the persons of consequence that make the 'reason why.'"

And Desire had the last word.

Hazel Ripwinkley was thinking neither of large holes nor little
ones,--cats nor kittens; she was saying to Luclarion, sitting in her
shady down-stairs room behind the kitchen, that looked out into the
green yard corner, "how nicely things came out, after all!"

"They seemed so hobblety at first, when I went up there and saw all
those beautiful books, and pictures, and people living amongst them
every day, and the poor Kincaids not getting the least bit of a
stretch out of their corner, ever. I'll tell you what I thought,
Luclarion;" and here she almost whispered, "I truly did. I thought
God was making a mistake."

Luclarion put out her lips into a round, deprecating pucker, at
that, and drew in her breath,--

"Oo--sh!"

"Well, I mean it seemed as if there was a mistake somewhere; and
that I'd no business, at any rate, with what they wanted so. I
couldn't get over it until I asked for those pictures; and mother
said it was such a bold thing to do!"

"It was bold," said Luclarion; "but it wasn't forrud. It was gi'n
you, and it hit right. That was looked out for."

"It's a stumpy world," said Luclarion Grapp to Mrs. Ripwinkley,
afterward; "but some folks step right over their stumps athout
scarcely knowin' when!"

XII.

CRUMBS.

Desire Ledwith was, at this epoch, a perplexity and a worry,--even a
positive terror sometimes,--to her mother.

It was not a case of the hen hatching ducks, it was rather as if a
hen had got a hawk in her brood.

Desire's demurs and questions,--her dissatisfactions, sittings and
contempts,--threatened now and then to swoop down upon the family
life and comfort with destroying talons.

"She'll be an awful, strong-minded, radical, progressive,
overturning woman," Laura said, in despair, to her friend Mrs.
Megilp. "And Greenley Street, and Aspen Street, and that everlasting
Miss Craydocke, are making her worse. And what can I do? Because
there's Uncle."

Right before Desire,--not knowing the cloud of real bewilderment
that was upon her young spiritual perceptions, getting their first
glimpse of a tangled and conflicting and distorted world,--she drew
wondering comparisons between her elder children and this odd,
anxious, restless, sharp-spoken girl.

"I don't understand it," she would say. "It isn't a bit like a child
of mine. I always took things easy, and got the comfort of them
somehow; I think the world is a pretty pleasant place to live in,
and there's lots of satisfaction to be had; and Agatha and Florence
take after me; they are nice, good-natured, contented girls;
managing their allowances,--that I wish were more,--trimming their
own bonnets, and enjoying themselves with their friends,
girl-fashion."

Which was true. Agatha and Florence were neither fretful nor
dissatisfied; they were never disrespectful, perhaps because Mrs.
Ledwith demanded less of deferential observance than of a kind of
jolly companionship from her daughters; a go-and-come easiness in
and out of what they called their home, but which was rather the
trimming-up and outfitting place,--a sort of Holmes' Hole,--where
they put in spring and fall, for a thorough overhaul and rig; and at
other times, in intervals or emergencies, between their various and
continual social trips and cruises. They were hardly ever
all-togetherish, as Desire had said, if they ever were, it was over
house cleaning and millinery; when the ordering was complete,--when
the wardrobes were finished,--then the world was let in, or they let
themselves out, and--"looked."

"Desire is different," said Mrs. Ledwith. "She's like Grant's
father, and her Aunt Desire,--pudgicky and queer."

"Well, mamma," said the child, once, driven to desperate logic for
defense, "I don't see how it can be helped. If you _will_ marry into
the Ledwith family, you can't expect to have your children all
Shieres!"

Which, again, was very true. Laura laughed at the clever sharpness
of it, and was more than half proud of her bold chick-of-prey, after
all.

Yet Desire remembered that her Aunt Frances was a Shiere, also; and
she thought there might easily be two sides to the same family; why
not, since there were two sides still further back, always? There
was Uncle Titus; who knew but it was the Oldways streak in him after
all?

Desire took refuge, more and more, with Miss Craydocke, and Rachel
Froke, and the Ripwinkleys; she even went to Luclarion with
questions, to get her quaint notions of things; and she had ventured
into Uncle Titus's study, and taken down volumes of Swedenborg to
pry into, while he looked at her with long keen regards over his
spectacles, and she did not know that she was watched.

"That young girl, Desire, is restless, Titus," Rachel Froke said to
him one day. "She is feeling after something; she wants something
real to do; and it appears likely to me that she will do it, if they
don't take care."

After that, Uncle Titus fixed his attention upon her yet more
closely; and at this time Desire stumbled upon things in a strange
way among his bookshelves, and thought that Rachel Froke was growing
less precise in her fashion of putting to rights. Books were tucked
in beside each other as if they had been picked up and bestowed
anyhow; between "Heaven and Hell" and the "Four Leading Doctrines,"
she found, one day, "Macdonald's Unspoken Sermons," and there was a
leaf doubled lengthwise in the chapter about the White Stone and the
New Name. Another time, a little book of poems, by the same author,
was slid in, open, over the volumes of Darwin and Huxley, and the
pages upon whose outspread faces it lay were those that bore the
rhyme of the blind Bartimeus:--

          "O Jesus Christ! I am deaf and blind;
           Nothing comes through into my mind,
             I only am not dumb:
           Although I see Thee not, nor hear,
           I cry because Thou mayst be near
             O Son of Mary! come!"

Do you think a girl of seventeen may not be feeling out into the
spiritual dark,--may not be stretching helpless hands, vaguely,
toward the Hands that help? Desire Ledwith laid the book down again,
with a great swelling breath coming up slowly out of her bosom, and
with a warmth of tears in her earnest little eyes. And Uncle Titus
Oldways sat there among his papers, and never moved, or seemed to
look, but saw it all.

He never said a word to her himself; it was not Uncle Titus's way to
talk, and few suspected him of having anything to say in such
matters; but he went to Friend Froke and asked her,--

"Haven't you got any light that might shine a little for that child,
Rachel?"

And the next Sunday, in the forenoon, Desire came in; came in,
without knowing it, for her little light.

She had left home with the family on their way to church; she was
dressed in her buff silk pongee suit trimmed with golden brown bands
and quillings; she had on a lovely new brown hat with tea roses in
it; her gloves and boots were exquisite and many buttoned; Agatha
and Florence could not think what was the matter when she turned
back, up Dorset Street, saying suddenly, "I won't go, after all."
And then she had walked straight over the hill and down to Greenley
Street, and came in upon Rachel, sitting alone in a quiet gray
parlor that was her own, where there were ferns and ivies in the
window, and a little canary, dressed in brown and gold like Desire
herself, swung over them in a white wire cage.

When Desire saw how still it was, and how Rachel Froke sat there
with her open window and her open book, all by herself, she stopped
in the doorway with a sudden feeling of intrusion, which had not
occurred to her as she came.

"It's just what I want to come into; but if I do, it won't be
there. I've no right to spoil it. Don't mind, Rachel. I'll go away."

She said it softly and sadly, as if she could not help it, and was
turning back into the hall.

"But I do mind," said Rachel, speaking quickly. "Thee will come in,
and sit down. Whatever it is thee wants, is here for thee. Is it the
stillness? Then we will be still."

"That's so easy to say. But you can't do it for me. _You_ will be
still, and I shall be all in a stir. I want so to be just hushed
up!"

"Fed, and hushed up, in somebody's arms, like a baby. I know," said
Rachel Froke.

"How does she know?" thought Desire; but she only looked at her with
surprised eyes, saying nothing.

"Hungry and restless; that's what we all are," said Rachel Froke,
"until"--

"Well,--until?" demanded the strange girl, impetuously, as Rachel
paused. "I've been hungry ever since I was born, mother says."

"Until He takes us up and feeds us."

"Why don't He?--Mrs. Froke, when does He give it out? Once a month,
in church, they have the bread and the wine? Does that do it?"

"Thee knows we do not hold by ordinances, we Friends," said Rachel.
"But He gives the bread of life. Not once a month, or in any place;
it is his word. Does thee get no word when thee goes to church? Does
nothing come to thee?"

"I don't know; it's mixed up; the church is full of bonnets; and
people settle their gowns when they come in, and shake out their
hitches and puffs when they go out, and there's professional music
at one end, and--I suppose it's because I'm bad, but I don't know;
half the time it seems to me it's only Mig at the other. Something
all fixed up, and patted down, and smoothed over, and salted and
buttered, like the potato hills they used to make on my plate for me
at dinner, when I was little. But it's soggy after all, and has an
underground taste. It isn't anything that has just grown, up in the
light, like the ears of corn they rubbed in their hands. Breakfast
is better than dinner. Bread, with yeast in it, risen up new. They
don't feed with bread very often."

"The yeast in the bread, and the sparkle in the wine they are the
life of it; they are what make the signs."

"If they only gave it out fresh, and a little of it! But they keep
it over, and it grows cold and tough and flat, and people sit round
and pretend, but they don't eat. They've eaten other things,--all
sorts of trash,--before they came. They've spoiled their appetites.
Mine was spoiled, to-day. I felt so new and fussy, in these brown
things. So I turned round, and came here."

Mr. Oldways' saying came back into Mrs. Froke's mind:--

"Haven't you got any light, Rachel, that might shine a little for
that child?"

Perhaps that was what the child had come for.

What had the word of the Spirit been to Rachel Froke this day? The
new, fresh word, with the leaven in it? "A little of it;" that was
what she wanted.

Rachel took up the small red Bible that lay on the lightstand beside
her.

"I'll will give thee my First-Day crumb, Desire," she said. "It may
taste sweet to thee."

She turned to Revelation, seventh chapter.

"Look over with me; thee will see then where the crumb is," she
said; and as Desire came near and looked over her upon the page,
she read from the last two verses:--

"They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more.

"For the _Tenderness_ that is in the midst of the _Almightiness_
shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of water;
and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."

Her voice lingered over the words she put for the "Lamb" and the
"Throne," so that she said "Tenderness" with its own very yearning
inflection, and "Almightiness" with a strong fullness, glad in that
which can never fall short or be exhausted. Then she softly laid
over the cover, and sat perfectly still. It was the Quaker silence
that falls upon them in their assemblies, leaving each heart to
itself and that which the Spirit has given.

Desire was hushed all through; something living and real had
thrilled into her thought; her restlessness quieted suddenly under
it, as Mary stood quiet before the message of the angel.

When she did speak again, after a time, as Rachel Froke broke the
motionless pause by laying the book gently back again upon the
table, it was to say,--

"Why don't they preach like that, and leave the rest to preach
itself? A Sermon means a Word; why don't they just say the word, and
let it go?"

The Friend made no reply.

"I never could--quite--like that about the 'Lamb,' before," said
Desire, hesitatingly. "It seemed,--I don't know,--putting Him
_down_, somehow; making him tame; taking the grandness away that
made the gentleness any good. But,--'Tenderness;' that is beautiful!
Does it mean so in the other place? About taking away the sins,--do
you think?"

"'The Tenderness of God--the Compassion--that taketh away the sins
of the world?'" Mrs. Froke repeated, half inquiringly. "Jesus
Christ, God's Heart of Love toward man? I think it is so. I think,
child, thee has got thy crumb also, to-day."

But not all yet.

Pretty soon, they heard the front door open, and Uncle Titus come
in. Another step was behind his; and Kenneth Kincaid's voice was
speaking, about some book he had called to take.

Desire's face flushed, and her manner grew suddenly flurried.

"I must go," she said, starting up; yet when she got to the door,
she paused and delayed.

The voices were talking on, in the study; somehow, Desire had last
words also, to say to Mrs. Froke.

She was partly shy about going past that open door, and partly
afraid they might not notice her if she did. Back in her girlish
thought was a secret suggestion that she was pushing at all the time
with a certain self-scorn and denial, that it might happen that she
and Kenneth Kincaid would go out at the same moment; if so, he would
walk up the street with her, and Kenneth Kincaid was one of the few
persons whom Desire Ledwith thoroughly believed in and liked. "There
was no Mig about him," she said. It is hazardous when a girl of
seventeen makes one of her rare exceptions in her estimate of
character in favor of a man of six and twenty.

Yet Desire Ledwith hated "nonsense;" she wouldn't have anybody
sending her bouquets as they did to Agatha and Florence; she had an
utter contempt for lavender pantaloons and waxed moustaches; but for
Kenneth Kincaid, with his honest, clear look at life, and his high
strong purpose, to say friendly things,--tell her a little now and
then of how the world looked to him and what it demanded,--this
lifted her up; this made it seem worth while to speak and to hear.

So she was very glad when Uncle Titus saw her go down the hall,
after she had made up her mind that that way lay her straight path,
and that things contrived were not things worth happening,--and
spoke out her name, so that she had to stop, and turn to the open
doorway and reply; and Kenneth Kincaid came over and held out his
hand to her. He had two books in the other,--a volume of Bunsen and
a copy of "Guild Court,"--and he was just ready to go.

"Not been to church to-day?" said Uncle Titus to Desire.

"I've been--to Friend's Meeting," the girl answered.

"Get anything by that?" he asked, gruffly, letting the shag down
over his eyes that behind it beamed softly.

"Yes; a morsel," replied Desire. "All I wanted."

"All you wanted? Well, that's a Sunday-full!"

"Yes, sir, I think it is," said she.

When they got out upon the sidewalk, Kenneth Kincaid asked, "Was it
one of the morsels that may be shared, Miss Desire? Some crumbs
multiply by dividing, you know."

"It was only a verse out of the Bible, with a new word in it."

"A new word? Well, I think Bible verses often have that. I suppose
it was what they were made for."

Desire's glance at him had a question in it.

"Made to look different at different times, as everything does that
has life in it. Isn't that true? Clouds, trees, faces,--do they ever
look twice the same?"

"Yes," said Desire, thinking especially of the faces. "I think they
do, or ought to. But they may look _more_."

"I didn't say _contradictory_. To look more, there must be a
difference; a fresh aspect. And that is what the world is full of;
and the world is the word of God."

"The world?" said Desire, who had been taught in a dried up,
mechanical sort of way, that the Bible is the word of God; and
practically left to infer that, that point once settled, it might be
safely shut, up between its covers and not much meddled with,
certainly not over freely interpreted.

"Yes. What God had to say. In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was God. Without him was not anything made that was made."

Desire's face brightened. She knew those words by heart. They were
the first Sunday-school lesson she ever committed to memory, out of
the New Testament; "down to 'grace and truth,'" as she recollected.
What a jumble of repetitions it had been to her, then! Sentences so
much alike that she could not remember them apart, or which way they
came. All at once the simple, beautiful meaning was given to her.

_What God had to say._

And it took a world,--millions, of worlds,--to say it with.

"And the Bible, too?" she said, simply following out her own mental
perception, without giving the link. It was not needed. They were
upon one track.

"Yes; all things; and all _souls_. The world-word comes through
things; the Bible came through souls. And it is all the more alive,
and full, and deep, and changing; like a river."

"Living fountains of waters! that was part of the morsel to-day,"
Desire repeated impulsively, and then shyly explained.

"And the new word?"

Desire shrunk into silence for a moment; she was not used to, or
fond of Bible quoting, or even Bible talk; yet sin was hungering all
the time for Bible truth.

Mr. Kincaid waited.

So she repeated it presently; for Desire never made a fuss; she was
too really sensitive for that.

"'The Tenderness in the midst of the Almightiness shall feed them,
and shall lead them to living fountains of water.'"

Mr. Kincaid recognized the "new word," and his face lit up.

"'The Lamb in the midst of the Throne,'" he said. "Out of the Heart
of God, the Christ. Who was there before; the intent by which all
things were made. The same yesterday, and to-day, and forever; who
ever liveth to make intercession for us. Christ _had to be_. The
Word, full of grace, must be made flesh. Why need people dispute
about Eternity and Divinity, if they can only see that?--Was that
Mrs. Froke's reading?"

"Yes; that was Rachel's sermon."

"It is an illumination."

They walked all up Orchard Street without another word.

Then Kenneth Kincaid said,--"Miss Desire, why won't you come and
teach in the Mission School?"

"I teach? Why, I've got everything to learn!"

"But as fast as you _do_ learn; the morsels, you know. That is the
way they are given out. That is the wonder of the kingdom of heaven.
There is no need to go away and buy three hundred pennyworth before
we begin, that every one may take a little; the bread given as the
Master breaks it feeds them till they are filled; and there are
baskets full of fragments to gather up."

Kenneth Kincaid's heart was in his Sunday work, as his sister had
said. The more gladly now, that the outward daily bread was being
given.

Mr. Geoffrey,--one of those busy men, so busy that they do promptly
that which their hands find to do,--had put Kenneth in the way of
work. It only needed a word from him, and the surveying and laying
out of some new streets and avenues down there where Boston is
growing so big and grand and strange, were put into his charge.
Kenneth was busy now, cheerily busy, from Monday morning to Saturday
night; and restfully busy on the Sunday, straightening the paths and
laying out the ways for souls to walk in. He felt the harmony and
the illustration between his week and his Sunday, and the one
strengthening the other, as all true outward work does harmonize
with and show forth, and help the spiritual doing. It could not have
been so with that gold work, or any little feverish hitching on to
other men's business; producing nothing, advancing nothing, only
standing between to snatch what might fall, or to keep a premium for
passing from hand to hand.

Our great cities are so full,--our whole country is so
overrun,--with these officious middle-men whom the world does not
truly want; chiffonniers of trade, who only pick up a living out of
the great press and waste and overflow; and our boys are so eager to
slip in to some such easy, ready-made opportunity,--to get some
crossing to sweep.

What will come of it all, as the pretenses multiply? Will there be
always pennies for every little broom? Will two, and three, and six
sweeps be tolerated between side and side? By and by, I think, they
will have to turn to and lay pavements. Hard, honest work, and the
day's pay for it; that is what we have got to go back to; that and
the day's snug, patient living, which the pay achieves.

Then, as I say, the week shall illustrate the Sunday, and the Sunday
shall glorify the week; and what men do and build shall stand true
types, again, for the inner growth and the invisible building; so
that if this outer tabernacle were dissolved, there should be seen
glorious behind it, the house not made with hands,--eternal.

As Desire Ledwith met this young Kenneth Kincaid from day to day,
seeing him so often at her Aunt Ripwinkley's, where he and Dorris
went in and out now, almost like a son and daughter,--as she walked
beside him this morning, hearing him say these things, at which
the heart-longing in her burned anew toward the real and
satisfying,--what wonder was it that her restlessness grasped at
that in his life which was strong and full of rest; that she felt
glad and proud to have him tell his thought to her; that without any
silliness,--despising all silliness,--she should yet be conscious,
as girls of seventeen are conscious, of something that made her day
sufficient when she had so met him,--of a temptation to turn into
those streets in her walks that led his way? Or that she often, with
her blunt truth, toward herself as well as others, and her quick
contempt of sham and subterfuge, should snub herself mentally, and
turn herself round as by a grasp of her own shoulders, and make
herself walk off stoutly in a far and opposite direction, when,
without due need and excuse, she caught herself out in these things?

What wonder that this stood in her way, for very pleasantness, when
Kenneth asked her to come and teach in the school? That she was
ashamed to let herself do a thing--even a good thing, that her life
needed,--when there was this conscious charm in the asking; this
secret thought--that she should walk up home with him every Sunday!

She remembered Agatha and Florence, and she imagined, perhaps, more
than they would really have thought of it at home; and so as they
turned into Shubarton Place,--for he had kept on all the way along
Bridgeley and up Dorset Street with her,--she checked her steps
suddenly as they came near the door, and said brusquely,--

"No, Mr. Kincaid; I can't come to the Mission. I might learn A, and
teach them that; but how do I know I shall ever learn B, myself?"

He had left his question, as their talk went on, meaning to ask it
again before they separated. He thought it was prevailing with her,
and that the help that comes of helping others would reach her need;
it was for her sake he asked it; he was disappointed at the sudden,
almost trivial turn she gave it.

"You have taken up another analogy, Miss Desire," he said. "We were
talking about crumbs and feeding. The five loaves and the five
thousand. 'Why reason ye because ye have no bread? How is it that ye
do not understand?'"

Kenneth quoted these words naturally, pleasantly; as he might quote
anything that had been spoken to them both out of a love and
authority they both recognized, a little while ago.

But Desire was suddenly sharp and fractious. If it had not touched
some deep, live place in her, she would not have minded so much. It
was partly, too, the coming toward home. She had got away out of the
pure, clear spaces where such things seemed to be fit and
unstrained, into the edge of her earth atmosphere again, where,
falling, they took fire. Presently she would be in that ridiculous
pink room, and Glossy Megilp would be chattering about "those lovely
purple poppies with the black grass," that she had been lamenting
all the morning she had not bought for her chip hat, instead of the
pomegranate flowers. And Agatha would be on the bed, in her cashmere
sack, reading Miss Braddon.

"It would sound nice to tell them she was going down to the Mission
School to give out crumbs!"

Besides, I suppose that persons of a certain temperament never utter
a more ungracious "No," than when they are longing all the time to
say "Yes."

So she turned round on the lower step to Kenneth, when he had asked
that grave, sweet question of the Lord's, and said perversely,--

"I thought you did not believe in any brokering kind of business.
It's all there,--for everybody. Why should I set up to fetch and
carry?"

She did not look in his face as she said it; she was not audacious
enough to do that; she poked with the stick of her sunshade between
the uneven bricks of the sidewalk, keeping her eyes down, as if she
watched for some truth she expected to pry up. But she only wedged
the stick in so that she could not get it out; and Kenneth Kincaid
making her absolutely no answer at all, she had to stand there,
growing red and ashamed, held fast by her own silly trap.

"Take care; you will break it," said Kenneth, quietly, as she gave
it a twist and a wrench. And he put out his hand, and took it from
hers, and drew gently upward in the line in which she had thrust it
in.

"You were bearing off at an angle. It wanted a straight pull."

"I never pull straight at anything. I always get into a crook,
somehow. You didn't answer me, Mr. Kincaid. I didn't mean to be
rude--or wicked. I didn't mean--"

"What you said. I know that; and it's no use to answer what people
don't mean. That makes the crookedest crook of all."

"But I think I did mean it partly; only not contrarimindedly. I do
mean that I have no business--yet awhile. It would only be--Migging
at gospel!"

And with this remarkable application of her favorite illustrative
expression, she made a friendly but abrupt motion of leave-taking,
and went into the house.

Up into her own room, in the third story, where the old furniture
was, and no "fadging,"--and sat down, bonnet, gloves, sunshade, and
all, in her little cane rocking-chair by the window.

Helena was down in the pink room, listening with charmed ears to the
grown up young-ladyisms of her elder sisters and Glossy Megilp.

Desire sat still until the dinner-bell rang, forgetful of her dress,
forgetful of all but one thought that she spoke out as she rose at
last at the summons to take off her things in a hurry,--

"I wonder,--I _wonder_--if I shall ever live anything all straight
out!"

XIII.

PIECES OF WORLDS.

Mr. Dickens never put a truer thought into any book, than he put at
the beginning of "Little Dorrit."

That, from over land and sea, from hundreds, thousands of miles
away, are coming the people with whom we are to have to do in our
lives; and that, "what is set to us to do to them, and what is set
for them to do to us, will all be done."

Not only from far places in this earth, over land and sea,--but from
out the eternities, before and after,--from which souls are born,
and into which they die,--all the lines of life are moving
continually which are to meet and join, and bend, and cross our own.

But it is only with a little piece of this world, as far as we can
see it in this short and simple story, that we have now to do.

Rosamond Holabird was coming down to Boston.

With all her pretty, fresh, delicate, high-lady ways, with her
beautiful looks, and her sweet readiness for true things and noble
living, she was coming, for a few days only,--the cooperative
housekeeping was going on at Westover, and she could not be spared
long,--right in among them here in Aspen Street, and Shubarton
Place, and Orchard Street, and Harrisburg Square, where Mrs.
Scherman lived whom she was going to stay with. But a few days may
be a great deal.

Rosamond Holabird was coming for far more than she knew. Among
other things she was coming to get a lesson; a lesson right on in a
course she was just now learning; a lesson of next things, and best
things, and real folks.

You see how it happened,--where the links were; Miss Craydocke, and
Sin Scherman, and Leslie Goldthwaite, were dear friends, made to
each other one summer among the mountains. Leslie had had Sin and
Miss Craydocke up at Z----, and Rosamond and Leslie were friends,
also.

Mrs. Frank Scherman had a pretty house in Harrisburg Square. She had
not much time for paying fashionable calls, or party-going, or
party-giving. As to the last, she did not think Frank had money
enough yet to "circumfuse," she said, in that way.

But she had six lovely little harlequin cups on a side-shelf in her
china closet, and six different-patterned breakfast plates, with
colored borders to match the cups; rose, and brown, and gray, and
vermilion, and green, and blue. These were all the real china she
had, and were for Frank and herself and the friends whom she made
welcome,--and who might come four at once,--for day and night. She
delighted in "little stays;" in girls who would go into the nursery
with her, and see Sinsie in her bath; or into the kitchen, and help
her mix up "little delectabilities to surprise Frank with;" only the
trouble had got to be now, that the surprise occurred when the
delectabilities did not. Frank had got demoralized, and expected
them. She rejoiced to have Miss Craydocke drop in of a morning and
come right up stairs, with her little petticoats and things to work
on; and she and Frank returned these visits in a social, cosy way,
after Sinsie was in her crib for the night. Frank's boots never went
on with a struggle for a walk down to Orchard Street; but they were
terribly impossible for Continuation Avenue.

So it had come about long ago, though I have not had a corner to
mention it in, that they "knew the Muffin Man," in an Aspen Street
sense; and were no strangers to the charm of Mrs. Ripwinkley's
"evenings." There was always an "evening" in the "Mile Hill House,"
as the little family and friendly coterie had come to call it.

Rosamond and Leslie had been down together for a week once, at the
Schermans; and this time Rosamond was coming alone. She had business
in Boston for a day or two, and had written to ask Asenath "if she
might." There were things to buy for Barbara, who was going to be
married in a "navy hurry," besides an especial matter that had
determined her just at this time to come.

And Asenath answered, "that the scarlet and gray, and green and blue
were pining and fading on the shelf; and four days would be the very
least to give them all a turn and treat them fairly; for such things
had their delicate susceptibilities, as Hans Andersen had taught us
to know, and might starve and suffer,--why not? being made of
protoplasm, same as anybody."

Rosamond's especial errand to the city was one that just a little
set her up, innocently, in her mind. She had not wholly got the
better,--when it interfered with no good-will or generous
dealing,--of a certain little instinctive reverence for imposing
outsides and grand ways of daily doing; and she was somewhat
complacent at the idea of having to go,--with kindly and needful
information,--to Madam Mucklegrand, in Spreadsplendid Park.

Madam Mucklegrand was a well-born Boston lady, who had gone to
Europe in her early youth, and married a Scottish gentleman with a
Sir before his name. Consequently, she was quite entitled to be
called "my lady;" and some people who liked the opportunity of
touching their republican tongues to the salt of European
dignitaries, addressed her so; but, for the most part, she assumed
and received simply the style of "Madam." A queen may be called
"Madam," you know. It covers an indefinite greatness. But when she
spoke of her late,--very long ago,--husband, she always named him as
"Sir Archibald."

Madam Mucklegrand's daughter wanted a wet-nurse for her little baby.

Up in Z----, there was a poor woman whose husband, a young brakeman
on the railroad, had been suddenly killed three months ago, before
her child was born. There was a sister here in Boston, who could
take care of it for her if she could go to be foster-mother to some
rich little baby, who was yet so poor as this--to need one. So
Rosamond Holabird, who was especially interested for Mrs. Jopson,
had written to Asenath, and had an advertisement put in the
"Transcript," referring to Mrs. Scherman for information. And the
Mucklegrand carriage had rolled up, the next day, to the house in
Harrisburg Square.

They wanted to see the woman, of course, and to hear all about
her,--more than Mrs. Scherman was quite able to tell; therefore when
she sent a little note up to Z----, by the evening mail, Rosamond
replied with her "Might she come?"

She brought Jane Jopson and the baby down with her, left them over
night at Mrs. Ginnever's, in Sheafe Street, and was to go for them
next morning and take them up to Spreadsplendid Park. She had sent a
graceful, polite little note to Madam Mucklegrand, dated "Westover,
Z----," and signed, "Rosamond Holabird," offering to do this, that
there might not be the danger of Jane's losing the chance in the
meanwhile.

It was certainly to accomplish the good deed that Rosamond cared
the most; but it was also certainly something to accomplish it in
that very high quarter. It lent a piquancy to the occasion.

She came down to breakfast very nicely and discriminatingly dressed,
with the elegant quietness of a lady who knew what was simply
appropriate to such an errand and the early hour, but who meant to
be recognized as the lady in every unmistakable touch; and there was
a carriage ordered for her at half past nine.

Sin Scherman was a cute little matron; she discerned the dash of
subdued importance in Rosamond's air; and she thought it very
likely, in the Boston nature of things, that it would get
wholesomely and civilly toned down.

Just at this moment, Rosamond, putting on her little straw bonnet
with real lace upon it, and her simple little narrow-bordered green
shawl, that was yet, as far as it went, veritable cashmere,--had a
consciousness, in a still, modest way, not only of her own personal
dignity as Rosamond Holabird, who was the same going to see Madam
Mucklegrand, or walking over to Madam Pennington's, and as much in
her place with one as the other; but of the dignity of Westover
itself, and Westover ladyhood, represented by her among the palaces
of Boston-Appendix to-day.

She was only twenty, this fair and pleasant Rosamond of ours, and
country simple, with all her native tact and grace; and she forgot,
or did not know how full of impressions a life like Madam
Mucklegrand's might be, and how very trifling and fleeting must be
any that she might chance to make.

She drove away down to the North End, and took Jane Jopson and her
baby in,--very clean and shiny, both of them,--and Jane
particularly nice in the little black crape bonnet that Rosamond
herself had made, and the plain black shawl that Mrs. Holabird had
given her.

She stood at the head of the high, broad steps, with her mind very
much made up in regard to her complete and well-bred self-possession,
and the manner of her quietly assured self-introduction. She had her
card all ready that should explain for her; and to the servant's
reply that Madam Mucklegrand was in, she responded by moving forward
with only enough of voluntary hesitation to allow him to indicate to
her the reception room, at the door of which she gave him the little
pasteboard, with,--

"Take that to her, if you please," and so sat down, very much as if
she had been in such places frequently before, which she never had.
One may be quite used to the fine, free essence of gentle living,
and never in all one's life have anything to do with such solid,
concrete expression of it as Rosamond saw here.

Very high, to begin with, the ceiled and paneled room was; reaching
up into space as if it had really been of no consequence to the
builders where they should put the cover on; and with no remotest
suggestion of any reserve for further superstructure upon the same
foundation.

Very dark, and polished, and deeply carved, and heavily ornamented
were its wainscotings, and frames, and cornices; out of the new look
of the streets, which it will take them yet a great while to
outgrow, she had stepped at once into a grand, and mellow, and
ancient stateliness.

There were dim old portraits on the walls, and paintings that hinted
at old mastership filled whole panels; and the tall, high-backed,
wonderfully wrought oaken chairs had heraldic devices in relief upon
their bars and corners; and there was a great, round mosaic table,
in soft, rich, dark colors, of most precious stones; these, in
turn, hidden with piles of rare engravings.

The floor was of dark woods, inlaid; and sumptuous rugs were put
about upon it for the feet, each one of which was wide enough to
call a carpet.

And nothing of it all was _new_; there was nothing in the room but
some plants in a jardiniere by the window, that seemed to have a bit
of yesterday's growth upon it.

A great, calm, marble face of Jove looked down from high up, out of
the shadows.

Underneath sat Rosamond Holabird, holding on to her identity and her
self-confidence.

Madam Mucklegrand came in plainly enough dressed,--in black; you
would not notice what she had on; but you would notice instantly the
consummate usedness to the world and the hardening into the mould
thereof that was set and furrowed upon eye and lip and brow.

She sailed down upon Rosamond like a frigate upon a graceful little
pinnace; and brought to within a pace or two of her, continuing to
stand an instant, as Rosamond rose, just long enough for the shadow
of a suggestion that it might not be altogether material that she
should be seated again at all.

But Rosamond made a movement backward to her chair, and laid her
hand upon its arm, and then Madam Mucklegrand decided to sit down.

"You called about the nurse, I conclude, Miss--Holabird?"

"Yes, ma'am; I thought you had some questions you wished to ask, and
that I had better come myself. I have her with me, in the carriage."

"Thank you," said Madam Mucklegrand, politely.

But it was rather a _de haut en bas_ politeness; she exercised it
also toward her footman.

Then followed inquiries about age, and health, and character.
Rosamond told all she knew, clearly and sufficiently, with some
little sympathetic touches that she could not help, in giving her
story.

Madam Mucklegrand met her nowhere, however, on any common ground;
she passed over all personal interest; instead of two women
befriending a third in her need, who in turn was to give life to a
little child waiting helplessly for some such ministry, it might
have been the leasing of a house, or the dealing about some
merchandise, that was between them.

Rosamond proposed, at last, to send Jane Jopson in.

Jane and her baby were had in, and had up-stairs; the physician and
attending nurse pronounced upon her; she was brought down again, to
go home and dispose of her child, and return. Rosamond, meanwhile,
had been sitting under the marble Jove.

There was nothing really rude in it; she was there on business; what
more could she expect? But then she knew all the time, that she too
was a lady, and was taking trouble to do a kind thing. It was not so
that Madam Mucklegrand would have been treated at Westover.

Rosamond was feeling pretty proud by the time Madam Mucklegrand came
down stairs.

"We have engaged the young woman: the doctor quite approves; she
will return without delay, I hope?"

As if Rosamond were somehow responsible all through.

"I have no doubt she will; good morning, madam."

"Good morning. I am, really, very much obliged. You have been of
great service."

Rosamond turned quietly round upon the threshold.

"That was what I was very anxious to be," she said, in her perfectly
sweet and musical voice,--"to the poor woman."

Italics would indicate too coarsely the impalpable emphasis she put
upon the last two words. But Mrs. Mucklegrand caught it.

Rosamond went away quite as sure of her own self-respect as ever,
but very considerably cured of Spreadsplendidism.

This was but one phase of it, she knew; there are real folks, also,
in Spreadsplendid Park; they are a good deal covered up, there, to
be sure; but they can't help that. It is what always happens to
somebody when Pyramids are built. Madam Mucklegrand herself was,
perhaps, only a good deal covered up.

How lovely it was to go down into Orchard Street after that, and
take tea with Miss Craydocke! How human and true it seemed,--the
friendliness that shone and breathed there, among them all. How
kingdom-of-heaven-like the air was, and into what pleasantness of
speech it was born!

And then Hazel Ripwinkley came over, like a little spirit from
another blessed society, to tell that "the picture-book things were
all ready, and that it would take everybody to help."

That was Rosamond's first glimpse of Witch Hazel, who found her out
instantly,--the real, Holabirdy part of her,--and set her down at
once among her "folks."

It was bright and cheery in Mrs. Ripwinkley's parlor; you could
hardly tell whence the cheeriness radiated, either.

The bright German lamp was cheery, in the middle of the round table;
the table was cheery, covered with glossy linen cut into large,
square book-sheets laid in piles, and with gay pictures of all
kinds, brightly colored; and the scissors,--or scissorses,--there
were ever so many shining pairs of them,--and the little mucilage
bottles, and the very scrap-baskets,--all looked cozy and
comfortable, and as if people were going to have a real good time
among them, somehow.

And the somehow was in making great beautiful, everlasting
picture-books for the little orphans in Miss Craydocke's Home,--the
Home, that is, out of several blessed and similar ones that she was
especially interested in, and where Hazel and Diana had been with
her until they knew all the little waifs by sight and name and
heart, and had their especial chosen property among them, as they
used to have among the chickens and the little yellow ducks at
Homesworth Farm.

Mrs. Ripwinkley was cheery; it might be a question whether all the
light did not come from her first, in some way, and perhaps it did;
but then Hazel was luminous, and she fluttered about with quick,
happy motions, till like a little glancing taper she had shone upon
and lit up everybody and everything; and Dorris was sunny with clear
content, and Kenneth was blithe, and Desire was scintillant, as she
always was either with snaps or smiles; and here came in beaming
Miss Craydocke, and gay Asenath and her handsome husband; and our
Rosa Mundi; there,--how can you tell? It was all round; and it was
more every minute.

There were cutters and pasters and stitchers and binders and every
part was beautiful work, and nobody could tell which was
pleasantest. Cutting out was nice, of course; who doesn't like
cutting out pictures? Some were done beforehand, but there were as
many left as there would be time for. And pasting, on the fine,
smooth linen, making it glow out with charming groups and tints of
flowers and birds and children in gay clothes,--that was
delightful; and the stitchers had the pleasure of combining and
arranging it all; and the binders,--Mrs. Ripwinkley and Miss
Craydocke,--finished all off with the pretty ribbons and the gray
covers, and theirs being the completing touch, thought _they_ had
the best of it.

"But I don't think finishing is best, mother," said Hazel, who was
diligently snipping in and out around rose leaves or baby faces, as
it happened. "I think beginning is always beautiful. I never want to
end off,--anything nice, I mean."

"Well, we don't end off this," said Diana. "There's the giving,
next."

"And then their little laughs and Oo's," said Hazel.

"And their delight day after day; and the comfort of them in their
little sicknesses," said Miss Craydocke.

"And the stories that have got to be told about every picture," said
Dorris.

"No; nothing really nice does end; it goes on and on," said Mrs.
Ripwinkley.

"Of course!" said Hazel, triumphantly, turning on the Drummond light
of her child-faith. "We're forever and ever people, you know!"

"Please paste some more flowers, Mr. Kincaid," said Rosamond, who
sat next him, stitching. "I want to make an all-flower book of this.
No,--not roses; I've a whole page already; this great white lily, I
think. That's beautiful!"

"Wouldn't it do to put in this laurel bush next, with the bird's
nest in it?"

"O, those lovely pink and white laurels! Yes. Where did you get such
pictures, Miss Hazel?"

"O, everybody gave them to us, all summer, ever since we began. Mrs.
Geoffrey gave those flowers; and mother painted some. She did that
laurel. But don't call me Miss Hazel, please; it seems to send me
off into a corner."

Rosamond answered by a little irresistible caress; leaning her head
down to Hazel, on her other side, until her cheek touched the
child's bright curls, quickly and softly. There was magnetism
between those two.

Ah, the magnetism ran round!

"For a child's picture-book, Mrs. Ripwinkley?" said Mrs. Scherman,
reaching over for the laurel picture. "Aren't these almost
too exquisite? They would like a big scarlet poppy just as
well,--perhaps better. Or a clump of cat-o'-nine-tails," she added,
whimsically.

"There _is_ a clump of cat-o'-nine-tails," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "I
remember how I used to delight in them as a child,--the real ones."

"Pictures are to _tell_ things," said Desire, in her brief way.

"These little city refugees _must_ see them, somehow," said
Rosamond, gently. "I understand. They will never get up on the
mountains, maybe, where the laurels grow, or into the shady swamps
among the flags and the cat-o'-nine-tails. You have _picked out_
pictures to give them, Mrs. Ripwinkley."

Kenneth Kincaid's scissors stopped a moment, as he looked at
Rosamond, pausing also over the placing of her leaves.

Desire saw that from the other side; she saw how beautiful and
gracious this girl was--this Rosamond Holabird; and there was a
strange little twinge in her heart, as she felt, suddenly, that let
there be ever so much that was true and kindly, or even tender, in
her, it could never come up in her eyes or play upon her lips like
that she could never say it out sweetly and in due place everything
was a spasm with her; and nobody would ever look at her just as
Kenneth Kincaid looked at Rosamond then.

She said to herself, with her harsh, unsparing honesty, that it must
be a "hitch inside;" a cramp or an awkwardness born in her, that set
her eyes, peering and sharp, so near together, and put that knot
into her brows instead of their widening placidly, like Rosamond's,
and made her jerky in her speech. It was no use; she couldn't look
and behave, because she couldn't _be_; she must just go boggling and
kinking on, and--losing everything, she supposed.

The smiles went down, under a swift, bitter little cloud, and the
hard twist came into her face with the inward pinching she was
giving herself; and all at once there crackled out one of her sharp,
strange questions; for it was true that she could not do otherwise;
everything was sudden and crepitant with her.

"Why need all the good be done up in batches, I wonder? Why can't it
be spread round, a little more even? There must have been a good
deal left out somewhere, to make it come in a heap, so, upon you,
Miss Craydocke!"

Hazel looked up.

"I know what Desire means," she said. "It seemed just so to me,
_one_ way. Why oughtn't there to be _little_ homes, done-by-hand
homes, for all these little children, instead of--well--machining
them all up together?"

And Hazel laughed at her own conceit.

"It's nice; but then--it isn't just the way. If we were all brought
up like that we shouldn't know, you see!"

"You wouldn't want to be brought up in a platoon, Hazel?" said
Kenneth Kincaid. "No; neither should I."

"I think it was better," said Hazel, "to have my turn of being a
little child, all to myself; _the_ little child, I mean, with the
rest of the folks bigger. To make much of me, you know. I shouldn't
want to have missed that. I shouldn't like to be _loved_ in a
platoon."

"Nobody is meant to be," said Miss Craydocke.

"Then why--" began Asenath Scherman, and stopped.

"Why what, dear?"

"Revelations," replied Sin, laconically. "There are loads of people
there, all dressed alike, you know; and--well--it's platoony, I
think, rather! And down here, such a world-full; and the sky--full
of worlds. There doesn't seem to be much notion of one at a time, in
the general plan of things."

"Ah, but we've got the key to all that," said Miss Craydocke. "'The
very hairs of your head are all numbered.' It may be impossible with
us, you know, but not with Him."

"Miss Hapsie! you always did put me down, just when I thought I was
smart," said Sin Scherman.

Asenath loved to say "Miss Hapsie," now and then, to her friend,
ever since she had found out what she called her "squee little
name."

"But the little children, Miss Craydocke," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "It
seems to me Desire has got a right thought about it."

Mrs. Ripwinkley and Hazel always struck the same note. The same
delicate instinct moved them both. Hazel "knew what Desire meant;"
her mother did not let it be lost sight of that it was Desire who
had led the way in this thought of the children; so that the abrupt
beginning--the little flash out of the cloud--was quite forgotten
presently, in the tone of hearty understanding and genuine interest
with which the talk went on; and it was as if all that was generous
and mindfully suggestive in it had first and truly come from her.
They unfolded herself for her--these friendly ones--as she could not
do; out of her bluntness grew a graciousness that lay softly over
it; the cloud itself melted away and floated off; and Desire began
to sparkle again more lambently. For she was not one of the kind to
be meanly or enviously "put out."

"It seemed to me there must be a great many spare little corners
somewhere, for all these spare little children," she said, "and
that, lumped up together so, there was something they did not get."

"That is precisely the thing," said Miss Craydocke, emphatically. "I
wonder, sometimes," she went on, tenderly, "if whenever God makes a
little empty place in a home, it isn't really on purpose that it
might be filled with one of these,--if people only thought."

"Miss Craydocke," said Hazel, "how did you begin your beehive?"

"I!" said the good lady. "I didn't. It began itself."

"Well, then, how did you _let_ it begin?"

"Ah!"

The tone was admissive, and as if she had said, "_That_ is another
thing!" She could not contradict that she had let it be.

"I'll tell you a queer story," she said, "of what they say they used