They might have transplanted the game,—they did take slips from it,—and we might not always have had tickets to our own play; but they could not transplant Harry Goldthwaite and Dakie Thayne. They would come over, nearly every day, at morning or evening, and practise "coil," or make some other plan or errand; and so there came to be always something going on at the Holabirds', and if the other girls wanted it, they had to come where it was.

Mrs. Van Alstyne came often; Rosamond grew very intimate with her.

Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks did say, one day, that she thought "the Holabirds were slightly mistaking their position"; but the remark did not come round, westover, till long afterward, and meanwhile the position remained the same.

It was right in the midst of all this that Ruth astonished the family again, one evening.

"I wish," she said, suddenly, just as if she were not suggesting something utterly incongruous and disastrous, "that we could ask Lucilla Waters up here for a little visit."

The girls had a way, in Z——, of spending two or three days together at each other's houses, neighbors though they were, within easy reach, and seeing each other almost constantly. Leslie Goldthwaite came up to the Haddens', or they went down to the Goldthwaites'. The Haddens would stay over night at the Marchbanks', and on through the next day, and over night again. There were, indeed, three recognized degrees of intimacy: that which took tea,—that which came in of a morning and stayed to lunch,—and that which was kept over night without plan or ceremony. It had never been very easy for us Holabirds to do such things without plan; of all things, nearly, in the world, it seemed to us sometimes beautiful and desirable to be able to live just so as that we might.

"I wish," said Ruth, "that we could have Lucilla Waters here."

"My gracious!" cried Rosamond, startled into a soft explosion. "What for?"

"Why, I think she'd like it," answered Ruth.

"Well, I suppose Arctura Fish might 'like it' too," responded Rose, in a deadly quiet way now, that was the extreme of sarcasm.

Ruth looked puzzled; as if she really considered what Rosamond suggested, not having thought of it before, and not quite knowing how to dispose of the thought since she had got it.

Dakie Thayne was there; he sat holding some gold-colored wool for Mrs. Holabird to wind; she was giving herself the luxury of some pretty knitting,—making a bright little sofa affghan. Ruth had forgotten him at the instant, speaking out of a quiet pause and her own intent thought.

She made up her mind presently,—partly at least,—and spoke again. "I don't believe," she said, "that it would be the next thing for Arctura Fish."

Dakie Thayne's eyebrows went up, just that half perceptible line or two. "Do you think people ought always to have the next thing?" he asked.

"It seems to me it must be somebody's fault if they don't," replied Ruth.

"It is a long waiting sometimes to get the next thing," said Dakie Thayne. "Army men find that out. They grow gray getting it."

"That's where only one can have it at a time," said Ruth. "These things are different."

"'Next things' interfere occasionally," said Barbara. "Next things up, and next things down."

"I don't know," said Rose, serenely unconscious and impersonal. "I suppose people wouldn't naturally—it can't be meant they should—walk right away from their own opportunities."

Ruth laughed,—not aloud, only a little single breath, over her work.

Dakie Thayne leaned back.

"What,—if you please,—Miss Ruth?"

"I was thinking of the opportunities down," Ruth answered.

It was several days after this that the young party drifted together again, on the Westover lawn. A plan was discussed. Mrs. Van Alstyne had walked over with Olivia and Adelaide Marchbanks, and it was she who suggested it.

"Why don't you have regular practisings," said she, "and then a meeting, for this and the archery you wanted to get up, and games for a prize? They would do nicely together."

Olivia Marchbanks drew up a little. She had not meant to launch the project here. Everything need not begin at Westover all at once.

But Dakie Thayne broke in.

"Did you think of that?" said he. "It's a capital idea."

"Ideas are rather apt to be that," said Adelaide Marchbanks. "It is the carrying out, you see."

"Isn't it pretty nearly carried out already? It is only to organize what we are doing as it is."

"But the minute you do organize! You don't know how difficult it is in a place like this. A dozen of us are not enough, and as soon as you go beyond, there gets to be too much of it. One doesn't know where to stop."

"Or to skip?" asked Harry Goldthwaite, in such a purely bright, good-natured way that no one could take it amiss.

"Well, yes, to skip," said Adelaide. "Of course that's it. You don't go straight on, you know, house by house, when you ask people,—down the hill and into the town."

"We talked it over," said Olivia. "And we got as far as the Hobarts." There Olivia stopped. That was where they had stopped before.

"O yes, the Hobarts; they would be sure to like it," said Leslie Goldthwaite, quick and pleased.

"Her ups and downs are just like yours," said Dakie Thayne to Ruth Holabird.

It made Ruth very glad to be told she was at all like Leslie; it gave her an especially quick pulse of pleasure to have Dakie Thayne say so. She knew he thought there was hardly any one like Leslie Goldthwaite.

"O, they won't exactly do, you know!" said Adelaide Marchbanks, with an air of high free-masonry.

"Won't do what?" asked Cadet Thayne, obtusely.

"Suit," replied Olivia, concisely, looking straight forward without any air at all.

"Really, we have tried it since they came," said Adelaide, "though what people come for is the question, I think, when there isn't anything particular to bring them except the neighborhood, and then it has to be Christian charity in the neighborhood that didn't ask them to pick them up. Mamma called, after a while; and Mrs. Hobart said she hoped she would come often, and let the girls run in and be sociable! And Grace Hobart says 'she hasn't got tired of croquet,—she likes it real well!' They're that sort of people, Mr. Thayne."

"Oh! that's very bad," said Dakie Thayne, with grave conclusiveness.

"The Haddens had them one night, when we were going to play commerce. When we asked them up to the table, they held right back, awfully stiff, and couldn't find anything else to say than,—out quite loud, across everything,—'O no! they couldn't play commerce; they never did; father thought it was just like any gambling game!'"

"Plucky, anyhow," said Harry Goldthwaite.

"I don't think they meant to be rude," said Elinor Hadden. "I think they really felt badly; and that was why it blurted right out so. They didn't know what to say."

"Evidently," said Olivia. "And one doesn't want to be astonished in that way very often."

"I shouldn't mind having them," said Elinor, good-naturedly. "They are kind-hearted people, and they would feel hurt to be left out."

"That is just what stopped us," said Adelaide. "That is just what the neighborhood is getting to be,—full of people that you don't know what to do with."

"I don't see why we need to go out of our own set," said Olivia.

"O dear! O dear!"

It broke from Ruth involuntarily. Then she colored up, as they all turned round upon her; but she was excited, and Ruth's excitements made her forget that she was Ruth, sometimes, for a moment. It had been growing in her, from the beginning of the conversation; and now she caught her breath, and felt her eyes light up. She turned her face to Leslie Goldthwaite; but although she spoke low she spoke somehow clearly, even more than she meant, so that they all heard.

"What if the angels had said that before they came down to Bethlehem!"

Then she knew by the hush that she had astonished them, and she grew frightened; but she stood just so, and would not let her look shrink; for she still felt just as she did when the words came.

Mrs. Van Alstyne broke the pause with a good-natured laugh.

"We can't go quite back to that, every time," she said. "And we don't quite set up to be angels. Come,—try one more round."

And with some of the hoops still hanging upon her arm, she turned to pick up the others. Harry Goldthwaite of course sprang forward to do it for her; and presently she was tossing them with her peculiar grace, till the stake was all wreathed with them from bottom to top, the last hoop hanging itself upon the golden ball; a touch more dexterous and consummate, it seemed, than if it had fairly slidden over upon the rest.



Rosamond knew what a cunning and friendly turn it was; if it had not been for Mrs. Van Alstyne, Ruth's speech would have broken up the party. As it was, the game began again, and they stayed an hour longer.

Not all of them; for as soon as they were fairly engaged, Ruth said to Leslie Goldthwaite, "I must go now; I ought to have gone before. Reba will be waiting for me. Just tell them, if they ask."

But Leslie and the cadet walked away with her; slowly, across the grounds, so that she thought they were going back from the gate; but they kept on up over the hill.

"Was it very shocking?" asked Ruth, troubled in her mind. "I could not help it; but I was frightened to death the next minute."

"About as frightened as the man is who stands to his gun in the front," said Dakie Thayne. "You never flinched."

"They would have thought it was from what I had said," Ruth answered. "And that was another thing from the saying."

"You had something to say, Leslie. It was just on the corner of your lip. I saw it."

"Yes; but Ruth said it all in one flash. It would have spoiled it if I had spoken then."

"I'm always sorry for people who don't know how," said Ruth. "I'm sure I don't know how myself so often."

"That is just it," said Leslie. "Why shouldn't these girls come up? And how will they ever, unless somebody overlooks? They would find out these mistakes in a little while, just as they find out fashions: picking up the right things from people who do know how. It is a kind of leaven, like greater good. And how can we stand anywhere in the lump, and say it shall not spread to the next particle?"

"They think it was pushing of them, to come here to live at all," said Ruth.

"Well, we're all pushing, if we're good for anything," said Leslie. "Why mayn't they push, if they don't crowd out anybody else? It seems to me that the wrong sort of pushing is pushing down."

"Only there would be no end to it," said Dakie Thayne, "would there? There are coarse, vulgar people always, who are wanting to get in just for the sake of being in. What are the nice ones to do?"

"Just be nice, I think," said Leslie. "Nicer with those people than with anybody else even. If there weren't any difficulty made about it,—if there weren't any keeping out,—they would tire of the niceness probably sooner than anything. I don't suppose it is the fence that keeps out weeds."

"You are just like Mrs. Ingleside," said Ruth, walking closer to Leslie as she spoke.

"And Mrs. Ingleside is like Miss Craydocke: and—I didn't suppose I should ever find many more of them, but they're counting up," said Dakie Thayne. "There's a pretty good piece of the world salted, after all."

"If there really is any best society," pursued Leslie, "it seems to me it ought to be, not for keeping people out, but for getting everybody in as fast as it can, like the kingdom of heaven."

"Ah, but that is kingdom come," said Dakie Thayne.

It seemed as if the question of "things next" was to arise continually, in fresh shapes, just now, when things next for the Holabirds were nearer next than ever before.

"We must have Delia Waite again soon, if we can get her," said mother, one morning, when we were all quietly sitting in her room, and she was cutting out some shirts for Stephen. "All our changes and interruptions have put back the sewing so lately."

"We ought not to have been idle so much," said Barbara. "We've been a family of grasshoppers all summer."

"Well, the grasshopping has done you all good. I'm not sorry for it," said Mrs. Holabird. "Only we must have Delia for a week now, and be busy."

"If Delia Waite didn't have to come to our table!" said Rosamond.

"Why don't you try the girl Mrs. Hadden has, mother? She goes right into the kitchen with the other servants."

"I don't believe our 'other servants' would know what to do with her," said Barbara. "There's always such a crowd in our kitchen."

"Barbara, you're a plague!"

"Yes. I'm the thorn in the flesh in this family, lest it should be exalted above measure; and like Saint Paul, I magnify mine office."

"In the way we live," said Mrs. Holabird, "it is really more convenient to let a seamstress come right to table with us; and besides, you know what I think about it. It is a little breath of life to a girl like that; she gets something that we can give as well as not, and that helps her up. It comes naturally, as it cannot come with 'other servants.' She sits with us all day; her work is among ladies, and with them; she gets something so far, even in the midst of measuring and gorings, that common housemaids cannot get; why shouldn't she be with us when we can leave off talk of measures and gores, and get what Ruth calls the 'very next'? Delia Waite is too nice a girl to be put into the kitchen to eat with Katty, in her 'crowd.'"

"But it seems to set us down; it seems common in us to be so ready to be familiar with common people. More in us, because we do live plainly. If Mrs. Hadden or Mrs. Marchbanks did it, it might seem kind without the common. I think they ought to begin such things."

"But then if they don't? Very likely it would be far more inconvenient for them; and not the same good either, because it would be, or seem, a condescension. We are the 'very next,' and we must be content to be the step we are."

"It's the other thing with us,—con-ascension,—isn't it, mother? A step up for somebody, and no step down for anybody. Mrs. Ingleside does it," Ruth added.

"O, Mrs. Ingleside does all sorts of things. She has that sort of position. It's as independent as the other. High moral and high social can do anything. It's the betwixt and between that must be careful."

"What a miserably negative set we are, in such a positive state of the world!" cried Barbara. "Except Ruth's music, there isn't a specialty among us; we haven't any views; we're on the mean-spirited side of the Woman Question; 'all woman, and no question,' as mother says; we shall never preach, nor speech, nor leech; we can't be magnificent, and we won't be common! I don't see what is to become of us, unless—and I wonder if maybe that isn't it?—we just do two or three rather right things in a no-particular sort of a way."

"Barbara, how nice you are!" cried Ruth.

"No. I'm a thorn. Don't touch me."

"We never have company when we are having sewing done," said Mrs. Holabird. "We can always manage that."

"I don't want to play Box and Cox," said Rosamond.

"That's the beauty of you, Rosa Mundi!" said Barbara, warmly. "You don't want to play anything. That's where you'll come out sun-clear and diamond bright!"



CHAPTER V.

THE "BACK YETT AJEE."

Those who do not like common people need not read this chapter.

We had Delia Waite the next week. It happened well, in a sort of Box-and-Cox fashion; for Mrs. Van Alstyne went off with some friends to the Isles of Shoals, and Alice and Adelaide Marchbanks went with her; so that we knew we should see nothing of the two great families for a good many days; and when Leslie came, or the Haddens, we did not so much mind; besides, they knew that we were busy, and they did not expect any "coil" got up for them. Leslie came right up stairs, when she was alone; if Harry or Mr. Thayne were with her, one of us would take a wristband or a bit of ruffling, and go down. Somehow, if it happened to be Harry, Barbara was always tumultuously busy, and never offered to receive: but it always ended in Rosamond's making her. It seemed to be one of the things that people wait to be overcome in their objections to.

We always had a snug, cosey time when Delia was with us; we were all simple and busy, and the work was getting on; that was such an under-satisfaction; and Delia was having such a good time. She hardly ever failed to come to us when we wanted her; she could always make some arrangement.

Ruth was artful; she tucked in Lucilla Waters, after all; she said it would be such a nice chance to have her; she knew she would rather come when we were by ourselves, and especially when we had our work and patterns about. Lucilla brought a sack and an overskirt to make; she could hardly have been spared if she had had to bring mere idle work. She sewed in gathers upon the shirts for mother, while Delia cut out her pretty material in a style she had not seen. If we had had grasshopper parties all summer before, this was certainly a bee, and I think we all really liked it just as well as the other.

We had the comfort of mother's great, airy room, now, as we had never even realized it before. Everybody had a window to sit at; green-shaded with closed blinds for the most part; but that is so beautiful in summer, when the out-of-doors comes brimming in with scent and sound, and we know how glorious it is if we choose to open to it, and how glorious it is going to be when we do throw all wide in the cooling afternoon.

"How glad I am we have to have busy weeks sometimes!" said Ruth, stopping the little "common-sense" for an instant, while she tossed a long flouncing over her sewing-table. "I know now why people who never do their own work are obliged to go away from home for a change. It must be dreadfully same if they didn't. I like a book full of different stories!"

Lucilla Waters lives down in the heart of the town. So does Leslie Goldthwaite, to be sure; but then Mr. Goldthwaite's is one of the old, old-fashioned houses that were built when the town was country, and that has its great yard full of trees and flowers around it now; and Mrs. Waters lives in a block, flat-face to the street, with nothing pretty outside, and not very much in; for they have never been rich, the Waterses, and Mr. Waters died ten years ago, when Lucilla was a little child. Lucilla and her mother keep a little children's school; but it was vacation now, of course.

Lucilla is in Mrs. Ingleside's Bible-class; that is how Ruth, and then the rest of us, came to know her. Arctura Fish is another of Mrs. Ingleside's scholars. She is a poor girl, living at service,—or, rather, working in a family for board, clothing, and a little "schooling,"—the best of which last she gets on Sundays of Mrs. Ingleside,—until she shall have "learned how," and be "worth wages."

Arctura Fish is making herself up, slowly, after the pattern of Lucilla Waters. She would not undertake Leslie Goldthwaite or Helen Josselyn,—Mrs. Ingleside's younger sister, who stays with her so much,—or even our quiet Ruth. But Lucilla Waters comes just next. She can just reach up to her. She can see how she does up her hair, in something approaching the new way, leaning back behind her in the class and tracing out the twists between the questions; for Lucilla can only afford to use her own, and a few strands of harmless Berlin wool under it; she can't buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats, or intricacies ready made up at the—upholsterer's, I was going to say. So it is not a hopeless puzzle and an impracticable achievement to little Arctura Fish. It is wonderful how nice she has made herself look lately, and how many little ways she puts on, just like Lucilla's. She hasn't got beyond mere mechanical copying, yet; when she reaches to where Lucilla really is, she will take in differently.

Ruth gave up her little white room to Delia Waite, and went to sleep with Lucilla in the great, square east room.

Delia Waite thought a great deal of this; and it was wonderful how nobody could ever get a peep at the room when it looked as if anything in it had been used or touched. Ruth is pretty nice about it; but she cannot keep it so sacredly fair and pure as Delia did for her. Only one thing showed.

"I say," said Stephen, one morning, sliding by Ruth on the stair-rail as they came down to breakfast, "do you look after that piousosity, now, mornings?"

"No," said Ruth, laughing, "of course I can't."

"It's always whopped," said Stephen, sententiously.

Barbara got up some of her special cookery in these days. Not her very finest, out of Miss Leslie; she said that was too much like the fox and the crane, when Lucilla asked for the receipts. It wasn't fair to give a taste of things that we ourselves could only have for very best, and send people home to wish for them. But she made some of her "griddles trimmed with lace," as only Barbara's griddles were trimmed; the brown lightness running out at the edges into crisp filigree. And another time it was the flaky spider-cake, turned just as it blushed golden-tawny over the coals; and then it was breakfast potato, beaten almost frothy with one white-of-egg, a pretty good bit of butter, a few spoonfuls of top-of-the-milk, and seasoned plentifully with salt, and delicately with pepper,—the oven doing the rest, and turning it into a snowy souffle.

Barbara said we had none of us a specialty; she knew better; only hers was a very womanly and old-fashioned, not to say kitcheny one; and would be quite at a discount when the grand co-operative kitchens should come into play; for who cares to put one's genius into the universal and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-souffles to be carried half a mile to the table?

Barbara delighted to "make company" of seamstress week; "it was so nice," she said, "to entertain somebody who thought 'chickings was 'evingly.'"

Rosamond liked that part of it; she enjoyed giving pleasure no less than any; but she had a secret misgiving that we were being very vulgarly comfortable in an underhand way. She would never, by any means, go off by herself to eat with her fingers.

Delia Waite said she never came to our house that she did not get some new ideas to carry home to Arabel.

Arabel Waite was fifty years old, or more; she was the oldest child of one marriage and Delia the youngest of another. All the Waites between them had dropped away,—out of the world, or into homes here and there of their own,—and Arabel and Delia were left together in the square, low, gambrel-roofed house over on the other hill, where the town ran up small.

Arabel Waite was an old dressmaker. She could make two skirts to a dress, one shorter, the other longer; and she could cut out the upper one by any new paper pattern; and she could make shell-trimmings and flutings and box-plaitings and flouncings, and sew them on exquisitely, even now, with her old eyes; but she never had adapted herself to the modern ideas of the corsage. She could not fit a bias to save her life; she could only stitch up a straight slant, and leave the rest to nature and fate. So all her people had the squarest of wooden fronts, and were preternaturally large around the waist. Delia sewed with her, abroad and at home,—abroad without her, also, as she was doing now for us. A pattern for a sleeve, or a cape, or a panier,—or a receipt for a tea-biscuit or a johnny-cake, was something to go home with rejoicing.

Arabel Waite and Delia could only use three rooms of the old house; the rest was blinded and shut up; the garret was given over to the squirrels, who came in from the great butternut-trees in the yard, and stowed away their rich provision under the eaves and away down between the walls, and grew fat there all winter, and frolicked like a troop of horse. We liked to hear Delia tell of their pranks, and of all the other queer, quaint things in their way of living. Everybody has a way of living; and if you can get into it, every one is as good as a story. It always seemed to us as if Delia brought with her the atmosphere of mysterious old houses, and old, old books stowed away in their by-places, and stories of the far past that had been lived there, and curious ancient garments done with long ago, and packed into trunks and bureaus in the dark, unused rooms, where there had been parties once, and weddings and funerals and children's games in nurseries; and strange fellowship of little wild things that strayed in now,—bees in summer, and squirrels in winter,—and brought the woods and fields with them under the old roof. Why, I think we should have missed it more than she would, if we had put her into some back room, and poked her sewing in at her, and left her to herself!

The only thing that wasn't nice that week was Aunt Roderick coming over one morning in the very thick of our work, and Lucilla's too, walking straight up stairs, as aunts can, whether you want them or not, and standing astonished at the great goings-on.

"Well!" she exclaimed, with a strong falling inflection, "are any of you getting ready to be married?"

"Yes'm," said Barbara, gravely, handing her a chair. "All of us."

Then Barbara made rather an unnecessary parade of ribbon that she was quilling up, and of black lace that was to go each side of it upon a little round jacket for her blue silk dress, made of a piece laid away five years ago, when she first had it. The skirt was turned now, and the waist was gone.

While Aunt Roderick was there, she also took occasion to toss over, more or less, everything that lay about,—"to help her in her inventory," she said after she went away.

"Twelve new embroidered cambric handkerchiefs," repeated she, as she turned back from the stair-head, having seen Aunt Roderick down.

Barbara had once, in a severe fit of needle-industry, inspired by the discovery of two baby robes of linen cambric among mother's old treasures, and their bestowal upon her, turned them into these elegances, broadly hemmed with the finest machine stitch, and marked with beautiful great B's in the corners. She showed them, in her pride, to Mrs. Roderick; and we knew afterward what her abstract report had been, in Grandfather Holabird's hearing. Grandfather Holabird knew we did without a good many things; but he had an impression of us, from instances like these, that we were seized with sudden spasms of recklessness at times, and rushed into French embroideries and sets of jewelry. I believe he heard of mother's one handsome black silk, every time she wore it upon semiannual occasions, until he would have said that Mrs. Stephen had a new fifty-dollar dress every six months. This was one of our little family trials.

"I don't think Mrs. Roderick does it on purpose," Ruth would say. "I think there are two things that make her talk in that way. In the first place, she has got into the habit of carrying home all the news she can, and making it as big as possible, to amuse Mr. Holabird; and then she has to settle it over in her own mind, every once in a while, that things must be pretty comfortable amongst us, down here, after all."

Ruth never dreamed of being satirical; it was a perfectly straightforward explanation; and it showed, she truly believed, two quite kind and considerate points in Aunt Roderick's character.

After the party came back from the Isles of Shoals, Mrs. Van Alstyne went down to Newport. The Marchbankses had other visitors,—people whom we did not know, and in whose way we were not thrown; the haute volee was sufficient to itself again, and we lived on a piece of our own life once more.

"It's rather nice to knit on straight," said Barbara; "without any widening or narrowing or counting of stitches. I like very well to come to a plain place."

Rosamond never liked the plain places quite so much; but she accommodated herself beautifully, and was just as nice as she could be. And the very best thing about Rose was, that she never put on anything, or left anything off, of her gentle ways and notions. She would have been ready at any time for the most delicate fancy-pattern that could be woven upon her plain places. That was one thing which mother taught us all.

"Your life will come to you; you need not run after it," she would say, if we ever got restless and began to think there was no way out of the family hedge. "Have everything in yourselves as it should be, and then you can take the chances as they arrive."

"Only we needn't put our bonnets on, and sit at the windows," Barbara once replied.

"No," said Mrs. Holabird; "and especially at the front windows. A great deal that is good—a great deal of the best—comes in at the back-doors."

Everybody, we thought, did not have a back-door to their life, as we did. They hardly seemed to know if they had one to their houses.

Our "back yett was ajee," now, at any rate.

Leslie Goldthwaite came in at it, though, just the same, and so did her cousin and Dakie. [Footnote: Harry Goldthwaite is Leslie's cousin, and Mr. Aaron Goldthwaite's ward. I do not believe we have ever thought to put this in before.]

Otherwise, for two or three weeks, our chief variety was in sending for old Miss Trixie Spring to spend the day.

Miss Trixie Spring is a lively old lady, who, some threescore and five years ago, was christened "Beatrix." She plays backgammon in the twilights, with mother, and makes a table at whist, at once lively and severe, in the evenings, for father. At this whist-table, Barbara usually is the fourth. Rosamond gets sleepy over it, and Ruth—Miss Trixie says—"plays like a ninkum."

We always wanted Miss Trixie, somehow, to complete comfort, when we were especially comfortable by ourselves; when we had something particularly good for dinner, or found ourselves set cheerily down for a long day at quiet work, with everything early-nice about us; or when we were going to make something "contrive-y," "Swiss-family-Robinson-ish," that got us all together over it, in the hilarity of enterprise and the zeal of acquisition. Miss Trixie could appreciate homely cleverness; darning of carpets and covering of old furniture; she could darn a carpet herself, so as almost to improve upon—certainly to supplant—the original pattern. Yet she always had a fresh amazement for all our performances, as if nothing notable had ever been done before, and a personal delight in every one of our improvements, as if they had been her own. "We're just as cosey as we can be, already,—it isn't that; but we want somebody to tell us how cosey we are. Let's get Miss Trixie to-day," says Barbara.

Once was when the new drugget went down, at last, in the dining-room. It was tan-color, bound with crimson,—covering three square yards; and mother nailed it down with brass-headed tacks, right after breakfast, one cool morning. Then Katty washed up the dark floor-margin, and the table had its crimson-striped cloth on, and mother brought down the brown stuff for the new sofa-cover, and the great bunch of crimson braid to bind that with, and we drew up our camp-chairs and crickets, and got ready to be busy and jolly, and to have a brand-new piece of furniture before night.

Barbara had made peach-dumpling for dinner, and of course Aunt Trixie was the last and crowning suggestion. It was not far to send, and she was not long in coming, with her second-best cap pinned up in a handkerchief, and her knitting-work and her spectacles in her bag.

The Marchbankses never made sofa-covers of brown waterproof, nor had Miss Trixies to spend the day. That was because they had no back-door to their house.

I suppose you think there are a good many people in our story. There are; when we think it up there are ever so many people that have to do with our story every day; but we don't mean to tell you all their stories; so you can bear with the momentary introduction when you meet them in our brown room, or in our dining-room, of a morning, although we know very well also that passing introductions are going out of fashion.

We had Dakie Thayne's last visit that day, in the midst of the hammering and binding. Leslie and he came in with Ruth, when she came back from her hour with Reba Hadden. It was to bid us good by; his furlough was over, he was to return to West Point on Monday.



"Another two years' pull," he said. "Won't you all come to West Point next summer?"

"If we take the journey we think of," said Barbara, composedly,—"to the mountains and Montreal and Quebec; perhaps up the Saguenay; and then back, up Lake Champlain, and down the Hudson, on our way to Saratoga and Niagara. We might keep on to West Point first, and have a day or two there."

"Barbara," said mother, remonstratingly.

"Why? Don't we think of it? I'm sure I do. I've thought of it till I'm almost tired of it. I don't much believe we shall come, after all, Mr. Thayne."

"We shall miss you very much," said Mrs. Holabird, covering Barbara's nonsense.

"Our summer has stopped right in the middle," said Barbara, determined to talk.

"I shall hear about you all," said Dakie Thayne. "There's to be a Westover column in Leslie's news. I wish—" and there the cadet stopped.

Mother looked up at him with a pleasant inquiry.

"I was going to say, I wish there might be a Westover correspondent, to put in just a word or two, sometimes; but then I was afraid that would be impertinent. When a fellow has only eight weeks in the year of living, Mrs. Holabird, and all the rest is drill, you don't know how he hangs on to those eight weeks,—and how they hang on to him afterwards."

Mother looked so motherly at him then!

"We shall not forget you—Dakie," she said, using his first name for the first time. "You shall have a message from us now and then."

Dakie said, "Thank you," in a tone that responded to her "Dakie."

We all knew he liked Mrs. Holabird ever so much. Homes and mothers are beautiful things to boys who have had to do without them.

He shook hands with us all round, when he got up to go. He shook hands also with our old friend, Miss Trixie, whom he had never happened to see before. Then Rosamond went out with him and Leslie,—as it was our cordial, countrified fashion for somebody to do,—through the hall to the door. Ruth went as far as the stairs, on her way to her room to take off her things. She stood there, up two steps, as they were leaving.

Dakie Thayne said good by again to Rosamond, at the door, as was natural; and then he came quite back, and said it last of all, once more, to little Ruth upon the stairs. He certainly did hate to go away and leave us all.

"That is a very remarkable pretty-behaved young man," said Miss Trixie, when we all picked up our breadths of waterproof, and got in behind them again.

"The world is a desert, and the sand has got into my eyes," said Barbara, who had hushed up ever since mother had said "Dakie." When anybody came close to mother, Barbara was touched. I think her love for mother is more like a son's than a daughter's, in the sort of chivalry it has with it.

* * * * *

It was curious how suddenly our little accession of social importance had come on, and wonderful how quickly it had subsided; more curious and wonderful still, how entirely it seemed to stay subsided.

We had plenty to do, though; we did not miss anything; only we had quite taken up with another set of things. This was the way it was with us; we had things we must take up; we could not have spared time to lead society for a long while together.

Aunt Roderick claimed us, too, in our leisure hours, just then; she had a niece come to stay with her; and we had to go over to the "old house" and spend afternoons, and ask Aunt Roderick and Miss Bragdowne in to tea with us. Aunt Roderick always expected this sort of attention; and yet she had a way with her as if we ought not to try to afford things, looked scrutinizingly at the quality of our cake and preserves, and seemed to eat our bread and butter with consideration.

It helped Rosamond very much, though, over the transition. We, also, had had private occupation.

"There had been family company at grandfather's," she told Jeannie Hadden, one morning. "We had been very much engaged among ourselves. We had hardly seen anything of the other girls for two or three weeks."

Barbara sat at the round table, where Stephen had been doing his geometry last night, twirling a pair of pencil compasses about on a sheet of paper, while this was saying. She lifted up her eyes a little, cornerwise, without moving her head, and gave a twinkle of mischief over at mother and Ruth. When Jeannie was gone, she kept on silently, a few minutes, with her diagrams. Then she said, in her funniest, repressed way,—

"I can see a little how it must be; but I suppose I ought to understand the differential calculus to compute it. Circles are wonderful things; and the science of curves holds almost everything. Rose, when do you think we shall get round again?"

She held up her bit of paper as she spoke, scrawled over with intersecting circles and arcs and ellipses, against whose curves and circumferences she had written names: Marchbanks, Hadden, Goldthwaite, Holabird.

"It's a mere question of centre and radius," she said. "You may be big enough to take in the whole of them, or you may only cut in at the sides. You may be just tangent for a minute, and then go off into space on your own account. You may have your centre barely inside of a great ring, and yet reach pretty well out of it for a good part; you must be small to be taken quite in by anybody's!"

"It doesn't illustrate," said Rose, coolly. "Orbits don't snarl up in that fashion."

"Geometry does," said Barbara. "I told you I couldn't work it all out. But I suppose there's a Q.E.D. at the end of it somewhere."

* * * * *

Two or three days after something new happened; an old thing happened freshly, rather,—which also had to do with our orbit and its eccentricities. Barbara, as usual, discovered and announced it.

"I should think any kind of an astronomer might be mad!" she exclaimed. "Periods and distances are bad enough; but then come the perturbations! Here's one. We're used to it, to be sure; but we never know exactly where it may come in. The girl we live with has formed other views for herself, and is going off at a tangent. What is the reason we can't keep a satellite,—planet, I mean?"

"Barbara!" said mother, anxiously, "don't be absurd!"

"Well, what shall I be? We're all out of a place again." And she sat down resignedly on a very low cricket, in the middle of the room.

"I'll tell you what we'll do, mother," said Ruth, coming round. "I've thought of it this good while. We'll co-operate!"

"She's glad of it! She's been waiting for a chance! I believe she put the luminary up to it! Ruth, you're a brick—moon!"



CHAPTER VI.

CO-OPERATING.

When mother first read that article in the Atlantic she had said, right off,—

"I'm sure I wish they would!"

"Would what, mother?" asked Barbara.

"Co-operate."

"O mother! I really do believe you must belong, somehow, to the Micawber family! I shouldn't wonder if one of these days, when they come into their luck, you should hear of something greatly to your advantage, from over the water. You have such faith in 'they'! I don't believe 'they' will ever do much for 'us'!"

"What is it, dear?" asked Mrs. Hobart, rousing from a little arm-chair wink, during which Mrs. Holabird had taken up the magazine.

Mrs. Hobart had come in, with her cable wool and her great ivory knitting-pins, to sit an hour, sociably.

"Co-operative housekeeping, ma'am," said Barbara.

"Oh! Yes. That is what they used to have, in old times, when we lived at home with mother. Only they didn't write articles about it. All the women in a house co-operated—to keep it; and all the neighborhood co-operated—by living exactly in the same way. Nowadays, it's co-operative shirking; isn't it?"

One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was more simple or sharp.

That was all that was said about co-operative housekeeping at the time. But Ruth remembered the conversation. So did Barbara, for a while, as appeared in something she came out with a few days after.

"I could—almost—write a little poem!" she said, suddenly, over her work. "Only that would be doing just what the rest do. Everything turns into a poem, or an article, nowadays. I wish we'd lived in the times when people did the things!"

"O Barbara! Think of all that is being done in the world!"

"I know. But the little private things. They want to turn everything into a movement. Miss Trixie says they won't have any eggs from their fowls next winter; all their chickens are roosters, and all they'll do will be to sit in a row on the fence and crow! I think the world is running pretty much to roosters."

"Is that the poem?"

"I don't know. It might come in. All I've got is the end of it. It came into my head hind side before. If it could only have a beginning and a middle put to it, it might do. It's just the wind-up, where they have to give an account, you know, and what they'll have to show for it, and the thing that really amounts, after all."

"Well, tell us."

"It's only five lines, and one rhyme. But it might be written up to. They could say all sorts of things,—one and another:—

"I wrote some little books; I said some little says; I preached a little preach; I lit a little blaze; I made things pleasant in one little place."

There was a shout at Barbara's "poem."

"I thought I might as well relieve my mind," she said, meekly. "I knew it was all there would ever be of it."

But Barbara's rhyme stayed in our heads, and got quoted in the family. She illustrated on a small scale what the "poems and articles" may sometimes do in the great world,

We remembered it that day when Ruth said, "Let's co-operate."

We talked it over,—what we could do without a girl. We had talked it over before. We had had to try it, more or less, during interregnums. But in our little house in Z——, with the dark kitchen, and with Barbara and Ruth going to school, and the washing-days, when we had to hire, it always cost more than it came to, besides making what Barb called a "heave-offering of life."

"They used to have houses built accordingly," Rosamond said, speaking of the "old times." "Grandmother's kitchen was the biggest and pleasantest room in the house."

"Couldn't we make the kitchen the pleasantest room?" suggested Ruth. "Wouldn't it be sure to be, if it was the room we all stayed in mornings, and where we had our morning work? Whatever room we do that in always is, you know. The look grows. Kitchens are horrid when girls have just gone out of them, and left the dish-towels dirty, and the dish-cloth all wabbled up in the sink, and all the tins and irons wanting to be cleaned. But if we once got up a real ladies' kitchen of our own! I can think how it might be lovely!"

"I can think how it might be jolly-nificent!" cried Barbara, relapsing into her dislocations.

"You like kitchens," said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet ill-usedness.

"Yes, I do," said Barbara. "And you like parlors, and prettinesses, and feather dusters, and little general touchings-up, that I can't have patience with. You shall take the high art, and I'll have the low realities. That's the co-operation. Families are put up assorted, and the home character comes of it. It's Bible-truth, you know; the head and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. Let's just see what we shall come to! People don't turn out what they're meant, who have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike. There's a great deal in being Holabirdy,—or whatever-else-you-are-y!"

"If it only weren't for that cellar-kitchen," said Mrs. Holabird.

"Mother," said Ruth, "what if we were to take this?"

We were in the dining-room.

"This nice room!"

"It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know."

Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,—the new, pretty drugget,—the freshly clad, broad old sofa,—the high wainscoted walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,—the ceiling faintly tinted with buff,—the buff holland shades to the windows,—the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a gleam of silver and glass,—the two or three pretty engravings in the few spaces for them,—O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a kitchen.

But Ruth began again.

"You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we might bring the kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen."

"But the stove," said mother.

"I think," said Barbara, boldly, "that a cooking-stove, all polished up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!"

"It is clumsy, one must own," said Mrs. Holabird, "besides being suggestive."

"So is a piano," said the determined Barbara.

"I can imagine a cooking-stove," said Rosamond, slowly.

"Well, do! That's just where your gift will come in!"

"A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made to order,—like an urn, or something,—with a copper faucet, and nothing else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use; it might be like that little picnicking dower-house we read about in a novel, or like Marie Antoinette's Trianon."

"That's what it would come to, if it was part of our living, just as we come to have gold thimbles and lovely work-boxes. We should give each other Christmas and birthday presents of things; we should have as much pleasure and pride in it as in the china-closet. Why, the whole trouble is that the kitchen is the only place taste hasn't got into. Let's have an art-kitchen!"

"We might spend a little money in fitting up a few things freshly, if we are to save the waste and expense of a servant," said Mrs. Holabird.

The idea grew and developed.

"But when we have people to tea!" Rosamond said, suddenly demurring afresh.

"There's always the brown room, and the handing round," said Barbara, "for the people you can't be intimate with, and think how crowsy this will be with Aunt Trixie or Mrs. Hobart or the Goldthwaites!"

"We shall just settle down," said Rose, gloomily.

"Well, I believe in finding our place. Every little brook runs till it does that. I don't want to stand on tip-toe all my life."

"We shall always gather to us what belongs. Every little crystal does that," said mother, taking up another simile.

"What will Aunt Roderick say?" said Ruth.

"I shall keep her out of the kitchen, and tell her we couldn't manage with one girl any longer, and so we've taken three that all wanted to get a place together."

And Barbara actually did; and it was three weeks before Mrs. Roderick found out what it really meant.

We were in a hurry to have Katty go, and to begin, after we had made up our minds; and it was with the serenest composure that Mrs. Holabird received her remark that "her week would be up a-Tuesday, an' she hoped agin then we'd be shooted wid a girl."

"Yes, Katty; I am ready at any moment," was the reply; which caused the whites of Katty's eyes to appear for a second between the lids and the irids.

There had been only one applicant for the place, who had come while we had not quite irrevocably fixed our plans.

Mother swerved for a moment; she came in and told us what the girl said.

"She is not experienced; but she looks good-natured; and she is willing to come for a trial."

"They all do that," said Barbara, gravely. "I think—as Protestants—we've hired enough of them."

Mother laughed, and let the "trial" go. That was the end, I think, of our indecisions.

We got Mrs. Dunikin to come and scrub; we pulled out pots and pans, stove-polish and dish-towels, napkins and odd stockings missed from the wash; we cleared every corner, and had every box and bottle washed; then we left everything below spick and span, so that it almost tempted us to stay even there, and sent for the sheet-iron man, and had the stove taken up stairs. We only carried up such lesser movables as we knew we should want; we left all the accumulation behind; we resolved to begin life anew, and feel our way, and furnish as we went along.

Ruth brought home a lovely little spice-box as the first donation to the art-kitchen. Father bought a copper tea-kettle, and the sheet-iron man made the tin boiler. There was a wide, high, open fireplace in the dining-room; we had wondered what we should do with it in the winter. It had a soapstone mantel, with fluted pilasters, and a brown-stone hearth and jambs. Back a little, between these sloping jambs, we had a nice iron fire-board set, with an ornamental collar around the funnel-hole. The stove stood modestly sheltered, as it were, in its new position, its features softened to almost a sitting-room congruity; it did not thrust itself obtrusively forward, and force its homely association upon you; it was low, too, and its broad top looked smooth and enticing.

There was a large, light closet at the back of the room, where was set a broad, deep iron sink, and a pump came up from the cistern. This closet had double sliding doors; it could be thrown all open for busy use, or closed quite away and done with.

There were shelves here, and cupboards. Here we ranged our tins and our saucepans,—the best and newest; Rosamond would have nothing to do with the old battered ones; over them we hung our spoons and our little strainers, our egg-beaters, spatulas, and quart measures,—these last polished to the brightness of silver tankards; in one corner stood the flour-barrel, and over it was the sieve; in the cupboards were our porcelain kettles,—we bought two new ones, a little and a big,—the frying-pans, delicately smooth and nice now, outside and in, the roasting-pans, and the one iron pot, which we never meant to use when we could help it. The worst things we could have to wash were the frying and roasting pans, and these, we soon found, were not bad when you did it all over and at once every time.



Adjoining this closet was what had been the "girl's room," opening into the passage where the kitchen stairs came up, and the passage itself was fair-sized and square, corresponding to the depth of the other divisions. Here we had a great box placed for wood, and a barrel for coal, and another for kindlings; once a week these could be replenished as required, when the man came who "chored" for us. The "girl's room" would be a spare place that we should find twenty uses for; it was nice to think of it sweet and fresh, empty and available; very nice not to be afraid to remember it was there at all.

We had a Robinson-Crusoe-like pleasure in making all these arrangements; every clean thing that we put in a spotless place upon shelf or nail was a wealth and a comfort to us. Besides, we really did not need half the lumber of a common kitchen closet; a china bowl or plate would no longer be contraband of war, and Barbara said she could stir her blanc-mange with a silver spoon without demoralizing anybody to the extent of having the ashes taken up with it.

By Friday night we had got everything to the exact and perfect starting-point; and Mrs. Dunikin went home enriched with gifts that were to her like a tin-and-wooden wedding; we felt, on our part, that we had celebrated ours by clearing them out.

The bread-box was sweet and empty; the fragments had been all daintily crumbled by Ruth, as she sat, resting and talking, when she had come in from her music-lesson; they lay heaped up like lightly fallen snow, in a broad dish, ready to be browned for chicken dressing or boiled for brewis or a pudding. Mother never has anything between loaves and crumbs when she manages; then all is nice, and keeps nice.

"Clean beginnings are beautiful," said Rosamond, looking around. "It is the middle that's horrid."

"We won't have any middles," said Ruth. "We'll keep making clean beginnings, all the way along. That is the difference between work and muss."

"If you can," said Rose, doubtfully.

I suppose that is what some people will say, after this Holabird story is printed so far. Then we just wish they could have seen mother make a pudding or get a breakfast, that is all. A lady will no more make a jumble or litter in doing such things than she would at her dressing-table. It only needs an accustomed and delicate touch.

I will tell you something of how it was, I will take that Monday morning—and Monday morning is as good, for badness, as you can take—just after we had begun.

The room was nice enough for breakfast when we left it over night. There was nothing straying about; the tea-kettle and the tin boiler were filled,—father did that just before he locked up the house; we had only to draw up the window-shades, and let the sweet light in, in the morning.

Stephen had put a basket of wood and kindlings ready for Mrs. Dunikin in the kitchen below, and the key of the lower door had been left on a beam in the woodshed, by agreement. By the time we came down stairs Mrs. Dunikin had a steaming boiler full of clothes, and had done nearly two of her five hours' work. We should hand her her breakfast on a little tray, when the time came, at the stair-head; and she would bring up her cup and plate again while we were clearing away. We should pay her twelve and a half cents an hour; she would scrub up all below, go home to dinner, and come again to-morrow for five hours' ironing. That was all there would be about Mrs. Dunikin.

Meanwhile, with a pair of gloves on, and a little plain-hemmed three-cornered, dotted-muslin cap tied over her hair with a muslin bow behind, mother had let down the ashes,—it isn't a bad thing to do with a well-contrived stove,—and set the pan, to which we had a duplicate, into the out-room, for Stephen to carry away. Then into the clean grate went a handful of shavings and pitch-pine kindlings, one or two bits of hard wood, and a sprinkle of small, shiny nut-coal. The draughts were put on, and in five minutes the coals were red. In these five minutes the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. It was not like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the middle of the room with its volcanic margin of cinders and ashes.

Then—that Monday morning—we had brewis to make, a little buttered toast to do, and some eggs to scramble. The bright coffee-pot got its ration of fragrant, beaten paste,—the brown ground kernels mixed with an egg,—and stood waiting for its drink of boiling water. The two frying-pans came forth; one was set on with the milk for the brewis, into which, when it boiled up white and drifting, went the sweet fresh butter, and the salt, each in plentiful proportion;—"one can give one's self carte-blancher," Barbara said, "than it will do to give a girl";—and then the bread-crumbs; and the end of it was, in a white porcelain dish, a light, delicate, savory bread-porridge, to eat daintily with a fork, and be thankful for. The other pan held eggs, broken in upon bits of butter, and sprinkles of pepper and salt; this went on when the coffee-pot—which had got its drink when the milk boiled, and been puffing ever since—was ready to come off; over it stood Barbara with a tin spoon, to toss up and turn until the whole was just curdled with the heat into white and yellow flakes, not one of which was raw, nor one was dry. Then the two pans and the coffee-pot and the little bowl in which the coffee-paste had been beaten and the spoons went off into the pantry-closet, and the breakfast was ready; and only Barbara waited a moment to toast and butter the bread, while mother, in her place at table, was serving the cups. It was Ruth who had set the table, and carried off the cookery things, and folded and slid back the little pembroke, that had held them beside the stove, into its corner.

Rosamond had been busy in the brown room; that was all nice now for the day; and she came in with a little glass vase in her hand, in which was a tea-rose, that she put before mother at the edge of the white waiter-napkin; and it graced and freshened all the place; and the smell of it, and the bright September air that came in at the three cool west windows, overbore all remembrance of the cooking and reminder of the stove, from which we were seated well away, and before which stood now a square, dark green screen that Rosamond had recollected and brought down from the garret on Saturday. Barbara and her toast emerged from its shelter as innocent of behind-the-scenes as any bit of pretty play or pageant.

Barbara looked very nice this morning, in her brown-plaid Scotch gingham trimmed with white braids; she had brown slippers, also, with bows; she would not verify Rosamond's prophecy that she "would be all points," now that there was an apology for them. I think we were all more particular about our outer ladyhood than usual.

After breakfast the little pembroke was wheeled out again, and on it put a steaming pan of hot water. Ruth picked up the dishes; it was something really delicate to see her scrape them clean, with a pliant knife, as a painter might cleanse his palette,—we had, in fact, a palette-knife that we kept for this use when we washed our own dishes,—and then set them in piles and groups before mother, on the pembroke-table. Mother sat in her raised arm-chair, as she might sit making tea for company; she had her little mop, and three long, soft clean towels lay beside her; we had hemmed a new dozen, so as to have plenty from day to day, and a grand Dunikin wash at the end on the Mondays.

After the china and glass were done and put up, came forth the coffee-pot and the two pans, and had their scald, and their little scour,—a teaspoonful of sand must go to the daily cleansing of an iron utensil, in mother's hands; and that was clean work, and the iron thing never got to be "horrid," any more than a china bowl. It was only a little heavy, and it was black; but the black did not come off. It is slopping and burning and putting away with a rinse, that makes kettles and spiders untouchable. Besides, mother keeps a bottle of ammonia in the pantry, to qualify her soap and water with, when she comes to things like these. She calls it her kitchen-maid; it does wonders for any little roughness or greasiness; such soil comes off in that, and chemically disappears.

It was all dining-room work; and we were chatty over it, as if we had sat down to wind worsteds; and there was no kitchen in the house that morning.

We kept our butter and milk in the brick buttery at the foot of the kitchen stairs. These were all we had to go up and down for. Barbara set away the milk, and skimmed the cream, and brought up and scalded the yesterday's pans the first thing; and they were out in a row—flashing up saucily at the sun and giving as good as he sent—on the back platform.

She and Rosamond were up stairs, making beds and setting straight; and in an hour after breakfast the house was in its beautiful forenoon order, and there was a forenoon of three hours to come.

We had chickens for dinner that day, I remember; one always does remember what was for dinner the first day in a new house, or in new housekeeping. William, the chore-man, had killed and picked and drawn them, on Saturday; I do not mean to disguise that we avoided these last processes; we preferred a little foresight of arrangement. They were hanging in the buttery, with their hearts and livers inside them; mother does not believe in gizzards. They only wanted a little salt bath before cooking.

I should like to have had you see Mrs. Holabird tie up those chickens. They were as white and nice as her own hands; and their legs and wings were fastened down to their sides, so that they were as round and comfortable as dumplings before she had done with them; and she laid them out of her two little palms into the pan in a cunning and cosey way that gave them a relish beforehand, and sublimated the vulgar need.

We were tired of sewing and writing and reading in three hours; it was only restful change to come down and put the chickens into the oven, and set the dinner-table.

Then, in the broken hour while they were cooking, we drifted out upon the piazza, and among our plants in the shady east corner by the parlor windows, and Ruth played a little, and mother took up the Atlantic, and we felt we had a good right to the between-times when the fresh dredgings of flour were getting their brown, and after that, while the potatoes were boiling.

Barbara gave us currant-jelly; she was a stingy Barbara about that jelly, and counted her jars; and when father and Stephen came in, there was the little dinner of three covers, and a peach-pie of Saturday's making on the side-board, and the green screen up before the stove again, and the baking-pan safe in the pantry sink, with hot water and ammonia in it.

"Mother," said Barbara, "I feel as if we had got rid of a menagerie!"

"It is the girl that makes the kitchen," said Ruth.

"And then the kitchen that has to have the girl," said Mrs. Holabird.

Ruth got up and took away the dishes, and went round with the crumb-knife, and did not forget to fill the tumblers, nor to put on father's cheese.

Our talk went on, and we forgot there was any "tending."

"We didn't feel all that in the ends of our elbows," said mother in a low tone, smiling upon Ruth as she sat down beside her.

"Nor have to scrinch all up," said Stephen, quite out loud, "for fear she'd touch us!"

I'll tell you—in confidence—another of our ways at Westover; what, we did, mostly, after the last two meals, to save our afternoons and evenings and our nice dresses. We always did it with the tea-things. We just put them, neatly piled and ranged in that deep pantry sink; we poured some dipperfuls of hot water over them, and shut the cover down; and the next morning, in our gingham gowns, we did up all the dish-washing for the day.

* * * * *

"Who folded all those clothes?" Why, we girls, of course. But you can't be told everything in one chapter.



CHAPTER VII.

SPRINKLES AND GUSTS.

Mrs. Dunikin used to bring them in, almost all of them, and leave them heaped up in the large round basket. Then there was the second-sized basket, into which they would all go comfortably when they were folded up.

One Monday night we went down as usual; some of us came in,—for we had been playing croquet until into the twilight, and the Haddens had just gone away, so we were later than usual at our laundry work. Leslie and Harry went round with Rosamond to the front door; Ruth slipped in at the back, and mother came down when she found that Rosamond had not been released. Barbara finished setting the tea-table, which she had a way of doing in a whiff, put on the sweet loaf upon the white trencher, and the dish of raspberry jam and the little silver-wire basket of crisp sugar-cakes, and then there was nothing but the tea, which stood ready for drawing in the small Japanese pot. Tea was nothing to get, ever.

"Mother, go back again! You tired old darling, Ruth and I are going to do these!" and Barbara plunged in among the "blossoms."

That was what we called the fresh, sweet-smelling white things. There are a great many pretty pieces of life, if you only know about them. Hay-making is one; and rose-gathering is one; and sprinkling and folding a great basket full of white clothes right out of the grass and the air and the sunshine is one.

Mother went off,—chiefly to see that Leslie and Harry were kept to tea, I believe. She knew how to compensate, in her lovely little underhand way, with Barbara.

Barbara pinned up her muslin sleeves to the shoulder, shook out a little ruffled short-skirt and put it on for an apron, took one end of the long white ironing-table that stood across the window, pushed the water-basin into the middle, and began with the shirts and the starched things. Ruth, opposite, was making the soft underclothing into little white rolls.

Barbara dampened and smoothed and stretched; she almost ironed with her fingers, Mrs. Dunikin said. She patted and evened, laid collars and cuffs one above another with a sprinkle of drops, just from her finger-ends, between, and then gave a towel a nice equal shower with a corn-whisk that she used for the large things, and rolled them up in it, hard and fast, with a thump of her round pretty fist upon the middle before she laid it by. It was a clever little process to watch; and her arms were white in the twilight. Girls can't do all the possible pretty manoeuvres in the German or out at croquet, if they only once knew it. They do find it out in a one-sided sort of way: and then they run to private theatricals. But the real every-day scenes are just as nice, only they must have their audiences in ones and twos; perhaps not always any audience at all.

Of a sudden Ruth became aware of an audience of one.

Upon the balcony, leaning over the rail, looking right down into the nearest kitchen window and over Barbara's shoulder, stood Harry Goldthwaite. He shook his head at Ruth, and she held her peace.

Barbara began to sing. She never sang to the piano,—only about her work. She made up little snatches, piecemeal, of various things, and put them to any sort of words. This time it was to her own,—her poem.

"I wrote some little books; I said some little says; I preached a little pre-e-each; I lit a little blaze; I made—things—pleasant—in one—little—place."

She ran down a most contented little trip, with repeats and returns, in a G-octave, for the last line. Then she rolled up a bundle of shirts in a square pillow-case, gave it its accolade, and pressed it down into the basket.

"How do you suppose, Ruth, we shall manage the town-meetings? Do you believe they will be as nice as this? Where shall we get our little inspirations, after we have come out of all our corners?"

"We won't do it," said Ruth, quietly, shaking out one of mother's nightcaps, and speaking under the disadvantage of her private knowledge.

"I think they ought to let us vote just once," said Barbara; "to say whether we ever would again. I believe we're in danger of being put upon now, if we never were before."

"It isn't fair," said Ruth, with her eyes up out of the window at Harry, who made noiseless motion of clapping his hands. How could she tell what Barbara would say next, or how she would like it when she knew?

"Of course it isn't," said Barbara, intent upon the gathers of a white cambric waist of Rosamond's. "I wonder, Ruth, if we shall have to read all those Pub. Doc.s that father gets. You see women will make awful hard work of it, if they once do go at it; they are so used to doing every—little—thing"; and she picked out the neck-edging, and smoothed the hem between the buttons.

"We shall have to take vows, and devote ourselves to it," Barbara went on, as if she were possessed. "There will have to be 'Sisters of Polity.' Not that I ever will. I don't feel a vocation. I'd rather be a Polly-put-the-kettle-on all the days of my life."

"Mr. Goldthwaite!" said Ruth.

"May I?" asked Harry, as if he had just come, leaning down over the rail, and speaking to Barbara, who faced about with a jump.

She knew by his look; he could not keep in the fun.

"'May you'? When you have, already!"

"O no, I haven't! I mean, come down? Into the one-pleasant-little-place, and help?"

"You don't know the way," Barbara said, stolidly, turning back again, and folding up the waist.

"Don't I? Which,—to come down, or to help?" and Harry flung himself over the rail, clasped one hand and wrist around a copper water-pipe that ran down there, reached the other to something-above the window,—the mere pediment, I believe,—and swung his feet lightly to the sill beneath. Then he dropped himself and sat down, close by Barbara's elbow.

"You'll get sprinkled," said she, flourishing the corn-whisk over a table-cloth.

"I dare say. Or patted, or punched, or something. I knew I took the risk of all that when I came down amongst it. But it looked nice. I couldn't help it, and I don't care!"

Barbara was thinking of two things,—how long he had been there, and what in the world she had said besides what she remembered; and—how she should get off her rough-dried apron.

"Which do you want,—napkins or pillow-cases?" and he came round to the basket, and began to pull out.

"Napkins," says Barbara.

The napkins were underneath, and mixed up; while he stooped and fumbled, she had the ruffled petticoat off over her head. She gave it a shower in such a hurry, that as Harry came up with the napkins, he did get a drift of it in his face.

"That won't do," said Barbara, quite shocked, and tossing the whisk aside. "There are too many of us."

She began on the napkins, sprinkling with her fingers. Harry spread up a pile on his part, dipping also into the bowl. "I used to do it when I was a little boy," he said.

Ruth took the pillow-cases, and so they came to the last. They stretched the sheets across the table, and all three had a hand in smoothing and showering.

"Why, I wish it weren't all done," says Harry, turning over three clothes-pins in the bottom of the basket, while Barbara buttoned her sleeves. "Where does this go? What a nice place this is!" looking round the clean kitchen, growing shadowy in the evening light. "I think your house is full of nice places."

"Are you nearly ready, girls?" came in mother's voice from above.

"Yes, ma'am," Harry answered back, in an excessively cheery way. "We're coming"; and up the stairs all three came together, greatly to Mrs. Holabird's astonishment.

"You never know where help is coming from when you're trying to do your duty," said Barbara, in a high-moral way. "Prince Percinet, Mrs. Holabird."

"Miss Polly-put—" began Harry Goldthwaite, brimming up with a half-diffident mischief. But Barbara walked round to her place at the table with a very great dignity.

People think that young folks can only have properly arranged and elaborately provided good times; with Germania band pieces, and bouquets and ribbons for the German, and oysters and salmon-salad and sweatmeat-and-spun-sugar "chignons"; at least, commerce games and bewitching little prizes. Yet when lives just touch each other naturally, as it were,—dip into each other's little interests and doings, and take them as they are, what a multiplication-table of opportunities it opens up! You may happen upon a good time any minute, then. Neighborhoods used to go on in that simple fashion; life used to be "co-operative."

Mother said something like that after Leslie and Harry had gone away.

"Only you can't get them into it again," objected Rosamond. "It's a case of Humpty Dumpty. The world will go on."

"One world will," said Barbara. "But the world is manifold. You can set up any kind of a monad you like, and a world will shape itself round it. You've just got to live your own way, and everything that belongs to it will be sure to join on. You'll have a world before you know it. I think myself that's what the Ark means, and Mount Ararat, and the Noachian—don't they call it?—new foundation. That's the way they got up New England, anyhow."

"Barbara, what flights you take!"

"Do I? Well, we have to. The world lives up nineteen flights now, you know, besides the old broken-down and buried ones."

It was a few days after that, that the news came to mother of Aunt Radford's illness, and she had to go up to Oxenham. Father went with her, but he came back the same night. Mother had made up her mind to stay a week. And so we had to keep house without her.

One afternoon Grandfather Holabird came down. I don't know why, but if ever mother did happen to be out of the way, it seemed as if he took the time to talk over special affairs with father. Yet he thought everything of "Mrs. Stephen," too, and he quite relied upon her judgment and influence. But I think old men do often feel as if they had got their sons back again, quite to themselves, when the Mrs. Stephens or the Mrs. Johns leave them alone for a little.

At any rate, Grandfather Holabird sat with father on the north piazza, out of the way of the strong south-wind; and he had out a big wallet, and a great many papers, and he stayed and stayed, from just after dinner-time till almost the middle of the afternoon, so that father did not go down to his office at all; and when old Mr. Holabird went home at last, he walked over with him. Just after they had gone Leslie Goldthwaite and Harry stopped, "for a minute only," they said; for the south-wind had brought up clouds, and there was rain threatening. That was how we all happened to be just as we were that night of the September gale; for it was the September gale of last year that was coming.

The wind had been queer, in gusts, all day; yet the weather had been soft and mild. We had opened windows for the pleasant air, and shut them again in a hurry when the papers blew about, and the pictures swung to and fro against the walls. Once that afternoon, somebody had left doors open through the brown room and the dining-room, where a window was thrown up, as we could have it there where the three were all on one side. Ruth was coming down stairs, and saw grandfather's papers give a whirl out of his lap and across the piazza floor upon the gravel. If she had not sprung so quickly and gathered them all up for him, some of them might have blown quite away, and led father a chase after them over the hill. After that, old Mr. Holabird put them up in his wallet again, and when they had talked a few minutes more they went off together to the old house.



It was wonderful how that wind and rain did come up. The few minutes that Harry and Leslie stopped with us, and then the few more they took to consider whether it would do for Leslie to try to walk home, just settled it that nobody could stir until there should be some sort of lull or holding up.

Out of the far southerly hills came the blast, rending and crashing; the first swirls of rain that flung themselves against our windows seemed as if they might have rushed ten miles, horizontally, before they got a chance to drop; the trees bent down and sprang again, and lashed the air to and fro; chips and leaves and fragments of all strange sorts took the wonderful opportunity and went soaring aloft and onward in a false, plebeian triumph.

The rain came harder, in great streams; but it all went by in white, wavy drifts; it seemed to rain from south to north across the country,—not to fall from heaven to earth; we wondered if it would fall anywhere. It beat against the house; that stood up in its way; it rained straight in at the window-sills and under the doors; we ran about the house with cloths and sponges to sop it up from cushions and carpets.

"I say, Mrs. Housekeeper!" called out Stephen from above, "look out for father's dressing-room! It's all afloat,—hair-brushes out on voyages of discovery, and a horrid little kelpie sculling round on a hat-box!"

Father's dressing-room was a windowed closet, in the corner space beside the deep, old-fashioned chimney. It had hooks and shelves in one end, and a round shaving-stand and a chair in the other. We had to pull down all his clothes and pile them upon chairs, and stop up the window with an old blanket. A pane was cracked, and the wind, although its force was slanted here, had blown it in, and the fine driven spray was dashed across, diagonally, into the very farthest corner.

In the room a gentle cascade descended beside the chimney, and a picture had to be taken down. Down stairs the dining-room sofa, standing across a window, got a little lake in the middle of it before we knew. The side door blew open with a bang, and hats, coats, and shawls went scurrying from their pegs, through sitting-room and hall, like a flight of scared, living things. We were like a little garrison in a great fort, besieged at all points at once. We had to bolt doors,—latches were nothing,—and bar shutters. And when we could pause indoors, what a froth and whirl we had to gaze out at!

The grass, all along the fields, was white, prostrate; swept fiercely one way; every blade stretched out helpless upon its green face. The little pear-trees, heavy with fruit, lay prone in literal "windrows." The great ashes and walnuts twisted and writhed, and had their branches stripped upward of their leaves, as a child might draw a head of blossoming grass between his thumb and finger. The beautiful elms were in a wild agony; their graceful little bough-tips were all snapped off and whirled away upon the blast, leaving them in a ragged blight. A great silver poplar went over by the fence, carrying the posts and palings with it, and upturned a huge mass of roots and earth, that had silently cemented itself for half a century beneath the sward. Up and down, between Grandfather Holabird's home-field and ours, fallen locusts and wild cherry-trees made an abatis. Over and through all swept the smiting, powdery, seething storm of waters; the air was like a sea, tossing and foaming; we could only see through it by snatches, to cry out that this and that had happened. Down below us, the roof was lifted from a barn, and crumpled up in a heap half a furlong off, against some rocks; and the hay was flying in great locks through the air.

It began to grow dark. We put a bright, steady light in the brown room, to shine through the south window, and show father that we were all right; directly after a lamp was set in Grandfather Holabird's north porch. This little telegraphy was all we could manage; we were as far apart as if the Atlantic were between us.

"Will they be frightened about you at home?" asked Ruth of Leslie.

"I think not. They will know we should go in somewhere, and that there would be no way of getting out again. People must be caught everywhere, just as it happens, to-night."

"It's just the jolliest turn-up!" cried Stephen, who had been in an ecstasy all the time. "Let's make molasses-candy, and sit up all night!"

Between eight and nine we had some tea. The wind had lulled a little from its hurricane force; the rain had stopped.

"It had all been blown to Canada, by this time," Harry Goldthwaite said. "That rain never stopped anywhere short, except at the walls and windows."

True enough, next morning, when we went out, the grass was actually dry.

It was nearly ten when Stephen went to the south window and put his hands up each side of his face against the glass, and cried out that there was a lantern coming over from grandfather's. Then we all went and looked.

It came slowly; once or twice it stopped; and once it moved down hill at right angles quite a long way. "That is where the trees are down," we said. But presently it took an unobstructed diagonal, and came steadily on to the long piazza steps, and up to the side door that opened upon the little passage to the dining-room.

We thought it was father, of course, and we all hurried to the door to let him in, and at the same time to make it nearly impossible that he should enter at all. But it was Grandfather Holabird's man, Robert.

"The old gentleman has been taken bad," he said. "Mr. Stephen wants to know if you're all comfortable, and he won't come till Mr. Holabird's better. I've got to go to the town for the doctor."

"On foot, Robert?"

"Sure. There's no other way. I take it there's many a good winter's firing of wood down across the road atwixt here and there. There ain't much knowing where you can get along."

"But what is it?"

"We mustn't keep him," urged Barbara.

"No, I ain't goin' to be kep'. 'T won't do. I donno what it is. It's a kind of a turn. He's comin' partly out of it; but it's bad. He had a kind of a warnin' once before. It's his head. They're afraid it's appalectic, or paralettic, or sunthin'."

Robert looked very sober. He quite passed by the wonder of the gale, that another time would have stirred him to most lively speech. Robert "thought a good deal," as he expressed it, of Grandfather Holabird.

Harry Goldthwaite came through the brown room with his hat in his hand. How he ever found it we could not tell.

"I'll go with him," he said. "You won't be afraid now, will you, Barbara? I'm very sorry about Mr. Holabird."

He shook hands with Barbara,—it chanced that she stood nearest,—bade us all good night, and went away. We turned back silently into the brown room.

We were all quite hushed from our late excitement. What strange things were happening to-night!

All in a moment something so solemn and important was put into our minds. An event that,—never talked about, and thought of as little, I suppose, as such a one ever was in any family like ours,—had yet always loomed vaguely afar, as what should come some time, and would bring changes when it came, was suddenly impending.

Grandfather might be going to die.

And yet what was there for us to do but to go quietly back into the brown room and sit down?

There was nothing to say even. There never is anything to say about the greatest things. People can only name the bare, grand, awful fact, and say, "It was tremendous," or "startling," or "magnificent," or "terrible," or "sad." How little we could really say about the gale, even now that it was over! We could repeat that this and that tree were blown down, and such a barn or house unroofed; but we could not get the real wonder of it—the thing that moved us to try to talk it over—into any words.

"He seemed so well this afternoon," said Rosamond.

"I don't think he was quite well," said Ruth. "His hands trembled so when he was folding up his papers; and he was very slow."

"O, men always are with their fingers. I don't think that was anything," said Barbara. "But I think he seemed rather nervous when he came over. And he would not sit in the house, though the wind was coming up then. He said he liked the air; and he and father got the shaker chairs up there by the front door; and he sat and pinched his knees together to make a lap to hold his papers; it was as much as he could manage; no wonder his hands trembled."

"I wonder what they were talking about," said Rosamond.

"I'm glad Uncle Stephen went home with him," said Ruth.

"I wonder if we shall have this house to live in if grandfather should die," said Stephen, suddenly. It could not have been his first thought; he had sat soberly silent a good while.

"O Stevie! don't let's think anything about that!" said Ruth; and nobody else answered at all.

We sent Stephen off to bed, and we girls sat round the fire, which we had made up in the great open fireplace, till twelve o'clock; then we all went up stairs, leaving the side door unfastened. Ruth brought some pillows and comfortables into Rosamond and Barbara's room, made up a couch for herself on the box-sofa, and gave her little white one to Leslie. We kept the door open between. We could see the light in grandfather's northwest chamber; and the lamp was still burning in the porch below. We could not possibly know anything; whether Robert had got back, and the doctor had come,—whether he was better or worse,—whether father would come home to-night. We could only guess.

"O Leslie, it is so good you are here!" we said.

There was something eerie in the night, in the wreck and confusion of the storm, in our loneliness without father and mother, and in the possible awfulness and change that were so near,—over there in Grandfather Holabird's lighted room.



CHAPTER VIII.

HALLOWEEN.

Breakfast was late the next morning. It had been nearly two o'clock when father had come home. He told us that grandfather was better; that it was what the doctor called a premonitory attack; that he might have another and more serious one any day, or that he might live on for years without a repetition. For the present he was to be kept as easy and quiet as possible, and gradually allowed to resume his old habits as his strength permitted.

Mother came back in a few days more; Aunt Radford also was better. The family fell into the old ways again, and it was as if no change had threatened. Father told mother, however, something of importance that grandfather had said to him that afternoon, before he was taken ill. He had been on the point of showing him something which he looked for among his papers, just before the wind whirled them out of his hands. He had almost said he would complete and give it to him at once; and then, when they were interrupted, he had just put everything up again, and they had walked over home together. Then there had been the excitement of the gale, and grandfather had insisted upon going to the barns himself to see that all was made properly fast, and had come back all out of breath, and had been taken with that ill turn in the midst of the storm.

The paper he was going to show to father was an unwitnessed deed of gift. He had thought of securing to us this home, by giving it in trust to father for his wife and children.

"I helped John into his New York business," he said, "by investing money in it that he has had the use of, at moderate interest, ever since; and Roderick and his wife have had their home with me. None of my boys ever paid me any board. I sha'n't make a will; the law gives things where they belong; there's nothing but this that wants evening; and so I've been thinking about it. What you do with your share of my other property when you get it is no concern of mine as I know of; but I should like to give you something in such a shape that it couldn't go for old debts. I never undertook to shoulder any of them; what little I've done was done for you. I wrote out the paper myself; I never go to lawyers. I suppose it would stand clear enough for honest comprehension,—and Roderick and John are both honest,—if I left it as it is; but perhaps I'd as well take it some day to Squire Hadden, and swear to it, and then hand it over to you. I'll see about it."

That was what grandfather had said; mother told us all about it; there were no secret committees in our domestic congress; all was done in open house; we knew all the hopes and the perplexities, only they came round to us in due order of hearing. But father had not really seen the paper, after all; and after grandfather got well, he never mentioned it again all that winter. The wonder was that he had mentioned it at all.

"He forgets a good many things, since his sickness," father said, "unless something comes up to remind him. But there is the paper; he must come across that."

"He may change his mind," said mother, "even when he does recollect. We can be sure of nothing."

But we grew more fond than ever of the old, sunshiny house. In October Harry Goldthwaite went away again on a year's cruise.

Rosamond had a letter from Mrs. Van Alstyne, from New York. She folded it up after she had read it, and did not tell us anything about it. She answered it next day; and it was a month later when one night up stairs she began something she had to say about our winter shopping with,—

"If I had gone to New York—" and there she stopped, as if she had accidentally said what she did not intend.

"If you had gone to New York! Why! When?" cried Barbara. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing," Rosamond answered, in a vexed way. "Mrs. Van Alstyne asked me, that is all. Of course I couldn't."

"Of course you're just a glorious old noblesse oblige-d! Why didn't you say something? You might have gone perhaps. We could all have helped. I'd have lent you—that garnet and white silk!"

Rosamond would not say anything more, and she would scarcely be kissed.

After all, she had co-operated more than any of us. Rose was always the daughter who objected and then did. I have often thought that young man in Scripture ought to have been a woman. It is more a woman's way.

The maples were in their gold and vermilion now, and the round masses of the ash were shining brown; we filled the vases with their leaves, and pressed away more in all the big books we could confiscate, and hunted frosted ferns in the wood-edge, and had beautiful pine blazes morning and evening in the brown room, and began to think how pleasant, for many cosey things, the winter was going to be, out here at Westover.

"How nicely we could keep Halloween," said Ruth, "round this great open chimney! What a row of nuts we could burn!"

"So we will," said Rosamond. "We'll ask the girls. Mayn't we, mother?"

"To tea?"

"No. Only to the fun,—and some supper. We can have that all ready in the other room."

"They'll see the cooking-stove."

"They won't know it, when they do," said Barbara.

"We might have the table in the front room," suggested Ruth.

"The drawing-room!" cried Rosamond. "That would be a make-shift. Who ever heard of having supper there? No; we'll have both rooms open, and a bright fire in each, and one up in mother's room for them to take off their things. And there'll be the piano, and the stereoscope, and the games, in the parlor. We'll begin in there, and out here we'll have the fortune tricks and the nuts later; and then the supper, bravely and comfortably, in the dining-room, where it belongs. If they get frightened at anything, they can go home; I'm going to new cover that screen, though, mother; And I'll tell you what with,—that piece of goldy-brown damask up in the cedar-trunk. And I'll put an arabesque of crimson braid around it for a border, and the room will be all goldy-brown and crimson then, and nobody will stop to think which is brocade and which is waterproof. They'll be sitting on the waterproof, you know, and have the brocade to look at. It's just old enough to seem as if it had always been standing round somewhere."

"It will be just the kind of party for us to have," said Barbara.

"They couldn't have it up there, if they tried. It would be sure to be Marchbanksy."

Rosamond smiled contentedly. She was beginning to recognize her own special opportunities. She was quite conscious of her own tact in utilizing them.

But then came the intricate questions of who? and who not?

"Not everybody, of course," said Rose, "That would be a confusion. Just the neighbors,—right around here."

"That takes in the Hobarts, and leaves out Leslie Goldthwaite," said Ruth, quietly.

"O, Leslie will be at the Haddens', or here," replied Rosamond. "Grace Hobart is nice," she went on; "if only she wouldn't be 'real' nice!"

"That is just the word for her, though," said Ruth. "The Hobarts are real."

Rosamond's face gathered over. It was not easy to reconcile things. She liked them all, each in their way. If they would only all come, and like each other.

"What is it, Rose?" said Barbara, teasing. "Your brows are knit,—your nose is crocheted,—and your mouth is—tatted! I shall have to come and ravel you out."

"I'm thinking; that is all."

"How to build the fence?"

"What fence?"

"That fence round the pond,—the old puzzle. There was once a pond, and four men came and built four little houses round it,—close to the water. Then four other men came and built four big houses, exactly behind the first ones. They wanted the pond all to themselves; but the little people were nearest to it; how could they build the fence, you know? They had to squirm it awfully! You see the plain, insignificant people are so apt to be nearest the good time!"

"I like to satisfy everybody."

"You won't,—with a squirm-fence!"

If it had not been for Ruth, we should have gone on just as innocently as possible, and invited them—Marchbankses and all—to our Halloween frolic. But Ruth was such a little news-picker, with her music lessons! She had five scholars now; beside Lily and Reba, there were Elsie Hobart and little Frank Hendee, and Pen Pennington, a girl of her own age, who had come all the way from Fort Vancouver, over the Pacific Railroad, to live here with her grandmother. Between the four houses, Ruth heard everything.

All Saints' Day fell on Monday; the Sunday made double hallowing, Barbara said; and Saturday was the "E'en." We did not mean to invite until Wednesday; on Tuesday Ruth came home and told us that Olivia and Adelaide Marchbanks were getting up a Halloween themselves, and that the Haddens were asked already; and that Lily and Reba were in transports because they were to be allowed to go.

"Did you say anything?" asked Rosamond.

"Yes. I suppose I ought not; but Elinor was in the room, and I spoke before I thought."

"What did you tell her?"

"I only said it was such a pity; that you meant to ask them all. And Elinor said it would be so nice here. If it were anybody else, we might try to arrange something."

But how could we meddle with the Marchbankses? With Olivia and Adelaide, of all the Marchbankses? We could not take it for granted that they meant to ask us. There was no such thing as suggesting a compromise. Rosamond looked high and splendid, and said not another word.

In the afternoon of Wednesday Adelaide and Maud Marchbanks rode by, homeward, on their beautiful little brown, long-tailed Morgans.

"They don't mean to," said Barbara. "If they did, they would have stopped."

"Perhaps they will send a note to-morrow," said Ruth.

"Do you think I am waiting, in hopes?" asked Rosamond, in her clearest, quietest tones.

Pretty soon she came in with her hat on. "I am going over to invite the Hobarts," she said.

"That will settle it, whatever happens," said Barbara.

"Yes," said Rosamond; and she walked out.

The Hobarts were "ever so much obliged to us; and they would certainly come." Mrs. Hobart lent Rosamond an old English book of "Holiday Sports and Observances," with ten pages of Halloween charms in it.

From the Hobarts' house she walked on into Z——, and asked Leslie Goldthwaite and Helen Josselyn, begging Mrs. Ingleside to come too, if she would; the doctor would call for them, of course, and should have his supper; but it was to be a girl-party in the early evening.

Leslie was not at home; Rosamond gave the message to her mother. Then she met Lucilla Waters in the street.

"I was just thinking of you," she said. She did not say, "coming to you," for truly, in her mind, she had not decided it. But seeing her gentle, refined face, pale always with the life that had little frolic in it, she spoke right out to that, without deciding.

"We want you at our Halloween party on Saturday. Will you come? You will have Helen and the Inglesides to come with, and perhaps Leslie."

Rosamond, even while delivering her message to Mrs. Goldthwaite for Leslie, had seen an unopened note lying upon the table, addressed to her in the sharp, tall hand of Olivia Marchbanks.

She stopped in at the Haddens, told them how sorry she had been to find they were promised; asked if it were any use to go to the Hendees'; and when Elinor said, "But you will be sure to be asked to the Marchbankses yourselves," replied, "It is a pity they should come together, but we had quite made up our minds to have this little frolic, and we have begun, too, you see."

Then she did go to the Hendees', although it was dark; and Maria Hendee, who seldom went out to parties, promised to come. "They would divide," she said. "Fanny might go to Olivia's. Holiday-keeping was different from other invites. One might take liberties."

Now the Hendees were people who could take liberties, if anybody. Last of all, Rosamond went in and asked Pen Pennington.

It was Thursday, just at dusk, when Adelaide Marchbanks walked over, at last, and proffered her invitation.

"You had better all come to us," she said, graciously. "It is a pity to divide. We want the same people, of course,—the Hendees, and the Haddens, and Leslie." She hardly attempted to disguise that we ourselves were an afterthought.

Rosamond told her, very sweetly, that we were obliged, but that she was afraid it was quite too late; we had asked others; the Hobarts, and the Inglesides; one or two whom Adelaide did not know,—Helen Josselyn, and Lucilla Waters; the parties would not interfere much, after all.