a
corporal and was to stay behind. At the time I blamed her sorely and
wrote her a bitter letter, but, dearie me, life is life for all of us,
and Miss Lisbet wasn't her treasure as she was mine. We made it up
later, Essie and me.

My dear wrote me herself, the saddest letter that ever I had from her,
I believe. The old mahogany pieces had been stored, very careful, and
burned in the storage, and the linen was out and the china broken, and
the new baby would find but a poor house, she feared, when they should
be settled. Could I find her one for Essie's place? And oh, if only
she could see my face, for she dreaded her coming trial, with every one
strange!

I was sitting in my new black, when I read the letter, with poor mother
free of her rheumatics at last, and all soft as I was from it, I cried
and cried!

I wrote her that I'd find some one, and then I went to the old doctor
and we talked and twisted it this way and that, and he went up to The
Cedars and called on Madam's heir-at-law, a crabbed old cousin that
lived much to himself and saw only the doctor, and the end of it was
that I was to pick out what I thought Miss Lisbet would like in the
matter of furniture, for he used but a third of the rooms, and what
linen and stuff his housekeeper thought could be spared.

And wasn't I glad to hear that, for well I knew the housekeeper, a good
woman who'd nursed turn about with mother for years, and had seen my
young lady grow up!

Well, if I do say it of myself, I stripped The Cedars thorough! And
yet a stranger would hardly know. It was full, do you see, from many
generations, and overflowing, and I furnished three bedrooms, complete,
from the garrets! Blankets I got, and a trunk of towels, and seven
woven bedspreads, and a dining-table that Miss Lisbet's mother's mother
had eaten a wedding dinner at, and the stuffed macaw on his ebony
perch! Eight dozen dinner napkins that had never seen the laundry, and
carpets that the moths were sure to take if I didn't! And brass
fire-irons and a great chest of books and some heads of statues she'd
always liked, and big engravings of foreign places, broken old ruins
and such. And her nursery fittings, that had never been touched, I
took entire--fire guard and small chairs, Moses in the Bulrushes,
little kneeling Samuel and all! And nearly everything from her lovely
bedroom--chintz valances, and the little South American
dressing-cabinet, and the china-set in a str