guage; but, indeed, they seemed to me very real and
engaging. What though all was on a small scale, it was the perfume
which gave this white violet distinction, and made it superior to the
broadest camelia--the fullest dahlia that ever bloomed.

"Ah! and you remember the old time at Bretton?"

"Better," said she, "better, perhaps, than you. I remember it with
minute distinctness: not only the time, but the days of the time, and
the hours of the days."

"You must have forgotten some things?"

"Very little, I imagine."

"You were then a little creature of quick feelings: you must, long ere
this, have outgrown the impressions with which joy and grief, affection
and bereavement, stamped your mind ten years ago."

"You think I have forgotten whom I liked, and in what degree I liked
them when a child?"

"The sharpness must be gone--the point, the poignancy--the deep imprint
must be softened away and effaced?"

"I have a good memory for those days."

She looked as if she had. Her eyes were the eyes of one who can
remember; one whose childhood does not fade like a dream, nor whose
youth vanish like a sunbeam. She would not take life, loosely and
incoherently, in parts, and let one season slip as she entered on
another: she would retain and add; often review from the commencement,
and so grow in harmony and consistency as she grew in years. Still I
could not quite admit the conviction that _all_ the pictures which now
crowded upon me were vivid and visible to her. Her fond attachments,
her sports and contests with a well-loved playmate, the patient, true
devotion of her child's heart, her fears, her delicate reserves, her
little trials, the last piercing pain of separation.... I retraced
these things, and shook my head incredulous. She persisted. "The child
of seven years lives yet in the girl of seventeen," said she.

"You used to be excessively fond of Mrs. Bretton," I remarked,
intending to test her. She set me right at once.

"Not _excessively_ fond," said she; "I liked her: I respected her as I
should do now: she seems to me very little altered."

"She is not much changed," I assented.

We were silent a few minutes. Glancing round the room she said, "There
are several things here that used to be at Bretton! I remember that
pincushion and that looking-glass."

Evidently she was not deceived in her estimate of her own memory; not,
at least, so far.

"You think, then, you would have known Mrs. Bretton?" I we