es? or is it the picture
on the back?" said Laura.

"Oh, either. I was thinking of a beauty I saw at Crosby's yesterday,
with the Madonna della Seggiola on the back. Now it is a good thing to
have such a picture about one, any way. I looked at this through the
microscope. It was surprisingly well done; and I suppose the watches are
as good as most."

"Better than yours and mine, Del?" said Laura, demurely.

"Why, no,--I suppose not so good. But I was thinking more of the
picture."

"Oh!" said Laura.

I was on the point of asking what she thought of Knight's Shakspeare,
when the bell rang and Polly brought up Miss Russell's card.

Miss Russell was good and pretty, with a peach-bloom complexion, soft
blue eyes, and curling auburn hair. Still those were articles that could
not well be appraised, as I thought the first minute after we were
seated in the parlor. But she had over her shoulders a cashmere scarf,
which Mr. Russell had brought from India himself, which was therefore a
genuine article, and which, to crown all, cost him only fifty dollars.
It would readily bring thrice that sum in Boston, Miss Russell said. But
such chances were always occurring. Then she described how the shawls
were all thrown in a mess together in a room, and how the captains of
vessels bought them at hap-hazard, without knowing anything about their
value or their relative fineness, and how you could often, if you knew
about the goods, get great bargains. It was a good way to send out fifty
or a hundred dollars by some captain you could trust for taste, or the
captain's wife. But it was generally a mere chance. Sometimes there
would be bought a great old shawl that had been wound round the naked
waist and shoulders of some Indian till it was all soiled and worn. That
would have to be cut up into little neck-scarfs. But sometimes, too, you
got them quite new. Papa knew about dry goods, luckily, and selected a
nice one.

Part of this was repulsive,--but, again, part of it attractive. We don't
expect to be the cheated ones ourselves.

The bell rang again, and this time Lieutenant Clarence Herbert entered
on tiptoe: not of expectation particularly, but he had a way of
tiptoeing which had been the fashion before he went to sea the last
time, and which he resumed on his return, without noticing that in the
mean time the fashion had gone by, and everybody stood straight and
square on his feet. The effect, like all just-gone-by fashions, was