skirt. I
do declare! you mustn't talk."

"I'm not," said Sarah, laughing; "it's you that are talking. You haven't
sewed a stitch for five minutes, either."

Gypsy sighed, and her needle began to fly savagely. There was a little
silence.

"You see," said Gypsy, breaking it, "I'm trying to reform."

"Reform?" said Sarah, with some vague ideas of Luther and Melancthon, and
Gypsy's wearing a wig and spectacles, and reading Cruden's "Concordance."

"Yes," nodded Gypsy, "reform. I never knew anybody need it as much as I. I
never do things anyway, and then I do them wrong, and then I forget all
about them. Mother says I'm improving. She says my room used to look like
a perfect Babel, and now I keep the wardrobe door shut, and dust it
out--sometimes. Then there's my mending. I came out here so's to be quiet
and _keep at it_. The poor dear woman is so afraid I won't learn to do
things in a lady-like way. It would be dreadful not to grow up a lady,
wouldn't it?"

"Dreadful!" said Sarah; "only I wish you'd hurry and get through, so we
can go down to the swamp and sail. Couldn't you take a little bigger
stitches?"

"No," said Gypsy, resolutely; "I should have to rip it all out. I'm going
to do it right, if it takes me all day."

Gypsy began to sew with a will, and Sarah, finding it was for her own
interest in the end, stopped talking; so the fearful seam was soon neatly
finished, the work folded up, and the thimble and scissors put away
carefully in the little green reticule.

"I lose so many thimbles,--you don't know!" observed Gypsy, by way of
comment. "I'm going to see if I can't keep this one three months."

"Now let's go," said Sarah.

"In a minute; I must carry my work up first. I'm going to jump off--it's
real fun. You see if I don't go as far as that dandelion."

So Gypsy sprang from the tree, carrying a shower of blossoms with her.

"Oh, look out for the statue!" cried Sarah.

The warning came too late. Gypsy fell short of her mark, hit the
water-nymph heavily, and it fell with a crash into the water, where the
paved bottom was hard as rock.

"Just see what you've done!" said Sarah, who had not a capacity for making
comforting remarks. "What do you suppose your father will say?"

Gypsy stood aghast. The water gurgled over the fallen statue, whose
pretty, upraised hands were snapped at the wrist, and the wondering face
crushed in. There was a moment's silence.

"Don't you tell!" said Sarah at length; "n