ght-gray silk dress, a
large white collar, and a borderless cap of lace over her dark hair.
The indispensable bit of color was, in her case, supplied by a vivid
scarlet shawl of Chinese crepe, one of those heavily embroidered
shawls of dazzling color, which seem in these latter days to have
disappeared.

It was getting near to seven o'clock, when they entered the hall and
found it already full and happy. They had not thought it necessary to
wait in whispering silence, until the music came and opened the
entertainment. They possessed among themselves many good story
tellers, and they were heartily laughing in chorus at some comic
incident which a fisherman was relating, when the Ruleson party
arrived.

Then there was one long, loud, unanimous cry for Christine Ruleson,
for Christine was preeminent as a vive-voce story teller, a rare art
even among the nations of Europe. She nodded and smiled, and without
any affectation of reluctance, but with a sweet readiness to give
pleasure, went at once to the platform, and as easily, and as
naturally as if she were telling it at her home fireside, she raised
her hand for attention, and said:

* * * * *

"_The Wreck of the Grosvenor_

"The _Grosvenor_, an East Indiaman, homeward bound, went to pieces on
the coast of Caffraria. There were a hundred and thirty-five souls on
board, and they resolved to cross the trackless desert to the Dutch
settlements at the Cape of Good Hope. A solitary child was among the
passengers, a boy of seven years old, who had no relation on board,
and when he saw the party beginning to move away, he cried after some
member of it, who had been kind to him. The child's cry went to every
heart. They accepted him as a sacred charge.

"By turns they carried him through the deep sand and the long grass.
They pushed him across broad rivers on a little raft. They shared with
him such fish as they found to eat. Beset by lions, by savages, by
hunger and death in ghastly forms, they never--O Father in heaven! Thy
name be blessed for it! they never forgot the child. The captain and
his faithful coxswain sat down together to die, the rest go on for
their lives--but they take the child with them. The carpenter, his
chief friend, dies from eating, in his hunger, poisonous berries; the
steward assumed the sacred guardianship of the boy. He carried him in
his arms, when he himself was weak and suffering. He fed him, when he
was griped