them down!"

"There's one thing," said Kate Sencerbox. "You might be parlor
people all your days, and not get into everybody's parlor, either.
There's an up-side and a down-side, all the way through, from top to
bottom. The very best chance, for some people, if they only knew it,
into some houses, would be up through the kitchen."

"Never mind," said Bel, putting sugar into Mary Pinfall's second cup
of coffee. "I've got the notion of those lines, Kate,--I was going
to tell you,--into my head at last, I do believe. Red-hot iron makes
a rainbow through a prism, like any light; but iron-_steam_ stops a
stripe of the color; and every burning thing does the same
way,--stops its own color when it shines through its own vapor;
there! Let's hold on to that, and we'll go all over it another time.
There's a piece about it in last month's Scribner."

"What _are_ you talking about?" said Elise Mokey.

"The way they've been finding out what the sun is made of. By the
black lines across the rainbow colors. It's a telegraph; they've
just learned to read it."

"But what do _you_ care?"

"I guess it's put there as much, for me as anybody," said Bel. "I
don't think we should ever pick up such things, though, among the
basting threads at Fillmer & Bylles'. They're lying round here,
loose; in books and talk, and everything. They're going to have
Crambo this evening, Kate. After these dishes are washed, I mean to
try my hand at it. They were laughing about one Mrs. Scherman made
last time; they couldn't quite remember it. I've got it. I picked it
up among the sweepings. I shall take it in to her by and by."

Bel went to her work-basket as she spoke, and lifting up some calico
pieces that lay upon it, drew from underneath two or three folded
bits of paper.

"This is it," she said, selecting one, and coming back and reading.

(Do you see, let me ask in a hurried parenthesis,--how the tone of
this household might easily have been a different one, and pervaded
differently its auxiliary department? How, in that case, it might
have been nothing better than a surreptitious scrap of silk or
velvet, that would have lain in Bel Bree's work-basket, with a story
about it of how, and for what gayety, it had been made; a scrap out
of a life that these girls could only gossip and wonder about,--not
participate, and with self-same human privilege and faculty delight
in; and yet the only scrap that--"out of the sweepings"--they could
have picke