soil; she seemed to have no destination; and
after surveying him a moment, she mounted a fallen tree, and, bending
and swinging forward over a bough, still surveyed him.

"Ah, ha!" said Mr. Roger Raleigh; "what have we here?"

The child still looked in his face, but vouchsafed, in her swinging, no
reply.

"What is the little lady's name?" he asked then.

This query, apparently more comprehensible, elicited a response. She
informed him that her name was "Dymom, Pink, and Beauty."

"Indeed! And anything else?"

"Rose Pose," she added, as if soliciting the aid of memory by lifting
her hands near her temples.

"Is that all?"

"Little silly Daffodilly."

"No more?"

"Rite."

"Rite,--ah, that is it! Rite what?"

"Rite!" said the child, authoritatively, bringing down her foot and
shaking back her hair.

"And how old is Rite?"

"One, two, four, twenty. Maman is twenty;--Rite is twenty, too."

"When was Rite four?"

"A great while ago. She went to heaven in the afternoon," was added,
confidentially, after a moment's inspection to see if he were worthy.

"Ah! And what was there there?"

"Pitchtures, and music, and peoples, and a great house."

"And where is Rite going now?"

"Going away in a ship."

"Rite will have to wash her face first."

But at this proposition the child flashed open her pale-blue orbs,
half-closed them as a sleepy cat does, and, with no other change of
countenance to mark her indignation, appeared to shut him out from her
contemplation. Directly afterward, she opened them again, bent forward
and back over the swinging, and recommenced her song, as if there were
not another person than herself within a hundred miles. Half-hidden in
the great hemlock-bough, this tiny, fantastic creature, so fair, so
supercilious, seemed in her waywardness a veritable fay, mate for any of
the little men in green, bibbers of dewdrops, lodgers in bean-blossoms,
Green-Jacket, Red-Cap, and White-Owl's-Feather.

Mr. Raleigh hesitated whether or not he should remain and watch her fade
away into the twilight, wondered if she were bewitching him, then rubbed
his hand across his eyes and said, in a disenchanted, matter-of-fact
manner,--

"Do you know your way home, child?" and obtained, of course, no reply.
For an instant he had half the mind to leave her to find it; but at once
convicted of his absurdity, "Then I shall take you with me," he said,
making a step toward her,--"because you are, or will be, l