sister Fanny's health; but they were afraid to let me run quite wild,
and so she--my sister--led me out often wherever I wished to go, and
helped me fill a little pasteboard museum which she made for me."

Miss Dudley's large, soft, trusty brown eyes met mine tenderly, as she
said: "These things must indeed possess a more than common interest for
you then. Have you that museum now?"

"No, ma'am; I sometimes wish I had. I gave it away when I went to
Greenville _to keep school_," I added; not that I supposed it would
matter anything to her, but that I thought it just as well to make sure
of her understanding my position in life.

"That is so natural to us all,--to part with these little relics when we
are still very young, and then to wish them back again before we are
much older! You would smile to see a little museum that I keep for my
brother,--not his scientific collection, which I hope some day to have
the pleasure of showing you,--but 'an _olla podrida_ in an ancestral
wardrobe,' as my little Paul calls it, of his and my two little nieces'
first baby-shoes, rattles, corals, and bells, wooden horses, primers,
picture-books, and so forth, down to the cups and balls, and copy-books,
which they have cast off within a month or two, each labelled with the
owner's name, and the date of deposit. No year goes by without leaving
behind some memento of each of them, or even without my laying aside
there some trifling articles of dress that they have worn. It is a fancy
of my brother's. He says that others may claim their after-years, but
their childhood is his own,--all of it that is not mine,--and he must
keep it for himself, and for them when they come back to visit him in
his old age. It is a birthday treat to them already to take the key from
my split-ring, and look together over the half-forgotten things. But
there is one thing there--a manuscript on the topmost shelf--which they
do not know about, but which we take out and laugh over sometimes when
they are all in bed,--a record that I have kept of all the most
diverting things which we have heard them say, ever since they began to
learn to talk." She checked herself,--I fancied because she remembered
that, in her enthusiasm about the children, she had forgotten to what a
new acquaintance she was speaking. She rose to take leave, and resumed,
shaking hands with me cordially,--she had, I observed, a remarkably
cordial and pleasant, earnest way of shaking hands,--"But up