of a soldier who had failed to return from the war. It was a
very sad piece. Sadie had to weep, and more than once Emmy Lou had found
tears in her own eyes, watching her.

Miss Carrie said Sadie showed histrionic talent. Emmy Lou asked Hattie
about it, who said it meant tears, and Emmy Lou remembered then how
tears came naturally to Sadie.

When Aunt Cordelia heard they must dress to suit the part she came to
see Miss Carrie, and so did the mamma of Sadie and the mamma of Hattie.

"Dress them in a kind of mild mourning," Miss Carrie explained, "not too
deep, or it will seem too real, and, as three little sisters, suppose we
dress them alike."

And now Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou stood at the gate ready for the
play. Stiffly immaculate white dresses, with beltings of black sashes,
flared jauntily out above spotless white stockings and sober little
black slippers, while black-bound Leghorn hats shaded three anxious
little countenances. By the exact centre, each held a little
handkerchief, black-bordered.

"It seems almost wicked," Aunt Cordelia had ventured at this point; "it
seems like tempting Providence."

But Sadie's mamma did not see it so. Sadie's mamma had provided the
handkerchiefs. Tears were Sadie's feature in the play.

Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou wore each an anxious seriousness of
countenance, but it was a variant seriousness.

Hattie's tense expression breathed a determination which might have
been interpreted do or die; to Hattie life was a battling foe to be
overcome and trodden beneath a victorious heel; Hattie was an infantile
St. George always on the look for The Dragon, and to-day The Exhibition
was The Dragon.

Sadie's seriousness was a complacent realization of large
responsibility. Her weeping was a feature. Sadie remembered she had
histrionic talent.

Emmy Lou's anxiety was because there loomed ahead the awful moment of
mounting the platform. It was terrible on mere Fridays to mount the
platform and, after vain swallowing to overcome a labial dryness and a
lingual taste of copper, try to suit the action to the word, but to
mount the platform for The Play--Emmy Lou was trying not to look that
far ahead. But as the hour approached, the solemn importance of the
occasion was stealing brainward, and she even began to feel glad she was
a part of The Exhibition, for to have been left out would have been
worse even than the moment of mounting the platform.

"My grown-up brother's coming,