catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable sisterhood"--"In truth
I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide--awake of these
things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at
Folkestone for France.

We spent our first reunited week at the Castle Hotel, which was founded
on an ancient castle wall, or part of it; traces of it were shown to
guests. The harbor lapped the sea-wall in front; the Isle of Wight,
white-ramparted, gleamed through the haze in the offing. I suppose,
during that week, we were enough employed in telling one another our
histories during our separation; and naturally that of my mother and
sisters filled the larger space. They had brought home words and phrases
in a foreign tongue, which made me feel very ignorant; they had talked
familiarly with kings and queens; they had had exciting experiences in
Madeira; they brought with them photographs and colored prints of people
and places, unlike anything that I had seen. My mother, who was an
unsurpassed narrator of events, gave us wonderful and vivid accounts of
all they had seen and done, which I so completely assimilated that to
this day I could repeat a great deal of them; my father listened with
eyes like stars (as my mother would have said), and with a smile in the
corners of his mouth. It was glorious weather all the time, or so it
seems to have been to me. My sisters and I renewed our acquaintance,
and found one another none the worse. Nobody called on us except a Mrs.
Hume, with whom a stay of a fortnight was projected; she kept a girls'
school, and, this being vacation, she would take us as boarders. We
were starved there, as only a pinching, English, thin-bread-and-butter
housekeeper can starve people; and my sisters and I had for our playmate
a half-witted girl who was staying over the vacation, and who giggled
all the time. Mrs. Hume had aroused my enthusiasm by telling me that
there were endless sea-anemones along the coast; but Providence seemed
hostile to my sea-anemone proclivities; for it turned out that what Mrs.
Hume understood by sea-anemones was a small, white-flowering weed
that grew on the low bluff beside the water. I never told her my
disappointment, imagining that it would distress her; but it gnawed me
terribly, and she did not merit such forbearance.

We would much better have stayed at the hotel, only that they charged us
fourteen dollars a day, which was considered exorbitant in those days.
There were seven of u