ved from duty
for the day, and the morning was mild and beautiful, we sought a rustic
seat in the garden, and there in a little nook retired from view, I
heard the story of that life to which my own during the past year had
been so closely knit.

'There is one thing,' said Mrs. Simmons, 'in regard to our friend, to
which we have never alluded, and which, perhaps, you would rather have
me now pass over; but on that very thing her whole character and history
turn, and to omit it would leave nothing worth the telling--I mean her
personal appearance.

'When I was a child, my parents moved into the suburbs of Condar, and as
there were no houses between ours and Mr. Sunderland's, the two families
soon became well acquainted. On the day that I was ten years old, my
mother told me there was a baby girl at Mrs. Sunderland's, and said she
would take me to see it. I was delighted, and wanted to go immediately,
but mother said I must wait till to-morrow. To-morrow came, and I was
sick; and at last the baby was a week old when I was taken, the happiest
little mortal in existence, into that upper room where the little one
lay in its nurse's arms. I looked at it, and then at my mother.'

"What is the matter, Mary?' said she.

"It isn't a very pretty baby, is it, mother?'

"Oh it will grow prettier," said my mother, and with that I was
satisfied. I was extravagantly fond of babies, and this one I adopted as
my especial care, for there was no other in the neighborhood; and
besides, in my childish confusion of ideas, I supposed we were twins,
our birthdays being the same.

'From the time Laetitia first learned to speak, she came to me with all
her troubles and her interests, and I was always glad to be her
sympathizer, her counsellor, and her playmate. When she was five or six
years old she went to the nearest district school. She was always a
marked girl, from her extreme homeliness, her excellent scholarship, her
boldness in all active sports, and an odd humor which never failed to
interest and amuse. My mother's prophecy, alas! was not fulfilled. She
grew no prettier, but rather the reverse. She was the same in childhood
as when you knew her, with the high, bold forehead, crowned with white,
towy hair, small greenish-gray eyes, shaded and yet not shaded with
light yellowish eyelashes, short and thin; scanty eyebrows of the same
color; a nose so small and flat it seemed scarcely a projection from her
face; teeth tolerably good,