you enter my office as my medical student, and by that
time I shall have some plan arranged for your mother. Good-by; God bless
you, lad," said the good doctor, as he drove off and left Traverse
standing in the genial autumn sunshine, with his heart swelling and his
eyes overflowing with excess of gratitude and happiness.

CHAPTER XV.

CAP'S COUNTRY CAPERS.

"A willful elf--an uncle's child,
That half a pet and half a pest,
Was still reproved, endured, caressed,
Yet never tamed, though never spoiled."

Capitola at first was delighted and half incredulous at the great change
in her fortunes. The spacious and comfortable mansion of which she found
herself the little mistress; the high rank of the veteran officer who
claimed her as his ward and niece; the abundance, regularity and
respectability of her new life; the leisure, the privacy, the attendance
of servants, were all so different from anything to which she had
previously been accustomed that there were times when she doubted its
reality and distrusted her own identity.

Sometimes of a morning, after a very vivid dream of the alleys, cellars
and gutters, ragpickers, newsboys, and beggars of New York, she would
open her eyes upon her own comfortable chamber, with its glowing fire
and crimson curtains, and bright mirror crowning the walnut bureau
between them, she would jump up and gaze wildly around, not remembering
where she was or how she came thither.

Sometimes, suddenly startled by an intense realization of the contrast
between her past and her present life, she would mentally inquire:

"Can this be really I, myself, and not another? I, the little houseless
wanderer through the streets and alleys of New York? I, the little
newsgirl in boy's clothes? I, the wretched little vagrant that was
brought up before the recorder and was about to be sent to the House of
Refuge for juvenile delinquents? Can this be I, Capitola, the little
outcast of the city, now changed into Miss Black, the young lady,
perhaps the heiress of a fine old country seat; calling a fine old
military officer uncle; having a handsome income of pocket money settled
upon me; having carriages and horses and servants to attend me? No; it
can't be! It's just impossible! No; I see how it is. I'm crazy! that's
what I am, crazy! For, now I think of it, the last thing I remember of
my former life was being brought before the recorder for wearing boy's
clothes. Now, I'm sure