able. I remember wondering at the deep
interest that all the ladies seemed to take in the bride's pretty flow
of words about the fashions, the drives, and the pump-room, and the
long lists of visitors' names; this, too, without any connection
between the hearers and the people and places mentioned. When anybody
did recognize a name, however, about which she knew anything, it
seemed like the finding of a treasure. All the ladies bore down upon
it at once, dug up the family history to its farthest known point, and
divided the subject among them. Miss Lucy followed these letters
closely, and remembered them wonderfully, though (as I afterwards
found) she had never seen Bath, and knew no more of the people
mentioned than the little hearsay facts she had gathered from former
letters.

"It is a very useful art, my dear Ida, and one in which I have sadly
failed all my life, to be able to remember who is related to whom,
what watering-place such a family went to the summer before last, and
which common friends they met there, etc. But, like other arts, it
demands close attention, forbids day-dreaming, and takes up a good
deal of time.

"'_Wasn't_ it odd,' said Miss Lucy, one morning after breakfast, 'that
Cecilia and the major should meet those Hicksons!'

"'Who are the Hicksons?' I asked.

"'Oh! my dear girl, don't you remember, in Cecilia's last letter, her
telling us about the lady she met in that shop when they were in town,
buying a shawl the counterpart of her own? and it seems so odd they
should turn up in Bath, and be such nice people! Don't you remember
mamma said it must be the same family as that Colonel Hickson who was
engaged to a girl with one eye, and she caught the small-pox and got
so much marked, and he broke it off?'

"'Small-pox and one eye would look very ugly,' Fatima languidly
observed; and this subject drifted after the rest.

"One afternoon, I remember, it chanced that we were left alone with
our hostess in the drawing-room. No one else happened to be in the way
to talk to, and the good lady talked to us. We were clever girls for
our age, I fancy, and we had been used to talk a good deal with our
mother; at any rate we were attentive listeners, and I do not think
our hostess required much more of us. I think she was glad of anybody
who had not heard the whole affair from beginning to end, and so she
put up her feet on the sofa, and started afresh with the complete
history of her dear Cecilia fro