to the sobriety of the parish registers. So
Fatima she was called, and as she grew up pale, and moon-faced, and
dark-eyed, the name became her very well."

"Was it this Fatima who went out visiting with you?" asked Ida.

"Yes, my dear; and now as to the visit. The invitation came on my
thirteenth birthday.

"One's birthday is generally a day of some importance. A very notable
day whilst one is young, but less so when one is old, when one is
being carried quickly through the last stages of life, and when it
seems hardly worth while to count time so near the end of the journey.
Even in youth, however some birthdays are more important than others.
I remember looking forward to my tenth birthday as to a high point of
dignity and advancement; and the just pride of the occasion on which I
first wrote my age with more figures than one. With similar feelings,
I longed to be thirteen. The being able to write my age with two
figures had not, after all, shed any special lustre upon life; but
when I was 'in my teens' it must 'feel different somehow.' So I
thought. Moreover, this birthday was really to bring with it solid
advantages. I was now to be allowed to read certain books of a more
grown-up character than I had read hitherto, and to sit up till nine
o'clock. I was to wear sandals to my shoes. My hair was henceforth to
grow as long as I and the Fates would permit, and the skirts of my
frocks were to take an inch in the same direction. 'In four more
years,' I said to Fatima, as we sat on the eve of my birthday,
discussing its manifold advantages, 'in four more years I shall be
grown up. Miss Ansted was introduced at seventeen.' The prospect was
illimitable.

"'Do people always grow much on their birthdays?' asked one of the
little ones. I had boasted in the nursery, that when I was thirteen I
should be 'nearly grown up,' and I myself had hardly outlived the idea
that on one's birthday one was a year older than on the previous day,
and might naturally expect to have made a year's growth during the
night.

"This birthday, however, produced no such striking change. As usual,
the presents were charming; the wreath as lovely as Fatima's deft
fingers could make it, the general holiday and pleasure-making almost
too much of a good thing. Otherwise, there was little to mark it from
other days in the year.

"Towards evening we were all sitting on the grass, the boys with their
heads on the sisters' laps, and there had been an ou