nd then covering her eyes. "Come close! Look at mother! Is she
better--or is she dead?"

The doctor put one hand on the shoulder of the shrinking child, and
touched the woman with the other.

"She is better!" he said gently, "and she is dead."

Tenth Chronicle. REBECCA'S REMINISCENCES

Rebecca was sitting by the window in her room at the Wareham Female
Seminary. She was alone, as her roommate, Emma Jane Perkins, was
reciting Latin down below in some academic vault of the old brick
building.

A new and most ardent passion for the classics had been born in Emma
Jane's hitherto unfertile brain, for Abijah Flagg, who was carrying off
all the prizes at Limerick Academy, had written her a letter in Latin, a
letter which she had been unable to translate for herself, even with the
aid of a dictionary, and which she had been apparently unwilling that
Rebecca, her bosom friend, confidant, and roommate, should render into
English.

An old-fashioned Female Seminary, with its allotment of one medium-sized
room to two medium sized young females, gave small opportunities for
privacy by night or day, for neither the double washstand, nor the thus
far unimagined bathroom, nor even indeed the humble and serviceable
screen, had been realized, in these dark ages of which I write.
Accordingly, like the irrational ostrich, which defends itself by the
simple process of not looking at its pursuers, Emma Jane had kept her
Latin letter in her closed hand, in her pocket, or in her open book,
flattering herself that no one had noticed her pleased bewilderment at
its only half-imagined contents.

All the fairies were not present at Rebecca's cradle. A goodly number of
them telegraphed that they were previously engaged or unavoidably absent
from town. The village of Temperance, Maine, where Rebecca first saw the
light, was hardly a place on its own merits to attract large throngs of
fairies. But one dear old personage who keeps her pocket full of Merry
Leaves from the Laughing Tree, took a fancy to come to the little
birthday party; and seeing so few of her sister-fairies present, she
dowered the sleeping baby more richly than was her wont, because of its
apparent lack of wealth in other directions. So the child grew, and the
Merry Leaves from the Laughing Tree rustled where they hung from the
hood of her cradle, and, being fairy leaves, when the cradle was
given up they festooned themselves on the cribside, and later on blew
themse