she's eight years old, what a pity
'twould be, when it's real gold, too!"

But when Comfort was eight years old she was very small for her age,
and she could actually crowd two of her fingers--the little one and
the third--into the ring. She begged her mother to let her wear it
so, but she would not. "No," said she, "I sha'n't let you make
yourself a laughing-stock by wearing a ring any such way as that.
Besides, you couldn't use your fingers. You've got to wait till your
hand grows to it."

So poor little Comfort waited, but she had a discouraged feeling
sometimes that her hand never would grow to it. "Suppose I shouldn't
be any bigger than you, mother," she said, "couldn't I ever wear the
ring?"

"Hush! you will be bigger than I am. All your father's folks are, and
you look just like them," said her mother, conclusively, and Comfort
tried to have faith. The gold dollar also could only impart the
simple delight of possession, for it was not to be spent. "I am going
to give her a gold dollar to keep beside the ring," Aunt Comfort had
said.

"What is it for?" Comfort asked sometimes when she gazed at it
shining in its pink cotton bed in the top of the work-box.

"It's to keep," answered her mother.

Comfort grew to have a feeling, which she never expressed to anybody,
that her gold dollar was somehow like Esau's birthright, and
something dreadful would happen to her if she parted with it. She
felt safer, because a "mess of pottage" didn't sound attractive to
her, and she did not think she would ever be tempted to spend her
gold dollar for that.

Comfort went to school when she was ten years old. She had not begun
as early as most of the other girls, because she lived three quarters
of a mile from the school-house and had many sore throats. The
doctors had advised her mother to teach her at home; and she could do
that, because she had been a teacher herself when she was a girl.

Comfort had not been to school one day before everybody in it knew
about her gold ring and her dollar, and it happened in this way: She
sat on the bench between Rosy and Matilda Stebbins, and Rosy had a
ring on the middle finger of her left hand. Rosy was a fair, pretty
little girl, with long light curls, which all the other girls admired
and begged for the privilege of twisting. Rosy at recess usually had
one or two of her friends standing at her back twisting her soft
curls over their fingers.

Rosy wore pretty gowns and aprons, to