e will get into my
short story. They get into a short time, in such a summer holiday, and
so why not? At any rate, I must tell you about these Josselyns.

These two had never in all their lives been away pleasuring before. They
had nobody but each other to come with now. Susan had been away a good
deal in the last two years, but it had not been pleasuring. Martha was
some five or six years the younger. She had a pretty face, yet marked,
as it is so sad to see the faces of the young, with lines and
loss--lines that tell of cares too early felt, and loss of the first
fresh, redundant bloom that such lines bring.

They sat a great deal at this window of theirs. It was a sort of
instinct and habit with them, and it made them happier than almost
anything else,--sitting at a window together. It was home to them
because at home they lived so: life and duty were so framed in for
them,--in one dear old window-recess. Sometimes they thought that it
would he heaven to them by and by: that such a seat, and such a quiet,
happy outlook, they should find kept for them together, in the Father's
mansion, up above.

At home, it was up three flights of stairs, in a tall, narrow city
house, of which the lower floors overflowed with young, boisterous half
brothers and sisters,--the tide not seldom rising and inundating their
own retreat,--whose delicate mother, not more than eight years older
than her eldest step-daughter, was tied hand and foot to her nursery,
with a baby on her lap, and the two or three next above with hands
always to be washed, disputes and amusements always to be settled, small
morals to be enforced, and clean calico tiers to be incessantly put on.

And Susan and Martha sat upstairs and made the tiers.

Mr. Josselyn was a book-keeper, with a salary of eighteen hundred
dollars, and these seven children. And Susan and Martha were girls of
fair culture, and womanly tastes, and social longings. How does this
seem to you, young ladies, and what do you think of their upstairs life
together, you who calculate, if you calculate at all, whether five
hundred dollars may carry you respectably through your half-dozen city
assemblies, where you shine in silk and gossamer, of which there will
not be "a dress in the room that cost less than seventy-five dollars,"
and come home, after the dance, "a perfect rag"?

Two years ago, when you were perhaps performing in tableaux for the
"benefit of the Sanitary," these two girls had fel