hat?"

"Oh, stepmothers are always mean to you and abuse you."

"How do you know? You haven't got any."

"No; but I knew a girl that had." Isabel took advantage of Phebe's
interest in the subject, to slip the half-eaten turnip into her pocket.

"What happened?" Phebe demanded.

"Oh, everything. The stepmother used to take tucks in her dresses, and
whip her, and send her to bed, and even when there was company. And her
own mother used to stand by the bed and say,--

'How is my baby and how is my fawn?
Once more will I come, and then vanish at dawn.'"

Phebe turned around sharply.

"What a fib! That's in a book of fairy stories, and you said you knew
the girl, Isabel St. John."

"So I did. Her name was Eugenia Martha Smith."

But Phebe refused to be convinced.

"I don't believe one word of it, Isabel; and you needn't feel so smart,
even if you do have a mother of your own. I used to have; and I know my
stepmother will be nicer than your mother."

"How do you know?"

"She's prettier and she's younger. She gave me lots and lots of peaches,
too, and your mother wouldn't let us have a single one, so there now."

"Do you know the reason why?" Isabel demanded, in hot indignation.

"No, I don't, and I don't believe she does," Phebe answered recklessly.

"She said, after you'd gone, that she'd have been willing to let you
have one, but you were so deceitful, you'd have taken a dozen, as soon
as her back was turned. Now what do you think?"

Even between the friends, quarrels had been known to occur before now,
and one seemed imminent. An unexpected diversion intervened.

"Little girls," a solemn voice sounded in their ears; "do you know you
are taking turnips that do not belong to you?"

It was Mr. Elnathan Rogers. Isabel quaked, but Phebe faced him boldly.

"Yes, sir."

"But it is a sin to steal--"

"A pin." Phebe unexpectedly capped his sentence for him. "These aren't
worth a pin, anyway, and I don't see the harm of hooking two or three."

"But they are not your own," Mr. Rogers reiterated. He was more
accustomed to the phraseology of the prayer-meeting than of the public
school.

"Ours aren't ripe yet," she answered, as she scrambled down from the
fence. "When they are, I'll bring some of them over, if you want them.
Yours aren't very good ones, either."

Isabel also descended from the fence. As she did so, her skirt clung for
a moment, and the turnip rolled out from her pocket. Mr. Rogers eye