his story now, as he promised."

"As the wig began to speak," said their mother, "he gave a slight
hitch on one side, just as if some one pushed him up a little, and
then, after a short pause, began thus: "You will be astonished,
perhaps, to know that it is more than a hundred years since I first
saw the light. None of you have lived so long, or seen as much as I
have. I cannot tell all I have seen or known. It would take too
long, and weary you too much. I can only give a slight sketch of my
long life.

In the year seventeen hundred and fifty, the baby head upon which I
grew came into this strange world in which we live. O, how happy was
the mother who saw me for the first time! How full was her joy when
she stroked the small head of her little girl, and exclaimed, "How
beautiful and soft her hair is! softer than velvet or satin." Even
then, every one said, "What a beautiful head of hair! What a lovely
baby!"

The little girl whose head I adorned was the daughter of a poor
vicar who lived with his wife in an obscure country town in England.

Alice was their fifth child, but their only daughter. She was very
beautiful, and, I may say it surely without vanity now, I was her
greatest ornament. I was of a beautiful auburn color, and fell in
thick clusters all over her happy, gentle head, and shaded her
laughter-loving face. After a day of hard work, how fond her mother
was of taking her little pet in her lap, and twisting up every curl
in nice order under her white linen night-cap, before putting her to
bed! Her father, too, would wind my ringlets around his great
fingers, made hard and rough with toil in the garden, and would kiss
every one of them, and pray God to bless the young head on which
they grew.

As the dear head grew larger, I grew larger and thicker. Every one
who saw me noticed me. One would say, "It looks like a pot of
hyacinths"; another, "It has caught the sunshine and kept it."

What a pleasant life I led! When Alice grew a large girl, she became
something of a romp, and one of her favorite amusements was to go to
the top of a hill near her father's house, when there was a high
wind, and let it blow through her curls, and sing and shout and
dance from the fulness of her joy. When she came home, she would say
"Mother, the wind has been combing my hair."

O the horrid combing that I had to endure every morning! One must be
a head of curly hair to know how terrible is a comb.

If you will not thin