in the whole course of your life before? Isn't she big? Isn't she beautiful? Isn't she good? Just see her little hands and her hair! She never cries except when it is clearly her duty to cry. See her turn her head to look at me! Oh, you angel!' And, setting the long-suffering baby, she smothered it with kisses. `I never, never, never did see anything so sweet. Smell her, Katy! Doesn't she smell like heaven?'

Little Rose was indeed a delicious baby, all dimples and good humour and violet powder, with a skin as soft as a lily's leaf, and a happy capacity for allowing herself to be petted and cuddled without remonstrance. Katy wanted to hold her all the time, but this Rose would by no means permit; in fact, I may as well say at once that the two girls spent a great part of their time during the visit in fighting for the possession of the baby, who looked on at the struggle, and smiled on the victor, whichever it happened to be, with all the philosophic composure of Helen of Troy. She was so sunny and equable that it was no more trouble to care for and amuse her than if she had been a bird or a kitten, and, as Rose remarked, it was `ten times better fun.

`I was never allowed as many dolls as I wanted in my infancy,' she said. `I suppose I tore them to pieces too soon.'

`Were you such a very bad child?' asked Katy.

`Oh, utterly depraved, I believe! You wouldn't think so now, would you? I recollect some dreadful occasions at school. Once I had my head pinned up in my apron because I would make faces at the other scholars, and they laughed; but I promptly bit a bay window through the apron, and ran my tongue out of it till they laughed worse than ever. The teacher used to send me home with notes fastened to my pinafore with things like this written in them: "Little Frisk has been more troublesome than usual today. She has pinched all the younger children, and bent the bonnets of all the older ones. We hope to see an amendment soon, or we do not know what we shall do."'

`Why did they call you Little Frisk?' inquired Katy, after she had recovered from the laugh which Rose's reminiscences called forth.

`It was a term of endearment, I suppose, but somehow my family never seemed to enjoy it as they ought. I cannot understand,' she went on reflectively, `why I had not sense enough to suppress those awful little notes. It would have been so easy to lose them on the way home, but somehow it never occurred to me. Little Rose will be wiser than that, won't you, my angel? She will tear up the horrid notes - mammy will show her how!'

All the time that Katy was washing her face and brushing the dust of the railway from her dress, Rose sat by with the little Rose in her lap, entertaining her thus. When she was ready, the droll little mamma tucked her baby under her arm and led the way downstairs to a large square parlour with a bay window, through which the westering sun was shining. It was a pretty room, and had a flavour about it `just like Rose', Katy declared. No one else would have hung the pictures or looped back the curtains in exactly that way, or have hit upon the happy device of filling the grate with a great bunch of marigolds, pale brown, golden, and orange, to simulate the fire which would have been quite too warm on so mild an evening. Morris papers and chintzes and `artistic' shades of colour were in their infancy at that date, but Rose's taste was in advance of her time, and with a foreshadowing of the coming `reaction', she had chosen a `greenery, yallery' paper for her walls, against which hung various articles which looked a great deal queerer then than they would today. There was a mandolin, picked up at some Eastern sale, a warming pan in shining brass from her mother's attic, two old samplers worked in faded silks, and a quantity of gaily-tinted Japanese `fans and embroideries. She had also begged from an old aunt at Beverly Farms a couple of droll little armchairs in white painted wood, with covers of antique needlework. One had `Chit' embroidered on the middle of its cushion, the other, `Chat'. These stood suggestively at the corners of the hearth.

`Now, Katy,' said Rose, seating herself in `Chit', `pull up "Chat", and let us begin.'