Polly’s needle snapped in two, but she did not mind it, as she said, with a look that silenced even sharp- tongued Trix,

“I can’t help believing what my own eyes and ears have seen and heard. You lead such safe and happy lives, you can’t imagine the misery that is all round you; but if you could get a glimpse of it, it would make your hearts ache, as it has mine.”

“Do you suffer from heartache? Somone hinted as much to me, but you looked so well, I couldn’t believe it.”

Now that was cruel in Trix, more cruel than anyone guessed; but girls’ tongues can deal wounds as sharp and sudden as the slender stiletto Spanish women wear in their hair, and Polly turned pale, as those words stabbed her. Belle saw it, and rushed to the rescue with more goodwill than wisdom.

“Nobody ever accused you of having any heart to ache with. Polly and I are not old enough yet to get tough and cool, and we are still silly enough to pity unhappy people, Tom Shaw especially,” added Belle, under her breath.

That was a two-edged thrust, for Trix was decidedly an old girl, and Tom was generally regarded as a hapless victim. Trix turned red; but before she could load and fire again, Emma Davenport, who laboured under the delusion that this sort of skirmishing was ill-natured, and therefore ill-bred, spoke up in her pleasant way,—

“Speaking of pitying the poor, I always wonder why it is that we all like to read and cry over their troubles in books, but when we have the real thing before us, we think it is uninteresting and disagreeable.”

“It’s the genius that gets into the books which makes us like the poverty, I fancy. But I don’t quite agree that the real thing isn’t interesting. I think it would be, if we knew how to look at and feel it,” said Polly, very quietly, as she pushed her chair out of the arctic circle of Miss Perkins into the temperate one of friendly Emma.

“But how shall we learn that? I don’t see what we girls can do more than we do now. We haven’t much money for such things, shouldn’t know how to use it if we had; and it isn’t proper for us to go poking into dirty places, to hunt up the needy. ‘Going about doing good, in pony phaetons’, as somebody says, may succeed in England, but it won’t work here,” said Fanny, who had begun, lately, to think a good deal of someone besides herself, and so found her interest in her fellow-beings increasing daily.

“We can’t do much perhaps, just yet; but still there are things left undone that naturally fall to us. I know a house,” said Polly, sewing busily as she talked, “where every servant who enters it becomes an object of interest to the mistress and her daughters. These women are taught good habits, books are put where they can get them, sensible amusements are planned for them sometimes, and they soon feel that they are not considered mere scrubs, to do as much work as possible for as little money as possible, but helpers in the family, who are loved and respected in proportion to their faithfulness. This lady feels her duty to them, owns it, and does it, as conscientiously as she wants them to do theirs by her; and that is the way it ought to be, I think.”

As Polly paused, several keen eyes discovered that Emma’s cheeks were very red, and saw a smile lurking in the corners of the mouth that tried to look demure, which told them who Polly meant.

“Do the Biddies all turn out saints in that well-regulated family?” asked the irrepressible Trix.

“No; few of us do that, even in the parlour; but everyone of the Biddies is better for being there, whether they are grateful or not. I ought not to have mentioned this, perhaps, but I wanted to show you one thing that we girls can do. We all complain about bad servants, most as much as if we were housekeepers ourselves; but it never occurs to us to try and mend the matter by getting up a better spirit between mistress