THE GRANDMOTHER'S SHOE.
notion that my behavior would do me credit, they should find it so.
This was a very good, kind Friend; she let me pay the turnpikes myself, through the window; she bought buns for me; and, by dint of questioning her, I discovered that Lucy, and James, and Martin had got a pony, a donkey, some guinea-pigs, gardens of thenown, a swing, and O, joy of joys, a little mill that would go round and grind corn.
By the time I had been welcomed in this hospitable house, and had helped to grind corn in the marvellous mill, I was only a little sorrowful; and by the time I had laid my head on the pillow, in a tiny bedroom next to Lucy's, I felt very much reconciled to my fate, though I knew that I should probably sleep there several weeks.
I was ten years old, and Lucy, a prim little creature, was about the same age; her brothers were quite little children; the other members of the family consisted of a grandmother—a very stern, severe person, whom I greatly dreaded—the master of the house (her son), concerning whom I only knew that he was extremely kind and benign to us, and that he was a widower; and, lastly, his eldest daughter, the child of his first marriage, a sweet girl, little more than twenty years old, but wearing already the clear, high cap in which a really pretty face looks prettier than in almost anything else, and having about her the peculiar self-possession and composure of manner so often seen among those of her society.
Lucy and I were a source of great interest to one another; we liked to be together, because of the dif-
