the daughters of an assemblyman, and had a furnace in their house, and had had gold watches for Christmas. It was very perplexing.
“First one finds a May-flower’s going to be a princess!” Delia shouted. Delia was singularly unimaginative; the idea of royalty was her single entrance to fields of fancy. The stories that I made up always began “Once there was a fairy”; Margaret and Betty started at gnomes and dwarfs; Calista usually selected a poor little match girl or a boot-black asleep in a piano box; but Delia invariably chose a royal family, with many sons.
We ran, shouting, across the stretch of scruboak which stretched where the town blocks of houses and streets gave it up and reverted to the open country. To reach this unprepossessing green place, usually occupied by a decrepit wagon and a pile of cord-wood, was like passing through a doorway into the open. We expressed our freedom by shouting and scrambling to be princesses—all, that is, save Mary Elizabeth. She went soberly about, a little apart, and I wished with all my heart that she might find the first May-flower; but she did not do so.
We hunted for wind-flowers. It was on Pros-
