this, for she was not a woman of much reading; but the Doctor was so positive that Emily was in the right way, that she rested in peace. Emily grew happier than ever she had been in her life. She and her young friend were inseparable; they worked together, they read and studied together, they rode out together in the old farm-wagon. I never felt so strong and well before,' said Emily, 'and I feel good for something.'

There was in the neighbourhood a poor young girl, who by a fall, years before, had been made a helpless cripple. Her mother was a hard-working woman, and often had to leave her daughter alone while she went out to scrub or wash to get money to support her. Pussy first took Emily to see this girl when she went to carry her some nice things which she had made for her. Emily became very much interested in the poor patient face and the gentle cheerfulness with which she bore her troubles.

'Now,' she said, 'every week I will make something and take to poor Susan; it will be a motive for me to learn how to do things,' and so she did. Sometimes she carried to her a nice little print of yellow butter arranged with fresh green leaves; sometimes it was a little mould of blanc-mange, and sometimes a jelly. She took to cutting and fitting and altering one of her own wrappers for Susan's use, and she found a pleasure in these new cares that astonished herself.

'You have no idea,' she said, 'how different life looks to me, now that I live a little for somebody besides myself. I had no idea that I could do so many things as I do; it's such a surprise and pleasure to me to find that I can. Why have I always been such a fool as to suppose that I was happy in living such a lazy, useless life as I have lived?'

Emily wrote these thoughts to her mother. Now her mother was not in the least used to

thinking, and new thoughts made a troublesome buzzing in her brain; so she carried her letters to Dr. Hardhack, and asked what he thought of them.

'Iron in her blood, my dear madam-iron in her blood! Just what she needs. She'll come home a strong, bouncing girl, I hope.'

'O, shocking!' cried her mother.

'Yes, bouncing,' said Dr. Hardhack, who had a perverse and contrary desire to shock fine ladies. Why shouldn't she bounce? A ball that won't bounce has no elasticity, and is good for nothing without a bat to bang it about. I shall give you back a live daughter in the fall instead of a half-dead one; and I expect you'll all scream, and stop your ears, and run under beds with fright because you never saw a live girl before.'

'Isn't Dr. Hardhack so original?' said mamma to grandmamma.

But then, you know, he's all the fashion now,' said grandmamma.

XIV.

UR little friend, Miss Emily Proudie, had on the whole a very pleasant

summer of it at the farm. By the

time that huckleberries were ripe, in August, she could take her basket on her arm, and, in company with Pussy, take long walks, and spend whole afternoons in the pastures, sitting down on the great wide cushions of white foamy moss, such as you always find in huckleberry pastures, and picking pailfuls of the round, shining black fruit. She never found herself tired and panting for breath, as she used to in her city life; for there were no bandages or strings around her lungs to confine her breath

ing, and in place of the hot, close air of city pavements there were the spicy odours of the sweet-fern and the pine-trees and the bayberrybushes.

Then Pussy had brought her to be acquainted with all the birds, so that she knew every one just as well as she used to know her old calling acquaintance on Fifth Avenue. There was frisky Master Catbird, who sang like every other bird in the woods in turn-five minutes like this one, and the next five minutes like that oneand ended by laughing at them all, with as plain a laugh as ever a bird could make. And there were the bobolinks, with the white spots on their black wings, that fluttered and said,

Chack, chack, chack!' as if they didn't know how to sing a word, and then all of a sudden broke out into a perfect bird babble of Cheechees' and 'Twitter-twitters,' and said, 'O limph, O limph, O limp-e-te! sweetmeats, sweetmeats!' and, 'Veni si-no pi-le-cheer-ene!'

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