t, in later life, of wealth
and luxury and spotless housekeeping. And she knew it from top to
bottom. The spacious upper floor, which in ordinary dwellings would have
been an attic, was the realm of young George and his sisters, Edith and
Mary (Aunt Mary's namesake). Rainy Saturdays, all too brief, Honora had
passed there, when the big dolls' house in the playroom became the scene
of domestic dramas which Edith rehearsed after she went to bed, although
Mary took them more calmly. In his tenderer years, Honora even fired
George, and riots occurred which took the combined efforts of Cousin
Eleanor and Mammy Lucy to quell. It may be remarked, in passing, that
Cousin Eleanor looked with suspicion upon this imaginative gift of
Honora's, and had several serious conversations with Aunt Mary on the
subject.

It was true, in a measure, that Honora quickened to life everything she
touched, and her arrival in Wayland Square was invariably greeted
with shouts of joy. There was no doll on which she had not bestowed a
history, and by dint of her insistence their pasts clung to them with
all the reality of a fate not by any means to be lived down. If George
rode the huge rocking-horse, he was Paul Revere, or some equally
historic figure, and sometimes, to Edith's terror, he was compelled to
assume the role of Bluebeard, when Honora submitted to decapitation with
a fortitude amounting to stoicism. Hide and seek was altogether too tame
for her, a stake of life and death, or imprisonment or treasure, being
a necessity. And many times was Edith extracted from the recesses of the
cellar in a condition bordering on hysterics, the day ending tamely with
a Bible story or a selection from "Little Women" read by Cousin Eleanor.

In autumn, and again in spring and early summer before the annual
departure of the Hanbury family for the sea, the pleasant yard with its
wide shade trees and its shrubbery was a land of enchantment threatened
by a genie. Black Bias, the family coachman, polishing the fat carriage
horses in the stable yard, was the genie; and George the intrepid knight
who, spurred by Honora, would dash in and pinch Bias in a part of his
anatomy which the honest darky had never seen. An ideal genie, for he
could assume an astonishing fierceness at will.

"I'll git you yit, Marse George!"

Had it not been for Honora, her cousins would have found the paradise in
which they lived a commonplace spot, and indeed they never could
realize