hat dream, and often in my prayers have I lifted
up my heart to my sainted mother, and cried to her as to the blessed
Virgin and Saint Margaret, my name-saint; and how often she has heard
me and rescued me in need and jeopardy! As to my cousin, she was ever
dearer to me from that night; for had not my own mother given me to her,
and when folks looked at me pitifully and bewailed my lot, I could laugh
in my heart and think: 'If only you knew! Your children have only one
mother, but we have two; and our own real mother is prettier than any
one's, while the other, for all that she is so ugly, is the best.'"

It was the compassion of folks that first led me to such thoughts, and
as I grew older I began to deem that their pity had done little good to
my young soul. Friends are ever at hand to comfort every job; but few
are they who come to share his heaviness, all the more so because all
men take pleasure in comparing their own fair lot with the evil lot of
others. Compassion--and I am the last to deny it--is a noble and
right healing grace; but those who are so ready to extend it should be
cautious how they do so, especially in the case of a child, for a child
is like a sapling which needs light, and those who darken the sun that
shines on it sin against it, and hinder its growth. Instead of bewailing
it, make it glad; that is the comfort that befits it.

I felt I had discovered a great and important secret and I was eager
to make our sainted mother known to my brothers; but they had found her
already without any aid from their little sister. I told first one and
then the other all that stirred within me, and when I spoke to Herdegen,
the elder, I saw at once that it was nothing new to him. Kunz, the
younger, I found in the swing; he flew so high that I thought he would
fling himself out, and I cried to him to stop a minute; but, as he
clutched the rope tighter and pulled himself together to stand firm on
the board, he cried: "Leave me now, Margery; I want to go up, up; up to
Heaven--up to where mother is!"

That was enough for me; and from that hour we often spoke together of
our sainted mother, and Cousin Maud took care that we should likewise
keep our father in mind. She had his portrait--as she had had my
mother's--brought from the great dining-room, where it had hung, into
the large children's room where she slept with me. And this picture,
too, left its mark on my after-life; for when I had the measles, and
Master P