ow, namely, what Miss Lisbet
was always planning to do--and what she really did do.

So now I'll begin at the beginning.

* * * * *

It was the morning of the day I was ten years old that I first saw her.
A Saturday it was, and a holiday, and mother gave me a piece of currant
bread, buttered, for a treat, and the day free till sunset, after my
morning tasks were through. I was all that was left her--five others
buried, in fifteen years--and she was very easy with me, for which you
could scarcely blame her, poor soul! Three lost in England, of the
smallpox, and one that hardly opened his little eyes, and my sister of
something that they had no name for rightly in those days, doctor says,
but they call it appendicitis now. I was born over here, and never saw
England, though I've always loved to read about it and always called it
"home," not thinking, as one often will. Mother had black memories of
the old country and was anxious for us to grow up little Americans,
though I can see now that she went to work very wrong to bring that
about, for we always curtseyed to the rector and old Madam Winthrop
when she rode by in the coach, and never, in short, thought of looking
higher than we were born.

So when I saw a lovely young lady drive up in a pony cart, hand the
reins to the groom, get out, and walk through the gate toward me, I
held the currant bread behind me and dropped a little curtsey.

"Is this Mrs. Pennyfield's house?" she says, stopping and staring at me.

"Yes, miss, she's my mother," says I.

"What is your name?" says she.

"Rhoda Pennyfield, please, miss," says I, and then, the goodness knows
why, for I was a shy enough little thing commonly, "It's my birthday!"

"Why, how funny!" she says, smiling the loveliest smile in the world.
"It's mine, too! How old are you, Rhoda Pennyfield?"

"Ten, miss."

"Isn't that wonderful!" she cries out, blushing like a rose peony. "I
am ten to-day, too! What were your presents? Mine were the pony
phaeton and this gold watch (she held it out to me on a chain about her
neck) and a macaw from South America from my Uncle Mather, on an ebony
perch. And a French doll from my aunty in New York, but I don't care
for dolls any more. What had you?"

Now, as you can see, if I had really been a little American, I should
have been jealous and ashamed that things were so different between us,
but such a notion never entered my head.

"Mother