and by the time they are thirty get quite a
bundle of whims and crotchets on their backs; but they are all at sixes
and sevens, uneven and knotty like fagots, and won't lie compactly,
don't belong to them, and anybody might surprise them out of them. But
for me, you see, mine are harmonious, in my veins; I was born with them.
Not that I was always what I am now. Oh, bless your heart! plums and
nectarines, and luscious things that ripen and develop all their
rare juices, were green once, and so was I. Awkward, tumble-about,
near-sighted, till I was twenty, a real raw-head-and-bloody-bones to all
society; then mamma, who was never well in our diving-bell atmosphere,
was ordered to the West Indies, and papa said it was what I needed, and
I went, too,--and oh, how sea-sick! Were you ever? You forget all about
who you are, and have a vague notion of being Universal Disease. I have
heard of a kind of myopy that is biliousness, and when I reached the
islands my sight was as clear as my skin; all that tropical luxuriance
snatched me to itself at once, recognized me for kith and kin; and mamma
died, and I lived. We had accidents between wind and water, enough to
have made me considerate for others, Lu said; but I don't see that I'm
any less careful not to have my bones spilt in the flood than ever
I was. Slang? No,--poetry. But if your nature had such a wild, free
tendency as mine, and then were boxed up with proprieties and civilities
from year's end to year's end, may-be you, too, would escape now and
then in a bit of slang.

We always had a little boy to play with, Lu and I, or rather
Lu,--because, though he never took any dislike to me, he was absurdly
indifferent, while he followed Lu about with a painful devotion. I
didn't care, didn't know; and as I grew up and grew awkwarder, I was the
plague of their little lives. If Lu had been my sister instead of my
orphan cousin, as mamma was perpetually holding up to me, I should have
bothered them twenty times more; but when I got larger and began to be
really distasteful to his fine artistic perception, mamma had the sense
to keep me out of his way; and he was busy at his lessons, and didn't
come so much. But Lu just fitted him then, from the time he daubed
little adoring blotches of her face on every barn-door and paling, till
when his scrap-book was full of her in all fancies and conceits, and he
was old enough to go away and study Art. Then he came home occasionally,
and alwa