es, and this narrative of his boyhood ends.

CAROLINE

[Illustration: Miss CAROLINE AND BECKY.]

Since the time of Cinderella the First there have been many similar
instances in real life of the persecution of youth by family injustice
and cruelty, and no case more strikingly similar than that of Miss
Caroline Brandenburg Gann, whose youthful career was one of monotonous
hardship and injustice until the arrival of her fairy prince.

The story is a short one to relate, but to live through the days and
months of sixteen unhappy years seemed an eternal process to the young
heart beating high with hopes which must constantly be stifled, and give
place to bitter disappointment.

But to go back for a moment to the time when Louis XVIII. was restored a
second time to the throne of his father, and all the English who had
money or leisure rushed over to the Continent. At that time there lived
in a certain boarding-house at Brussels a lady who was called Mrs. Crabb;
and her daughter, a genteel young widow, who bore the name of Mrs.
Wellesley McCarty. Previous to this Mrs. McCarty, who was then Miss
Crabb, had run off one day with a young Ensign, who possessed not a
shilling, and who speedily died, leaving his widow without property, but
with a remarkably fine pair of twins, named Rosalind Clancy and Isabella
Finigan Wellesley McCarty.

The young widow being left penniless, her mother, who had disowned the
runaway couple, was obliged to become reconciled to her daughter and to
share her small income of one hundred and twenty pounds a year with her.
Upon this at the boarding-house in Brussels the two managed to live. The
twins were put out, after the foreign fashion, to nurse, and a village in
the neighbourhood, and the widow and her mother maintained a very good
appearance despite their small income; and it was not long before the
Widow McCarty married a young Englishman, James Gann, Esq.--of the great
oil-house of Gann, Blubbery, and Gann,--who was boarding in the same
house with Mrs. Crabb and her daughter. These ladies, who had their full
share of common sense, took care to keep the twins in the background
until such time as the Widow McCarty had become Mrs. Gann. Then on the
day after the wedding, in the presence of many friends who had come to
offer their congratulations, a stout nurse, bearing the two chubby little
ones, made her appearance; and these rosy urchins, springing forward,
shouted affectionately, "_M