the north side,
between the front and back room. Well, when they went to look for it,
there was no little room there; there was only a shallow china-closet.
She asked her sisters when the house had been altered and a closet made
of the room that used to be there. They both said the house was exactly
as it had been built--that they had never made any changes, except to
tear down the old wood-shed and build a smaller one.

"Father and mother laughed a good deal over it, and when anything was
lost they would always say it must be in the little room, and any
exaggerated statement was called 'little-roomy.' When I was a child I
thought that was a regular English phrase, I heard it so often.

"Well, they talked it over, and finally they concluded that my mother
had been a very imaginative sort of a child, and had read in some book
about such a little room, or perhaps even dreamed it, and then had 'made
believe,' as children do, till she herself had really thought the room
was there."

"Why, of course, that might easily happen."

"Yes, but you haven't heard the queer part yet; you wait and see if you
can explain the rest as easily.

"They stayed at the farm two weeks, and then went to New York to live.
When I was eight years old my father was killed in the war, and mother
was broken-hearted. She never was quite strong afterwards, and that
summer we decided to go up to the farm for three months.

"I was a restless sort of a child, and the journey seemed very long to
me; and finally, to pass the time, mamma told me the story of the
little room, and how it was all in her own imagination, and how there
really was only a china-closet there.

"She told it with all the particulars; and even to me, who knew
beforehand that the room wasn't there, it seemed just as real as could
be. She said it was on the north side, between the front and back rooms;
that it was very small, and they sometimes called it an entry. There was
a door also that opened out-of-doors, and that one was painted green,
and was cut in the middle like the old Dutch doors, so that it could be
used for a window by opening the top part only. Directly opposite the
door was a lounge or couch; it was covered with blue chintz--India
chintz--some that had been brought over by an old Salem sea-captain as a
'venture.' He had given it to Maria when she was a young girl. She was
sent to Salem for two years to school. Grandfather originally came from
Salem."

"I though