smay. However,
Freddy was good-natured, and did not wish to vex his little sister, and
so he pretended not to see me. Three days intervened before the
birthday, and incessantly during that time did luckless Augusta contrive
to drop me about in the oddest places, putting Fred's gravity and good
humour to the sorest test possible, and I think both were equally
relieved when the day arrived at last, and she was able to present it in
due form. Fred had plenty of marbles of a better kind and more suitable
for playing, but he did not vex his affectionate little sister by
telling her so. For a long time I was kept in his desk with a funny
jumble of other odds and ends not often wanted, but never exposed to
view, for poor Fred on first returning to school had innocently
exhibited me as an _agate_ marble, fully believing I really was so. But
a more knowing boy, the son of a working jeweller who was on the same
form with him, soon undeceived him, and from that time, with natural
disgust at having been "so green," as his schoolfellow said, Fred
carefully buried me in the recesses of his desk, and showed me no more.

"When he left school I went back among his other valuables, and was
buried for many years in his old play-box. But one day I was rummaged
out with a host of other antiquated things and laid on the table. A very
smart young lady in a gay muslin dress, plentifully be-dropped with
knots of ribbon, seemed to be "tidying up" as she called it; a process
that appeared to me to consist in routing out and clearing away all the
old hoards, and making the room as bare as an empty shop.

"'Oh dear,' she laughed, as I tumbled out with the rest of the boyish
treasures; 'here's that wretched old marble, which was _not_ agate after
all. The little horror! Here, Jane, give it to Cook; she wanted a marble
the other day to put into her tea-kettle, and this will be just the
thing for her.'

"And so I was consigned to Cook, and for many months continued to roll
and rattle about in the bottom of her horrid old black tea-kettle,
accumulating all the disagreeable "fur," as she called it, that is
generally found lining the inside of a kettle where the water in use is
very hard. My pretty streaks and spots soon disappeared beneath this
dreadful covering, and no one now--not even Fred Finekyn himself--(far
less the airyfied young lady, into whom my early admirer, Augusta, had
merged), would have recognised the gay and polished marble in the ro