at they did not keep
any horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an
acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-bonnet-maker)
that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--they were letting
in persons one knew nothing about.

Miss Clara Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate used
in the household from which Myrtle came. _Her_ father had just bought a
complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a good deal of
china at her own home,--old china, which had been a hundred years in the
family, some of it.

"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clara Browne. "What queer-looking
stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as new and
bright! Papaae had all our pictures painted on purpose for us. Have you
got any handsome pictures in your house?"

"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said,
"some of them older than the china."

"How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?"

"One was a great beauty in her time."

"How jolly!"

"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her
religion,--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."

"How very very wicked! It wasn't nice a bit, was it? Ain't you telling
me stories? Was that a hundred years ago?--But you've got some new
pictures and things, haven't you? Who furnished your parlors?"

"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."

"Stuff and nonsense. I don't believe it. What color are your
carriage-horses?"

"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse but
a cow."

"Not keep any horses! Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."

Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a
pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if
she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess. After all, the questions
amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne.
Of that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of
discoursing. Her "papaae" commonly said _sir_ in talking with a
gentleman, and her "mammaae" would once in a while forget, and go down
the area steps instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived in
a brown-stone front, which veneers everybody's antecedents with a facing
of respectability.

Miss Clara Browne wrote home to _her_ mother in the same terms as Miss
Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful co