erbs, in taking a journey, in giving a _fete
champetre_! (Garden lighted with Chinese lanterns, of course,--house
covered inside and out with roses.) Things enough, indeed, there were to
be bought. But the right thing!

A house, a park, a pair of horses, a curricle, a pony-phaeton. But how
many feet of ground would fifty dollars buy?--and scarcely the hoof of
a horse.

There was a diamond ring. Not for me; because "he" had been too poor
to offer me one. But I could give it to him. No,--that wouldn't do. He
wouldn't wear it,--nor a pin of ditto. He had said, simplicity in dress
was good economy and always good taste. No. Then something else,--that
wouldn't wear, wouldn't tear, wouldn't lose, rust, break.

As to clothes, to which I swung back in despair,--this very Aunt Allen
had always sent us all our clothes. So it would only be getting
more, and wouldn't seem to be anything. She was an odd kind of
woman,--generous in spots, as most people are, I believe. Laura and
I both said, (to each other,) that, if she would allow us a hundred
dollars a year each, we could dress well and suitably on it. But,
instead of that, she sent us every year, with her best love, a
trunk full of her own clothes, made for herself, and only a little
worn,--always to be altered, and retrimmed, and refurbished: so that,
although worth at first perhaps even more than two hundred dollars,
they came, by their unfitness and non-fitness, to be worth to us only
three-quarters of that sum; and Laura and I reckoned that we lost
exactly fifty dollars a year by Aunt Allen's queerness. So much for our
gratitude! Laura and I concluded it would be a good lesson to us about
giving; and she had whispered to me something of the same sort, when
I insisted on dressing Betsy Ann Hemmenway, a little mulatto, in an
Oriental caftan and trousers, and had promised her a red sash for her
waist. To be sure, Mrs. Hemmenway despised the whole thing, and said she
"wouldn't let Betsy Ann be dressed up like a circus-rider, for nobody";
and that she should "wear a bonnet and mantilly, like the rest of
mankind." Which, indeed, she did,--and her bonnet rivalled the
_coiffures_ of Paris in brilliancy and procrastination; for it never
came in sight till long after its little mistress. However, of that
by-and-by. I was only too glad that Aunt Allen had not sent me another
silk gown "with her best love, and, as she was only seventy, perhaps it
might be useful." No,--here was the fi