!"

The old Mother, Life, keeps saying that to us all.

As individuals, it is well for us to remember it; that we may not
have things until we are helped; at any rate, until the full and
proper time comes, for courageously and with right assurance helping
ourselves.

Yet it is good for _people_, as people, to get a morsel--a
flavor--in advance. It is well that they should be impatient for the
King's supper, to which we shall all sit down, if we will, one day.

So I have not waited for everything to happen and become a usage,
that I have told you of in this little story. I confess that there
are good things in it which have not yet, literally, come to pass. I
have picked something out of the pie beforehand.

I meant, therefore, to have laid all dates aside; especially as I
found myself a little cramped by them, in re-introducing among these
"Other Girls" the girls whom we have before, and rather lately,
known. Lest, possibly, in anything which they have here grown to, or
experienced, or accomplished, the sharply exact reader should seem
to detect the requirement of a longer interval than the almanacs
could actually give, I meant to have asked that it should be
remembered, that we story-tellers write chiefly in the Potential
Mood, and that tenses do not very essentially signify. It will all
have had opportunity to be true in eighteen-seventy-five, if it have
not had in eighteen-seventy-three. Well enough, indeed, if the
prophecies be justified as speedily as the prochronisms will.

The Great Fire, you see, came in and dated it. I could not help
that; neither could I leave the great fact out.

Not any more could I possibly tell what sort of April days we should
have, when I found myself fixed to the very coming April and Easter,
for the closing chapters of my tale. If persistent snow-storms fling
a falsehood in my face, it will be what I have not heretofore
believed possible,--a _white_ one; and we can all think of balmy
Aprils that have been, and that are yet to be.

With these appeals for trifling allowance,--leaving the larger need
to the obvious accounting for in a largeness of subject which no
slight fiction can adequately handle,--I give you leave to turn the
page.

A. D. T. W.
BOSTON, _March_, 1873.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER
I. SPILLED OUT
II. UP-STAIRS
III. TWO TRIPS IN THE TRAIN
IV. NINETY-NINE FAHRENHEIT
V. SPILLED