looks as if it were walking
up stairs,--built on flat, natural steps of the rock, and so
climbing up, room behind room, with steps inside to
correspond. I have liked so much to go through it, and imagine
stories about it, though all the story there is, is that of
Mr. Flavius Josephus Browne, the man of the brick enterprise,
who built it in this odd way, and probably imagined a story
for himself that he never lived out in it, because his money
and his business came to an end. How strange it is that work
doesn't always make money, and that it takes so much
combination to make anything worth while! I wonder that even
men know just what to do. And as for women,--why, when they
take to elbowing men out, what will it all come to?

"I have written on, until I have written off some of my heavy
feelings that I began with. If I could only _talk_ to you,
dear Miss Euphrasia, I think they would all go. But I will not
trouble you any longer now; I am quite ashamed of the great
packet this will make when it is folded up. But you told me to
let you know all about myself, and I can't help minding such
an injunction as that!

"Yours gratefully and affectionately always,
"SYLVIE ARGENTER."

Miss Kirkbright had not read this straight through without a pause.
Two or three times she had let her hands drop to her lap with the
letter in them, and sat thinking. When she came to what Sylvie said
about her "laughing to know how she had been saving," Miss Euphrasia
stopped, not to laugh, but to wipe tears from her eyes.

"The poor, dear, brave little soul!" she said to herself. "And that
blessed Mrs. Jeffords,--to let her think she is earning her board
with ironing sheets, perhaps, and washing dishes! Km!"

That last unspellable sound was a half choke and half chuckle, that
Miss Euphrasia surprised herself in making out of the sudden, mixed
impulse to sob, and laugh, and to catch somebody in her arms and
kiss that wasn't there.

"If I were an angel, I suppose I _could_ wait," she went on saying
to herself after that. "But even for them, it must be hard work some
times. And so,--how the great Reasons Why flash upon one out of
one's own little experience!--of that wonderful, blessed Day, when
all shall be made right, the angels in heaven know not, neither the
Son, but the F