hops."

"That's what Bel said. Well, I'm glad you like it. Sha'n't I wipe up
some of those cups?"

"They're all done now," said Bel, piling them together.

In fifteen minutes after their own tea was ended, the kitchen was in
order again; the dumb-waiter, with its freight, sent up to the china
closet; the brown linen cloth and the napkins folded away in the
drawer, and the white-topped table ready for evening use. Bel Bree
had not been brought up in a New England farm-house, and seen her
capable stepmother "whew round," to be hard put to it, now, over
half a dozen cups and tumblers more or less.

"We must go," said Elise Mokey. "I've got the buttons to sew on to
those last night-gowns of Miss Ledwith's. I want to carry them back
to-morrow."

"You're lucky to sew for her," said Bel. "But you see we all have to
do for somebody, and I'd as lief it would be teacups, for my part,
as buttons."

Bel Bree's old tricks of rhyming were running in her head. This game
of Crambo--a favorite one with the Schermans and their bright little
intimate circle--stirred up her wits with a challenge. And under
the wits,--under the quick mechanic action of the serving
brain,--thoughts had been daily crowding and growing, for which
these mere mental facilities were waiting, the ready instruments.

I have said that Bel Bree was a born reformer and a born poet; and
that the two things go together. To see freshly and clearly,--to
discern new meaning in old living,--living as old as the world is;
to find by instinct new and better ways of doing, the finding of
which is often only returning to the heart and simplicity of the
old living before it _was_ old with social circumventions and needed
to be fresh interpreted; these are the very heavenly gift and office
of illumination and leadership. Just as she had been made, and just
where she had been put,--a girl with the questions of woman-life
before her in these days of restless asking and uncertain
reply,--with her lot cast here, in this very crowding, fermenting,
aspiring, great New England metropolis, in the hour of its most
changeful and involved experience,--she brought the divine talisman
of her nature to bear upon the nearest, most practical point of the
wide tangle with which it came in contact. And around her in this
right place that she had found and taken, gathered and wrought
already, by effluence and influence, forces and results that gather
and work about any nucleus of life, ho