n why.'"

And Desire had the last word.

* * * * *

Hazel Ripwinkley was thinking neither of large holes nor little
ones,--cats nor kittens; she was saying to Luclarion, sitting in her
shady down-stairs room behind the kitchen, that looked out into the
green yard corner, "how nicely things came out, after all!"

"They seemed so hobblety at first, when I went up there and saw all
those beautiful books, and pictures, and people living amongst them
every day, and the poor Kincaids not getting the least bit of a
stretch out of their corner, ever. I'll tell you what I thought,
Luclarion;" and here she almost whispered, "I truly did. I thought
God was making a mistake."

Luclarion put out her lips into a round, deprecating pucker, at
that, and drew in her breath,--

"Oo--sh!"

"Well, I mean it seemed as if there was a mistake somewhere; and
that I'd no business, at any rate, with what they wanted so. I
couldn't get over it until I asked for those pictures; and mother
said it was such a bold thing to do!"

"It was bold," said Luclarion; "but it wasn't forrud. It was gi'n
you, and it hit right. That was looked out for."

"It's a stumpy world," said Luclarion Grapp to Mrs. Ripwinkley,
afterward; "but some folks step right over their stumps athout
scarcely knowin' when!"

XII.

CRUMBS.

Desire Ledwith was, at this epoch, a perplexity and a worry,--even a
positive terror sometimes,--to her mother.

It was not a case of the hen hatching ducks, it was rather as if a
hen had got a hawk in her brood.

Desire's demurs and questions,--her dissatisfactions, sittings and
contempts,--threatened now and then to swoop down upon the family
life and comfort with destroying talons.

"She'll be an awful, strong-minded, radical, progressive,
overturning woman," Laura said, in despair, to her friend Mrs.
Megilp. "And Greenley Street, and Aspen Street, and that everlasting
Miss Craydocke, are making her worse. And what can I do? Because
there's Uncle."

Right before Desire,--not knowing the cloud of real bewilderment
that was upon her young spiritual perceptions, getting their first
glimpse of a tangled and conflicting and distorted world,--she drew
wondering comparisons between her elder children and this odd,
anxious, restless, sharp-spoken girl.

"I don't understand it," she would say. "It isn't a bit like a child
of mine. I always took things easy, and got the comfort of them
some