d in
blue velvet, she was another child. Once the most retiring of the class,
she now became the least so. Once the most studious, she now yearned to
be sent on outpost duty, on small shopping expeditions for her teacher,
to the Principal's office, or to other class rooms with notes or with
new students. And upon all these expeditions she wore an air of
conscious correctness and the royal-blue velvet cape. She had once been
the most truthful of small persons, but the glory of the cape tinged
everything, and she allowed the other children to infer--nay, she even
definitely stated--that this was the Sunday coat earlier referred to,
and that she was wearing it to school because it had been superseded by
another even more wonderful. Her auditors were too impressed to be
unconvinced, and, to cover her very literal nakedness in every other
respect, she invented for herself an entirely new disease.

"Say, Becky," one of the little girls in her class asked her, "don't you
never put yourself on mit underwear nor underclothes? Ain't you scared
you should to get cold in your bones? My mamma, she puts me on mit all
from wool underwear--costs twenty-seven cents a suit by Grand
Street--and I puts them on when the school opens, and I don't takes them
off to the fourth of July."

"Oh," retorted Becky, with more truth than she knew, "it ain't so awful
healthy you should make like that. My mamma says it is healthy for me
the wind shall come on my skin. She says sooner no wind comes outside
of your skin, no blood could go inside of your skin. And don't you know
how teacher says what somebody what ain't got blood going in them is
dead ones?"

"Und you _likes_," marvelled her friend, "you _likes_ the wind shall
blow on you?"

"Sure," lied Becky, with a shiver, and she certainly had her wish.

But these appearances were only kept up for the eyes of the common herd.
In the sanctuary of Teacher's confidence she was more unreserved, and
whenever she could secure that young lady's kind ear, she bombarded it
with gratitude and with reports of the impression made in the
neighborhood of her one-roomed home by the shining splendor of that
precious gift.

"Sooner I comes on mine house," she reported, "sooner all the ladies
opens the doors and rubbers on mine cape. Sooner I walks by my block
all the children wants I shall let them wear it. Only I won't let nobody
wear it the while it is a present off of you."

"That's very nice of you," smile