the rest of the night. My mother stayed upstairs with Mary 'Liza.

"But I did not sleep well," was her grieved report at breakfast. "The
pillows smelled horribly of sausage, I suppose because Molly's hands
were so greasy. Marthy! see that the pillow-cases are changed this
morning."

Before Marthy got upstairs, I mustered and dragooned sufficient courage
to enable me to visit the room. Still trembling and full of loathing at
what I must see, I turned over the pillow. The red flannel was
there--and the raw cotton--and inside of all, IT--Frank no longer--as
cold as a stone!

I took it up with the tongs and threw it out of the window--and said
never a word about it to anybody.

[Illustration]

Chapter XII

My Prize Beet

[Illustration]

I had been seven years old for so long that I alluded to myself
habitually as "almost eight." We had our governess now, Miss Davidson, a
handsome, amiable, and somewhat sentimental Bostonian recommended by a
Richmond friend of my father. Four other girls studied with us. Two of
them, Paulina and Sarah Hobson, were our second cousins. They stayed at
our house from Monday morning until Friday evening, going home for
Sunday, unless the weather were bad. Madeline and Rosa Pemberton were
day scholars, the Pemberton plantation adjoining ours.

I was the youngest of the six, and while I fancy that I was rather a
favorite with Miss Davidson, I endured much from the girls on account of
my inferiority in age, as well as because of my "old-fashioned,
conceited ways." That was one reason I spoke of being almost eight. I
was trying to grow up to what they complained of as "getting above"
myself.

The frank brutality of school children of both sexes, as contrasted with
the unselfish forbearance (or the show of it) and the suave courtesy of
well-bred men and women, is an instructive study in the evolution of
ethics. The youngest boy or girl in class or college is the weakest wolf
in the pack, the under dog in the fight. I had all of a little girl's
natural desire for new playfellows and the dreamer's passion for more
material for castle-building. The prospect of "the school" was
ravishing. I constructed scenes and rehearsed conversations, with the
cast of coming actors, until the quartette must have been super-or
sub-human, had they come up to one tithe of my requirements.

In plain and very homely fact, they were four commonplace, provincial
girls of average natural intelligence, i