unrolled a giant parcel of candied sweets, which their
mother would have sacrificed on the shrine of jalap and senna, the
purchase of a surreptitious moment, and was now dispensing the brilliant
comestibles with much ill-subdued glee. One mouth, that had bitten off
the head of a checkerberry chanticleer, was convulsed with the
acidulous tickling of sweetened laughter, till the biter was bit and a
metamorphosis into the animal of attack seemed imminent; at the hands of
another a warrior in barley-sugar was experiencing the vernacular for
defeat with reproving haste and gravity; and there was yet another
little omnivorous creature that put out both hands for indiscriminate
snatching, and made a spectacle of himself in a general plaster of
gum-arabic-drop and brandy-smash.

"Contraband?" said Mr. Raleigh.

"And sweet as stolen fruit," said Marguerite. "Ursule makes the
richest comfits, but not so innumerable as these. Mamma and I owe our
sweet-tooth and honey-lip to bits of her concoction."

"Mrs. Purcell," asked Mr. Raleigh, as that lady entered, "is this little
banquet no seduction to you?"

"What are you doing?" she replied.

"Drinking honey-dew from acorns."

"Laudersdale as ever!" ejaculated she, looking over his shoulder. "I
thought you had 'no sympathy with'"----

"But I 'like to see other folks take'"----

"Their sweets, in this case. No, thank you," she continued, after this
little rehearsal of the past. "What are you poisoning all this brood
for?"

"Mrs. Laudersdale eats sweetmeats; they don't poison her," remonstrated
Katy.

"Mrs. Laudersdale, my dear, is exceptional."

Katy opened her eyes, as if she had been told that the object of her
adoration was Japanese.

"It is the last grain that completes the transformation, as your
story-books have told; and one day you will see her stand, a statue
of sugar, and melt away in the sun. To be sure, the whole air will be
sweetened, but there will be no Mrs. Laudersdale."

"For shame, Mrs. Purcell!" cried Marguerite. "You're not sweet-tempered,
or you'd like sweet dainties yourself. Here are nuts swathed in syrup;
you'll have none of them? Here are health and slumber and idle dreams
in a chocolate-drop. Not a chocolate? Here are dates; if you wouldn't
choose the things in themselves, truly you would for their associations?
See, when you take up one, what a picture follows it: the plum that has
swung at the top of a palm and crowded into itself the glow of