d her rosy mouth pursed up with a solemn
sense of the importance of her judgment as she is testing the heat of her
oven.

Oh, Di, Di! for all you seem to have nothing on your mind but the
responsibility for all those pumpkin pies and cranberry tarts, we
wouldn't venture a very large wager that you are not thinking about
cousin James under it all at this very minute, and that all this pretty
bustling housewifeliness owes its spice and flavor to the thought that
James is coming to the Thanksgiving dinner.

To be sure if any one had told Di so, she would have flouted the very
idea. Besides, she had privately informed Almira Sisson, her special
particular confidante, that she knew Jim would come home from college
full of conceit, and thinking that everybody must bow down to him, and
for her part she meant to make him know his place. Of course Jim and she
were good friends, etc., etc.

Oh, Di, Di! you silly, naughty girl, was it for this that you stood so
long at your looking-glass last night, arranging how you would do your
hair for the Thanksgiving night dance? Those killing bows which you
deliberately fabricated and lodged like bright butterflies among the dark
waves of your hair--who were you thinking of as you made and posed them?
Lay your hand on your heart and say who to you has ever seemed the best,
the truest, the bravest and kindest of your friends. But Di doesn't
trouble herself with such thoughts--she only cuts out saucy mottoes from
the flaky white paste to lay on the red cranberry tarts, of which she
makes a special one for each cousin. For there is Bill, the second
eldest, who stays at home and helps work the farm. She knows that Bill
worships her very shoe-tie, and obeys all her mandates with the faithful
docility of a good Newfoundland dog, and Di says "she thinks everything
of Bill--she likes Bill." So she does Ed, who comes a year or two behind
Bill, and is trembling out of bashful boyhood. So she does Rob and Ike
and Pete and the whole healthy, ramping train who fill the Pitkin farm-
house with a racket of boots and boys. So she has made every one a tart
with his initial on it and a saucy motto or two, "just to keep them from
being conceited, you know."

All day she keeps busy by the side of the deacon's wife--a delicate,
thin, quiet little woman, with great thoughtful eyes and a step like a
snowflake. New England had of old times, and has still, perhaps, in her
farm-houses, these women who seem from