rey shawl
crossed tightly over her bosom and drawn to the back of her waist, where
it was secured by a safety pin of an enormous size. Beside her my father
looked so young and so amiable that I had a confused impression that he
had shrunk to my own age and importance. Then my mother retreated into
the kitchen and he resumed immediately his natural proportions. After
thirty years, when I think now of that ugly little room, with its
painted pine furniture, with its coloured glass vases, filled with dried
cat-tails, upon the mantelpiece, with its crude red and yellow print of
a miniature David attacking a colossal Goliath, with its narrow
window-panes, where beyond the "prize" red geranium the wind drove the
fallen leaves over the brick pavement, with its staring whitewashed
walls, and its hideous rag carpet--when I think of these vulgar details
it is to find that they are softened in my memory by a sense of peace,
of shelter, and of warm firelight shadows.

My mother had just laid the supper table, over which I had watched her
smooth the clean red and white cloth with her twisted fingers; President
was proudly holding aloft a savoury dish of broiled herrings, and my
father had pinned on my bib and drawn back the green-painted chair in
which I sat for my meals--when a hurried knock at the door arrested each
one of us in his separate attitude as if he had been instantly petrified
by the sound.

There was a second's pause, and then before my father could reach it,
the door opened and shut violently, and a woman, in a dripping cloak,
holding a little girl by the hand, came from the storm outside, and ran
straight to the fire, where she stood shaking the child's wet clothes
before the flames. As the light fell over them, I saw that the woman was
young and delicate and richly dressed, with a quantity of pale brown
hair which the rain and wind had beaten flat against her small
frightened face. At the time she was doubtless an unusually pretty
creature to a grown-up pair of eyes, but my gaze, burning with
curiosity, passed quickly over her to rest upon the little girl, who
possessed for me the attraction of my own age and size. She wore red
shoes, I saw at my first glance, and a white cloak, which I took to be
of fur, though it was probably made of some soft, fuzzy cloth I had
never seen. There was a white cap on her head, held by an elastic band
under her square little chin, and about her shoulders her hair lay in a
profuse, d