as a pallid little
creature, while they were brown; small, while they were large; but she
domineered over them like a king, and wreaked a whole vocabulary of
roughest fisherman's terms upon them when they displeased her. One awful
vengeance she reserved as a last resort: when they had been unbearably
troublesome she stole into their room at night in her little white
night-gown, with all her long thick black hair loose, combed over her
face, and hanging down round her nearly to her feet. This was a ghostly
visitation which the boys could not endure, for she left a lamp in the
hall outside, so that they could dimly see her, and then she stood and
swayed toward them slowly, backward and forward, without a sound, all
the time coming nearer and nearer, until they shrieked aloud in terror,
and Anne, hurrying to the rescue, found only three frightened little
fellows cowering together in their broad bed, and the hairy ghost gone.

"How can you do such things, Tita?" she said.

"It is the only way by which I can keep the little devils in order,"
replied Tita.

"Do not use such words, dear."

"Mother did," said the younger sister, in her soft calm voice.

This was true, and Tita knew that Anne never impugned the memory of that
mother.

"Who volunteers to help?" said Anne, lighting a candle in an iron
candlestick, and opening a door.

"I," said Louis.

"I," said Gabriel.

"Me too," said little Andre.

They followed her, hopping along together, with arms interlinked, while
her candle shed a light on the bare walls and floors of the rooms
through which they passed, a series of little apartments, empty and
desolate, at the end of which was the kitchen, inhabited in the daytime
by an Irishwoman, a soldier's wife, who came in the morning before
breakfast, and went home at dusk, the only servant William Douglas's
fast-thinning purse could afford. Anne might have had her kitchen nearer
what Miss Lois called the "keeping-room"; any one of the five in the
series would have answered the purpose as well as the one she had
chosen. But she had a dream of furnishing them all some day according to
a plan of her own, and it would have troubled her greatly to have used
her proposed china closet, pantry, store-room, preserve closet, or
fruit-room for culinary purposes. How often had she gone over the whole
in her mind, settling the position of every shelf, and deliberating over
the pattern of the cups! The Irishwoman had left some glea