f good stout cambric to a quarter-dollar bit of a
middle with a cataract of "chandelier" lace about it. She could tell
everybody how to do their hair, from "flat curls" and "scallops" down
or up to frizzes and chignons; and after we had all filed in slowly,
one by one, and filled up the room, I don't think there ever could
have been a funnier evening!

We had musical nights, and readings. We had a "Mutual Friend"
Thursday; that was Mrs. Ingleside's. Rosamond was the Boofer Lady;
Barbara was Lavvy the Irrepressible; and Miss Pennington herself was
Mrs. Wilfer; Mr. and Mrs. Hobart were the Boffins; and Doctor
Ingleside, with a wooden leg strapped on, dropped into poetry in the
light of a friend; Maria Hendee came in twisting up her back hair, as
Pleasant Riderhood,--Maria Hendee's back hair was splendid; Leslie
looked very sweet and quiet as Lizzie Hexam, and she brought with her
for her secondary that night the very, real little doll's dressmaker
herself,--Maddy Freeman, who has carved brackets, and painted lovely
book-racks and easels and vases and portfolios for almost everybody's
parlors, and yet never gets into them herself.

[Illustration]

Leslie would not have asked her to be Jennie Wren, because she really
has a lame foot; but when they told her about it, she said right off,
"O, how I wish I could be that!" She has not only the lame foot, but
the wonderful "golden bower" of sunshiny hair too; and she knows the
doll's dressmaker by heart; she says she expects to find her some
time, if ever she goes to England--or to heaven. Truly she was up to
the "tricks and the manners" of the occasion; nobody entered into it
with more self-abandonment than she; she was so completely Jennie Wren
that no one--at the moment--thought of her in any other character, or
remembered their rules of behaving according to the square of the
distance. She "took patterns" of Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks's trimmings to
her very face; she readied up behind Mrs. Linceford, and measured the
festoon of her panier. There was no reason why she should be afraid or
abashed; Maddy Freeman is a little lady, only she is poor, and a
genius. She stepped right _out_ of Dickens's story, not _into_ it, as
the rest of us did; neither did she even seem to step consciously into
the grand Pennington house; all she did as to that was to go "up
here," or "over there," and "be dead," as fresh, new-world delights
attracted her. Lizzie Hexam went too; they belonged togeth