."

"She will like it perfectly well. Grandmother is in authority here now;
I will go and ask her." This I knew would seem to her decisive.

"What did she say?" said Rhoda, rather eagerly, when I returned.

"She says yes, by all means; and that if you learn to read before aunt
comes home, you shall have a new dress, and I may choose it for you."

Now it was no sinecure, teaching Rhoda, but she won the dress,--a lilac
print, delicate and pretty enough for any one. I undertook to make the
dress, but she accomplished a good part of it herself. She said Miss
Reeny used to show her about sewing. Whatever was to be done with hands
she learned with surprising quickness. Grandmother suggested that the
reading lessons should be followed by a course in writing. Before the
lameness was well over, Rhoda could write, slowly indeed, yet legibly.

I carried her some roses one evening. While putting them in water, I
asked what flowers she liked best.

"I like sweetbriers best," said she. "I think sweetbriers are handsome
in the graveyard. I set out one over Jinny Collins's grave. For what I
know, it is growing now."

"Who was Jinny Collins, Rhoda?"

"A girl that used to live over at the poor-house when I did. She was
bound out to the Widow Whitmarsh, the spring that I went to live with
Mrs. Amos Kemp. Jinny used to have sick spells, and Mrs. Whitmarsh
wanted to send her back to the poor-house, but folks said she couldn't,
because she'd had her bound. She and Mrs. Kemp was neighbors; and after
Jinny got so as to need somebody with her nights, Mrs. Kemp used to let
me go and sleep with her, and then she could wake me up if she wanted
anything. I wanted to go, and Jinny wanted to have me come; she used to
say it did her lots of good. Sometimes we'd pretend we was rich, and was
in a great big room with curtains to the windows. We didn't have any
candle burning,--Mrs. Whitmarsh said there wa'n't no need of one, and
more there wa'n't. One night we said we'd take a ride to-morrow or next
day. We pretended we'd got a father, and he was real rich, and had got a
horse and wagon. Jinny said we'd go to the store and buy us a new white
gown,--she always wanted a white gown. By and by she said she was real
sleepy; she didn't have no bad coughing-spell that night, such as she
most always did. She asked me if I didn't smell the clover-blows, how
sweet they was; and then she talked about white lilies, and how she
liked 'em most of anything, wit