anksgiving Day. I looked upon it as the
beginning of my career, and bought crimping papers so that my hair could
be properly fluted. Of course, I wanted a new dress for the occasion,
and I spent several days in planning the kind of a one I thought best
suited to such a memorable event. I even picked out the particular
lace pattern I wanted for the ruffles. This was before I submitted the
proposition to Mother, however. When I told her about it she said she
could see no use in getting a new dress and going to all the trouble of
making it when my white one with the green harps was perfectly good.

This was such an unusual dress and had gone through so many
vicissitudes, that I really was devotedly attached to it. It had, in the
beginning, belonged to my Aunt Bess, and in the days of its first
glory had been a sheer Irish linen lawn, with tiny green harps on it at
agreeable intervals. But in the course of time, it had to be sent to
the wash-tub, and then, behold, all the little lovely harps followed
the example of the harp that "once through Tara's hall the soul of music
shed," and disappeared! Only vague, dirty, yellow reminders of their
beauty remained, not to decorate, but to disfigure the fine fabric.

Aunt Bess, naturally enough, felt irritated, and she gave the goods to
mother, saying that she might be able to boil the yellow stains out of
it and make me a dress. I had gone about many a time, like love amid the
ruins, in the fragments of Aunt Bess's splendour, and I was not happy in
the thought of dangling these dimmed reminders of Ireland's past around
with me. But mother said she thought I'd have a really truly white
Sunday best dress out of it by the time she was through with it. So
she prepared a strong solution of sodium and things, and boiled the
breadths, and every little green harp came dancing back as if awaiting
the hand of a new Dublin poet. The green of them was even more charming
than it had been at first, and I, as happy as if I had acquired the
golden harp for which I then vaguely longed, went to Sunday-school
all that summer in this miraculous dress of now-you-see-them
and-now-you-don't, and became so used to being asked if I were Irish
that my heart exulted when I found that I might--fractionally--claim to
be, and that one of the Fenian martyrs had been an ancestor. For a year,
even, after that discovery of the Fenian martyr, ancestors were a
favorite study of mine.

Well, though the dress became s