umb amazement.

"Not a _book_? Oh dear!" they sighed in concert.

Their father laughed outright.

"Why don't you ask some more questions?" he cried teasingly.

"Oh, because it seems as if every one mixed us up worse. I was so
_sure_ it was a book," groaned Hope, quite crestfallen.

"Well then, is it useful or ornamental?"

"Now, that's a poser!" He ruminated a minute, then said, "It's useful,
certainly, but not just what you'd call ornamental. One wouldn't save
it for an ornament--not this one, anyway, but simply for its contents--"

"I have it, I have it!" Faith actually jumped up and down.

"It's a letter! It's a letter from Debby! Now, isn't it? Your
'contents' gave it away. Say I'm right, father--come, now!"

"Well, you are. You've guessed it, that's certain."

"Humph!" sneered Hope, distinctly miffed, "who couldn't, after you'd
fairly told it? I knew all the time it was a book, or a letter, or
something."

"You should have said so sooner, Miss Hindsight," laughed her father.
"But I confess you came pretty close to it, my dear. And here it is.
From Debby, surely, because from Portsmouth, but this elegant modern
writing is never hers in the world. She has evidently engaged some
friend to write that address, and it's a neat one."

"Father, you said there was earth about it; how can that be?" broke in
Hope, scarcely mollified, as yet.

He held it up, and pointed to its worn condition, and two or three
black thumb-marks.

"Isn't there earth for you?" he laughed. "What is earth but soil?"

"Oh--h!" cried Hope, "is that fair--to play upon words so?"

"Let's call it square anyhow, sweetheart, and you read it aloud to
sister and me, won't you?"

Hope could do no less than comply, and the bulky missive was received
by the listeners with as much respectful enjoyment as if it had been a
neat-appearing, well-worded epistle, instead of the rambling,
disjointed, much-soiled, and oddly-expressed letter that it was. The
good woman began and ended every paragraph with lamentations and
longings over her darlings, and the lines between told of her 'good'
and 'bad' lodgers, as she distinctly divided them, her few pleasure
jaunts, and some of the gossip of the neighborhood, only a few words of
which concern this little history.

"You'll recklict," she wrote, "the leddy what come jest a dey or too
before yoo saled? Well, shees heer yit and I like 'er best ov al. She
ain't to say real lively, yoo no,