st come into her property
somewheres and take care of us. I don't know as I ever thought she'd
leave us, either way, and there she's gone."

"She won't forget us," said the peaceful proprietor.

"No," said the wife, "but it's lonesome. If it had only been Anne! I
shall miss Gerty the worst kind. And it'll kill the show!"

And to tell the truth, the show languished. Nothing but the happy
acquisition of a Chinese giant nearly eight feet high, with slanting
eyes and a long pigtail,--a man who did penance in his height for the
undue brevity of his undersized nation,--would have saved the "museum."

Meantime the neat proprieties of orderly life found but a poor disciple
in Gerty. Her warm heart opened to the dear old ladies; but she found
nothing familiar in this phantom of herself, this well-dressed little
girl who, after a rapid convalescence, was introduced at school and
"meeting" under the name of Adelaide. The school studies did not dismay
her, but she played the jew's-harp at recess, and danced the clog-dance
in india-rubbers, to the dismay of the little Misses Grundy, her
companions. In the calisthenic exercises she threw beanbags with an
untamed vigor that soon ripped the stitches of the bags, and sowed
those vegetables in every crack of the school-room floor. There was a
ladder in the garden, and it was some comfort to ascend it hand over
hand upon the under side, or to hang by her toes from the upper rung,
to the terror of her schoolmates.

But she became ashamed of the hardness of her palms, and she grew in
general weary of her life. Her clothes pinched her, so did her new
boots; Madam Delia had gone to Providence with the show, and Gerty had
not so much as seen the new Chinese giant.

Of all days Sunday was the most objectionable, when she had to sit
still in Friends' Meeting and think how pleasant it would be to hang by
the knees, head downward, from the parapet of the gallery. She liked
better the Seamen's Bethel, near by, where there was an aroma of tar
and tarpaulin that suggested the odors of the show-tent, and where,
when the Methodist exhorter gave out the hymn, "Howl, howl, ye winds of
night," the choir rendered it with such vigor that it was like being at
sea in a northeaster. But each week made her new life harder, until,
having cried herself asleep one Saturday evening, she rose early the
next morning for her orisons, which, I regret to say, were as follows:--

"I must get out of this," quoth Ge