nsense. I don't believe it. What color are your
carriage-horses?"

"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse but
a cow."

"Not keep any horses! Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."

Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a
pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if
she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess. After all, the questions
amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne.
Of that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of
discoursing. Her "papaa" commonly said sir in talking with a gentleman,
and her "mammaa" would once in a while forget, and go down the area
steps instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived behind a
brown stone front, which veneers everybody's antecedents with a facing
of respectability.

Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss
Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful common, and they
were letting in very queer folks.

Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
thousand would have been so unprepared to meet. She knew absolutely
nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons
were quite familiar.

There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens
and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally,
perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let alone. One of
the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.

"Oh, is n't 'Pickwick' nice?" she asked.

"I don't know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."

The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature. "Tasted any!
Why, I mean the 'Pickwick Papers,' Dickens's story. Don't you think
they're nice."

Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n't
know anything about them.

"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.

"Oh, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of
the great trunk and its contents. "I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and
'Evelina,' and 'Tristram Shandy'" (naughty girl!), "and the 'Castle of
Otranto,' and the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of Wakefield,'
and 'Don Quixote'--"

The young lady burst out laughing. "Stop! stop! for mercy's sake," she
cried. "You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and come back
to life again. Why you're Rip Van Winkle