ad, to whom those tiny frocks and
socks and shirts once belonged! Giving them away, I seem to have
wrenched my heart from the dead children; each gift was a separate
pang. The toys, too, go to-morrow to the Sisters of Charity, who have
a great house near at hand. A Sister, a virginal creature whom I have
seen holding the puny babies of the poor to a breast innocently
maternal, has told me of the children who at Christmastide have no
toys. This year they shall not go without; so I am sending them
all--the doll's house and the rocking-horse, and all the queer
contents of the nursery shelves, and the fairy stories well thumbed,
with here and there a loose page, and the boxes of bricks and the
clockwork mouse--all, all my treasures.

Yet, if the children had all lived, I might yet have had my nurseries.
The three youngest died one after another: my smallest boy, whom I
have not ceased yet to regard as my baby, I kept in the nurseries as
long as I could. He has not yet outgrown his guinea-pigs, and his
bantams, his squirrels, and his litter of puppies. When he went to
school he commended each to my care, with tears he in vain tried
manfully to wink away. Dear little sweetheart, he gave way at last,
and we cried together passionately. But I wish he need not have gone
for another year. He was more babyish than the others, more content to
remain long my baby. His first letters from school were tear-stained
and full of babyish thoughts and reminiscences. But he is growing
ashamed of the softness, I can see, and talks of 'fellows,' and
'fielding,' and 'runs,' and 'wickets' in a way that shows me that my
baby has put on the boy.

It was not fair, I see, to have kept the nurseries so long. The boys
at the University, the girls, enjoying their first introduction to the
gay world, have wanted rooms for their friends, and generous as the
big house is, it does not do much more than hold its own happy brood.
The nurseries are to be made into a couple of charming rooms, the one
with a paper of tea-roses on a white satin ground, and yellow and
white hangings, and paint and tiles in the pretty grate. The other is
to be green and pink, with a suite of green furniture and rosy
hangings. I entered into it with zest as my girls debated it. But all
the time my heart cried out against the devastation of its dreams.
To-morrow, when they begin to dismantle my nurseries, I do not know
how I shall bear it. I feel to-night as if they were going to