many "little women" laboring with needles and trying to
set the troublesome stitches straight and even, to keep the thread
from tangling and the seam clean. The results are far from perfection,
but they are encouraging.

Some of the children _wear_ thimbles, and some set them upon their desks
and _wiggle_ the needle through without their aid. Here is a child so
tiny that no thimble in the box will serve her. She has a delicate
face, with big brown eyes, and her fingers are the slenderest of
appendages to her atoms of hands. Her sister, a year or so older, has
a round, chubby face, with plump, dimpled, brown hands, but these fat
fingers also must grow to the smallest thimble. Here is a quiet,
modest little girl whose five baptismal names, Cynthia Ann Finetta
Bloomfield Celeste, furnish her nothing prettier for every day use
than "Lusty." She could not thread a needle or tie a knot when she
joined the Hope Band, and the second year she wore one of the smallest
thimbles with a bit of cloth inside for "chinking" to keep it on. Here
Susie's sympathies are drawn out towards a thin, nervous-looking
little Frances, who has a hand and foot crippled. She walks painfully
along to her place and holds her work at a disadvantage in the poor
little cramped left hand, but she likes to be there with the others.

Most of the heads are covered with little tight braids, on some heads
standing at every angle, on some laid smoothly down, one braid tied to
another. A few have their curly hair cropped close, and here is a
little girl with a bushy mass overshadowing her lively face. She takes
but a stitch or two until she goes up to the front and holds her work
out for her teacher's inspection. Some time elapses before that lady
can notice it and say, "That is pretty good, Lena; now go right on
carefully." Lena returns slowly to her place, takes a stitch or two
more and repeats the performance. When will the work be completed? O
no, that is the way she used to do, but _now_--

A middle-sized "Topsy" comes pushing rudely forward, tossing her head
and whispering disagreeable things to those she has to pass, and Susy
hopes she will not be brought into any closer relations with _her_, when
she happens to see her tenderly fondling a broken-armed, broken-legged
dollie, while her work is being adjusted, and thinks somewhat better
of her. There are several Lilies and Roses in this growing garden. The
lilies are not white and the roses are not red, bu