e smouldering fires flickering under
it; but, as often happens in dreams, a certain rainbow vividness and
clearness invested everything, and she and Sally were jumping for joy at
the beautiful things they found on the beach.

Suddenly, there stood before them a woman, dressed in a long white
garment. She was very pale, with sweet, serious dark eyes, and she led
by the hand a black-eyed boy, who seemed to be crying and looking about
as for something lost. She dreamed that she stood still, and the woman
came toward her, looking at her with sweet, sad eyes, till the child
seemed to feel them in every fibre of her frame. The woman laid her hand
on her head as if in blessing, and then put the boy's hand in hers, and
said, "Take him, Mara, he is a playmate for you;" and with that the
little boy's face flashed out into a merry laugh. The woman faded away,
and the three children remained playing together, gathering shells and
pebbles of a wonderful brightness. So vivid was this vision, that the
little one awoke laughing with pleasure, and searched under her pillows
for the strange and beautiful things that she had been gathering in
dreamland.

"What's Mara looking after?" said Sally, sitting up in her trundle-bed,
and speaking in the patronizing motherly tone she commonly used to her
little playmate.

"All gone, pitty boy--all gone!" said the child, looking round
regretfully, and shaking her golden head; "pitty lady all gone!"

"How queer she talks!" said Sally, who had awakened with the project of
building a sheet-house with her fairy neighbor, and was beginning to
loosen the upper sheet and dispose the pillows with a view to this
species of architecture. "Come, Mara, let's make a pretty house!" she
said.

"Pitty boy out dere--out dere!" said the little one, pointing to the
window, with a deeper expression than ever of wishfulness in her eyes.

"Come, Sally Kittridge, get up this minute!" said the voice of her
mother, entering the door at this moment; "and here, put these clothes
on to Mara, the child mustn't run round in her best; it's strange, now,
Mary Pennel never thinks of such things."

Sally, who was of an efficient temperament, was preparing energetically
to second these commands of her mother, and endue her little neighbor
with a coarse brown stuff dress, somewhat faded and patched, which she
herself had outgrown when of Mara's age; with shoes, which had been
coarsely made to begin with, and very much battered