es walked away in the moonlight.

The following week was one of numerous consultations among the girls.
Grandmother Fellows's wardrobe was pretty thoroughly rummaged under that
good-natured old lady's superintendence, and many were the queer effects
of old garments upon young figures which surprised the steady-going
mirror in her quiet chamber.

"I 'm afraid I can never depend on it again," said Mrs. Fellows.'

She had promised to be at the party.

"She looked so grave when I first asked her," Mary explained to the
girls, "that I was sorry I spoke of it. I was afraid she thought we
wanted her only as a sort of convenience, to help out our pantomime by
the effect of her white hair. But in a minute she smiled in her cheery
way, and said, as if she saw right through me: 'I suppose, my child, you
think being old a sort of misfortune, like being hunchbacked or blind,
and are afraid of hurting my feelings, but you need n't be. The good
Lord has made it so that at whichever end of life we are, the other end
looks pretty uninteresting, and if it won't hurt your feelings to have
somebody in the party who has got through all the troubles you have yet
before you, I should be glad to come.' That was turning the tables for
us pretty neatly, eh, girls?"

The young ladies would not have had the old lady guess it for worlds,
but truth compels me to own that all that week they improved every
opportunity furtively to study Mrs. Fellows's gait and manner, with a
view to perfecting their parts.

Frank and George met a couple of times in Henry's room to smoke it
over and settle details, and Henry called on Jessie to arrange several
concerted features of the programme, and for some other reasons for
aught I know.

As each one studied his or her part and strove in imagination to
conceive how they would act and feel as old men and old women, they grew
more interested, and more sensible of the mingled pathos and absurdity
of the project, and its decided general effect of queerness. They all
set themselves to make a study of old age in a manner that had never
occurred to them before, and never does occur to most people at all.
Never before had their elderly friends received so much attention at
their hands.

In the prosecution of these observations they were impressed with the
entire lack of interest generally felt by people in the habits and
manners of persons in other epochs of life than their own. In respect
of age, as in so many ot