picturesque!"

"Why, of course," cried Mrs. Clymer. "I wish you would tell us of it.
You mean Nannie, don't you?"

The Southerner leaned slightly forward, with a look of interest.

"It is so long ago," said Mrs. Curtis, who had been Constance Ridgely,
"but something has made me think of Nannie all the afternoon. My
friendship with Nannie began almost thirty years ago, when Miss Arthur
kept the Pleasant Street kindergarten next to No. 3. The school was a
dear; but I remember so well the odd mixture of admiration and dread I
felt for the big, tumultuous public school. The boys used to make faces
at us, but they were so daring and they turned somersaults so nimbly!
And I was devoured with curiosity regarding the little girls who came to
school without their nurses. I thought it must be grand! One little girl
I singled out. She used to wear a red jersey and a red tam-o'-shanter.
She wasn't precisely pretty--according to my childish, wax-dolly
standard of beauty--but there was something fascinating in the way her
silky mop of brown hair flung itself to the wind, in the flash of her
brown eyes and her white teeth and the feather-down lightness of her
motions. She was as reckless of her frock as her bones--I was trained to
be very careful of both. The fearless rush with which she would slide
down the high bank or skin up a tree to the very awful, oscillating
top--I can't describe the awesome joy of seeing her! And she was so gay;
she had the sweetest, merriest laugh in the world. I loved it. Ah, how
many times did I glue my demure little face, which hid so many wild
fancies, to a certain knot-hole in that high, high fence of Miss
Arthur's, which all our mothers praised because it protected our
privacy, watching the boys and girls, and _my_ girl run out to recess!
And, oh, the blow it was when the hour of recess at the kindergarten was
changed! Because the No. 3 boys stole Bennie Olmstead's roller skates,
and there was a combat, in which our injured and innocent boys were no
match for the wicked No. 3's; and Miss Betty, who attended to minor
matters of our physical comfort, being only the third kindergartner, who
was learning and received no salary, and of course had most of the
drudgery, washed at least four bloody noses and one bitten ear, and put
butchers' brown paper on half a dozen bruises, while the little girls
wept for sympathy and Bennie howled for his skates! I wept, too; but it
was because I could never any more lo