s in Miss
Craydocke's pretty room. It was wonderful the cleverness the Josselyns
had come to with little frocks. One a skirt, and the other a body,--they
made nothing of finishing the whole at a sitting. "It's only seeing
the end from the beginning," Martha said, when Leslie uttered her
astonishment. "We know the way, right through; and no way seems
long when you've traveled it often." To be sure, Prissy Hoskins's
delaines and calicoes didn't need to be contrived after Demorest's
fashion-plates.

Then they had their holiday, taking the things over to the Cliff, and
trying them all on Prissy, very much as if they had been a party of
children, and she a paper doll. Her rosy little face and willful curls
came out of each prettier than the last, precisely as a paper dolly's
does, and when at the end of all they got her into a bright violet print
and a white bib-apron, it was well they were the last, for they couldn't
have had the heart to take her out of them. Leslie had made for her a
small hoop from the upper half of one of her own, and laced a little
cover upon it, of striped seersucker, of which there was a petticoat
also to wear above. These, clear, clean, and stiffened, came from Miss
Craydocke's stores. She never traveled without her charity-trunk,
wherein, put at once in perfect readiness for different use the moment
they passed beyond her own, she kept all spare material that waited for
such call. Breadths of old dresses, ripped and sponged and pressed, or
starched, ironed, and folded; flannel petticoats shrunken short;
stockings "cut down" in the old, thrifty, grandmother fashion;
underclothing strongly patched (as she said, "the Lord's mark put upon
it, since it had pleased Him to give her the means to do without
patches"); odds and ends of bonnet-ribbons, dipped in spirits and rolled
tightly upon blocks, from which they unrolled nearly as good as
new,--all these things, and more, religiously made the most of for
whomsoever they might first benefit, went about with her in this, the
biggest of her boxes, which, give out from it as she might, she never
seemed, she said, to get quite to the bottom of.

Under the rounded skirts, below the short, plain trousers, Prissy's
ankles and feet were made shapely with white stockings and new, stout
boots. (Aunt Hoskins believed in "white stockin's, or go athout. Bilin'
an' bleachin' an' comin' out new; none o' yer aggravations 'v
everlastin' dirt-color.") And one thing more,