the middle, and cutting it
in two.

Ruphelle had an English father and mother. I remember Madam Allen's
turban, how it loomed up over her stately head like a great white
peony. There was a saucy brother Augustus, whom I never could abide,
and a grandpa, who always said and did such strange things that I did
not understand what it meant till I grew older, and learned that he
was afflicted with "softening of the brain."

Then in the kitchen there was a broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced woman,
named Tempy Ann Crawford, whom I always see, with my mind's eye,
roasting coffee and stirring it with a pudding-stick, or rolling out
doughnuts, which she called crullers, and holding up a fried image,
said to be a little sailor boy with a tarpaulin hat on,--only his
figure was injured so much by swelling in the lard kettle that his own
mother wouldn't have known him; still he made very good eating.

There was a little bound girl in the family, Ann Smiley, who often led
me into mischief, but always before Madam Allen looked as demure as a
little gray kitten.

Fel and I were uncommonly forward about learning our letters, and
wished very much to go to school and finish our education; but were
told that the "committee men" would not let us in till we were four
years old. My birthday came the first of May, and very proud was I
when mother led me up to a lady visitor, and said, "My little girl is
four years old to-day." I thought the people "up street" would ring
bells and fire cannons, but they forgot it. I looked in the glass, and
could not see the great change in my face which I had expected. I
didn't look any "diffunt." How would the teacher know I was so old?

"O, will they let me in?" I asked. "For always when I go to school,
then somebody comes that's a teacher, and tells me to go home, and
says I musn't stay."

"You will have to wait till the school begins," said my mother, "and
that is all the better, for then little Fel can go too." I was willing
to wait, for Fel was the other half of me. In three weeks she was as
old as I was, and in the rosy month of June we began to go to the
district school.

Your grandfather lived a little way out of town, and Squire Allen
much farther; so every morning Ruphelle and her brother Augustus
called for me, and we girls trudged along to school together, while
Gust followed like a little dog with our dinner baskets. This was one
of the greatest trials in the whole world; for, do you see, he