croquet even was but in the mild fervour of its first existence. Schools of cookery and ambulances were unknown. And needle-work, bead-work, muslin-work, flourished. Crochet, even, was still pursued as a fine-art occupation. That period is as far back as the Crusades to the sympathetic reader, but to the Miss Warrenders it was the natural state of affairs. They went to Mrs. Bagley's very often, in the dulness of the afternoon, to turn over the Berlin wools and the crochet cottons, to match a shade, or to find a size they wanted. The expenditure was not great, and it gave an object to their walk. "I must go out," they would say to each other, "for there is that pink to match;" or "I shall be at a stand-still with my antimacassar; my cotton is almost done." It was not the fault of Minnie and Chatty that they had nothing better to do. Mrs. Bagley was old, but very lively, and capable, even while selling soap, or sugar, or a piece of bacon, or a tin tea-kettle, of seeing through her old spectacles whether the tint selected was one that matched. She was a woman who had "come through" much in her life. Her children were all grown up, and most of them dead. Those who remained were married, with children of their own, making a great struggle to bring them up, as she herself had done in her day. She had two daughters, widows,--one in the village, one at some distance off; and living with herself, dependent on her, yet not dependent altogether, was all that remained of another daughter, the one supposed to have been her favourite. It seemed to the others rather hard that granny should lavish all her benefits upon Eliza, while their own families got only little presents and helps now and then. But Lizzie was always the one with mother, they said, though goodness knows she had cost enough in her lifetime without leaving such a charge on granny's hands. Lizzie Bagley, who in her day had been the prettiest of the daughters, had married out of her own sphere, though it could not be said to be a very grand marriage. She had married a clerk, a sort of gentleman,--not like the ploughman and country tradesman who had fallen to the lot of her sisters. But he had never done well, had lost one situation after another, and had gone out finally to Canada, where he died,--he and his wife both; leaving their girl with foreign ways and a will of her own, such as the aunts thought (or at least said) does not develop on the home soil. As poor little Lizzie, however, had been but two years away, perhaps the blame did not entirely lie with Canada. Her mother's beauty and her father's gentility had given to Lizzie many advantages over her cousins. She was prettier and far more "like a lady" than the best of them; she had a slim, straight little person, without the big joints and muscles of the race, and with blue eyes which were really blue, and not whitey-gray. And instead of going out to service, as would have been natural, she had learned