When the exercises were finished the children were all taken down-stairs and they looked very pretty flitting about. There was another surprise, one that greatly interested the little girl. In one prettily arranged booth were two curious small beings who had a history. They had already been in Sunday-school on two occasions. A missionary to China, seeing these little girls about to be sold, had rescued them by buying them himself. He had brought them back on his return, and now kindly disposed people were making up a sum to provide them with a home and educate them. Hanny pressed forward holding John's hand tightly. They were so strange-looking. The larger and older one was not at all pretty, but the younger one had a sweet sort of shyness and was not so stolid. Their yellow-brown skins, oblique dark eyes, black brows, and black hair done up in a remarkable fashion with some long pins, and their Chinese attire seemed very curious. The gentleman with them said there were hundreds of little girls sold in China, and that women bought them for future wives for their sons, and treated them like bond slaves. These children's feet had not been cramped, this was done mainly to the higher orders. He had some Chinese shoes worn by grown women, and they were such short, queer things, like some of the pincushions made for the Fair. We didn't suppose then the Chinese would come and live with us and have a Chinatown in the heart of the city; do our laundry work and take possession of our kitchens; that the blue shirts and queer pointed shoes would be a common sight in our streets. So the Chinese children were a curiosity. Indeed, several years elapsed before Hanny saw another inhabitant of the Flowery Kingdom. "Don't you want to put something in the box?" John held out a quarter to the little girl. Her eyes sparkled with pleasure. Then she shook hands with the small Chinese maidens, and she felt almost as if she had been to a foreign country. If Mrs. Reed had been present she would have marched Charles home in short order. She did not believe in praising children, or anybody else for that matter. Everybody, in her opinion, needed a strict hand. She hardly approved of the singing-school, and if she had really understood that Charles would stand out alone facing the audience, and then be applauded for what he had done, and go into the fair and be praised and "treated," she would have been horrified and put him on the strictest sort of discipline for the next month. Charles had endeavored to persuade his mother to go, but she wanted to get the turkey ready for the Christmas dinner, and had no time for such trifling things. No woman had who did her duty by her house and her family. The harder and stonier and more rigid the discipline was, the more virtue it contained, she thought. There was no especial end in view with her; it was the way all along that one had to be careful about and make as rough as possible.