When I, the writer was a little girl, a very, very old lady used on bright, fair days to lead me down the country road, past many white houses amid their orchards, and point out a great, old hickory tree, and tell me that was the spot where she had, in her madness, left her baby, “who is now Mrs. B----,” she would say. But I always had to hear over again about “Watch,” whom, the old lady said, “had scratched and fit, and killed ’chucks and snakes, and taken the children to and from school for eight years after that! And then, one night, he had got up from his mat and come into the bed-room and stood by the bed, and had licked the hand of his master, and had gone back to his mat, and in the morning he was quite dead. Just as if Death knew he could only get him away from us by taking him in his sleep!” And I would lean against the kind, old lady, and say gravely: “What a pity he had to die before I was born--I would have loved ‘Watch’!” And I love his memory to-day--brave, old, black “Watch”! Dinah Dinah Dinah was not “all things to all men,” but she was everything to one small girl, and a good many things to other members of the family. I think I had better say a few words right here about the aforesaid small girl. She was an only child, and so far beyond mere prettiness as to be really beautiful. Quick, clever, and high spirited, the slavish idolatry of her mother had worked her ruin. _Enfant terrible_, she was a burden to herself, a terror to all those about her; except during the rare absence of that mother, when, oh! the pity, the shame of it! the little Marie became obedient, gracious, and charming; as sweetly angelic as she was beautiful.