tried to thrust into the baby's tiny hand--I often look back on those days. It seems to me that my cup of happiness must have been lipping over. Rosamund grew like a flower. There was always something special about her, and we felt it from the first. It wasn't only her beauty, it was something fine, aloof. You remember her, Ann?" "Yes, I remember her, Mother. She was always different, even at the beginning she wasn't red and puckered and squirming like most babies, but faintly pink like a rose. Father worshipped her. Of course, you know that you made far more of her than of any of the rest of us, and we were glad and willing that it should be so. We were never rough with her. She never lived the tumbled puppy-like life that I lived as a child." Mrs. Douglas nodded. Presently she said: "You had a happy childhood, Ann?" "Hadn't we just? No children ever had a happier; we were so free. When I see children dragging along dreary daily walks with nurses, I do pity them. We hated being taken walks by Ellie Robbie, and generally ran away. We used to meet the Johnstons with their Ellen, and then we big ones dashed off together on business of our own, leaving the poor nurses tethered to the prams. We were marauders of the worst type. Having always a great hunger for sweets and being always destitute of money, we had to devise schemes for getting them. In Nether Street there stood a little sweetie shop owned by one Archibald Forbes, a good-natured man who had once (in an evil moment for himself) given us a few sweeties for nothing. With the awful pertinacity of children we went back continually in the hope that he might do it again! (What you and Father would have thought if you had seen us, I know not!) Sometimes he ordered us away, but, when in a more forthcoming mood, he would make us say recitations to him, and then reward us. He must have been a very patient man, Mr. Archibald Forbes, for I can see him, his spectacles on the end of his nose, and his bushy eyebrows pulled down, standing behind his counter, listening without a movement to Mark relentlessly getting through 'The scene was changed'--you know that thing about Mary Queen of Scots?" "Indeed I do. If Mark was asked to recite when Mrs. Goskirk was present, and she heard him begin, 'The scene was changed,' she gave a resigned sigh and took up her knitting; and there was another about Henry of Navarre that was almost as bad. The things you did were short and harmless." "Oh, quite," said Ann. "There was one about a little girl called Fanny, a child for whom we had a deep distaste. She had a dream about being in heaven, I remember: 'I thought to see Papa's estate But oh! 'twas far too small, Mamma; The whole wide world was not so big As William's cricket ball, Mamma.' And she finished: 'Your pretty Fanny woke, Mamma, And lo! 'twas but a dream.'