One afternoon, Mrs. Vernon returned exceedingly wearied from a visit to a sick woman who resided at some distance. The walk was too long for her, and had her daughter been at home, she would not have been suffered to take it; for Flora, in the vigour of her youthful strength, appropriated to herself all the more distant visits. Certainly a feeling of regret crossed the mind of Mrs. Vernon, as she wearily ascended her own stair, and heard loud, angry sounds from above, that peace and seclusion were now hers no longer--that she could not have rest when she was tired, nor solitude when she was sad. But she struggled against the feeling as against a sin. As Mrs. Vernon approached the door of Emma’s sleeping apartment, it was evident that the sound came from thence, and that the angry voice was the widow’s. "Tiresome monkey! you have destroyed it entirely! my beautiful India muslin! Was ever mother tormented as I am? Ah, is that you?" continued Emma, as Mrs. Vernon crossed the entrance to her room. "Just come in here, do, and see what this insufferable child has been doing!" Mrs. Vernon entered, and beheld Lyddie, the little culprit, in the centre of the apartment, fancifully arrayed in all the finery which she had pillaged from a large trunk of her mother’s. A yellow satin dress, with the body turned in, was fastened by a red scarf round the waist of the child; and being, of course, much too long, swept the floor on every side with its gaudy folds. Long feathers, scarlet and white, were stuck in the girl’s lank dark hair; while an India muslin shawl, which had been twisted into the form of a turban, appeared, with a grievous rent in the middle, in the hands of the irritated parent. "Did you ever see anything like it? The vanity, the folly, the absurdity of the child! Here I find her parading before the glass, dressed up like a May-queen, and in all the best clothes which I used to wear in my happier days! Take them off!" she cried in a shriller tone to the child, who stood biting the ends of her fingers, in mingled sulkiness and fear. "Take them off, I say! and if ever you touch them again, you shall have a whipping--such a whipping as you will remember to the last day of your life! I am sure that no one," she continued, turning towards Mrs. Vernon, who was silently disrobing the culprit--"no one but a parent can tell the incessant anxiety, plague, and worry, caused by children! It is enough to drive us out of our senses!"