This was the family circle in which Polly Adams had spent the thirteen happy years of her life, respecting and loving her father, adoring her mother, and continually coming in conflict with Aunt Jane. And Polly herself? Like countless other girls, she was good and bad, naughty and lovable by turns, now yielding to violent fits of temper, now going into the depths of penitence for them; but always, in the inmost recesses of her childish soul, possessed with a firm resolve to be as good a woman as her mother was before her. She knew no higher ambition. CHAPTER II. THE V. Everybody in town knew the Hapgood house. It stood close to the street, under a row of huge elms, and surrounded with clumps of purple and white lilac bushes whose topmost blossoms peeped curiously in at the chamber windows. Such houses are only found in New England, but there they abound with their broad front "stoops," the long slant of their rear roofs, where a ladder is firmly fixed, to serve in case of fire, and the great, low rooms grouped around the immense chimney in the middle. The Hapgood house had been in the family for generations, and was kept in such an excellent state of repair that it bade fair to outlast many of the more recent houses of the town. A wing had been built out at the side; but even with this modern addition, no one needed to glance up at the date on the chimney--sixteen hundred and no- matter-what--to assure himself of the great age of the stately old house before him. Up in the Hapgood attic a serious consultation was going on. "Now, girls," Polly Adams began solemnly, "'most half of our vacation has gone, and I think we ought to do something before it's over." "Aren't we doing something this very minute, I should like to know?" inquired Molly Hapgood, who had felt privileged, in her capacity as hostess, to throw herself down on the old bed which occupied one corner of the garret. Polly frowned on such levity. "I don't mean that, Molly, and you know it. What I think is, that we should get together regularly every two or three days and do something special. Aunt Jane is in lots of clubs and things, and-- " "I've heard it said," interrupted Jean Dwight solemnly, "that Aunt Jane spent so much time doing good outside that she never had a chance to be good at home." "Now, Jean, that isn't fair," said Polly laughing. "You know I'd be the very last one to hold up Aunt Jane as an example, only she has such good times with her everlasting old people that I thought we might do something like it." "Which do you propose to do," asked Molly disrespectfully, "start a society for the improvement of the jail or open a mission at the poor-house to teach Miss Bean some manners?"