"Crawling!" repeated his father, "I think it was leaping, bouncing, more like a catamount than a caterpillar." "I would be ashamed to be a coward and afraid of ghosts," exclaimed Mittie, with a scornful flash of her bright, black eyes. "Miss Thusa didn't tell about ghosts," said Helen, bursting into a passion of tears. This was true, in the _letter_, but not in the _spirit_--and, young as she was, she knew and felt it, and the wormwood of remorse gave bitterness to her tears. Never had she felt so wretched, so humiliated. She had fallen in her own estimation. Her father, brother and sister had ridiculed her and _called her names_--a terrible thing for a child. One had called her a _caterpillar_, another a _catamount_, and a third a _coward_. And added to all this was a sudden and unutterable horror of the color of yellow, formerly her favorite hue. She mentally resolved never to wear that horrible yellow night dress, which had drawn upon her so many odious epithets, even though she froze to death without it. She would rather wear her old ones, even if they had ten thousand patches, than that bright, new, golden tinted garment, so late the object of her intense admiration. "I declare," cried Louis, unconscious of the Spartan resolution his little sister was forming, and good naturedly seeking to turn her tears into smiles, "I do declare, I thought Helen was a pumpkin, bursting into the room with such a noise, wrapped up in this yellow concern. Mother, what in the name of all that's tasteful, makes you clothe her by night in Chinese mourning?" "It was her own choice," replied Mrs. Gleason, taking the weeping child in her own lap. "She saw a little girl dressed in this style, and thought she would be perfectly happy to be the possessor of such a garment." "I never will put it on again as long as I live," sobbed Helen. "Every body laughs at it." "Perhaps somebody else will have a word to say about it," said her mother, in a grave, gentle voice. "When I have taken so much pains to make it, and bind it with soft, bright ribbon, to please my little girl, it seems to me that it is very ungrateful in her to make such a remark as that." "Oh, mother, don't," was all Helen could utter; and she made as strong a counter resolve that she would wear the most hideous garment, and brave the ridicule of the whole world, rather than expose herself to the displeasure of a mother so kind and so indulgent. "You had better put her back in bed," said Mr. Gleason; "children acquire such bad habits by indulgence." Helen trembled and clung close to her mother's bosom. "I fear she may again rise in her sleep and fall down stairs," said the more anxious mother. "Turn the key on the outside, till we retire ourselves," observed the father. To be locked up alone in the darkness! Helen felt as if she had heard her death-warrant, and pale even to _blueness_, she leaned against her mother, incapable of articulating the prayer that trembled on her ashy lips.