Maggie answered by seizing her front locks and cutting them straight across the middle of her forehead. "Oh, my buttons! Maggie, you'll catch it!" exclaimed Tom; "you'd better not cut any more off." Snip! went the great scissors again while Tom was speaking, and he couldn't help feeling it was rather good fun; Maggie would look so queer. "Here, Tom, cut it behind for me," said Maggie, excited by her own daring, and anxious to finish the deed. "You'll catch it, you know," said Tom, nodding his head in an admonitory manner, and hesitating a little as he took the scissors. "Never mind, make haste!" said Maggie, giving a little stamp with her foot. Her cheeks were quite flushed. The black locks were so thick, nothing could be more tempting to a lad who had already tasted the forbidden pleasure of cutting the pony's mane. I speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of shears meet through a duly resisting mass of hair. One delicious grinding snip, and then another and another, and the hinder locks fell heavily on the floor, and Maggie stood cropped in a jagged, uneven manner, but with a sense of clearness and freedom, as if she had emerged from a wood into the open plain. "Oh, Maggie," said Tom, jumping round her, and slapping his knees as he laughed, "Oh, my buttons! what a queer thing you look! Look at yourself in the glass; you look like the idiot we throw out nutshells to at school." Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly of her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn't want her hair to look pretty,--that was out of the question,--she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, and say she was like the idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and still Tom laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie's flushed cheeks began to pale, and her lips to tremble a little. "Oh, Maggie, you'll have to go down to dinner directly," said Tom. "Oh, my!" "Don't laugh at me, Tom," said Maggie, in a passionate tone, with an outburst of angry tears, stamping, and giving him a push. "Now, then, spitfire!" said Tom. "What did you cut it off for, then? I shall go down: I can smell the dinner going in." He hurried downstairs and left poor Maggie to that bitter sense of the irrevocable which was almost an everyday experience of her small soul. She could see clearly enough, now the thing was done, that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever; for Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstances of an active imagination.