spoke of Annie Deane as "little," although she was five feet four in her stockings. Everybody always ran away with the impression--and treated her accordingly--that she was very young, although she had seen every day of twenty-five years. "I was born young, and have never learned much of anything since," she would laughingly say when somebody had called her "child" and advised her about her manners. She _was_ a child spiritually, and it certainly seemed as if she would never be spiritually grown up. Her father had died at sixty, so springy of step, so airy of movement, so jaunty, so natty, so nice in his No. 3 gaiters and his nobby hats, that to see him ten paces off one would have sworn he had not twenty years upon his canary-bird head. Annie was like him, and her head swung and swayed, fluttered and tiptilted on its graceful neck, as much as his had done as a young canary-bird's ways are like an old one's. "Ef the air of that girl ain't enough to make a hoss larf!" said, with edifying perseverance, the youngest and burnt-umberest of the burnt-umber maidens with whom they boarded. Miss Roberta Editha was sentimental and thirty-five. She pressed a vision of beauty to her virginal breast. Years before she had cut from some illustrated paper a very pretty picture representing some strolling actor who played Hamlet and Claude Melnotte upon the boards of rural theatres. It had miraculously large eyes, a small mouth with downward curves, and flat rings of hair upon its pallid brow. Its air was generally cankered and worm-eaten, but Miss Roberta ("Old Bob," some of the graceless artists called her behind her back) interpreted that air as expressive of a soul which found this life of too rank and coarse a flavor for its daily food. She had cut out this woodcut, and had worn it for years in a massive heirloom locket around her long, brown neck.