“It doesn’t seem as if they could ever have been very little, does it, Mr. Mann?” Mr. Mann unfolded five fingers and a thumb and surveyed them gravely for a moment. “It is strange that this once measured three inches by two and couldn’t hit out any better than your’s could.” Mae had laid her hand on her knee and was looking at it also in the most serious manner. Now she doubled it into a small but very pugnacious looking fist, which she shook most entrancingly before the very eyes of the young man by her side. The eyes turned such a peculiar look upon her that she hastened to add: “Go on with your dissolving views. It is number eight’s turn next. You are the showman, and I am interested spectator.” “You insist upon describing my pictures, so I think you are properly first assistant to the grand panorama. Here’s eight-year-old. Try your powers on her.” “Let me see. O, then I read all the while, the ‘Fairchild Family’ and ‘Anna Ross,’ and I used to wear my hair in very smooth braids, I remember. I was ever so good.” “Impossible; you must have forgotten,” suggested Norman. “You surely whispered in school and committed similar dreadful crimes. Poor little prig.” “No, don’t,” plead Mae; “please don’t laugh at the little girl me. I love to think of her as so goody-goody. Last night,” and Mae lowered her voice, “I seemed to see little Mae Madden kneeling down in the old nursery in her woolly wrapper saying her prayers,” and Mae brought up on the prayers very abruptly, and bent over toward the sand and began to draw hastily. “Here comes nine-year-old Mae. Mr. Mann, you may do the describing.” “O, I suppose there were doll’s parties, first valentines, and rides with Albert in his buggy, when you clung very tightly to the slight arm of the carriage and smiled very bravely up in his face. You must have been pretty then.” “No, I was dreadfully ugly. I had broken out two teeth climbing a stone wall.” “You had stopped being good?” “Yes, that only lasted a little bit of a time.” “Miss Mae, I’m sure you were never ugly, but naughty and silly, I dare say. Kept a diary now, didn’t you?” “Yes, and went to sleep with Eliza Cooke’s poems under my pillow every night, and my finger holding the book open at some such thrilling verse as this: ‘Say on that I’m over romantic In loving the wild and the free, But the waves of the dashing Atlantic, The Alps and the eagle for me.’” “Did you wear your hair plaited when you were ten years old?” enquired Norman, intensely busy with another drawing. “O no; I didn’t do anything when I was ten years old but get mad and make up with my two dearest friends.” “One of whom was your dearest friend one-half of the time and the other the rest of it, I suppose.” “Don’t be satirical, sir. I had a lover when I was eleven; I used to skate with him and write him little notes, folded very queerly.”