Mrs. Guest, peering through the pantry window, observed--and observed with some motherly displeasure, which she would have expressed had it not been too much trouble to open the window--that Sharley had put on her barbe,--that black barbe with the pink watered ribbons run through it. So extravagant in Sharley! Sharley would fain have been so extravagant as to put on her pink muslin too this afternoon; she had been more than half inclined to cry because she could not; but as it was not orthodox in Green Valley to wear one's "best clothes" on week-days, except at picnics or prayer-meetings, she had submitted, sighing, to her sprigged calico. It would have been worth while, though, to have seen her half an hour ago up in her room under the eaves, considering the question; she standing there with the sleeves of her dressing-sack fallen away from her pink, bare arms, and the hair clinging loose and moist to her bare white neck; to see her smooth the shimmering folds,--there were rose-buds on that muslin,--and look and long, hang it up, and turn away. Why could there not be a little more rose-bud and shimmer in people's lives! "Seems to me it's all calico!" cried Sharley. Then to see her overturning her ribbon-box! Nobody but a girl knows how girls dream over their ribbons. "He is coming!" whispered Sharley to the little bright barbe, and to the little bright face that flushed and fluttered at her in the glass,--"He is coming!" Sharley looked well, waiting there in the calico and lace upon the doorstep. It is not everybody who would look well in calico and lace; yet if you were to ask me, I could not tell you how pretty Sharley is, or if she is pretty at all. I have a memory of soft hair--brown, I think--and wistful eyes; and that I never saw her without a desire to stroke her, and make her pur as I would a kitten. How stiff and stark and black the railroad lay on its yellow ridge! Sharley drew her breath when the sudden four-o'clock whistle smote the air, and a faint, far trail of smoke puffed through the woods, and wound over the barren outline. Her mother, seeing her steal away through the kitchen-garden, and down the slope, called after her:-- "Charlotte! going to walk? I wish you'd let the baby go too. Well, she doesn't hear!" I will not assert that Sharley did not hear. To be frank, she was rather tired of that baby.