"I do not think that matters," said the eldest sister, gently, after a moment's silence. "Every body in the town knows who and what we are, or might, if they chose to inquire. We cannot conceal our poverty if we tried; and I don't think any body looks down upon us for it. Not even since we began to keep school, which you thought was such a terrible thing, Selina." "And it was. I have never reconciled myself to teaching the baker's two boys and the grocer's little girl. You were wrong, Johanna, you ought to have drawn the line somewhere, and it ought to have excluded trades-people." "Beggars can not be choosers," began Hilary. "Beggars!" echoed Selina. "No, my dear, we were never that," said Miss Leaf, interposing against one of the sudden storms that were often breaking out between these two. "You know well we have never begged or borrowed from any body, and hardly ever been indebted to any body, except for the extra lessons that Mr. Lyon would insist upon giving to Ascott at home." Here Johanna suddenly stopped, and Hilary, with a slight color rising in her face, said-- "I think, sisters, we are forgetting that the staircase is quite open, and though I am sure she has an honest look and not that of a listener, still Elizabeth might hear. Shall I call her down stairs, and tell her to light a fire in the parlor?" While she is doing it, and in spite of Selina's forebodings to the contrary, the small maiden did it quickly and well, especially after a hint or two from Hilary--let me take the opportunity of making a little picture of this same Hilary. Little it should be, for she was a decidedly little woman: small altogether, hands, feet, and figure being in satisfactory proportion. Her movements, like those of most little women, were light and quick rather than elegant; yet every thing she did was done with a neatness and delicacy which gave an involuntary sense of grace and harmony. She was, in brief, one of those people who are best described by the word "harmonious;" people who never set your teeth on edge, or rub you up the wrong way, as very excellent people occasionally do. Yet she was not over-meek or unpleasantly amiable; there was a liveliness and even briskness about her, as if the every day wine of her life had a spice of Champagniness, not frothiness but natural effervescence of spirit, meant to "cheer but not inebriate" a household. And in her own household this gift was most displayed. No centre of a brilliant, admiring circle could be more charming, more witty, more irresistibly amusing than was Hilary sitting by the kitchen fire, with the cat on her knee, between her two sisters, and the school-boy Ascott Leaf, their nephew--which four individuals, the cat being not the least important of them, constituted the family. In the family, Hilary shone supreme. All recognized her as the light of the house, and so she had been, ever since she was born, ever since her