She turned toward Mrs. Blakeney. “I feel just as if you had taken down a receiver, and asked me to listen into it, and that I heard a voice say, oh, ever so long-distance! ‘This is little Lydia speaking.’” Jimmy, too, was thoughtful. “But where does Lafayette come in, I wonder? Lafayette in Egypt?” Aunt Amanda smiled, picked up the bowl, and pointed out, just below the rim, a tiny engraving of a long-eared beast, bearing a cloaked figure, while another personage trudged at the side. Palm trees and a pyramid completed the scene. How strange that any one, above all a God-fearing Fairlee, could ever have failed to recognize the Bible story of Mary and Joseph, fleeing with the Child! Many curves and scrolls enclosed this specimen of the graver’s art, and among these could be discerned, in the flourishy French writing of which Grandma Bradford had often spoken, the legend— _La Fuite en Egypte_ For a collector, Mrs. Blakeney was certainly sportsmanlike, yes, magnanimous. We called it broad-minded when she gave to Jimmy Alexander’s bride, as a wedding-gift, her “Flight into Egypt” piece; an object so tenderly cherished by her that she had never even made mention of it in any of her monographs, but had kept it unspotted from the world, in her own collection. She had always, and with reason, considered it an Alexander heirloom to which she was justly entitled, through the bequest of her grand-uncle, Judge Alexander. She knew, however, that the Alexanders, like most of us, had had ups and downs; she knew that one branch of the family, had been prolific in good-for-nothings, some of whom had fallen so low as to misspell the family name for a whole generation, writing it Ellicksender, when they wrote it at all. Though she doubted the justice of calling the humble Ellicksender home a “den of thieves,” she nevertheless believed it probable that Judge Alexander’s “_La Fuite en Egypte_” porringer had come into his family’s possession in some vague, unexplained way, rather than by purchase. For Judge Alexander’s father, Dr. Phineas Alexander, that pillar of the Presbyterian faith, had originally been a mere Ellicksender, so-called; he it was who had “turned out real good,” and so had failed to win the interest of either Felix or myself, in our childish days. As Mrs. Blakeney said, “The ironies of Time certainly do iron out everything, if you wait long enough”; and it was Dr. Alexander, _alias_ Ellicksender, who had lifted up the fallen fortunes of his family to their former lofty place in American history. Felicia is really a kindly little soul. When I went to see Cousin Felix after the wedding, I was not surprised to find that on the ground of safety first, she insists that the Lafayette bottom shall remain, during her father’s lifetime, remarried to its fluted, flame-topped cover. The _écuelle_ is easily the pride of the collector’s heart. “Of course I have costlier pieces,” quoth Felix, “but none so dear to me as this.”