Our work among the lilies is done. If our admiration for them has been great, it has never been excessive. The lilies are the loveliest of all flowers, and the study of them is wrought with delight. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” “UPS AND DOWNS.” A TRUE STORY OF NEW YORK LIFE. BY N. O. LORIMER. CHAPTER III. If you had peeped into the big attic bedroom the three girls occupied at the top of the high New York boarding-house, you would have seen Ada Nicoli in her pretty white dressing-gown—such a pitiful reminder of her former luxury—putting little Sadie’s hair into curl-papers. In her lonely life she had grown passionately attached to her two little sisters who were so dependent on her, and the thing that hurt her most about her poverty was seeing little Sadie look careless and neglected. Often at night she was so tired and weary that it took all her courage to brush and dress their two heads of hair, and see that their clothes were in proper order for going to school the next day. A hat-box full of Southern bank-notes, which had been Marjorie’s and Sadie’s amusement for many a day in their old home for playing at store-keeping, came in handy for curling Sadie’s hair, and the child always wanted Ada to tell her the same story, how her mother’s mother had saved up the bank-notes during the great war, believing that the South would be victorious, and how she had made some of the notes during the war by making slippers out of the felt carpets and selling them. “If they were all real good dollars now, Ada,” the child said, “we needn’t live in this hen-roost any longer, need we?” Ada took the child in her arms. “Poor little Sadie,” she said. “While we three are together, it doesn’t so much matter, does it? We can have a little fun sometimes, can’t we?” “It isn’t so bad, siss,” the child answered, “but I do want to go to Barnum’s, and I wish the girls at school wouldn’t say, ‘When’s your father coming back? He’s been visiting for a long time.’” Then Marjorie chimed in with—“I passed two of the girls I used to go to school with to-day, Ada, and they both looked in at a shop window when I passed.”