Why, we girls would have no clothes to wear at all if it were not for the stores laid away in oak chests and wardrobes upstairs, belonging to dead-and-gone Brandon ladies. Fortunately they made no shoddy in those days, and the things have been safe in their camphor-lined dwellings from the moth and mildew. Brocades are there, fine yellow muslins that you could draw through a ring, woollens nearly as fine; and, as pretty as any of them, chintzes in bunched-up sacques belonging to a day when it was the fashion to be Arcadian. We have adapted them with the aid of Mary Fahy, the village dressmaker, and a deal of trouble I often have to prevent her alterations being too drastic. A newspaper sometimes comes our way, and I know that it is the fashion for ladies nowadays to dress picturesquely, so I insist, greatly to Mary's discontent, that the precious old stuffs must not be cut, or too much pulled about, but only just pinched in here, or drawn out there, to fit us. Not that she despises the beautiful material, which I have seen her fingering with rapt enjoyment. It is only that she hankers after the fashions ever since she paid a visit to Dublin, and, having a cousin a house-maid at the Castle, was permitted a peep at various festivities, with all the fine folk taking part in them. Mary's cousin, too, occasionally sends her a lady's paper, which serves to keep her ideas modern. However, I let her have her own way, with modifications, on the print frocks we wear in summer-time, to make up for my obstinacy about the old stuffs. I feel that I am talking as if I were the head of the family. That is because Aline and Esther leave so much to my judgment. I am supposed to have the brains of the women of the family, which, if it is true, is only fair, as the others have the beauty. I have been delicate since the fall that lamed me, pale and puny and insignificant, with light-coloured hair and washed-out blue eyes. Esther is like mother, but more beautiful--dark, with such vivid roses in her cheeks and lips, and such velvety eyes, and hair with coppery lights in it. Brandon is a big house, four stories in the middle, with wings of three stories on each side. But the upper stories do not exist for us. They have so long let in the weather that we have given them over to the owls and bats. There is a deal of rubbish up there as well, and the children look upon it as a kind of Treasure Land, so that we have to keep the doors of communication safely locked, or we would never have our young pickles out of the rotting rooms.