“I want to know!” cried Lydia. She followed Thomas into her state-room. “Well, well! They do seem to have thought of everything!” “I should say so,” exulted the boy. “Look here!” He showed her a little niche near the head of the berth strongly framed with glass, in which a lamp was made fast. “Light up, you know, when you want to read, or feel kind of lonesome.” Lydia clasped her hands in pleasure and amaze. “Oh, I tell you Captain Jenness meant to have things about right. The other state-rooms don't begin to come up to this.” He dashed out in his zeal, and opened their doors, that she might triumph in the superiority of her accommodations without delay. These rooms were cramped together on one side; Lydia's was in a comparatively ample corner by itself. She went on unpacking her trunk, and the boy again took his place near her, in the same attitude as before. “I tell you,” he said, “I shall like to see you with that silk on. Have you got any other nice ones?” “No; only this I'm wearing,” answered Lydia, half amused and half honest in her sympathy with his ardor about her finery. “They said not to bring many clothes; they would be cheaper over there.” She had now reached the bottom of her trunk. She knew by the clock that her grandfather could hardly have left the city on his journey home, but the interval of time since she had parted with him seemed vast. It was as if she had started to Boston in a former life; the history of the choosing and cutting and making of these clothes was like a dream of preëxistence. She had never had so many things new at once, and it had been a great outlay, but her aunt Maria had made the money go as far as possible, and had spent it with that native taste, that genius for dress, which sometimes strikes the summer boarder in the sempstresses of the New England hills. Miss Latham's gift was quaintly unrelated to herself. In dress, as in person and manner, she was uncompromisingly plain and stiff. All the more lavishly, therefore, had it been devoted to the grace and beauty of her sister's child, who, ever since she came to find a home in her grandfather's house, had been more stylishly dressed than any other girl in the village. The summer boarders, whom the keen eye of Miss Latham studied with unerring sense of the best new effects in costume, wondered at Lydia's elegance, as she sat beside her aunt in the family pew, a triumph of that grim artist's skill. Lydia knew that she was well dressed, but she knew that after all she was only the expression of her aunt's inspirations. Her own gift was of another sort. Her father was a music-teacher, whose failing health had obliged him to give up his profession, and who had taken the traveling agency of a parlor organ manufactory for the sake of the out-door life. His business had brought him to South Bradfield, where he sold an organ to Deacon Latham's church, and fell in love with his younger daughter. He died a few years