"Ah, you have never had a brother--my brother! so you cannot understand. I can feel his heels pressing against my stitches when he is walking a mile away. And I know whenever his fingers touch the buttons I have put back. Besides, don't you like to see people make bad things good, and things with holes in them whole again? Why, that is half the work of the world, Harriet! It is not his feet that make these holes," continued Miss Anna, nicely, "it is his shoes, his big, coarse shoes. And his clothes wear out so soon. He has a tailor who misfits him so exactly from year to year that there is never the slightest deviation in the botch. I know beforehand exactly where all the creases will begin. So I darn and mend. The idea of his big, soft, strong feet making holes in anything! but, then, you have never tucked him in bed at night, my dear, so you know nothing about his feet." "Not I!" said Harriet, embarrassed but not shocked. Miss Anna continued fondly in a lowered voice: "You should have heard him the other day when he pulled open a drawer: 'Why, Anna,' he cried, 'where on earth did I get all these new socks? The pair I left in here must have been alive: they've bred like rabbits.'--'Why, you've forgotten,' I said. 'It's your birthday; and I have made you over, so that you are as good as new--_me_!'" "I never have to be reminded of my birthday," remarked Harriet, reflectively. "Anna, do you know that I have lived about one-eighth of the time since Columbus discovered America: doesn't that sound awful!" "Ah, but you don't look it," said Miss Anna, artistically, "and that's the main object." "Oh, I don't feel it," retorted Harriet, "and that's the main object too. I'm as young as I ever was when I'm away from home; but I declare, Anna, there are times when my mother can make me feel I'm about the oldest thing alive." "Oh, come now! you mustn't begin to talk that way, or I'll have to give you more of the antidote. You are threatened with a relapse." "No more," ordered Harriet with a forbidding hand, "and I repeat what I said. Of course you know I never gossip, Anna; but when I talk to you, I do not feel as though I were talking to anybody." "Why, of course not," said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of the compliment, "I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity, Harriet." "Anna," said Harriet, after a pause of unusual length, "if it had not been for my mother, I should have been married long ago. Thousands of worse-looking women, and of actually worse women, marry every year in this world and marry reasonably well. It was because she tried to marry me off: that was the bottom of the deviltry--the men saw through her." "I am afraid they did," admitted Miss Anna, affably, looking down into a hole. "Of course I know I am not brilliant," conceded Harriet, "but then I am never commonplace." "I should like to catch any one saying such a thing." "Even if I were, commonplace women always make the best wives: do they not?"