When she was six years old, her beautiful mother died; and after that Julia and her brothers and sisters were brought up by their good aunt, who came to make her home with them and their father. A very good aunt she was, and devoted to the motherless children; but sometimes she did funny things. They went out to ride every day--the children, I mean--in a great yellow chariot lined with fine blue cloth. Now, it occurred to their kind aunt that it would have a charming effect if the children were dressed to match the chariot. So thought, so done! Dressmakers and milliners plied their art; and one day Broadway was electrified by the sight of the little Misses Ward, seated in uneasy state on the blue cushions, clad in wonderful raiment of yellow and blue. They [Illustration: JULIA WARD AND HER BROTHERS, AS CHILDREN. (From a miniature by Miss Anne Hall.)] had blue pelisses and yellow satin bonnets. And this was all very well for the two younger ones, with their dark eyes and hair, and their rosy cheeks; but Julia, young as she was, felt dimly that blue and yellow was not the combination to set off her tawny locks and exquisite sea-shell complexion. It is not probable, however, that she sorrowed deeply over the funny clothes; for her mind was never set on clothes, either in childhood or in later life. Did not her sister meet her one day coming home from school with one blue shoe and one green? Her mind was full of beautiful thoughts; her eyes were lifted to the green trees and the blue sky bending above them: what did she care about shoes? Yes; and later is it not recorded that her sisters had great difficulty in persuading her to choose the stuff for her wedding-gown? So indifferent was she to all matters of dress! Auntie F. had her own ideas about shoes and stockings,--not the color, but the quality of them. She did not believe in “pompeying” the children; so in the coldest winter weather Julia and her sisters went to school in thin slippers and white cotton stockings. You shiver at the bare thought of this, my girl readers! You look at your comfortable leggings and overshoes (that is, if you live in upper New England, or anywhere in the same latitude), and wonder how the Ward children lived through such a course of “hardening”! But they did live, and Julia seems now far younger and stronger than any of her children. School, which some children regard with mingled feelings (or so I have been told), was a delight to Julia. She grasped at knowledge with both hands,--plucked it as a little child plucks flowers, with unwearying enjoyment. Her teachers, like the “people” in the case of the “Young lady whose eyes Were unique as to color and size,”