One of the neighbors had kindly volunteered to take charge of the gloomy old house till my guardian came, but her presence disturbed me more than funereal stillness would have done. I had a family of dolls up stairs, and any amount of tiny household furniture, which I would have given the world to take with me; but this thrifty neighbor protested against it. She said that I was almost a young lady and must forget such childish things, now that I was going into the world to be properly educated. To a shy, sensitive child, this was enough. So, with a double sense of bereavement, I saw my pretty dolls and delicate toys swept into a basket and carried off to the woman's house, between two stout Irish girls, who seemed to be taking my heart off with them. In less than half an hour one of this woman's children came down the road with my prettiest doll under her arm. Its flaxen curls were all disordered, and its tiny feet, with their slippers of rose-colored kid, had evidently been in the mud, where she had probably insisted on making the doll walk. While I sat by the window, waiting and watching, this bare-headed little girl sat down by a fragment of stone that had fallen from the wall close by, and began pounding the head of my doll upon it with all her might. A cry broke from me that made the little wretch start and run away, leaving my poor mutilated doll by the stone. I ran out, seized upon my ruined doll, and came back to the house, crying over it in bitter grief. With trembling hands I unlocked my trunk, which was ready packed for travelling, and laid my broken treasure down among the most precious of my belongings. Just then Mrs. Pierce, our neighbor, came in, and in a half jeering, half kind way, expostulated with me for being such a little goose as to cry over a doll. This woman did not mean to be hard with me; far from it. Persons exist who are really kind-hearted, and seem cruel only because they cannot comprehend feelings utterly unknown to themselves. To me that doll was a type of my wrecked home; to her it was a combination of wax, sawdust, and leather, which a few dollars could at any time replace; besides that, she was put a little on the defensive by the fault of her child. While she reasoned with me in her coarse kindness, which only wounded me deeper, a carriage had driven up, and two persons entered through the outer door, which had been left open by the little girl when she ran into the house to claim her mother's protection. I was sitting on the floor by my trunk, with both hands pressed to my face, sobbing piteously, when a sweet, strange voice checked the force of that woman's harangue; some one sank down to the floor by me, and I was all at once drawn into a close embrace. "Don't cry, dear; it is all very sad, no doubt, but you are going with us, and to-morrow will be brighter."