below, and who came up sometimes and sat an hour with her, and took her cat when she came away, leaving in return, in her own absences, her great English ivy with Miss Bree.  Of the landlady who lived in the basement, and asked them all down, now and then, to play a game of cassino or double cribbage, and eat a Welsh rabbit:  of things outside that younger people did,—­the girls at the warerooms and their friends.  Of Peck’s cheap concerts, and the Public Library books to read on holidays and Sundays; of ten-cent trips down the harbor, to see the surf on Nantasket Beach; of the brilliant streets and shops; of the Public Garden, the flowers and the pond, the boats and the bridge; of the great bronze Washington reared up on his horse against the evening sky; of the deep, quiet old avenues of the Common; of the balloons and the fireworks on the “Fourth of Julies.”

I do not think she did it to entice her; I do not think it occurred to her that she was putting anything into Bel’s head; but when Bel all at once declared that she meant to go to Boston herself and seek her fortune,—­do machine-work or something,—­Aunt Blin felt a sudden thankful delight, and got a glimpse of a possible cheerfulness coming to herself that she had never dreamed of.  If it was pleasant to tell over these scraps of her small, husbanded enjoyments to Bel, what would it be to have her there, to share and make and enlarge them?  To bring young girls home sometimes for a chat, or even a cup of tea; to fetch books from the library, and read them aloud of a winter evening, while she stitched on by the gas-light with her glasses on her little homely old nose?  The little old nose radiated the concentrated delight of the whole diminutive, withered face; the intense gleam of the small, pale blue eyes that bent themselves together to a short focus above it, and the eagerness of the thin, shrunken lips that pursed themselves upward with an expression that was keener than a smile.  Bel laughed, and said she was “all puckered up into one little admiration point!”

After that, it was of no use to be wise and to make objections.

“I’ll take you right in with me, and look after you, if you do!” said Miss Bree.  “And two together, we can housekeep real comfortable!”

It was as if a new wave of youth, from the far-retreated tide, had swept back upon the beach sands of her life, to spend its sparkle and its music upon the sad, dry level.  Every little pebble of circumstance took new color under its touch.  Something belonging to her was still young, strong, hopeful.  Bel would be a brightness in the whole old place.  The middle-aged music-mistress would like her,—­perhaps even give her some fragmentary instruction in the clippings of her time.  Mrs. Pimminy, the landlady,—­old Mr. Sparrow, the watch-maker, who went up and down stairs to and from his nest under the eaves,—­the milliner in the second-floor-back,—­why, she would make friends with them all, like the sunshine!