I've _heard_ of them, but I never saw any. Did you ever?"

"I couldn't say," answered the old woman.

"My mind is not young like yours, missie, and there are times when
strange memories come back to me as of sights and sounds in a dream. I
am too old to see and hear as I once could. We are all old here, missie.
'Twas time something young came to the old house again."

"How strange and queer everything seems!" thought Griselda, as she got
into bed. "I don't feel as if I belonged to it a bit. And they are all
_so_ old; perhaps they won't like having a child among them?"

The very same thought that had occurred to the rooks! They could not
decide as to the fors and againsts at all, so they settled to put it to
the vote the next morning, and in the meantime they and Griselda all
went to sleep.

I never heard if _they_ slept well that night; after such unusual
excitement it was hardly to be expected they would. But Griselda, being
a little girl and not a rook, was so tired that two minutes after she
had tucked herself up in bed she was quite sound asleep, and did not
wake for several hours.

"I wonder what it will all look like in the morning," was her last
waking thought. "If it was summer now, or spring, I shouldn't
mind--there would always be something nice to do then."

As sometimes happens, when she woke again, very early in the morning,
long before it was light, her thoughts went straight on with the same