little, and she had grown up among them as their youngest sister; but
the doctor, from a tender scruple against seeming to usurp the place of
his brother in her childish thought, would not let her call him father,
and in obedience to the rule which she soon began to give their love,
they all turned and called him Uncle Jack with her. Yet the Ellisons,
though they loved their little cousin, did not spoil her,--neither the
doctor, nor his great grown-up sons whom she knew as the boys, nor his
daughters whom she called the girls, though they were wellnigh women
when she came to them. She was her uncle's pet and most intimate friend,
riding with him on his professional visits till she became as familiar a
feature of his equipage as the doctor's horse itself; and he educated
her in those extreme ideas, tempered by humor, which formed the
character of himself and his family. They loved Kitty, and played with
her, and laughed at her when she needed ridiculing; they made a jest of
their father on the one subject on which he never jested, and even the
antislavery cause had its droll points turned to the light. They had
seen danger and trouble enough at different times in its service, but no
enemy ever got more amusement out of it. Their house was a principal
_entrepôt_ of the underground railroad, and they were always helping
anxious travellers over the line; but the boys seldom came back from an
excursion to Canada without adventures to keep the family laughing for a
week; and they made it a serious business to study the comic points of
their beneficiaries, who severally lived in the family records by some
grotesque mental or physical trait. They had an irreverent name among
themselves for each of the humorless abolition lecturers who unfailingly
abode with them on their rounds; and these brethren and sisters, as they
called them, paid with whatever was laughable in them for the
substantial favors they received.

Miss Kitty, having the same natural bent, began even as a child to share