_really_ live in such a house!"

"And I shouldn't wonder if you did. Your present prospects look
very much like it," was Eugenia's scornful reply, which Dora
scarcely heard, for her thoughts were busy elsewhere.

She had an eye for the beautiful, and, strange to say, would at
any time have preferred remaining in her aunt's pleasant parlor,
to washing dishes from off the long kitchen table; but as this
last seemed to be her destiny, she submitted without a murmur,
contenting herself the while by building _castles_, just as
many a child has done before her and will do again. Some how, too,
Dora's castles, particularly the one of which she was mistress,
were always large and beautiful, just like Eugenia's description
of Rose Hill, to which she had listened with wonder, it seemed so
natural, so familiar, so like the realization of what she had many
a time dreamed, while her hands were busy with the dish towel or
the broom.

Dora was a strange child--so her mother and her aunt Sarah both
had told her--so her teachers thought, and so her companions said,
when she stole away by herself to _think_, preferring her own
thoughts to the pastime of her schoolmates. This _thinking_
was almost the only recreation which Dora had, and as it seldom
interfered with the practical duties of her life, no one was
harmed if she did sometimes imagine the most improbable things;
and if for a few days succeeding her cousin's visit to Rose Hill,
she did seem a little inattentive, and somewhat abstracted, it was
merely because she had for a time changed places with the
fashionable Mrs. Hastings, whose blue silk morning-gown, while