lucky centre of a thousand and one happy possibilities. I was grown
up, and out in the world, the wife of a very rich man, with costly
plumes in my bonnet, and rich lace on my showy parasol, like the lady
who had just driven by: I was quite my own mistress, with servants and
other people to obey me. I had a dashing barouche of my own, and was
rolling in conscious grandeur past my step-mother's window, with the
back of my expensive bonnet turned towards the half-closed shutter,
through which she was sure to be peering enviously--when the laths of
the very shutter in question were shaken impatiently, and a hasty,
authoritative voice cried out, "If you've nothing else to do but spoil
your new pink frock out there, Amelia Hampden, I wish you would come
in and play with your baby-brother for awhile;" and then, as the blind
and voice were lowered, I heard the usual "enough to provoke a saint,"
which was the finishing touch to every reprimand I either did, or did
not, deserve.

History repeats itself; nothing is surer. Here was I hand in hand with
a well-known hero of the Arabian Nights, weeping in open-mouthed
sorrow and astonishment over my basket of shattered glassware. I had
broken the salutary precept which exhorts us sanguine mortals not to
count our chickens before they are hatched, and now mourned the
prescribed result, an ice-cold shower bath in a Canadian December
could hardly be a more undesirable and unlooked for intrusion than was
this unappreciated and pressing invitation of Mrs. Hampden's in my
ears at this particular moment.

The rude awakening which her words caused me made me look quite absurd
in my own eyes, and with the sudden consciousness that I had been
making a fool of myself, pondering over such shadowy improbabilities,
as they seemed to me now, I turned sharply and impatiently from the