"That will be fine," said Mrs. Merrill; "the attic is plenty warm and you
can play up there all you like to, only you must remember to put everything
away neatly when you have finished playing."

"I will, mother dear," answered Mary Jane and she kissed her mother and
started up the stairs.

Now up in the Merrill attic, off in a nice comfortable corner where it
wouldn't be in any one's way, was the girls' "dress-up box." In it were
kept all the clothes that Alice and Mary Jane were allowed to play with.
There were old coats and wonderful old hats that were so queer one would
never guess real ladies had worn them! And slippers and hair ribbons and
petticoats and shawls and silk dresses and morning dresses and parasols
and--oh, the most things you ever saw! Whenever Mrs. Merrill had something
that she couldn't use any more and that wasn't worth giving away to some
needy person, she put it in the girls' box. And whenever the girls, either
Alice with her big girl friends or Mary Jane with her little playmates
wanted to dress up or have a show they helped themselves out of the box--it
was great fun as you can see. Many a morning when Mary Jane was tired of
being Mary Jane, she slipped off to the attic and dressed up to be somebody
else.

This particular morning she hardly knew what she was going to be. She
pulled out a couple of gay hair ribbons, a pair of dark gloves and a
shopping bag. And the bag decided the play for her.

"I'm going to be Aunt Effie-like-I-thought-she-was," she said gayly, "and
I'm going to come and visit!" And then she set to work pulling stuff out of
the box and hunting just the right thing to dress in. She finally put on a