98 TROTTYS WEDDING TOUR.

and hundreds of houses in hundreds of streets turned to
living fire.

Or she would watch the lights and shadows chasing each
other all over the little low room. Where they flecked the
ceiling, they painted rare fresco-work, that shifted and
changed to some new pattern every moment; where they
quivered over the bare plaster of the walls, they hung them
with tapestry drooping and rich with quaint devices, and glit-
tering with embroidery of black and golden threads. Every
piece of the old, well-worn furniture,—the huge pine bed-
stead, and Ruby’s little couch in the corner behind the chintz
curtain, the rocking-chair and the cricket and the rough
table, —all grew into the richest of foreign woods, with
coverings of crimson and orange velvet, and the curtain
waved itself into damask folds with jewelled fringes. As for
the unpainted floor, that became the pavement of a palace,
inlaid with ebony and gold.

At least, so Ruby used to think, and night after night,
when her father had gone to the village to sell his wood, or
the rabbits and squirrels that he shot in the forest, she would
fancy, all the evening long, that she was not Ruby at all, but
some beautiful, happy Princess.

Now how she came to be called Ruby I really do not know ;
but, after thinking of the matter two whole nights and a day,
IT have arrived at the conclusion that it was probably because
her cheeks were as red as the reddest gem, and as soft as the
sweetest of June roses, and her lips like beads of coral. I