RYE'S FRITTERS. 113 so. She liked to have her about, like a picture, and she liked to wear her pretty things for her, and hear her prettily say how pretty they were. Now that was the difference between her mother and Aunt Banger. Aunt Banger took to the “sensible” things. She tucked the pantalets, darned the stockings, made the night-dresses, settled the bills. The pretty mother embroidered and flounced and fluted and “ shaded” and “ toned”’; and Rye, as you might say, hung her up in a frame in the middle of her life, and let the light on her and kept the dust off. If she got over her depth in fractions, she went to Aunt Banger. When she was dress- ing for a party, she used her mother. But this has not so much to do with curls, as to admit of our spending any more time to talk it over, though there is a great deal that might be said about pretty mothers, — for and against,— as the little girls with pretty mothers will bear me witness. Rye and Prim went into Williams and Everett’s, and talked wisely at the pictures that they didn’t understand, and said nothing about those that they did; they went into Osgood’s, to match fringes for Prim; they went into Shreve and Stanwood’s, to price malachite,— for Prim, too,— and came away from the great glittering place thinking what very ill-used, ill-jewelled little girls they were, and stumbled over a bony little shoeless wretch selling molasses-candy at the door, and never stopped to think, — as the little girls in the stories generally do, and as a little girl, whether in a story H