MISS “BWI REIOP LY.

days I give him a promenade on the south window over there, or let him fly
about in the conservatory, and he gets quite gay. Usually, he sleeps most of
the time, however.”

“But,” struck in the other matron —by the way, she was Jack Tyler’s wife
— “naturalists tell us that the butterfly is an ephemeron.”

“T beg your pardon?” said Miss Betty inquiringly.

“ ] mean” — repressing a smile — “ that he lives only one day after leaving
the chrysalis.”

“They must be mistaken,” Miss Betty opined, amiably complacent. “This
one has been with me three weeks yesterday. I expect to keep him until
spring. All that a butterfly wants is sunshine and honey. When he gets both
he can’t help being contented. And this one has such a lovely disposition.”

She put him back tenderly upon the begonia, when he ceased to sip and
curled up the hair-like tube through which he had drawn his food. Then she
helped get the children into cloaks and caps, kissed each pair of lips, and thanked
their guardians for “lending” them to her.

“Now, sit down, honey,” she bustled back into the library to say to me.
“This chair, please,” pushing a low and luxurious one toward me, then pulling
up another for herself.

- “Tt seems almost sinful for me to be so comfortable,” I said, from the depths
of my satin nest.

Her little laugh trilled out, and I thought of the cricket on the hearth.

“ Now, my idea is that it is really wrong not to be comfortable and happy.
When nobody else is the worse for it, of course. I just love to see people hay-
ing the loveliest sort of times; gay as larks, happy as kings, pretty as butterflies,
and all that, don’t you know?”

This introduced my errand. My mother hoped Miss Betty would be inter-
ested in the case of a poor family in the lower part of the town, and had charged
me with the sad story. My unspoken contempt for my auditor’s intellectual
status was increased by the interjections with which she hearkened to me.

“Dreadful!” “Impossible!” « Heart-rending!” “Poor woman!” “Oh!
the poor dear little darlings,” were, to my notion, puffs of the idlest breath
ever exhaled. When at length she raised herself from the yielding cushions.
far enough to touch a silver bell upon the table nearest her, I supposed that the
subject was dismissed.

“Tea, Mary, please,” to the maid who appeared on the instant. How well
this luxurious sluggard was served when hundreds had neither fire nor home
upon this bitter afternoon. “ And tell Annie to send up some of her nice tea-:
cakes with it, Mary, please. I am sure Miss Dowling will enjoy them. There’s.
nothing that warms the bottom of one’s heart like a cup of hot tea. How good
your mother is to the poor and the afflicted! Quite like a ministering angel, I
do always maintain.”