Then they had their holiday, taking the things over to the Cliff, and trying them all on Prissy, very much as if they had been a party of children, and she a paper doll.  Her rosy little face and willful curls came out of each prettier than the last, precisely as a paper dolly’s does, and when at the end of all they got her into a bright violet print and a white bib-apron, it was well they were the last, for they couldn’t have had the heart to take her out of them.  Leslie had made for her a small hoop from the upper half of one of her own, and laced a little cover upon it, of striped seersucker, of which there was a petticoat also to wear above.  These, clear, clean, and stiffened, came from Miss Craydocke’s stores.  She never traveled without her charity-trunk, wherein, put at once in perfect readiness for different use the moment they passed beyond her own, she kept all spare material that waited for such call.  Breadths of old dresses, ripped and sponged and pressed, or starched, ironed, and folded; flannel petticoats shrunken short; stockings “cut down” in the old, thrifty, grandmother fashion; underclothing strongly patched (as she said, “the Lord’s mark put upon it, since it had pleased Him to give her the means to do without patches"); odds and ends of bonnet-ribbons, dipped in spirits and rolled tightly upon blocks, from which they unrolled nearly as good as new,—­all these things, and more, religiously made the most of for whomsoever they might first benefit, went about with her in this, the biggest of her boxes, which, give out from it as she might, she never seemed, she said, to get quite to the bottom of.

Under the rounded skirts, below the short, plain trousers, Prissy’s ankles and feet were made shapely with white stockings and new, stout boots. (Aunt Hoskins believed in “white stockin’s, or go athout.  Bilin’ an’ bleachin’ an’ comin’ out new; none o’ yer aggravations ’v everlastin’ dirt-color.”) And one thing more, the prettiest of all.  A great net of golden-brown silk that Leslie had begged Mrs. Linceford, who liked netting, to make, gathered into strong, large meshes the unruly wealth of hair brushed back in rippling lines from Prissy’s temples, and showing so its brighter, natural color from underneath, where the outside had grown sun-faded.

“I’m just like Cinderella,—­with four godmothers!” cried the child; and she danced up and down, as Leslie let her go from under her hands.

“You’re just like—­a little heathen!” screamed Aunt Hoskins.  “Where’s yer thanks?” Her own thanks spoke themselves, partly in an hysterical sort of chuckle and sniffle, that stopped each other short, and the rebuke with them.  “But there! she don’t know no better!  ’T ain’t fer every day, you needn’t think.  It’s for company to-day, an’ fer Sundays, an’ to go to Portsmouth.”

“Don’t spoil it for her, Miss Hoskins.  Children hate to think it isn’t for every day,” said Leslie Goldthwaite.

But the child-antidote to that was also ready.