I feel as if we had all creation for everything up here.  But I can’t put all creation in a letter if I try. That would spatter dreadfully.

I expect a long letter from you every day now.  But I don’t see what you will make it out of.  I think I have got all the things and you won’t have anything left but the words.  I am sure you don’t sit out on the wood-shed at Aunt Oferr’s, and I don’t believe you pound stones and bricks, and make colors.  Do you know when we rubbed our new shoes with pounded stone and made them gray?

I never told you about Luclarion.  She came up as soon as the things were all sent off, and she lives at the minister’s.  Where she used to live is only two miles from here, but other people live there now, and it is built on to and painted straw color, with a green door.

                  Your affectionate sister,
                                FRANCES SHIERE.

When Laura’s letter came this was it:—­

DEAR FRANK,—­I received your kind letter a week ago, but we have been very busy having a dressmaker and doing all our fall shopping, and I have not had time to answer it before.  We shall begin to go to school next week, for the vacations are over, and then I shall have ever so much studying to do.  I am to take lessons on the piano, too, and shall have to practice two hours a day.  In the winter we shall have dancing-school and practicing parties.  Aunt has had a new bonnet made for me.  She did not like the plain black silk one.  This is of gros d’Afrique, with little bands and cordings round the crown and front; and I have a dress of gros d’Afrique, too, trimmed with double folds piped on.  For every-day I have a new black mousseline with white clover leaves on it, and an all-black French chally to wear to dinner.  I don’t wear my black and white calico at all.  Next summer aunt means to have me wear white almost all the time, with lavender and violet ribbons.  I shall have a white muslin with three skirts and a black sash to wear to parties and to Public Saturdays, next winter.  They have Public Saturdays at dancing-school every three weeks.  But only the parents and relations can come.  Alice and Geraldine dance the shawl-dance with Helena Pomeroy, with crimson and white Canton crape scarfs.  They have showed me some of it at home.  Aunt Oferr says I shall learn the gavotte.

Aunt Oferr’s house is splendid.  The drawing-room is full of sofas, and divans, and ottomans, and a causeuse, a little S-shaped seat for two people.  Everything is covered with blue velvet, and there are blue silk curtains to the windows, and great looking-glasses between, that you can see all down into through rooms and rooms, as if there were a hundred of them.  Do you remember the story Luclarion used to tell us of when she and her brother Mark were little children and used to play that the looking-glass-things