Not long after Sally’s departure a handsome carriage, drawn by two fine bay horses, passed our house; and as the windows were down we could plainly discern a pale, delicate-looking lady, wrapped in shawls, a tall, stylish-looking girl, another one about my own age and two beautiful little boys.

“That’s the Gilberts, I know,” said Anna.  “Oh I’m so glad Sally’s gone, for now we shall have the full particulars;” and again we waited as impatiently for Sally’s return as we had once done before for grandma.

At last, to our great relief, the green ribbons and blue shawl were descried in the distance, and ere long Sally was with us, ejaculating, “Oh, my—­mercy me!” etc., thus giving us an inkling of what was to follow.  “Of all the sights that ever I have seen,” said she, folding up the blue shawl, and smoothing down the pink calico.  “There’s carpeting enough to cover every crack and crevice—­all pure bristles, too!”

Here I tittered, whereupon Sally angrily retorted, that “she guessed she knew how to talk proper, if she hadn’t studied grarmar.”

“Never mind,” said Anna, “go on; brussels carpeting and what else?”

“Mercy knows what else,” answered Sally.  “I can’t begin to guess the names of half the things.  There’s mahogany, rosewood, and marble fixin’s—­and in Miss Gilbert’s room there’s lace curtains and silk damson ones—­”

A look from Anna restrained me this time, and Sally continued.

“Mercy Jenkins is there, helpin’, and she says Mr. Gilbert told ’em, his wife never et a piece of salt pork in her life, and knew no more how bread was made than a child two years old.”

“What a simple critter she must be,” said grandma, while Anna asked if she saw Mrs. Gilbert, and if that tall girl was her daughter.

“Yes, I seen her,” answered Sally, “and I guess she’s weakly, for the minit she got into the house she lay down on the sofa, which Mr. Gilbert says cost seventy-five dollars.  That tall, proud-lookin’ thing they call Miss Adaline, but I’ll warrant you don’t catch me puttin’ on the miss.  I called her Adaline, and you had orto seen how her big eyes looked at me.  Says she, at last, ’Are you one of pa’s new servants?”

“‘Servants!’ says I, ’no indeed; I’m Mrs. Michael Welsh, one of your nighest neighbors.’

“Then I told her that there were two nice girls lived in the house with me, and she’d better get acquainted with ’em right away; and then with the hatefulest of all hateful laughs, she asked if ’they wore glass beads and went barefoot.’”

I fancied that neither Juliet nor Anna were greatly pleased at being introduced by Sally, the housemaid, to the elegant Adaline Gilbert, who had come to the country with anything but a favorable impression of its inhabitants.  The second daughter, the one about my own age, Sally said they called Nellie; “and a nice, clever creature she is, too—­not a bit stuck up like t’other one.  Why, I do believe she’d walked every big beam in the barn before she’d been there half an hour, and the last I saw of her she was coaxing a cow to lie still while she got upon her back!”