“No, ma’am; I sometimes wish I had.  I gave it away when I went to Greenville to keep school,” I added; not that I supposed it would matter anything to her, but that I thought it just as well to make sure of her understanding my position in life.

“That is so natural to us all,—­to part with these little relics when we are still very young, and then to wish them back again before we are much older!  You would smile to see a little museum that I keep for my brother,—­not his scientific collection, which I hope some day to have the pleasure of showing you,—­but ’an olla podrida in an ancestral wardrobe,’ as my little Paul calls it, of his and my two little nieces’ first baby-shoes, rattles, corals, and bells, wooden horses, primers, picture-books, and so forth, down to the cups and balls, and copy-books, which they have cast off within a month or two, each labelled with the owner’s name, and the date of deposit.  No year goes by without leaving behind some memento of each of them, or even without my laying aside there some trifling articles of dress that they have worn.  It is a fancy of my brother’s.  He says that others may claim their after-years, but their childhood is his own,—­all of it that is not mine,—­and he must keep it for himself, and for them when they come back to visit him in his old age.  It is a birthday treat to them already to take the key from my split-ring, and look together over the half-forgotten things.  But there is one thing there—­a manuscript on the topmost shelf—­which they do not know about, but which we take out and laugh over sometimes when they are all in bed,—­a record that I have kept of all the most diverting things which we have heard them say, ever since they began to learn to talk.”  She checked herself,—­I fancied because she remembered that, in her enthusiasm about the children, she had forgotten to what a new acquaintance she was speaking.  She rose to take leave, and resumed, shaking hands with me cordially,—­she had, I observed, a remarkably cordial and pleasant, earnest way of shaking hands,—­“But upon the subject of my museum, Miss Morne, I need hardly beg you to be more discreet than I, and not to mention a domestic trifle of so little general interest.”

I could only bow, but longed, as I attended her to the door, to assure her of the particular interest which I had already begun to feel in every trifle which belonged to her.

Her little barouche, and long-tailed, dark-gray ponies, vanished with her down the road; and I was left walking up and down the room.  The “kind o’ poor-lookin’, pale-lookin’, queer-lookin’ lady,” that Miss Mehitable had described,—­was this she?  How are we ever to know people by descriptions, when the same person produces one impression on one mind and quite another on another,—­nay, may have one set of inherent qualities brought out by contact with one character, and quite another set by contact with another character?  Have I described Miss Dudley?  No,—­and I cannot.  She was both unique and indescribable.