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“She looks just like a fashion plate,” snapped Lucy Demars, whose heavy black tresses were made for braids of satin sheen, and refused forever to be rolled into fashionable style, or curled by any means known to mortal man—or woman.

“I’m sure she hasn’t got a straight nose,” whined “Lew”-cretia Black, as the village people called her—a being of evident dough, unbaked and unrisen, with coarse hair, reddest of all hair reds.

It is too true. Dolly had a nose “tip-tilted like a flower,” a veritable nez retroässé,if Tom Thorne did call it a little turnip, or turn-up, as he willfully pronounced it. Blessed be Mr. Tennyson for giving poetry even to a turned-up nose! But if ever one deserved it, it was Dolly’s; for that delicate, piquant, baby-like organ, its soft plastic lines curving in the same fluent moulding with that of the peach—tinted cheek, the pink, pointed chin, the full scarlet lips, gave a certain character to a face otherwise too infantile, too inexpressive, to be interesting, unless in the infantile surroundings of cambric and cradle, and Dolly was too tall for any bassinet. She was tall, slender, graceful, with the idle, swaying, dependent grace of a willow bough or a smoke wreath. Nobody could say she was straight, or lithe, or erect, for she was always leaning on something or somebody; either her arms were clasped round “dear papa’s” neck, or one hand clinging to brother Will’s shoulder, or she was hanging like a climbing rose to the piazza lattices, or resting in the arms of some luxurious chair as if she had been thrown there like a scarf, pliant and helpless. But, as all the young men and most of the maidens about Basset frankly avowed, Dolly was “awful pretty.”

And in spite of all the old saws about the “skin-deep” nature of beauty, the “handsome does” of plainness, the grace of goodness, tell me, dear and honest reader, speaking in all that frankness which you can freely use in an inaudible answer, is there any thing in all this world as beautiful, as enchanting, as exquisite, as a really beautiful girl? You and I know very well there are no such tints and sparkle and delicate life in any other thing the Lord ever made. Did He not make them in His own image? And because we are old and sallow and worn, are we going to say that the only real beauty is in expression? that a lovely soul, and so on—you know it all. It is bosh, to use the language of the Turks, and the pretty creatures who read such moralities look in the glass and laugh at us. Bless them! they have a right to; but

my dears; you will feel it still more deeply then, and, if you are honest, own it.

Poor little Dolly! she had no mother. Mrs. Vane died when her child was only five years old, and Dolly could carry into her future life but a faint shadow of the dear dead mother who had left her with such bitter tears. But Mr. Vane had never married again. There was Will, a big boy, who could be sent to school. Roxy Keep, the housekeeper, a kindly, fussy, snuffy old soul, could see to Dolly’s physical well-being; and when the little creature grew and blossomed up toward girlhood, Katy Preston, the minister’s daughter, came and taught her every day.

Katy was a good girl, very good, with a thick nose and lips, small green eyes, plenty of dull brown hair, and a very thorough education. Mr. Vane gave her a large salary for educating Dolly, but he preferred to have her live at home. Will said she was too plain to have at the table, but Mr. Vane never offered any reason: be was a lazy man, but he was a gentleman. That he chose to remain unmarried after his beautiful wife left him was his own affair, he thought, so he never explained it. But for all Katy’shonest and painful endeavor, Dolly could not learn any thing to speak of. Lessons literally went in at one ear and out of the other: if she bounded Pennsylvania correctly to-day, just having sing-songed the task over to herself for half an hour, she was quite as likely to put Texas on the east and Georgia on the north of it to-morrow. She never could remember any date, not even the two that are supposed to be inborn with American children, for she insisted to Will, even with tears, that the Pilgrims came over in 1492, and shocked her father at a dinner party by exclaiming, “Oh, I do know about Columbus, Mr. Taylor: he discovered America in 1620.” And this to a man who had written a history himself! Poor Dolly! Arithmetic, grammar, philosophy, every sort of ology, alike slipped through her lovely head, and were dispersed in empty air. Natural history she did like, because she loved all kinds of animals with a certain enthusiasm curious to see; and music, too, found a lodgment in her slight brain. But neither of these pursuits was linked to any system. She played by ear, and her taper fingers touched the keys like a flight of summer moths hovering over a flower bed. There was no strength in those delicate dawn-tipped bits of snow to evoke the awful soul of music; its light laughter and fleeting tears alone followed the dance of her fairy fingers. And she knew no more about the classification of her birds and flowers than she did about the precession of the equinoxes; it was enough that her pets loved her and the flowers were bright and sweet, for, as I said to begin with, Dolly was a goose.