the daughters of an assemblyman, and had a furnace in their house, and had had gold watches for Christmas. It was very perplexing.
“First one finds a May-flower’s going to be a princess!” Delia shouted. Delia was singularly unimaginative; the idea of royalty was her single entrance to fields of fancy. The stories that I made up always began “Once there was a fairy”; Margaret and Betty started at gnomes and dwarfs; Calista usually selected a poor little match girl or a boot-black asleep in a piano box; but Delia invariably chose a royal family, with many sons.
We ran, shouting, across the stretch of scrub-oak which stretched where the town blocks of houses and streets gave it up and reverted to the open country. To reach this unprepossessing green place, usually occupied by a decrepit wagon and a pile of cord-wood, was like passing through a doorway into the open. We expressed our freedom by shouting and scrambling to be princesses—all, that is, save Mary Elizabeth. She went soberly about, a little apart, and I wished with all my heart that she might find the first May-flower; but she did not do so.
We hunted for wind-flowers. It was on Pros-
