"Did you have tea parties with them when you were a little girl, and never break any of them?" Constance asked with wide-open eyes, for she had broken half a dozen tea-sets in her short lifetime.
"You did not think then that when you were grown up you would give some other children chocolate in these cups, did you?" said Dora.
"If we should keep our things I wonder if they would be as funny and interesting to us when we are grown up?" Bess fingered one of the cups admiringly as she spoke.
"I never feel as if I'd care for things when I am old," said Elsie.
"I can remember when I used to feel so too, but it is a great mistake. Now I enjoy things which I have had for a long time, more than I do new ones. When I use my tea-set I always think of the days when my cousin Margaret and I used to play together."
"Couldn't you tell us about it, Miss Brown?—about your cousin and when you were a little girl?" asked Louise.
"Please, if it is not too much trouble," added Bess.
They all looked so eager she could not refuse.
"There is really not much to tell," she said. "Thirty years ago little girls were not very different from those I see now, though we had not half so many toys and books.
"This cousin and I lived with our grandmother. Margaret was a year younger than I, and a delicate child, while I was strong and well then. My father and mother died when I was a baby, and my grandmother's house in Philadelphia is the first place I remember. Margaret did not come to live with us till she was six years old. Her mother too was dead, and her father spent most of his time abroad. She used to talk a great deal of her home in the South, for she did not like the city, but longed for the country and the warm climate she was used to. I remember the stories she told me after we were in bed at night. Sometimes they were in rhyme and always about her beautiful southern home.