The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

When George died Mr. Wood felt it incumbent upon him to notify Mrs. Freeman Tracy, who was at Richfield Springs, having an ideal time, she told Mrs. Wood, rather complainingly, when she came to the funeral with her daughter Helen, who was nearly three years older than Alice. It was Helen’s first experience in a country farmhouse like the Woods, and some of her remarks on what she saw were not very complimentary. But Alice was too young to resent them, or understand. She admired her cousin greatly, especially her bronze boots, with their high, French heels.

“I wish I had some like ’em. Do they cost more than a dollar?” she said, with a rueful glance at her own coarser shoes.

“A dollar! I guess they do. Forty or fifty dollars at least!” Helen replied, at random, and without the slightest idea of the real cost of them or anything else.

Stooping down, she unbuttoned her boots in a trice, and, removing Alice’s shoes, put her own upon a pair of feet much too short for them, for Alice was small for her years and Helen was large.

“Why, they are too big. Your feet wobble awfully in them,” Helen said, “but I’ll tell you what to do. Put some cotton in ’em. Our maid Susan does, and mamma did once for me when my boots were too long. Find some, and I’ll show you.”

The cotton was found and the boots stuffed and pronounced a splendid fit, as Helen proceeded to button them. Suddenly it occurred to her that she had nothing to wear herself, as she couldn’t begin to get her foot into Alice’s shoe. With a jerk the boots came off, and, to Alice’s wondering looks, she said, “I must not give ’em to you, for I can’t go in my stocking feet to New York, but I’ll have mamma send you some, if you can’t buy ’em. You are real poor, ain’t you?”

Alice didn’t know whether she were poor or not. She only knew she wanted boots like these being taken from her feet and transferred to Helen’s, and two great tears rolled down her cheeks as she resumed her own despised shoes.

“Don’t cry,” Helen said, brusquely. “I’ll send you some boots and a lot of things.”

She kept her word, and from time to time boots and other articles of dress,—some new and some secondhand, but quite as good as new, when Mrs. Wood’s skillful fingers had made them over,—found their way to the farmhouse, and little Alice Tracy was for years the best-dressed child in Rocky Point. As the children grew older and saw each other on the very rare intervals when Mrs. Tracy stopped for a day at Rocky Point, they became very fond of each other, and Helen, who inherited her father’s generous nature, was often troubled because Alice was not wealthy like herself. All that she could make her mother do for her she did, and it was owing to her influence that when Alice was fifteen she was placed in a boarding school in Albany with her cousin, who did not care for books and who managed to elude her teachers and give more spreads and have more larks and still retain her good standing than any pupil in school. At the end of the year she left, a fully fledged young lady, “with more beaux on her string,” her companions said, than they all had together.

Alice stayed two years longer, and, at eighteen, went back to Rocky Point, with somewhat different views of the world from what she had when she left it. In one point, however, she was unchanged, and that was her love for the old couple, Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Mary, who had been so kind to her. If the homely ways and duties of the farm grated upon her she kept it to herself, and was the same sweet, lovable, sunny-tempered girl she had always been, putting her young strength to the wheel when the strain of work was hardest, and making the labor easier by half by the way with which she planned and executed it.