"Charles Lamb! Well, I'll believe you're the crazy one now, for he's been dead many a year."
"Oh, grandma," and Maud laughingly shook her head, "you are funny! Didn't I tell you that Edith Worster is a member of the Cozy Club? And they are all owlish sort of people—the owl is the bird of wisdom, you know. Well, while you were gone she came to call on me, and I'm sixteen and she's twenty-three."
"What of that?"
"Oh, she's seven years older than I am, and awfully wise, and I didn't know what to say to her exactly; and so, as I've been told to entertain people by asking them questions about themselves, I asked Edith what the Club was reading now. 'Charles Lamb,' and then you should have seen her face change; it was so eager, and looked so full of joy as I thought it had before looked full of misery. I'm sure her call on me was a duty one, one of the good-child kind, and then she asked me if I—I remember"—and Maud stretched her left arm out at full length, and, raising the index-finger, pointed to herself—"had lately read the essay of Elia, entitled, 'Rejoicings Upon the New Year's Coming of Age!'
"I shrunk into almost nothingness before her, no doubt, when I impulsively answered, 'Oh my, no! I don't even know who Elia is—any relation to Elias?' and then I laughed.
"But, grandma, she was awfully nice. She wasn't the least bit proud and horrid, hadn't any of that drawn-up lofty air some people would have put on, and she explained all about it, and told me Elia was the name Charles Lamb sometimes used for himself, and she made me so interested in him, telling me of his love for his sister Mary and his father, and that in writing to the poet Coleridge, who was Charles Lamb's greatest friend, he told him, 'I am wedded to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.' Did you know, grandma, Mary Lamb was out of her mind at times? Oh, it was such a grief to her brother!
"Well, no sooner was Edith Worster the other side of our hall door than I rushed to the library and pulled down book after book in my hunt for these same essays of Elia. I knew they were around somewhere, but whether the book was big or little, thick or thin, I didn't know. But after a while I found it, and then I got into that big sleepy hollow down there and read the essay Edith spoke about. Read it all through, remember; just put that to my credit."
"I will, Maud; but what's that got to do with your party?"
"Do? It did the party, that's all. Only listen, for my party was splendid. Didn't it have a go, though! It was simply delicious!" and Maud smacked her lips over the remembrance. "Oh, you ought to have seen it for yourself, grandma! You'll hear lots of talk about it yet, though, you'll see if you don't," and Maud wagged her head sagely.