IN LUCK.
BY MRS. ZADEL B. GUSTAFSON.
Lily De Koven was in luck. Luck, you know, is a word which stands for that which comes to you without your having done anything to get it for yourself; and as she had never done anything to bring about such results, I call it the good luck of little Lily De Koven that she had been born in a lovely home, to kind parents, and was growing up with all the most pleasant things of life around her. She had a little maid to braid her pretty yellow hair, lace her dainty boots, go up stairs and down stairs, or stay in her little lady's chamber dressing and making over the dresses of Lily's family of dolls.
One day, when Lily was not very well, and was lying in bed propped up by the pillows, her maid came in with a new doll, larger and handsomer than all the others.
Lily received the new doll calmly, for if it did not suit her she knew she could have another, so she had no cause for excitement. She looked it over carefully, touched the spring which made its eyes roll, drew off one of its tiny silk shoes and stockings, passed her hand over the lace train.
"I'll keep it," said Lily; "and now you bring me the whole family."
When all her dolls, little and big—all of them had been handsome in their day, but some of them were a little the worse for wear—were laid on the bed, she put the new one, with curling yellow hair almost exactly like her own, on the pillow beside her, and took up the others one by one.
"You can throw this one away," she said at last, holding out one which had a broken arm, and was leaking sawdust at the elbow; "I don't want but twelve children, anyway."
When her maid went out, Lily looked at her new doll, touched its hair and rich costume, but there was not any wonder in it for her; there had never been a time when she had not had as pretty dolls as money could buy; so Lily sighed and fell asleep almost immediately. Now Lily's maid left the disgraced doll on a chair in the kitchen, and there Mary the cook found it. It had on a pretty muslin dress and sash, and nice embroidered underwear, just like any fashionable young lady. It was Christmas week, and Mary had bought a doll to give to her little niece on Christmas-day, and seeing at once what a treasure this costume would be, she took it off, did it up as fresh as new, and made the doll she had bought look quite like a princess in it. So the old broken-armed doll had not a rag left of its former glory. But luck sometimes comes even to dolls.