The self-assertive sleigh-bells suddenly ceased their tinkling, and the long covered van, with its four horses, drew up in front of our "House of Many Gables," in Lake City. Watty, then a tall lad of eighteen, over-coated, fur-capped, and gloved, went quickly out, banging the front door after him, while his younger brothers and sisters made holes with their breath through the frost on the window panes, to watch his departure with the hilarious load of young folks.

"Why aint you goin', Mame?" asked Joe, our smallest son, of the girl spending her Christmas holidays with us.

"Wasn't asked," she replied defiantly. "An' what's more, I don't care to go anywheres, neither, if the girls don't act better to me than they done at that party the other night."

Belle raised her head from the Treasurer's book of the House of Refuge.

"Perhaps you weren't nice to them, Mary?"

"Yes, I was too. I smiled whenever one of them looked at me, but they all turned their heads as if they'd never seen me before."

My wife sighed as she bent over her book again. If the difficulty of befriending Mary rested only with outsiders it might have been patiently borne, but there was mother, to whom the girl's presence in the house was a constant grievance.

I had been able to buy a quiet horse and a Mikado cutter for Belle when the snow came, but she had no pleasure out of them during the vacation.

"I'm going to drive downtown, mother," I heard her say one morning. "Would you like to go?"

"Is Mary gaun?"

"I thought of taking her."

"Then I'll no' gang. I wadna like to crood Mary."

"Dear mother, there's plenty of room."

"Ay, ay, but ye ken Mary doesna like tae sit wi' her back tae the horse."

That sort of thing was always happening. One day the old lady came home from a round of visits, much perturbed in mind and body. The sandy hair I inherited, and have largely lost, does not show the gray with which it is mixed, and so light and wiry is she one finds it difficult to remember my mother's seventy years. She is a small woman, but her personality is sufficiently large for the ripples to be felt throughout the household when its surface is disturbed.

"What dae ye think I've been hearin'?" she cried, finding me alone in the nursery on the sofa, and helpless in her hands.

"I can't imagine, mother. You generally have something spicy to tell us after you've been calling on the MacTavishes."

"Dae ye ken 'at yon hizzy ye've ta'en intill yer hoose ca's hersel' Mary Gemmell?"

"Oh, well, what's in a name?"

"I wonner tae hear ye, Davvit! What wad yer faither hae thocht aboot it, or yer gran'faither? Gie'n the femly name, that's come doon unspotted frae ae generation till anither, tae a funnlin' aff the streets! Ou, ay! I micht 'a' kent what wad happen when I h'ard tell o' ye bein' merrit till an Amerrican."

"Hold up there, mother. You're just twenty years too late in raking up that story. If it suits me and Belle to have that girl called 'Mary Gemmell,' Mary Gemmell she shall be, if it turns all Scotland head over heels into the North Sea."

So seldom do I break out that an eruption of mine never fails to clear the air of an unwelcome topic.

Our boys have grown up on a sort of an "every-man-for himself" principle, and when it came to a fight for the favorite corner of the sofa, the favorite game, or picture-book, "Mamie" was in the thick of it every time.

"What else can you expect?" said I to Belle, consolingly. "She's been fighting the world on her own account ever since she can remember, and our house represents to her only a change of battle ground."

"I think her father must have been a gentleman."

"He certainly had one gentlemanly peculiarity."

"Don't be a brute, Dave. I mean that Mary's ancestors must have been wealthy people, she has such a taste for luxury."

"That doesn't follow. I'm sure you've seen plenty of poor folks go without the necessaries of life in order to get the luxuries."

"She is shiftless enough. To-day I took her into a store to buy her some stockings, and she refused to have any but the very best quality. 'The second best are what I get for myself, Mary,' said I; 'they wear much longer than the others.' 'I don't care,' she said. 'If I can't have the best, I don't want any.' 'Then do without,' said I, and we left the place. The fun of it is that she won't even darn her old ones! I can't always be so firm with her. I'm amazed at myself sometimes, the things she gets out of me. What do you suppose she wants now?"

I gave a warning cough to signify that my mother had come into the nursery, but Belle gazed straight ahead into the wood fire, and seesawed in the rattan rocker—a tuneful symphony in a mauve tea-gown.

"A cornet, if you please."

"A cornet!" said I. "Whatever put that into her head?"

"I can't tell. She says the music professor at the convent can teach her to play it, and she thinks if she learned she might be able to lead the singing in a church with one."

"Perhaps somebody played the cornet in that concert company she was with."

"Na, na. It's nearer hame than that," mother struck in. "She has a notion o' ane o' thae cratur's 'at pl'y at the Opera Hoose. I hae seen her gang by the window wi' him, an' spiered at Watty wha he was."

"I don't like Wat's telling tales of Mary."

"He dinna, Davvit, till I pit it tae him. He canna bear the tawpie, and doesna like to hae her p'inted oot as his sister. A body canna blame the laddie. It's a heap better than his fa'in' in luv wi' her."

"Perhaps it is," groaned Isabel.

When mother had gone to bed my wife said:

"Mrs. Wade has been here to-day to ask Watty and Mary to a young people's dance on Friday night."

"What did you say?"

"I told her I wasn't going to dress that girl up and send her out to parties to be snubbed and slighted by the other girls, as she was at the dancing school ball. She said that if I let Mary go she'd see that she had a good time. For her part, she admired the way I'd stuck up for the girl in spite of everything; and if she was good enough to live with us as a daughter, it would surely not contaminate anybody else to meet her out of an evening."

Saturday night I inquired of Belle how Mary got on at the party.

"First rate. Mrs. Wade met her at the door of the drawing room and kissed her. 'How you've grown, Mary!' said she, and then she took her round and introduced her to all the girls in the room, including some of those who've been cutting her right and left, as well as to every boy she didn't know already. Of course she danced every dance, and had the best time going."

"And, of course, she put it all down to her own superior attractions?"

"Just exactly. This morning she didn't want to help me make the beds!"

Mary's Christmas present had been a beautiful silver-plated cornet, and of course she must learn to play it when she went back to the convent. Word came shortly that the music master employed there could not undertake to teach her to play the instrument, but that a "professor" could be secured to go out from Detroit twice a week—if desired. We seemed to be in for it, so the lessons were desired, and we comforted ourselves with the assurance that if Mary did not turn out to be a tiptop reciter she would surely prove a tiptop cornet player. Her unusual talent would justify my wife in her unusual step, and the society of Lake City would forgive her for attempting to thrust the girl into its midst as an equal. Many of our acquaintances seemed to take mother's view of the case,—"Matter out of place becomes dirrt!"—and Belle was put on her mettle to convince the majority that she had done exactly the right thing in thus disclassing people. Disclassing people? In a free republic!

We received glowing accounts of the cornet lessons.

"Dear girl!" said Belle enthusiastically. "She must have the real artistic temperament to be so determined to excel in one or other of the arts."

"She's dramatic, anyway," said I, and I was confirmed in my opinion along in the spring, when the cornet, and aught else, appeared to have palled upon the versatile Mary. She wrote that she had serious thoughts of taking the veil.

"Bah!" said I; "what's she after now? She wants to scare us into something."

Belle wrote privately to the Lady Superior, telling her that if she considered Mary would be a desirable acquisition to their ranks she had no sort of objection to her joining them.

The good sister replied that Miss Gemmell had not a grain of the stuff of which nuns are made, that her leanings were all in a worldly direction.

"No hope in that quarter!" laughed I, but Belle chided me for making fun of Mary in her absence.

When "Miss Mamie Gemmell" joined us at Interlaken for the summer her convent manners lasted for about two weeks, and then gave place to those of a spoiled and pampered daughter of the house.

We in America are accustomed to disrespectfulness and waywardness in our own children, but to notice the same attitude in a little nobody from nowhere we have taken in out of charity, makes a man or woman stand aghast.

"I don't believe she cares a straw for me personally," Belle would say sometimes, "but I must confess I like her better than the cringing, fawning variety. She's outspoken in her impertinent demands."

After a very hot week in July I joyfully took the train on Saturday afternoon for the five miles' ride to Interlaken, and went to sleep that night with my ears full of the sound of waves and pine trees; my heart filled with the satisfaction of knowing that I had a whole round day ahead of me—a sunrise and a sunset at either end.

I omitted the sunrise part of the programme, but between ten and eleven I was ready for a walk down the pier to watch the bathers. American women are seldom plump enough to stand the undress uniform of a bathing costume. They run to extremes—become very stout indeed, or else very thin, but in girlhood the tendency is to over-slimness.

I was thinking what a contrast our summer girls would present to a group of Scotch lasses, though, to be sure, I was never privileged to see any of the latter in bathing-dress, when a well-rounded apparition in sky blue luster and no bathing cap emerged from one of the disrobing houses. This damsel betook herself boldly to the pier, instead of splashing around the edge of the sand as the others were doing, and, coming near the end, took a run and then a beautiful header into the deep blue water.

She had passed me too quickly to be recognized, but as her face appeared above the surface I saw it belonged to no other than our adopted daughter, for as such, at the moment, was I pleased to own her. She shook the water out of her ears, gave her knob of hair an extra twist, brushed back the ringlets that threatened her eyes, and looked as much at home as if there were eighteen feet of land, instead of eighteen feet of water below her.

There were several young men swimming about at the end of the wharf, and they declared with gusto that a springboard must be erected for "Miss Gemmell" at once. I declined to assist in breaking the Sabbath over any such pranks, but a couple of scantily clad, dripping youths arose from the deep and succeeded in loosening a heavy three-inch plank from the flooring of the wharf. This was projected well out over the water, and the fair Mary was induced to ascend and exhibit therefrom. I did not approve at all, but thought it my duty to remain as chaperon until Belle and another lady, whom I perceived walking leisurely out the pier, should arrive.

The young men sprang back into the water to be on the reception committee, and Mary teetered on the far end of the plank. There was heard a loud, suggestive crack, and she leaped into space in a most graceful semicircle before touching the water; but that awful board, the instant her weight was removed, rose straight up in the air, nearly knocked me off the dock, and with a groan slid through the opening whence it had been raised, into the depths below.

Belle rushed to my rescue, while the other woman stood still and shrieked.

"Nobody hurt!" called out from the water a nice-looking lad who was swimming beside Mary, and apparently daring her to further exploits.

"Who is the young man?" I asked my wife, being ready to change the subject from my own narrow escape.

"You mean the one with the Burne Jones head and the sleepy blue eyes that's round with Mary all the time? His name's Flaker, and he's a medical student from Chicago. That's all I know about him." But she was destined to hear more, as we sat on the hotel veranda that night, from two old ladies inside the open window and closed blind.

"Isn't it scandalous," said one, "the way Mrs. Gemmell tries to shove that girl forward on every occasion?"

"Yes," said the other. "The old friendship between her and Mrs. Martin is all broken up since she tried so hard to get Lincoln Todd entangled with her last summer, and now she's doing her best to catch young Flaker."

"I don't believe he has any idea who the girl is, or rather who she is not."

"No, indeed, and his people would be in a great state if they knew the sort of company he was keeping."

"Who are they?"

"Don't you know? His father is Dr. Flaker, who has that fine mansion on the Grand Boulevard, and his mother belongs to one of the best New York families. They're all as proud as Lucifer."

"I think it is time we went home, David. Listeners never hear any good of themselves," said Belle, loudly enough to arrest the attention of the two dames.

Walking over the dried-up moonlit grass to our cottage, I threatened to go back and give them a piece of my mind, but my wife said:

"Maybe I did need a slight reminder. I haven't paid much attention to Mary's goings-on this summer. I must talk to Mr. Flaker the first chance."

The opportunity came before the Evening was over, while I was in my pet hammock round the corner of the cottage, and Belle in a rocking-chair at the front.

"Good-evening, Mr. Flaker," I heard her say. "I don't think you've ever seen the inside of our cottage. Won't you step in for a moment, now that it is lighted up?"

The moment satisfied him, for he speedily returned to the veranda.

"I never saw such a beautiful swimmer as Miss Gemmell," said the mannish voice, and Belle replied impressively:

"I believe you are not aware, Mr. Flaker, that the young lady you call Miss Gemmell is not my own daughter."

"Your stepchild is she, or your husband's niece?"

"Neither. She is no relation at all—just a poor girl whom I have taken up to educate. She can barely read or write. I felt that I ought to tell you this because you have been paying her a good deal of attention."

"Indeed, Mrs. Gemmell, I admire Miss Gemmell very much; but I assure you I never regarded her as anything else than a pleasant summer acquaintance."

And Mary was dropped forthwith.