Little Miss By-The-Day | Page 5

in the north wall and let me peer down into Felicia's garden. If you'll look on the back of your envelope you can see just how it was, just how the walls shut off the rectory yard.
"She's exactly twenty-seven," she sighed, "the most perfect age to be! And if you were really going to tell her story you wouldn't have to go back all the way to 1817, you'd begin it about--well, let me see-- you'd begin it about 1897, I think, and right down there in that wee little garden. And of course you'd begin it with her whistling. And you'd ask anybody you were trying to tell about her whether they'd ever heard Mademoiselle Folly whistle--"
Did you? For if you have, I'm sure you've never forgotten the droll way that Mademoiselle Folly stepped out upon a stage in her quaint green frock and made her frightened curtsy. Can you recall her low contralto drawl and her inevitable,
"Oh, my dears, I do so hope that you're going to be good at pretending! You all of you look as though you could pretend if you just started! So let's you and I pretend that--"
Oh, I do so hope that you, too, are going "to be good at pretending"! That you can make yourself pretend that it's twenty years ago and that you're a nice invisible somebody standing down in a wee back yard of Felicia's. From the garden you can't see the river because the walls are too high. But now you're so close to them you see that they're crumbly brick walls almost covered with vines and that at prim intervals along their tops there are elaborate wrought-iron urns, each filled with a huge dusty century plant. And in the side wall toward the rectory yard of the church you can see an unused iron gate, its rusty lock and hinges matted through and through with ancient ivy. Pretend that it's moon-light and it's spring and that it's early evening in the year of our Lord 1897 and that over there by the gate is Felicia Day, about seven years old, peering through the gate into the rectory yard, laughing softly as she always laughs on choir practise nights. There was a certain bald dyspeptic choirmaster who was most irritable as he drilled his unruly boy choir and on warm evenings, when the oaken door under the heavy Gothic arches of the church was ajar, she could watch their garbed figures and wide opened mouths as they giggled over Gregorian chants under the swaying altar lights.
Once the tallest, naughtiest boy of all, the one with the cherubic "soprano" voice that was just threatening to break into piping uselessness, had climbed to the top of the wall and dropped his little black velvet cap at her feet.
"Get down from that wall!" the choirmaster had shouted.
Though the boy had ducked from view as suddenly as he had appeared he had managed to demand of the small person under the wall,
"Who are you, girl?"
She was holding the cap tightly while she answered,
"I don't know, 'zactly who I are--" when she heard the choirmaster shrieking,
"Dudley Hamilt! Come here at once!"
And though she watched every choir-practise night for ever so long she never caught another glimpse of the mischievous-eyed boy, a nasal- voiced woman sang in his stead and she never, never climbed walls.
But Felicia always waited patiently with the small black cap in her hands until a night when she summoned courage to call softly through the barred gate,
"Dudley! Dudley Hamilt!"
A fat boy ran to her and jeered,
"He's expelled! He can't come back till he's a tenor!"
So that's what you must pretend! That you can smile in the shadows of that moonlit garden, that you can smile at a dear little stupid who is waiting joyously for the time when Dudley Hamilt will come back a tenor!

CHAPTER I
IN THE BARRED GARDEN
She was a distinctly droll looking child at the age of seven, our little Felicia Day! With straight black hair brushed smoothly back and bound with a "circle comb," with short-waisted dresses that left her neck and arms bare. Her slender feet were encased in short white socks and low black slippers. And at her dear little feet was usually-- Babiche.
Babiche was so old that she whined at the evening chill; she perpetually teased to be taken back to her comfortable cushion at the foot of her mistress's bed. She was really very amusing when she sat up on her haunches and begged to be carried. For she was so fat that she hated to walk and she was a very spoiled doggy, that wee spaniel! A sort of a dowager queen of a doggy, a nice little old grandma lady of a dog.
The gentle yap-yap-yapping that could always be heard beyond the