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"Those horrid Mosquitos, - they are dreadfully plebeian! Can't one cut them?"

"Well, dear Miss Katy," said the Colonel, "if you ask my candid opinion as a friend, I should say not. There 's young Mosquito, who graduated last year, has gone into literature, and is connected with some of our leading papers, and they say he carries the sharpest pen of all the writers. It won't do to offend him."

"And so I suppose we must have his old aunts, and all six of his sisters, and all his dreadfully common relations."

"It is a pity," said the Colonel, "but one must pay one's tax to society."

Just at this moment the conference was interrupted by a visitor, Miss Keziah Cricket, who came in with her work-bag on her arm to ask a subscription for a poor family of Ants who had just had their house hoed up in clearing the garden-walks.

"How stupid of them!" said Katy, "not to know better than to put their house in the garden-walk; that's just like those Ants!"

“Well, they are in great trouble; all their stores destroyed, and their father killed, cut quite in two by a hoe."

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"How

very shocking! I don't like to hear of such disagreeable things, it affects my nerves terribly. Well, I'm sure I have n't anything to give. Mamma said yesterday she was sure she did n't know how our bills were to be paid, and there 's my green satin with point-lace yet to come home." And Miss Katy-did shrugged her shoulders and affected to be very busy with Colonel Katy-did, in just the way that young ladies sometimes do when they wish to signify to visitors that they had better leave.

Little Miss Cricket perceived how the case stood, and so hopped briskly off, without giving herself even time to be offended. "Poor extravagant little thing!" said she to herself, "it was hardly worth while to ask her."

"Pray, shall you invite the Crickets?" said Colonel Katy-did. "Who? I? Why, Colonel, what a question! Invite the Crickets? Of what can you be thinking?"

"And shall you not ask the Locusts, or the Grasshoppers?"

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Certainly. The Locusts, of course,

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a very cid and distinguished family; and the Grasshoppers are pretty well, and ought to be asked. But we must draw a line somewhere, and the Crickets! why, it's shocking even to think of!"

"I thought they were nice, respectable people."

"O, perfectly nice and respectable, — very good people, in fact, so far as that goes. But then you must see the difficulty."

"My dear cousin, I am afraid you must explain."

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'Why, their color, to be sure. Don't you see?"

"Oh!" said the Colonel. "That's it, is it? Excuse me, but I have been living in France, where these distinctions are wholly unknown, and I have not yet got myself in the train of fashionable ideas here."

"Well, then, let me teach you," said Miss Katy. "You know we republicans go for no distinctions except those created by Nature herself, and we found our rank upon color, because that is clearly a thing that none has any hand in but our Maker. You see?"

"Yes; but who decides what color shall be the reigning color?"

"I'm surprised to hear the question! The only true color- the only proper one is our color, to be sure. A lovely pea-green is the precise shade on which to found aristocratic distinction. But then we are liberal; we associate with the Moths, who are gray; with the Butterflies, who are blueand-gold-colored; with the Grasshoppers, yellow and brown; and society would become dreadfully mixed if it were not fortunately ordered that the Crickets are black as jet. The fact is, that a class to be looked down upon

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would be getting to the very top of the ladder if we once allowed them to

climb. But their being black is a convenience, - because, as long as we

are green and they black, we have a superiority that can never be taken from us. Don't you see now?"

"O yes, I see exactly," said the Colonel.

"Now that Keziah Cricket, who just came in here, is quite a musician, and her old father plays the violin beautifully;-by the way, we might engage him for our orchestra."

And so Miss Katy's ball came off, and the performers kept it up from sundown till daybreak, so that it seemed as if every leaf in the forest were alive. The Katy-dids, and the Mosquitos, and the Locusts, and a full orchestra of Crickets made the air perfectly vibrate, insomuch that old Parson Too-Whit, who was preaching a Thursday evening lecture to a very small audience, announced to his hearers that he should certainly write a discourse against dancing for the next weekly occasion.

The good Doctor was even with his word in the matter, and gave out some very sonorous discourses, without in the least stopping the round of gayeties kept up by these dissipated Katy-dids, which ran on, night after night, till the celebrated Jack Frost epidemic, which occurred somewhere about the first of September.

Poor Miss Katy, with her flimsy green satin and point-lace, was one of the first victims, and fell from the bough in company with a sad shower of last year's leaves. The worthy Cricket family, however, avoided Jack Frost by emigrating in time to the chimney-corner of a nice little cottage that had been built in the wood that summer.

There good old Mr. and Mrs. Cricket, with sprightly Miss Keziah and her brothers and sisters, found a warm and welcome home; and when the storm howled without, and lashed the poor naked trees, the Crickets on the warm hearth would chirp out cheery welcome to papa as he came in from the snowy path, or mamma as she sat at her work-basket. "Cheep, cheep, cheep!" little Freddy would say. 'cheep'?"

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Mamma, who is it says

"Dear Freddy, it's our own dear little cricket, who loves us and comes to sing to us when the snow is on the ground."

So when poor Miss Katy-did's satin and lace were all swept away, the warm home-talents of the Crickets made for them a welcome refuge. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

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I

SUSY'S DRAGON.

T was after school, and Susy sat in one of the great windows of the library, writing out her French exercises. It was evidently dull work for her, for she yawned, and fidgeted, and sighed, in a very restless manner; and every now and then she would stop in the midst of a line, and watch the boys playing at marbles on the sidewalk. There was little Kit, and Jimmy Grant; what good times they did have! O dear! she wished she was a boy, and was playing marbles on the sidewalk, instead of toiling at these tiresome French exercises. Nobody had to study so hard as she did, she was sure. There was Tom, now, flying his kite an hour ago; and there-yes, there was Fanny Hamlin going after trailing arbutus, as true as the world! This was

too great a temptation. Down went the exercises, and up went the window, in a breath. "O Fanny! Fanny! are you going after trailing arbutus ?"

Yes, Fanny was going after trailing arbutus, and she wished Susy would come with her. Why could n't she? Susy asked herself the very question, and came to the conclusion that there was really no sufficient reason why she could n't. "Because I can write the rest of my exercises out to-morrow morning," she thought.

"I'm just going for a walk to Pine-woods," she said to Aunt Cathy, who had the charge of Susy and her brothers since their mother's death.

Aunt Cathy lifted her kind but penetrating gaze to Susy's face, and Susy felt uncomfortable, though all her aunt said in reply was, "Very well, my dear; you know best whether you can spare the time."

This was always Aunt Cathy's way. She said a sensible girl of thirteen, like Susy, should be taught to depend on her own judgment in matters of this kind. Susy was the one who went to school; Susy was the one who had lessons to learn; - then Susy was the only one who could tell when these school duties were over, and whether her lessons were learned. And if Susy was n't faithful to her duty, then she must suffer the penalty. She was a baby no longer, to be governed blindly; she must learn to govern herself; it would teach her to know herself a great deal better, and to be self-reliant. Susy liked Aunt Cathy's "way," but she always knew when Aunt Cathy thought she had neglected anything, and it always made her feel very uneasy, as people do when they abuse the trust reposed in them. And now this lovely spring afternoon, searching for arbutus with Fanny Hamlin, there was this shadow of uneasiness, of something unfulfilled, which clouded the bright day, and made the pleasure half a pain. But they were very successful in their hunt for flowers. Susy had never carried home such a big basketful, and dear, kind Aunt Cathy admired them to her heart's content.

"But you look tired, Susy," she said to her.

"Yes, we went farther than we meant to at the start; why, we went almost to Long-Roads, Aunt Cathy."

"Which is almost three miles. I should think you'd be tired, Susy. Now I should advise you, my dear, to eat your supper at once and go to bed." And Susy was sensible enough to take this advice, for she remembered what she had to do in the morning: and if she should oversleep the time! "Will you call me when you get up, Bridget?" she asked of the cook, when she went up stairs.

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'Shure, it's not at five o'clock you 'd be wanting to rise?" exclaimed Bridget, in astonishment.

"But I do, Bridget; and I want you to call me."

"O well, I can do that aisy, Miss; but it'll not be so aisy for you to mind it," Bridget replied in her dry way; "for shure," she said to Katy Malony, the chambermaid, "have n't I tried her at this calling before, and did n't she always fail at the minding!"

It did n't seem more than an hour to Susy when she heard Bridget calling at her door, "Come, Miss Susy, it's five o'clock, and you remimber you wanted me to call yez."

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