hostess for to-day, and welcome you as if to my own fireside. You shall be my guests, too, at supper. Tomorrow, if you please, we will be brethren and sisters, and begin our new life from daybreak.”

“Have we our various parts assigned?” asked some one.

“Oh, we of the softer sex,” responded Zenobia, with her mellow, almost broad laugh, — most delectable to hear, but not in the least like an ordinary woman’s laugh, — ”we women (there are four of us here already) will take the domestic and indoor part of the business, as a matter of course.

To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew, — to wash, and iron, and scrub, and sweep, — and, at our idler intervals, to repose ourselves on knitting and sewing, —