THE NURSERY WINDOW.

"It is blind-man's holiday," said Hugh, a little boy of seven years old to his Aunt Helen, one evening in November; "and you know you promised us last summer, that when winter came, and there was blind-man's holiday before tea, you would tell us a story every evening. Don't you think this dark, cold evening is a good time to begin?"

"Yes, indeed, Aunt Helen," said Francis, his younger brother," it is a goodtime—there is nothing to be seen from the window. It has rained all day, and we have not been out, so that we are rather tired of all our toys. There is nothing we should like so much as to hear a story."

Aunt Helen was almost as ready to tell stories as the little boys were to hear them. "I think you deserve a story this evening," she said, "for you have been very quiet, and amused yourselves nicely all the afternoon. Let us all sit in the rocking-chair-Aunt Helen in the middle, and a

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little boy on each arm of the chair. Gently-no pushing, or the chair will come down with us all. Now, if you are comfortably settled, you may tell me what sort of a story you would like to have."

"A new story," said Hugh; "not anything that you ever read in a book, but something out of your own head. I think it had better be about what happened to you when you were a little girl.”

"I must think for a moment, then," said Aunt Helen. "Ah, I have it; Francis was saying just now that there was nothing to be seen from the window. I remember how fond I used to be of looking from my nursery window when I was a little girl, and I think I can tell you quite a new story about something I once saw from there. A good many years ago, then, Aunt Helen was a little girl; she was a very tiresome little girl; she used to go about from one person to another, asking questions.

"Do tell me one thing," she used to say.

"No, no, little Helen," answered the elder children, "you interrupt all our plays and our stories; you must really go away into a corner, and sit still in your high chair."

Now, little Helen did not like sitting in the

corner, so when she saw that no one would listen to her or play with her, she used to slip away from the others, and climb on to the low chest of drawers which stood under the nursery window, and amuse herself by looking down into the street.

Do you know, that I have never in all my life seen a street through which so many curious things passed, as that into which little Helen looked. I should never have done, if I were to tell you about *the organ-men, and the monkeys, and the lamplighter, and the little humpbacked man who carried a great basket of cockles on his shoulder. He said every time he passed, that they were all alive; but little Helen thought that could not be true. I shall only tell you of one thing that little Helen saw through the window.

One autumn evening, when it began to be dusk, before the lamplighter came, Helen saw a little woman pass by the area gate. She looked so little from the height at which Helen stood, that she might have been a child herself; but she was not a child, for she turned her face towards the window as she passed, and it was an old, withered, strange sort of face. Helen watched her till she had turned the corner of the street, and then she shut her eyes and covered them with her little hands. She felt