Chapter I: Preface

"Wait until you are helped, my dear! Don't touch the pie until it is cut!"

The old Mother, Life, keeps saying that to us all.

As individuals, it is well for us to remember it; that we may not have things until we are helped; at any rate, until the full and proper time comes, for courageously and with right assurance helping ourselves.

Yet it is good for _people_, as people, to get a morsel--a flavor--in advance. It is well that they should be impatient for the King's supper, to which we shall all sit down, if we will, one day.

So I have not waited for everything to happen and become a usage, that I have told you of in this little story. I confess that there are good things in it which have not yet, literally, come to pass. I have picked something out of the pie beforehand.

I meant, therefore, to have laid all dates aside; especially as I found myself a little cramped by them, in re-introducing among these "Other Girls" the girls whom we have before, and rather lately, known. Lest, possibly, in anything which they have here grown to, or experienced, or accomplished, the sharply exact reader should seem to detect the requirement of a longer interval than the almanacs could actually give, I meant to have asked that it should be remembered, that we story-tellers write chiefly in the Potential Mood, and that tenses do not very essentially signify. It will all have had opportunity to be true in eighteen-seventy-five, if it have not had in eighteen-seventy-three. Well enough, indeed, if the prophecies be justified as speedily as the prochronisms will.

The Great Fire, you see, came in and dated it. I could not help that; neither could I leave the great fact out.

Not any more could I possibly tell what sort of April days we should have, when I found myself fixed to the very coming April and Easter, for the closing chapters of my tale. If persistent snow-storms fling a falsehood in my face, it will be what I have not heretofore believed possible,--a _white_ one; and we can all think of balmy Aprils that have been, and that are yet to be.

With these appeals for trifling allowance,--leaving the larger need to the obvious accounting for in a largeness of subject which no slight fiction can adequately handle,--I give you leave to turn the page.

A. D. T. W.
BOSTON, _March_, 1873.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER
I. SPILLED OUT
II. UP-STAIRS
III. TWO TRIPS IN THE TRAIN
IV. NINETY-NINE FAHRENHEIT
V. SPILLED OUT AGAIN
VI. A LONG CHAPTER OF A WHOLE YEAR
VII. BEL AND BARTHOLOMEW
VIII. TO HELP: SOMEWHERE
IX. INHERITANCE
X. FILLMER AND BYLLES
XI. CHRISTOFERO
XII. LETTERS AND LINKS
XIII. RACHEL FROKE'S TROUBLE
XIV. MAVIS PLACE CHAPEL
XV. BONNY BOWLS
XVI. RECOMPENSE
XVII. ERRANDS OF HOPE
XVIII. BRICKFIELD FARMS
XIX. BLOSSOMING FERNS
XX. "WANTED"
XXI. VOICES AND VISIONS
XXII. BOX FIFTY-TWO
XXIII. EVENING AND MORNING: THE SECOND DAY
XXIV. TEMPTATION
XXV. BEL BREE'S CRUSADE: THE PREACHING
XXVI. TROUBLE AT THE SCHERMANS'
XXVII. BEL BREE'S CRUSADE: THE TAKING OF JERUSALEM
XXVIII. "LIVING IN"
XXIX. WINTERGREEN
XXX. NEIGHBOR STREET AND GRAVES ALLEY
XXXI. CHOSEN: AND CALLED
XXXII. EASTER LILIES
XXXIII. KITCHEN CRAMBO
XXXIV. WHAT NOBODY COULD HELP
XXXV. HILL-HOPE

THE OTHER GIRLS