It frightened her, and she ran away downstairs to get rid of it.
[Illustration] A few days after, she was sitting alone working on the photograph case.
It was rather pretty work, though not over-clean.

She had cut a well-shaped frame out of pasteboard, with a long, narrow piece bent back to serve as support.

The frame was covered with putty, and into the putty she fastened her shells.

They were of different sizes, shapes, and colors, and she was laying them on in a pretty pattern of stars and crescents.

She had just stopped to look at her work, her red lips shut together with the air of a connoisseur, and her head on one side, like a canary, when Joy came in.
"Just look here!" and she held up before her astonished eyes a handsome volume of blue and gold--Whittier's poems, and written on the fly-leaf, in Joy's very best copy-book hand, "For Auntie, with a Merry Christmas, from Joy." "Uncle sent to Boston for me, and got it, and he promised on his word 'n' honor, certain true, black and blue, he wouldn't let Auntie know a single sign of a thing about it.