nealogical accounts. Mary S. (the last
name being the same as that of my visitant), it appeared, was the
great-great-grandmother of Mrs. H. and myself. After cordially
recognizing our forgotten relationship, now for the first time called to
mind, we parted, my guest leaving me for his own home. We had been
sitting in my library on the lower floor. On going up-stairs where Mrs.
H. was sitting alone, just as I entered the room she pushed a paper
across the table towards me, saying that perhaps it might interest me.
It was one of a number of old family papers which she had brought from
the house of her mother, recently deceased.

I opened the paper, which was an old-looking document, and found that it
was a copy, perhaps made in this century, of the will of that same Mary
S. about whom we had been talking down-stairs.

If there is such a thing as a purely accidental coincidence this must be
considered an instance of it.

All one can say about it is that it seems very unlikely that such a
coincidence should occur, but it did.

I have not tried to keep my own personality out of these stories. But
after all, how little difference it makes whether or not a writer appears
with a mask on which everybody can take off,--whether he bolts his door
or not, when everybody can look in at his windows, and all his entrances
are at the mercy of the critic's skeleton key and the jimmy of any
ill-disposed assailant!

The company have been silent listeners for the most part; but the reader
will have a chance to become better acquainted with some cf them by and
by.

II

TO THE READER.

I know that it is a hazardous experiment to address myself again to a
public which in days long past has given me a generous welcome. But my
readers have been, and are, a very faithful constituency. I think there
are many among them who would rather listen to an old voice they are used
to than to a new one of better quality, even if the "childish treble"
should betray itself now and then in the tones of the overtired organ.
But there must be others,--I am afraid many others,--who will exclaim:
"He has had his day, and why can't he be content? We don't want literary
revenants, superfluous veterans, writers who have worn out their welcome
and still insist on being attended to. Give us something fresh,
something that belongs to our day and generation. Your morning draught
was well enough, but we don't care for your evening slip-slop. You are
not i