ency in all
the men's eyes to converge on her; and I do firmly believe, that, if
all their chairs were examined, they would be found a little obliquely
placed, so as to favor the direction in which their occupants love to
look.

That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
opposite to me, is no exception to the rule. She brought down some
mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber. She gave a
sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and sent another
by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.

--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in his
button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings. Very
fine performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions, truly
elegant!--Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in the year
(eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)--patronized
by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant, truly elegant
productions, very fine performances; these drawings reminded him of
them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an extraordinary art, painting;
Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures that he remembered seeing when
he was a boy. Used to remember some lines about a portrait Written by
Mr. Cowper, beginning,

"Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
With me but roughly since I heard thee last."

And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look. The dead
young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used to look
at him so many, many years ago. He stood still as if in a waking dream,
his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines grew indistinct and
they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face shaped itself out of
the glimmering light through which he saw them.--What is there quite
so profoundly human as an old man's memory of a mother who died in his
earlier years? Mother she remains till manhood, and by-and-by she grows
to be as a sister; and at last, when, wrinkled and bowed and broken,
he looks back upon her in her fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he
caresses, not his parent, but, as it were, his child.

If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words with
which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of thought.

--If they had only taken pi