ence, in my mother's management, that there was not an old maid
within seven miles of us who did not pronounce our tea-parties to be
perfect; and the great Mrs. Rollick, who gave forty guineas a year to
a professed cook and housekeeper, used regularly, whenever we dined
at Rollick Hall, to call across the table to my mother (who therewith
blushed up to her ears) to apologize for the strawberry jelly. It is
true that when, on returning home, my mother adverted to that flattering
and delicate compliment, in a tone that revealed the self-conceit of
the human heart, my father--whether to sober his Kitty's vanity into
a proper and Christian mortification of spirit, or from that strange
shrewd ness which belonged to him--would remark that Mrs. Rollick was
of a querulous nature; that the compliment was meant, not to please my
mother, but to spite the professed cook and housekeeper, to whom the
butler would be sure to repeat the invidious apology.

In settling at the Tower, and assuming the head of its establishment,
my mother was naturally anxious that, poor battered invalid though the
Tower was, it should still put its best leg foremost. Sundry cards,
despite the thinness of the neighborhood, had been left at the door;
various invitations, which my uncle had hitherto declined, had greeted
his occupation of the ancestral ruin, and had become more numerous since
the news of our arrival had gone abroad; so that my mother saw before
her a very suitable field for her hospitable accomplishments,--a
reasonable ground for her ambition that the Tower should hold up its
head as became a Tower that held the head of the family.

But not to wrong thee, O dear mother! as thou sittest there, opposite
the grim Captain, so fair and so neat,--with thine apron as white, and
thy hair as trim and as sheen, and thy morning cap, with its ribbons of
blue, as coquettishly arranged as if thou hadst a fear that the least
negligence on thy part might lose thee the heart of thine Austin,--not
to wrong thee by setting down to frivolous motives alone thy feminine
visions of the social amenities of life, I know that thine heart, in its
provident tenderness, was quite as much interested as ever thy vanities
could be, in the hospitable thoughts on which thou wert intent. For,
first and foremost, it was the wish of thy soul that thine Austin might,
as little as possible, be reminded of the change in his fortunes,--might
miss as little as possible those interru