room three days out of six. As, of course, all family arrangements
fell into the hands of servants, St. Clare found his menage anything but
comfortable. His only daughter was exceedingly delicate, and he feared
that, with no one to look after her and attend to her, her health and
life might yet fall a sacrifice to her mother's inefficiency. He had
taken her with him on a tour to Vermont, and had persuaded his cousin,
Miss Ophelia St. Clare, to return with him to his southern residence;
and they are now returning on this boat, where we have introduced them
to our readers.

And now, while the distant domes and spires of New Orleans rise to our
view, there is yet time for an introduction to Miss Ophelia.

Whoever has travelled in the New England States will remember, in some
cool village, the large farmhouse, with its clean-swept grassy yard,
shaded by the dense and massive foliage of the sugar maple; and remember
the air of order and stillness, of perpetuity and unchanging repose,
that seemed to breathe over the whole place. Nothing lost, or out of
order; not a picket loose in the fence, not a particle of litter in
the turfy yard, with its clumps of lilac bushes growing up under the
windows. Within, he will remember wide, clean rooms, where nothing ever
seems to be doing or going to be done, where everything is once and
forever rigidly in place, and where all household arrangements move with
the punctual exactness of the old clock in the corner. In the family
"keeping-room," as it is termed, he will remember the staid, respectable
old book-case, with its glass doors, where Rollin's History,* Milton's
Paradise Lost, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Scott's Family Bible,**
stand side by side in decorous order, with multitudes of other books,
equally solemn and respectable. There are no servants in the house, but
the lady in the snowy cap, with the spectacles, who sits sewing every
afternoon among her daughters, as if nothing ever had been done, or were
to be done,--she and her girls, in some long-forgotten fore part of the
day, "_did up the work_," and for the rest of the time, probably, at all
hours when you would see them, it is "_done up_." The old kitchen floor
never seems stained or spotted; the tables, the chairs, and the various
cooking utensils, never seem deranged or disordered; though three and
sometimes four meals a day are got there, though the family washing and
ironing is there performed, and though pounds of