WALTER'S LITTLE MOTHER.

WALTER'S LITTLE MOTHER.

On a still spring night, that had followed on a stormy day, a young
woman sat alone by her little lamp, watching and wakeful, although in
every other room of that old house, the lights had been put out above
an hour before.

It was in a narrow street of a little northern town, and not a footstep
was to be heard, save the watchman's, who stopped from time to time,
under the one lighted window, to sing out with especial emphasis, his
warning to be careful of fire and light. The casement was not closed,
and the lamp flickered in the night wind, that blew chill into the
room, stealing as it passed, the fragrance of the hyacinths that were
blooming in the window. But the girl did not close the casement; she
only drew her large brown shawl still closer about her shoulders, and
remained pensively looking over the book on her lap, towards the
sleeping town beyond; listening to the clock upon the tower as it
struck the successive quarters.

Opposite the deep old arm-chair in which she was reclining, a table had
been laid with a clean white cloth, and a little tea-kettle was singing
merrily beside a simple supper of cold meats, set out with a dainty
neatness that almost amounted to elegance. An arm-chair had been drawn
close to the single cover.

There was no other symptom of petticoat government in that large low
room. Discolored copper-plates, sketches in oils, fragments of antique
marbles, covered the walls, and lay about encumbering the furniture, in
artistical confusion. An old stove of green potter; had been crowned by
a Corinthian capital, blackened by the smoke and dust of years. Now, at
this quiet hour of the night, when the lamp in the centre left the
comers of the room in darkness, this motley assemblage almost haunted
one. The most incongruous things had been placed so close together, as
to make them all look strange.

The clock struck eleven. With a movement of impatience, the young woman
rose, and throwing down the little blue volume of which she had been
absently turning over the leaves, she went to the window and looked
out. Her earliest youth was past, and her countenance bore the stamp of
a resolute soul, that has suffered, and struggled, and ended by
becoming indifferent to evanescent charms. Yet if you looked longer at
that serious face, you could see that such charms had been intended for
it when Natu