t eighteen as she did at eight! She
shall have a chance to try, at any rate!"

Such was the self-sacrificing disposition with which Richard Venner,
Esq., a passenger by the Condor from Valparaiso, set foot upon his
native shore, and turned his face in the direction of Rockland, The
Mountain, and the mansion-house. He had heard something, from time
to time, of his New-England relatives, and knew that they were living
together as he left them. And so he heralded himself to "My dear Uncle"
by a letter signed "Your loving nephew, Richard Venner," in which letter
he told a very frank story of travel and mercantile adventure, expressed
much gratitude for the excellent counsel and example which had helped to
form his character and preserve him in the midst of temptation, inquired
affectionately after his uncle's health, was much interested to know
whether his lively cousin who used to be his playmate had grown up as
handsome as she promised to be, and announced his intention of paying
his respects to them both at Rockland. Not long after this came the
trunks marked R. V. which he had sent before him, forerunners of his
advent: he was not going to wait for a reply or an invitation.

What a sound that is,--the banging down of the preliminary trunk,
without its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all
personal appendages, so long as the owner's hand or eye is on them! If
it announce the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight to
look at it, to sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a lone
exile walking out on a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman lying
alongside, with the colors of his own native land at her peak, and the
name of the port he sailed from long ago upon her stern! But if it tell
the near approach of the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short
of the muffled noises made by the undertakers as they turn the corners
in the dim-lighted house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered
cautions, carries such a sense of knocking-kneed collapse with it as the
thumping down in the front entry of the heavy portmanteau, rammed with
the changes of uncounted coming weeks?

Whether the R. V. portmanteaus brought one or the other of these
emotions to the tenants of the Dudley mansion, it might not be easy
to settle. Elsie professed to be pleased with the thought of having an
adventurous young stranger, with stories to tell, an inmate of their
quiet, not to say dull, family. Under almost a