unvexed by
ever-changing fashions and domestics! What did they know of trouble
whose best silk gowns remained in fashion from year to year, and whose
cooks never treated them to an empty breakfast-table, and a cool "I
thought I'd be a-lavin' this marnin', mum"? Happy grandmothers!

Thus thinking, we pick up a little rough paper-book with marbled covers
from the corner of the old hair trunk where it was long ago thrown by
some careless hand. The little tumbled book proves to be a diary. Not a
record of a soul's strivings and pantings after a higher life, or a
curiously minute inquiry into the possible reasons which induced the
Almighty to allow Satan to afflict Job, but a simple daily note-book,
the memoranda of a housekeeper. The old letters had been to us what the
newspapers of to-day will be to the great-grandchildren of the present
generation. The diary carried us back into the immediate home-life of
seventy years ago.

The diarist had been a fair and stately dame in her day, and it is easy
to remove her from the frame where her portrait hangs on the walls of
the south parlor, and fancy her seated in the same room before the
crackling fire jotting down the memoranda of the day. She is a pretty
sight, we think, sitting in her straight-backed mahogany arm-chair, with
her feet on the polished brass fender and her book resting on the little
stand, which also holds the two tall silver candlesticks with their tall
tallow candles, for wax candles are saved for gala-nights, when diaries
are not in requisition. She must have been nearly forty years old when
she wrote in this little book, but we see her as her portrait shows her,
very young-looking in spite of her stateliness, enhanced though it is by
the high turban of embroidered muslin edged with soft lace falling over
the clusters of fair curls on her temples, and by the black satin gown,
short-waisted and scanty, relieved only by delicate lace frills, which
shade the beautiful throat and the strong, white, shapely hands. The
shadow on her face as she gazes into the fire is not marvelous, for it
is winter in her quiet Connecticut home; the post comes but twice a
week; her husband is representing his State in Washington, and her only
child is studying in distant Yale. Perhaps, though, the shadow is not
that of pure loneliness. Is there not some perplexity in it? And
something also of vexation? Yes, and it is the very vexation of spirit
which--in the face of Solomon's vene