rive to Tarrytown--A Poem to Ida.

_July 16_.

An air of mystery has pervaded the house for the past week. My offers
to take Ida's letters to the post, or to go and fetch home the mail,
have been met with a hasty negative, and Minna despatched forthwith to
attend to them; and whenever I might enter Ida's room, it would appear
to be at a most inopportune moment, for the earnest conversation that
had been going on between herself and Gabrielle would instantly stop,
and their countenances assume a most transparent expression of
indifference. Long whispered conversations with mamma were continually
taking place, and Ida seemed to be more frequently called to the
kitchen by Lina than I had ever before known her to be, that autocrat
being ordinarily by no means tolerant of her presence there. Finally,
Ida was summoned to New York upon important business--to meet her
lawyer, I supposed, but wondered why she did not simply authorize papa
to represent herself, as well as Gabrielle, whose guardian he is, and
thus spare herself a tedious day in the city in such sultry weather.

Yesterday was my birthday, and to-day is Marguerite's. As the fetes
occur in midsummer, we are usually--if in America--upon the Catskill
Mountains, or some equally inaccessible place, so that a celebration is
not practicable; indeed, our birthdays have not been celebrated since
1869, when some friends in Paris took us all to St. Germain, where we
passed a most delightful week at the Pavilion Henri Quatre (a hotel
built upon the spot where Louis XIV. was born), and daily drove and
picniced in the grand old forest for which St. Germain is noted. The
events of yesterday were therefore most unexpected and agreeable.

Ida and Gabrielle, after congratulating Marguerite and I, and giving us
some elegant presents (for we usually receive our presents upon the
same day, as less than twenty-four hours separate our anniversaries),
asked us to drive down to the station with them to meet the train, and
gently intimated that as some one might come up from New York with
papa, we had better put on our best bombazines. Quite obediently I
went upstairs, put on the dress with its weight of crape, clasped on my
new black velvet _ceinture_, with its buckles of oxidized silver in
delicate filagree work, (Marguerite's gift), and obtuse to the
inappropriateness of a dress fan for morning use, suspended from the
chatelaine another birthday gift--a black lace fan. Then, w