Ritter.

My pretty bits of fancy work with their bright-colored silks, the tiny
needle-book worked while in Munich in an especially pretty stitch, and
in the Bavarian colors--blue and white--and my Bavarian thimble--silver
and amethyst--are put away in a bureau drawer, for although a Catholic,
I do not imitate our Lutheran maid, who spends her Sundays in sewing
and knitting.

Plato and Kohlrausch, our week-day sustenance, do not come certainly
under the head of Sunday reading, although I see nothing objectionable
in them; but after all, one requires, I think, a change of literature
on Sundays as well as a different dress, and an extra course at dinner.

"What shall we do?" says Gabrielle.

We have each written a letter or two, for Sunday is, I am sure, every
one's letter-writing day, and now we put on our broad-brimmed garden
hats, with their graceful trimmings of gauze and crape, and stroll off
to the spicy pine grove, where we sit down on the dry spines, and
Arthur repeats to us quaint bits from some of the rare old books he
read in the British Museum three years ago, or entertains us with some
of his own adventures when travelling on foot over beautiful France and
Italy, and "Merrie England."

Ida and I, however, wandered away from the others this morning, and
strolled up to the dear old house in the woods where she passed her
childhood. This is, to my mind, the sweetest and most picturesque spot
upon the entire estate, and I do not wonder that Aunt Mary, with her
keen love for the beautiful in Nature, her indifference to general
society, and her devotion to her children, to study, and to reflection,
preferred the quiet seclusion of her home shut in by evergreens, with
the deep ravine, and the joyous little brook at her feet, to the most
superb mansion that graces our magnificent Hudson.

[Illustration: The House in the Woods.]

One of the purest springs on the place is in the ravine, or "Ida's
Glen," as uncle christened it long ago. Here at the foot of the long
wooden staircase is a basin of natural rock, and flowing into it is the
sweetest, coolest water in the world. This water Aunt Mary always
preferred to any other on the place--even to the spring at the foot of
the side-hill, so celebrated in the campaign times as the spot where
uncle and his visitors would stop to "take a drink," when returning
from a walk. Exquisite in her neatness, Aunt Mary would frequently
order the basin of her favorite sprin