ry under the hills below Peekskill, and spent
their time in wandering through the woods and picking wild-flowers; but
it lacks confirmation, and I should be sorry to believe that two
well-brought-up young people would prefer their own society to the
unlimited hospitality of their friends in the country.

Old Jacob Dolph, at home, had the great house all to himself; and,
although black Chloe took excellent care of his material comforts, he
was restless and troubled. He took most pleasure in a London almanac, on
whose smudgy pages he checked off the days. Letters came as often as the
steamboat arrived from Albany, and he read them, after his fashion. It
took him half the week to get through one missive, and by that time
another had arrived. But I fear he did not make much out of them.
Still, they gave him one pleasure. He endorsed them carefully with the
name of the writer, and the date of receipt, and then he laid them away
in his desk, as neatly as he had filed his business letters in his old
days of active life.

Every night he had a candle alight in the hallway; and if there were a
far-off rumble of carriage-wheels late at night, he would rise from his
bed--he was a light sleeper, in his age--and steal out into the
corridor, hugging his dressing-robe about him, to peer anxiously down
over the balusters till the last sound and the last faint hope of his
son's return had died away.

And, indeed, it was late in July when the travelling-carriage once more
drew up in front of the Dolph house, and old Julius opened the door, and
old Mr. Dolph welcomed them, and told them that he had been very lonely
in their absence, and that their mother--and then he remembered that
their mother was dead, and went into the house with his head bowed low.

III.

St. John's Park and Hudson Street and all well-bred New York, for that
matter, had its fill of the Dolph hospitality the next winter. It was
dinner and ball and rout and merry-making of one sort or another, the
season through. The great family sleighs and the little bachelor sleighs
whirred and jingled up to the Dolph door surely two, and sometimes four,
evenings in every week, and whirred and jingled away again at intensely
fashionable hours, such as plain folk used for sleeping.

They woke up Abram Van Riper, did the revellers northward bound to
country houses on the river-side, and, lying deep in his feather-bed, he
directed his rumbling imprecations at the panes of