ou
entered it with the feeling of spotless and all-pervading cleanliness--a
cleanliness that greeted you in the shining brass door-knocker; that
entertained you in the sitting room with its stiff, leather-covered
furniture, the brass-headed tacks whereof sparkled like so many
stars--a cleanliness that bade you farewell in the spotless stretch of
sand-sprinkled hallway, the wooden floor of which was worn into knobs
around the nail heads by the countless scourings and scrubbings to which
it had been subjected and which left behind them an all-pervading faint,
fragrant odor of soap and warm water.

Eleazer Cooper and his wife were childless, but one inmate made the
great, silent, shady house bright with life. Lucinda Fairbanks, a niece
of Captain Cooper's by his only sister, was a handsome, sprightly girl
of eighteen or twenty, and a great favorite in the Quaker society of the
city.

It remains only to introduce the final and, perhaps, the most important
actor of the narrative Lieut. James Mainwaring. During the past twelve
months or so he had been a frequent visitor at the Cooper house. At
this time he was a broad-shouldered, red-cheeked, stalwart fellow
of twenty-six or twenty-eight. He was a great social favorite, and
possessed the added romantic interest of having been aboard the
Constitution when she fought the Guerriere, and of having, with his own
hands, touched the match that fired the first gun of that great battle.

Mainwaring's mother and Eliza Cooper had always been intimate friends,
and the coming and going of the young man during his leave of absence
were looked upon in the house as quite a matter of course. Half a dozen
times a week he would drop in to execute some little commission for the
ladies, or, if Captain Cooper was at home, to smoke a pipe of tobacco
with him, to sip a dram of his famous old Jamaica rum, or to play a
rubber of checkers of an evening. It is not likely that either of the
older people was the least aware of the real cause of his visits; still
less did they suspect that any passages of sentiment had passed between
the young people.

The truth was that Mainwaring and the young lady were very deeply in
love. It was a love that they were obliged to keep a profound secret,
for not only had Eleazer Cooper held the strictest sort of testimony
against the late war--a testimony so rigorous as to render it altogether
unlikely that one of so military a profession as Mainwaring practiced
coul