he public, will have the effect of a shower of cayenne;
but her _magnum opus_, which discretion will probably forbid seeing the
light, is entitled _Dialogues of the Dead_, the scene being laid in
Hades, where her father and King Jerome rehearse her story. Her wit is
still incisive, her conversation replete with interest, her memory
retaining minutely every incident and figure of the wondrous diorama
that has unrolled before her eyes close upon a hundred years. Her birth
was nearly coeval with that of our republic, many of whose fathers she
knew. She wept as the tidings of Marie Antoinette's tragedy reached our
shores; she was a woman when Washington died; Jefferson was her friend;
La Fayette has held her hand; and her name is imperishably associated
with one "who kept the world at bay, whose game was empires, whose
stakes were thrones."

A SUMMER EVENING'S DREAM.

It is a village street, with great elms on either side, while along the
middle stands another row set in a narrow strip of grassy common, so
that the street and roadway are in reality double. The dwellings on
either side are not only widely parted by the broad street, but are
still further isolated, each in its large garden of ancient fruit trees.
It is four o'clock of a sunny August afternoon, and a quiet,
Sabbath-like but for its lazy voluptuousness, broods over the scene. No
carriage, or even pedestrian, has passed for an hour. The occasional
voices of children at play in some garden, the latching of a gate far
down the street, the dying fall of a drowsy chanticleer, are but the
punctuation of the poem of summer silence that has been flowing on all
the afternoon. Upon the tree-tops the sun blazes brightly, and between
their stems are glimpses of outlying meadows, which simmer in the heat
as if about to come to a boil. But the shadowed street offers a cool and
refreshing vista to the eye and a veritable valley of refuge to the
parched and dusty traveller along the highway.

On the broad piazza of one of the quaint old-fashioned houses, behind a
needless screen of climbing woodbine, two girls are whiling away the
afternoon. One of them is lounging in a lazy rocking-chair, while the
other sits more primly and is industriously sewing.

"I suppose you'll be glad enough to see George when he comes to-night to
take you back to the city? I'm afraid you find it pretty dull here,"
said the latter with an intonation of uneasy responsibility sufficiently
at