y grieved at heart at George's want of worldly success;
but, like a nice little Robin Redbreast, she covered up the grave of her
worldliness with the leaves of true love, and sung a "Who cares for
that?" above it.

Her thrifty management of the money her husband brought her soon bought
a snug little farm, and put up the little brown gambrel-roofed cottage
to which we directed your attention in the first of our story. Children
were born to them, and George found, in short intervals between voyages,
his home an earthly paradise. Ho was still sailing, with the fond
illusion, in every voyage, of making enough to remain at home,--when the
yellow fever smote him under the line, and the ship returned to Newport
without its captain.

George was a Christian man;--he had been one of the first to attach
himself to the unpopular and unworldly ministry of the celebrated Dr.
H., and to appreciate the sublime ideality and unselfishness of those
teachings which then were awakening new sensations in the theological
mind of New England. Katy, too, had become a professor with her husband
in the same church, and his death, in the midst of life, deepened the
power of her religious impressions. She became absorbed in religion,
after the fashion of New England, where devotion is doctrinal, not
ritual. As she grew older, her energy of character, her vigor and good
judgment, caused her to be regarded as a mother in Israel; the minister
boarded at her house, and it was she who was first to be consulted in
all matters relating to the well-being of the church. No woman could
more manfully breast a long sermon, or bring a more determined faith to
the reception of a difficult doctrine. To say the truth, there lay at
the bottom of her doctrinal system this stable corner-stone,--"Mr.
Scudder used to believe it,--_I_ will." And after all that is paid about
independent thought, isn't the fact, that a just and good soul has thus
or thus believed, a more respectable argument than many that often are
adduced? If it be not, more's the pity,--since two-thirds of the faith
in the world is built on no better foundation.

In time, George's old mother was gathered to her son, and two sons and a
daughter followed their father to the invisible,--one only remaining of
the flock and she a person with whom you and I, good reader, have joint
concern in the further unfolding of our story.

CHAPTER II.

As I before remarked, Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited company