ed us to school, or to some unsavory every-day
task! How deliciously the rain came pattering on the roof over our head,
or the red twilight streamed in at the window, while we sat snugly
ensconced over the delirious pages of some romance, which careful aunts
had packed away at the bottom of all things, to be sure we should never
read it! If you have anything, beloved friends, which you wish your
Charley or your Susie to be sure and read, pack it mysteriously away at
the bottom of a trunk of stimulating rubbish, in the darkest corner of
your garret;--in that case, if the book be at all readable, one that by
any possible chance can make its way into a young mind, you may be sure
that it will not only be read, but remembered to the longest day they
have to live.

Mrs. Katy Scudder's garret was not an exception to the general rule.
Those quaint little people who touch with so airy a grace all the lights
and shadows of great beams, bare rafters, and unplastered walls, had not
failed in their work there. Was there not there a grand easy-chair of
stamped-leather, minus two of its hinder legs, which had genealogical
associations through the Wilcoxes with the Vernons and through the
Vernons quite across the water with Old England? and was there not a
dusky picture, in an old tarnished frame, of a woman of whose tragic end
strange stories were whispered,--one of the sufferers in the time when
witches were unceremoniously helped out of the world, instead of being,
as now-a-days, helped to make their fortune in it by table-turning?

Yes, there were all these things, and many more which we will not stay
to recount, but bring you to the boudoir which Mary has constructed for
herself around the dormer-window which looks into the whispering old
apple-tree.

The inclosure was formed by blankets and bed-spreads, which, by reason
of their antiquity, had been pensioned off to an undisturbed old age in
the garret,--not _common_ blankets or bed-spreads, either,--bought,
as you buy yours, out of a shop,--spun or woven by machinery, without
individuality or history. Every one of these curtains had its story. The
one on the right, nearest the window, and already falling into holes,
is a Chinese linen, and even now displays unfaded, quaint patterns of
sleepy-looking Chinamen, in conical hats, standing on the leaves of most
singular herbage, and with hands forever raised in act to strike bells,
which never are struck and never will be till the