end of time. These,
Mrs. Katy Scudder had often instructed Mary, were brought from the
Indies by her great-great-grandfather, and were her grandmother's
wedding-curtains,--the grandmother who had blue eyes like hers and was
just about her height.

The next spread was spun and woven by Mrs. Katy's beloved Aunt
Eunice,--a mythical personage, of whom Mary gathered vague accounts that
she was disappointed in love, and that this very article was part of a
bridal outfit, prepared in vain, against the return of one from sea, who
never came back,--and she heard of how she sat wearily and patiently at
her work, this poor Aunt Eunice, month after month, starting every time
she heard the gate shut, every time she heard the tramp of a horse's
hoof, every time she heard the news of a sail in sight,--her color,
meanwhile, fading and fading as life and hope bled away at an inward
wound,--till at last she found comfort and reunion beyond the veil.

Next to this was a bed-quilt pieced in tiny blocks, none of them bigger
than a sixpence, containing, as Mrs. Katy said, pieces of the gowns of
all her grandmothers, aunts, cousins, and female relatives for years
back,--and mated to it was one of the blankets which had served Mrs.
Scudder's uncle in his bivouac at Valley Forge, when the American
soldiers went on the snows with bleeding feet, and had scarce anything
for daily bread except a morning message of patriotism and hope from
George Washington.

Such were the memories woven into the tapestry of our little boudoir.
Within, fronting the window, stands the large spinning-wheel, one end
adorned with a snowy pile of fleecy rolls,--and beside it, a reel and a
basket of skeins of yarn,--and open, with its face down on the beam of
the wheel, lay always a book, with which the intervals of work were
beguiled.

The dusky picture of which we have spoken hung against the rough wall in
one place, and in another appeared an old engraved head of one of the
Madonnas of Leonardo da Vinci, a picture which to Mary had a mysterious
interest, from the fact of its having been cast on shore after a furious
storm, and found like a waif lying in the sea-weed; and Mrs. Marvyn, who
had deciphered the signature, had not ceased exploring till she found
for her, in an Encyclopaedia, a life of that wonderful man, whose
greatness enlarges our ideas of what is possible to humanity,--and
Mary, pondering thereon, felt the Sea-worn picture as a constant vague
inspira