id school a great way off; I forget the name of the place. But
we are all going there to live for the summer. Mamma said we should keep
house in an 'apartment,' and I was perfectly horrified, and I said,
'Mamma, in one room?' and then Louise and Mary laughed till I was quite
angry; but mamma says that here an 'apartment' means a set of a good many
rooms, quite enough to live in. I don't believe you can have patience to
read this long letter; but I haven't told you half; no, not one half of
half. Good-by, you darling aunty. ALICE.

"P.S.--I wish you could just see mamma. It isn't only me that thinks she
is so pretty; papa thinks so too. He just sits and looks, and looks at
her, till mamma doesn't quite like it, and asks him to look at baby a
little!"

Ellen's first letter was short. Her heart was too full. She said at the
end,--

"I suppose you will both laugh and cry over Alice's letter. At first I
thought of suppressing it. But it gives you such a graphic picture of the
whole scene that I shall let it go. It is well that I had the excuse of
the surprise for my behavior, but I myself doubt very much if I should
have done any better, had I been prepared for their coming.

"God bless and thank you, dear Sally, for this last year, as I cannot.

"ELLEN."

These events happened many years ago. My sister and I are now old women.
Her life has been from that time to this, one of the sunniest and most
unclouded I ever knew.

John Gray is a hale old man; white-haired and bent, but clear-eyed and
vigorous. All the good and lovable and pure in his nature have gone on
steadily increasing: his love for his wife is still so full of sentiment
and romance that the world remarks it.

His grandchildren will read these pages, no doubt, but they will never
dream that it could have been their sweet and placid and beloved old
grandmother who, through such sore straits in her youth, kept her husband!

Esther Wynn's Love-Letters.

My uncle, Joseph Norton, lived in a very old house. It was one of those
many mansions in which that father of all sleepers, George Washington,
once slept for two nights. This, however, was before the house came into
the possession of our family, and we seldom mentioned the fact.

The rooms were all square, and high; many of the walls were of wood
throughout, panelled from the floor to the ceiling, and with curious china
tiles set in around the fire-places. In the room in which I always slept
whe