COGNITION.

It has again been unavoidable, in following the fortunes of other
characters connected with this narration, to lose sight of those who
have prominently figured in the mansion of Judge Owen--the Judge
himself, his wife, his daughter Emily, Aunt Martha, and the two lovers
who fought over that very pretty little bone as if they had been dogs
and she a tit-bit of very different description. But it is one of the
first principles of conducting the successful march of an army, that no
stragglers should be allowed to lag too far behind, lest a sudden
onslaught upon them might cause a panic extending to all the other
portions of the force. Let the Judge and his family, then, be kept up as
nearly as possible to the march of the main body; and especially let not
pretty Emily Owen and her mischievous printer-lover be lost from the
ranks by any contingency.

Aunt Martha saw farther into futurity than her niece, when she decided
that the row between Frank Wallace and Colonel John Boadley Bancker, if
it came to the Judge's ears, would be likely to make affairs much worse
instead of better; and Emily and she had some serious conversation over
the prospect, that night of the street accident, after both the rivals
had gone,--which did not tend to make the young girl go to her white
pillow with the most blissful of anticipations. The younger lady thought
it doubtful whether the matter need come to the knowledge of her father
at all, as she did not believe that the Colonel would so far bemean
himself as to make a complaint to the father of the young girl he was
pursuing, of the advantages which another suitor might possess over him
in the mind of the girl herself. Aunt Martha, who had seen somewhat more
than her niece of the world and its meanness, did not consider the
Colonel too proud to take such a course, if he believed himself likely
to gain by it; and besides--she remembered, what her niece did not, that
they were by no means alone in the house when the little affair
occurred. Servants--those important personages, who in modern days keep
the houses and permit their masters and mistresses, on the payment of a
round sum per week, to live in the house with them--those ubiquitous
personages, who seem to have the faculty of being precisely where they
are not wanted, when any family trouble is to be ventilated,--servants
were in the house at the time, and there was no guaranty whatever that
they had not been sufficiently nea