is it;" and so, in two weeks, I lost the best
little girl in the world: peace to her memory.

After this came an interregnum, which put me in mind of the chapter in
Chronicles that I used to read with great delight when a child, where
Basha, and Elah, and Tibni, and Zimri, and Omri, one after the other,
came on to the throne of Israel, all in the compass of half a dozen
verses. We had one old woman, who staid a week, and went away with the
misery in her tooth; one _young_ woman, who ran away and got married;
one cook, who came at night and went off before light in the morning;
one very clever girl, who staid a month, and then went away because her
mother was sick; another, who staid six weeks, and was taken with the
fever herself; and during all this time, who can speak the damage and
destruction wrought in the domestic paraphernalia by passing through
these multiplied hands?

What shall we do? Shall we give up houses, have no furniture to take
care of, keep merely a bag of meal, a porridge pot, and a pudding stick,
and sit in our tent door in real patriarchal independence? What shall we
do?

LITTLE EDWARD.

Were any of you born in New England, in the good old catechizing,
church-going, school-going, orderly times? If so, you may have seen my
Uncle Abel; the most perpendicular, rectangular, upright, downright good
man that ever labored six days and rested on the seventh.

You remember his hard, weather-beaten countenance, where every line
seemed drawn with "a pen of iron and the point of a diamond;" his
considerate gray eyes, that moved over objects as if it were not best to
be in a hurry about seeing; the circumspect opening and shutting of the
mouth; his down-sitting and up-rising, all performed with conviction
aforethought--in short, the whole ordering of his life and conversation,
which was, according to the tenor of the military order, "to the right
about face--forward, march!"

Now, if you supposed, from all this triangularism of exterior, that this
good man had nothing kindly within, you were much mistaken. You often
find the greenest grass under a snowdrift; and though my uncle's mind
was not exactly of the flower garden kind, still there was an abundance
of wholesome and kindly vegetation there.

It is true, he seldom laughed, and never joked himself; but no man had a
more serious and weighty conviction of what a good joke was in another;
and when some exceeding witticism was dispensed in his p