Mt. Vernon Street crosses the topmost height of Beacon Hill. Parallel to the famed thoroughfare of Beacon Street, it is like a more retired military line that has the compensation for its retirement of being spared the active brunt of service. A very few minutes’ climb from the office of _The Atlantic Monthly_ suffices to reach it. Precisely at that portion of it where the pretty grass-plots begin, to the houses on the upper side, is the attractive, stately mansion of an elder generation, in which Aldrich has taken up his abode. He bought it, some years ago, of Dr. Bigelow, a well-known name in Boston, and made it his own. It is one of a block, and is of red brick, four windows (and perhaps thirty feet) wide, and four tall stories in height, with a story of dormers above that. The classic doorway of white marble, solidly built, after the honest fashion of its time, is but a small detail after all in such an amplitude of façade, and melts easily into place as part of a genial whole. The quarter, its sidewalks and all, is chiefly of old red brick, tempered with the green of grass-plots, shrubs, and climbing vines. It has a pervading air of antiquity, and it quaintly suggests a bit of Chester or Coventry. The neighbors are, on the one hand, Charles Francis Adams; on the other, Bancroft, son of the historian; while, diagonally across the way, is a lady who is, by popular rumor, the richest woman in New England. The rooms of the house take a pleasing irregularity from the partial curvature of the walls, front and rear. They are all spacious, above-stairs as well as below. The “hall bedroom,” of modern progress, was hardly invented in its time. A platform and steps at one side of the hall, on entering (they clear a small alley to the rear) have a sort of altar-like aspect. The owner or his books might some time be apotheosized there, at need, amid candles and flowers. Aldrich has been fortunate in his marriage as in so many other ways. His family consists of a congenial and accomplished wife, and “the twins,” not unknown to literature. The most pervading trait of the interior is a sense of a discriminating judgment and ardor in household decoration. Both husband and wife share this taste, and together they have filled this abode and their two country houses with ample evidence of it, and with rare and taking objects brought from a wide circle of travel and research. Tribute should be paid to the quietness of tone, the air of comfort, in the whole. The collections are not made an end in themselves, but are parts of a harmonious interior. Several stories are carpeted alike, in a soft, low-toned hue. In days of professional decorators who throw together all the hues of the kaleidoscope, and none in a patch larger than your hand, and held upon these, brass, ebony, stamped leather, marquetry, enamels and bottle-glass, in a kind of chaotic pudding--in these days such an exceptional reserve as is here manifest seems little