But Cilly likes that—it sounds rural and like the country; and our room is lovely, with the two broad balconies where we sometimes have tea, when the west wind is not too strong, the sun too hot, or the mosquitoes too thick. Then it is such a nice place to smoke, but Cilly never lets me do that any more; she only smiles so sweetly on her gentlemen friends, and tells them it’s a nice place, that I am tempted to try it sometimes surreptitiously, when she and her mother are down town at some of the temperance meetings, but her mother would smell me a mile off, and so I forbear. Honestly, though, I do enjoy the balconies, and I rather like the arches over the windows, which I call the _twins_, and which are very pretty. They ought to be, for they cost enough. I’ve never told Cilly just how much I paid, besides her brother’s windfall, but when the greedy assessors tucked an extra four thousand on our house because of the _improvements_, I wondered how they guessed so accurately. We have five spare rooms now, but the new one in the attic, which was built for Lizzie’s children and the nurse, has never been occupied. The nurse is afraid to sleep there, you have to pass through such a menagerie of trunks, and broken chairs, and rag bags, and old hoop skirts, and cast off pants, and last year’s bonnets, to get to it, that it gives her the horrors, and as the children will not sleep without her, that room was made for nothing except to show. Mrs. Erastus Lord, senior, is dead, and Cilly was very sorry, when she died, and I suppose I was sorry, too; and I _know_ I was glad when Mrs. Erastus, junior, recovered the use of her limbs, and sailed away to Europe, where she finds the manners and customs more congenial to her taste than here. Cilly and I live very quietly together now, and I do not believe she has any thought of repairing again, though she has told me in confidence that the next time she does so, she means to stow the furniture in the barn, and knock the plaster off from all the old walls, which were so badly cracked when the house was fixed the last time; but when she actually gets to that point, as true as my name is John Logan, I’ll lock her up in a lunatic asylum and then commit suicide. THE PASSION PLAY AT OBERAMMERGAU, 1880.