was a little, beady-eyed old Frenchwoman, and slept in the remotest attic-chamber, so that she grew to be rather a myth, and Jenny’s friends used to disbelieve in her existence, and called Jenny Rose Marie, in joke. But we, who know everything, will not attempt to escape the reader’s perspicacity. Yes (though it has nothing to do with the story), James Starbuck was in fact the grandson of that old whaling-captain Obed, Flossie’s father’s elder brother--he would have been her second cousin, then--quite too far for city kin to be counted, even had Mrs. Gower known anything about it. His father, by some curious chance, atavism, or some other influence, had taken after the uncle, and ceased to follow the sea; but, not like his uncle, he had not prospered, and had lived upon the world when he could; when he could not, he brought his wife back to her home in the small country town in Connecticut. The father was one of those curious fellows who turn their hand to anything, and of whom the best you can say is that they are hardly respectable, and the worst that they don’t quite deserve to be hanged. Their lives are one long misdemeanor, but (unless we count fraudulent bankruptcy, and except an occasional bigamy) they rarely commit a crime. This Horace Starbuck had his ups and his downs, his ins and his outs; but the friends and the places of his prosperity knew him not in his adversity, and _vice versa_. There was no more continuity to his career than there is to a string of cheap assorted beads; and I doubt if even the devil took any serious interest in him. He was clever, too, in a way, with that common-school education no person born in New England can be without; he had made an invention, and owned a patent or two in the course of his life, and formed several corporations, in Connecticut and elsewhere, for their exploitation. It chanced that in one of these (it was upon a patent for machine-made shirts) some stockholder had actually paid up his stock; this lucky chance was the means of bringing seven thousand dollars into Horace Starbuck’s pocket, the largest sum he ever possessed at any one time of his life. He promptly got himself married to a girl in his own town, which was probably, on the whole, the most defensible action of his career. They went on a wedding-trip to New York, where Starbuck went into six new corporations; and in a few months they were as poor as ever, and these twin children were born to them. Mrs. Starbuck’s health gave out after this; and she never had any more children. Her husband’s business made it necessary for him to travel a great deal; and she sometimes went with him, sometimes not. Hardly a commercial hotel in the United States but Starbuck had stopped there; he made his nest in hotels, as a spider does in dark places by the sea. His travels led him all over the northern part of America and to Australia; his assets consisted of a diamond-pin, a gold watch and chain, and four collars and a