My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately. But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course of conversation, that the result of our