So sang Petronius, and so sing I. SECTION XI. The fair widow moved into her father’s house, and carried joy with her, and smiles, and a new life. The dusty halls and silent chambers were soon made glad, and gave no echo back to the busy feet which beat their floors in measured tread to the sound of lutes. Men wondered at the miser’s transformation, and the jolly sun, driving up the clear, blue, vaulted roof of the earth, looked in upon curtains, and mirrors, and rich carpets, and all the bought luxury of great wealth, and danced upon the draped walls, and laughed, and wondered too. But the change was of the surface. The miser loved his daughter with his whole soul; he loved gold with more than his whole soul—gold, his first love—and the daughter held a divided and an inferior empire in his affections. The miser loved his daughter as he best might, with his heart of shining metal, and he would have loved her had she been less than what she was; less beautiful, less worthy, less full of the love which flowed from her like a sea, and covered him, and he drank of it, a joy he had never known. He loved her, as the heir to his vast estates, as himself renewed, to bear his labor onward, to accumulate through still another span of life; and he showed her to the world, and took pride in this new glory, as a new title to his possessions, which was to carry them with himself, even beyond the grave. I was often with them; I became almost an inmate of the house, subsequent to the events which I have just related—the father’s legal adviser, the daughter’s best friend. Mr. Cornelius did not weary of the empty bustle and noise of fashion with which his daughter’s youth and brilliant position at once surrounded her; he seemed pleased with it, and often spoke of it as the proud homage which intellect, and nice honor, and high titles, and all the virtues, and all the prejudices of men, pay to wealth—and so, indeed, it was. With the daughter, these enjoyments soon palled. She had learned of sorrow from her birth, and had happily received from her mother a head too strong for turning; when, therefore, novelty wore away, and satiety began to usurp its place, she gradually withdrew from the press of company, and gave to her father those hours which others had before possessed. Although change had come over every thing else, Mr. Cornelius forbid its entrance into the one room reserved for himself; the room in which he had received his daughter, with the little table and the two chairs standing in the centre, and its naked walls and bare door, which were to him as old acquaintances, and where, alone, he now felt fully at home. There they would often sit together in the deep hours of the night, and while she played with his white locks, and watched the beatings of his heart, to find it tuned to a music widely different from her own, and listened to his never-ending promises, and never-ending hopes of a wealth which was