The lady who volunteered to introduce me to the daughters of Dr. Byles, was, as I afterwards understood, one of those who assisted in affording them some of the comforts which they denied to themselves. We set out on our visit on one of the loveliest mornings of a Boston summer, the warmth of the season being delightfully tempered by a cool breeze from the sea. After passing the beautiful Common, (why has it not a better name?) my companion pointed out to me, at what seemed the termination of the long vista of Tremont street, an old black-looking frame-house, which, at the distance from whence I saw it, seemed to block up the way by standing directly across it. It was the ancient residence of Mather Byles, and the present dwelling of his aged daughters; one of whom was in her eighty-first and the other in her seventy-ninth year. This part of Tremont street, which is on the south-eastern declivity of a hill, carried us far from all vicinity to the aristocratic section of Boston. At length we arrived at the domain of the two antique maidens. It was surrounded by a board fence, which had once been a very close one, but time and those universal depredators, “the boys,” had made numerous cracks and chinks in it. The house (which stood with the gable end to the street) looked as if it had never been painted in its life. Its exposure to the sun and rain, to the heats of a hundred summers and the snows of a hundred winters, had darkened its whole outside nearly to the blackness of iron. Also, it had, even in its best days, been evidently one of the plainest and most unbeautified structures in the town of Boston, where many of the old frame-houses can boast of a redolence of quaint ornament about the doors, and windows, and porches, and balconies. Still, there was something not unpleasant in its aspect, or rather in its situation. It stood at the upper end of a green lot, whose long thick grass was enamelled with field flowers. It was shaded with noble horse-chestnut trees relieved against the clear blue sky, and whose close and graceful clusters of long jagged leaves, fanned by the light summer breeze, threw their chequered and quivering shadows on the grass beneath, and on the mossy roof of the venerable mansion.