“No, sir!” he replied; “you are in league with them!—You lead me from place to place, and every where you tell me I am at home!—Oh! I shall never find it!—I wish to repose in my own house, and my own garden!—_my mother’s house!_—and you bring me here and tell me _this_ is my house!—Do you think I have grown so weak and imbecile as not to know the chamber where I was born?—the garden where I played when a child?—No!—I will not go in!—They are kind to me here, but I am not at home!—Do, take me home!—You seem to think that I cannot tell the difference between this great palace, with its rich carpets and its marble columns, and our own little cottage, with its arbor of grape-vines and wild-creepers, where my mother used to nurse me to sleep in the old carved rocking-chair!—Oh! take me home!” Long habituated to the management of lunatics, I had learned to guide the tangled reins of a disordered mind, and found but little difficulty in persuading the old man to rest awhile in the parlor on the plea of examining whether his granddaughter, to whom he was much attached, had not received some injury by stumbling in her descent from the coach. Seating him upon an ottoman, it was easy, by the same innocent deception to withdraw to another apartment in company with the ladies: and there, after tendering any further services which their affliction might render desirable, I heard, with deep attention, the history of their woes. Mr. A——, the old gentleman, was, as I had inferred, the father of the elder and the grandsire of the younger lady. At an early age he came into hereditary possession of a handsome capital, and a range of ample stores near the centre of the commercial mart of ——. His mother, who was esteemed rich in those early times (soon after the revolutionary war) retained the family homestead in addition to her dower; and, in this venerable mansion, distant about a mile from the borders of the _then_ small, but flourishing city, her son continued to reside; for he preferred the society of his remaining parent, and the quietude of rural life in the intervals of business, to the gayer scenes and more luxurious habits of the town. Thither, he soon conveyed a young and beautiful wife; and there his happiest years were spent in the midst of a family circle bound together by ties of the warmest affection.—Even their dead were gathered around them:—for the white monuments of their departed friends peered over the stone wall of the family grave-yard, from the grove of funereal pines behind the garden.