Miss Hester Templeton was a maiden lady who had long passed her grand climacteric, and who lived in that close retirement which is so peculiarly favorable to the growth of whims and oddities. At the age of twenty she had been betrothed, but her lover died on the very day fixed for their marriage; and the widowed bride, yielding to the violence of her overwhelming sorrow, determined to abjure the world forever. For years she never quitted the limits of her own apartment, and was generally looked upon as the victim of melancholy madness; until the death of her parents made it necessary for her to take some interest in the affairs of every-day life, when it was discovered that whatever might be her eccentricity, her intellect was perfectly unclouded. Acute and sensible in all worldly matters, quite competent to manage her pecuniary affairs, and gifted with a degree of shrewdness which enabled her to see through the fine-spun webs of cunning and deceit, there was yet one weak point in her character which showed how immedicable had been the early wound of her heart. Her memory of the dead was still religiously cherished, her vow of seclusion still bound her, and thirty years had passed since her foot had crossed the threshold of her own door. Living in a remote country village, which offered no temptation to either the speculator or the manufacturer, time had wrought few changes around her. The old homestead, in which she was born, was the spot in which she meant to die, and she would have thought it sacrilege to change the position of the cumbrous furniture, or even to displace a superannuated article by a more modern invention. Her own apartment was filled with memorials of her lost lover. His picture looked down upon her from the wall, his books lay on her table, and in an antique cabinet were preserved letters, love gifts, withered nosegays and all the melancholy remnants of by-gone affection, which, to the bereaved heart, are but as the dust and ashes of the dead. To this lonely and isolated being, in whose character romance and morbid sensibility were so singularly combined with worldly prudence and sagacity, the acquisition of a new object of interest, in the person of her little namesake, formed an epoch in life. She was flattered by the compliment, and pleased with the importance which it gave her in her own opinion. She determined to adopt the child, and, as she found no difficulty in obtaining the consent of the parents, she scarcely waited for the lapse of actual infancy ere she look the little girl to her heart and home.