“And, sir,” said Oliver Barton, “the only surviving heir of Catharine Blake you will recognize in me.” A whisper of delight ran through the rooms at this unexpected _dénouement_; the service proceeded, and in a few moments, tears, kisses, and confusion announced the silken bands of matrimony had firmly united two as pure, confiding hearts as ever throbbed in human breast. And thus the case was doubly gained. * * * * * MY AUNT FABBINS’S OLD GARRET. BY C. P. CRANCH. I have often wondered whether there ever was in our whole blessed United States, such a queer place as my Aunt Fabbins’s garret. In all my migrations from city to city, from house to house, from room to room, where I was the guest of people who were quite differently constituted by nature and education from my good aunt, I have thought to myself as I observed somewhat of the family economy in these various hospitable abodes, that there could not possibly be in a single one of them a room whose internal arrangement or disarrangement bore the faintest resemblance to that queer old garret at my Aunt Fabbins’s. Oh, it was the queerest of all queer places that the sun ever peeped into or did not peep into. Language utterly fails to tell how queer it was. I have sometimes thought I would seriously sit down and describe it at length; that I would take an inventory of all the queer things it contained, one by one, with scientific patience and accuracy, and give to the herein unenlightened world the results of my researches and labors, in the shape of an article for some antiquarian society, or, perhaps, some national academy of arts and sciences. Catacombs and tombs, and Egyptian pyramids, have been thrown open to the gaze of mankind, and the dim religious light of old cloisters and cathedrals has been invaded by the prying spirit of utilitarian curiosity and reform; and that which was hidden and mysterious, hath been everywhere brought into the atmosphere of vulgar daylight, and Penny Magazines, and Lyceum Lectures—and science every where is laying his cold clutch upon the shrinking form of poetic truth; then why should not the secrets of my Aunt Fabbins’s queer old musty fusty garret be disclosed, and the world be one little wrinkle the wiser?