then taking her favorite seat on a low ottoman beside me, she rested her beautiful head on my lap, its rich fall of ringlets almost sweeping the ground, and with her steady, brilliant eye, looked up in my face most coaxingly. I submitted; for, to tell the truth, I was not sorry to be made to read over “Ida’s Journal;” so many years had passed since the events it narrated had taken place, that it seemed to possess more of interest on account of the lapse of time. Ida was the daughter of a second cousin of my mother’s. This cousin was an orphan ward of my grandfather’s, and had been brought up from infancy in his family. I never saw her, but judging from a picture of her in my mother’s possession, she must have been a remarkably beautiful woman. She was very superior in mind, but wild and wayward in disposition. My Uncle Walter, my grandfather’s only son, loved his beautiful cousin—doated on her; but she, with willful opposition, rejected his love, and the worldly advantages attending on it, to follow the fortunes of a young German artist, who had taught her music, and who she fancied was the realization of the ideal her illy regulated fancy had formed. Her marriage with Hermann Bernstorf, and departure from her country, brought great sorrow to her friends, my mother said, and it was feared my Uncle Walter would never recover from the disappointment it caused him; but time is an excellent physician, and my Uncle Walter not only recovered from the disappointment, severe as it was, but became a model of husbands; and his devotion to my gentle, lovely Aunt Mary, was a constant subject of admiring remark with his nephews and nieces, who did not know the romance of his student days. Madame Bernstorf had removed to Germany immediately after her marriage. So much opposed was my grandfather to her marriage, that he would never see her after her engagement was disclosed; and she left home and kindred, who had worshiped her, and spoiled her with indulgence, to follow the uncertain fortunes of a stranger in a strange land. My mother loved her cousin dearly, and though she regretted the willfulness of her conduct, she did not feel unkindly toward her; and when my grandfather refused to see her, or remain under the same roof with her, to my mother’s house did she come, and there was her sad, tearful wedding celebrated.