Such was the exordium of a letter signed “CATHERINE CONOLLY,” and dated from “_Tarry-town_,” which I found on the centre-table one morning, after having been down the street to attend to a little business—giving a small order to a confectioner. The writer was an old school-mate of mine, whom, indeed, I had not seen since our school-days. She was Kitty Colville then—a fair, fat, freckled, _squashy_-looking girl, who was a sort of common favorite from the good-nature with which she bore being the butt of our tricks, and the scape-goat of our trespasses. She afterward married a young country doctor, and, as I had learned, was settled in some out-of-the-way village of which I had never known the name until I saw it at the head of her letter. I caught myself smiling as I laid down the missive, it was so characteristic of poor Kitty. After telling about her children, four in number, who were called after their grandfathers and grandmothers, John and Jacob, and Ruth and Sophia; and her husband, who had so much practice that he wore out a pair of saddle-bags every two years, she had filled the remainder of her page with apologies for her pen, ink, and bad writing. The neat but constrained chirography, into which she had been drilled at school by a teacher standing over her, had deteriorated into a scrawl, cramped here and straggling there, and the orthography testified that she no longer wrote with a dictionary at her elbow. “To chronicle small-beer,” it was very evident, had long been the extent of her literary efforts.