affection’s later offerings. But when one flower becomes the treasure of a life-time; when one lock of hair is guarded like the heart’s pearl of price, then be sure that the hallowing touch of sorrow has been there. It is only when grief and love go hand in hand, that trifles become holy relics wherever they tread. Alas! do we not all wear upon our hearts a reliquary, in which, impearled with tears, and adorned with the fine gold of our best affections, we have enshrined some fragment of the past, whose value we alone can tell? But I am growing sad, serious, and, of course, dull; yet the object which led me into this train of thought was certainly not calculated to inspire any especial exhibition of sentiment. I was rummaging in such a secretary as I have described, when I accidentally pulled out a round pincushion, banded with silver about the middle, and attached to a substantial silver chain, which terminated in a broad hook, for the purpose of fastening it to the girdle of some thrifty housewife. On the heavily-wrought circlet which made the equinoctial line of the purple velvet globes which had been doomed to do duty in so humble a capacity, were the initials “_A. L._,” and I at once recognized it as the constant appendage of my respected and venerated relative, Aunt Abby. I had just been reading a paragraph respecting the female clubs in Paris, and the sight of this relic of old times, reminded me of the fact that poor Aunt Abbey had lived just half a century too soon, for to the day of her death the old lady’s favorite topic of conversation was the “equality of the sexes.” How would she have rejoiced in the modern attempts to enfranchise woman from her thraldom! how would she have gloried in the idea of woman’s equal rights of property! how would she have delighted in the prospect of political privileges for her sex! how she would have expatiated upon the benefits of a female House of Representatives! Aunt Abby (my _great_ aunt, by the by) was emphatically an advocate for woman’s “_standing alone_,” (I believe that is the phrase among the reformers,) and certainly, though she had a father, uncles, cousins, to say nothing of a husband, she succeeded in “_standing alone_,” to a certain extent, all her life. But what, you will say, had a disciple of progress, a defender of woman’s rights, a declaimer against woman’s slavery, to do with a _pincushion_? Let me sketch her portrait at full length, and then you will see how curiously she blended the duties and prerogatives of both sexes in her own proper person.