"Yes, perhaps so. I am going with my cousin Charlotte,--going to work in the same store with her. She's been trying to have me come for a long time, and at last I've made up my mind to go." Hattie's parents were poor people; industrious and respectable, but with quite a large family; and Mr. Newberry himself, never a very "touch" man, as they express it in Vermont, and ill a good deal, they had hard work enough to make ends meet, and send the children to school, and all that. "O, so you are going to live in New York! How's that? Let me see; it seems to me that somebody wrote to my wife a few weeks ago, that you and young Dwight Phelps were to be married; and so I supposed you'd always stay up there." Hattie blushed, and replied, "O, there was such a rumor; but that's all over now." She tried to be cheerful, but a sigh, which did not escape my friend's ear, and a sad look, for an instant, which did not escape his eye, revealed to him that something had gone wrong with her; and he finally found, on joking her a little about the matter, kindly, that young Phelps's father, who was a sort of a miser, was in the way; that he wanted his son to marry some rich girl, or not a poor one in money, at least, however poor she might otherwise be; and the young man was in his father's hands, so far as pecuniary means were concerned, and would not be independent enough to think of marrying soon. The old man Phelps had threatened to disinherit him if he married against his will; and she had determined to not make difficulty in the family, and was on her way to New York, at her cousin's solicitation, to go to work where she could earn something, and help her father and mother support the family. The subject was a painful one for Hattie to descant upon, and my friend addressed himself to other matters of conversation. Hattie informed him that her cousin, Charlotte Keeney, was the chief clerk in a confectioner's establishment, with a neat restaurant attached, in Sixth Avenue, near Twelfth Street, New York, the proprietor of which was a certain Mr. Henry ---- (Brown, for a name)--a popular, thriving business man, of the rigid school of morals; just, generous, and kindly in manners, but as fixed in his opinions, and as relentless against evil-doers, and as unforgiving of actual moral delinquencies, as if he had been carved out of the "ribs" of the Mayflower--(before she became a slave-ship); a sort of wooden-headed man in all matters of morals; a descendant of the Puritan stock. This fact lightened my friend's regret that Hattie had resolved to go to the city to live, for he chanced to know Mr. Brown's reputation, otherwise he would have felt it his duty to say more to her of the perils and trials of city life than he did. He said, as he looked upon her wonderful beauty, and thought how many girls, almost as beautiful, had found city life full of thorns; had borne sad trials, and suffered deathly sorrows, principally through the