I went as appointed, and was presented by Mr. Garretson to his wife, a fair-looking old lady, of the blonde school. Indeed, she was a motherly, sweet woman to look upon, and had evidently drunken at the "fountain of youth" somewhere; for although she was only five years younger than Mr. Garretson, as I learned, she looked thirty years his junior. Her face was a blending of the Greek and modern German in style, nose aquiline, and head broad, and not lacking in height; a pleasingly-shaped head to look upon; and there was all the mercy, tenderness, and kindness in her eye and voice which one could desire to find in a woman. There was a sweet, unostentatious dignity, too, about her which compelled respect. She gave me a long account of the household's troubles, of her own watchings night after night, of the hypotheses she had had about the matter, and how one by one they had been exploded; and she and Mr. Garretson took me all over the house, even up into the attic, among piles of old "lumber," such as boxes, old trunks, old furniture, that had been set aside to make room for new, piled up with hosts of things which almost any other family would have sent off to the auction shops, or sold to second-hand furniture men. But she explained that some of these things had belonged to her grandfather, and other deceased relatives, and that a large old Dutch wooden chest, with great iron clasps all over it, was brought over by Mr. Garretson's ancestors from Europe. These she couldn't bear to sell, she said; "and often," said she, "they afford me great pleasure, for when Mr. Garretson and the girls are gone from home, I sit up here in this old chair" (and she pointed to a large chair, the posts of which were large enough each to make a modern chair out of), "and muse, read, and think over the past, and dwell upon heavenly things to come."