The dowager's chiding laugh, low and musical, at that festive gathering of little Sue's, was at once rebuke and pardon for the past. It inspired the music: the deft fiddler touched the speaking strings with firmer bow, and the clashing violins, tinkling triangle and the shrill bubbling of the quill pipe rolled mellowing through the halls and under arches of cedar and rosebush where lovers strolled among the shrubbery. The dowager sat gossiping in the broad hall. Such talk, too! with a flavor of old bellehood in it, when Mr. Clay's graceful form visited the saloons and Prentice and Wallace were young and dashing poets of society. She quoted with quaint accentuation mellow old-fashioned verses inscribed to her at those old merry meetings, and Time rolled up his curtain to feelings and fashions of thought like the faint musk of old pressed rose-leaves. Ah me! I wrote some verses myself t'other day--little verses indeed, and for a very little girl. But I think when the brain that thought and the heart that felt so are long dust, some old, old grandam shall take them from her reticule and say to great-grandchildren, "He wrote them for me when I was but a little girl," and across the ashes of three quarters of a century the dead lips shall speak again to hearts as kind and tender. The seed sowed in thorny labor may be choked up, and, barren of tears, the dry rocks of time wither the sweet old fancies I have written, but this little seed by the wayside shall lift its tiny sheaf, and I too shall have my small harvest of immortality. I think of it as I picture the dowager to myself, so fearfully and wonderfully made, and I confess to a chaste admiration for those old belles of society and their nepenthe of cosmetics, bringing down to us a sort of Hallow-e'en summer dressed in the quaint phraseology of an elder period. I do protest against those jejune satirists who hold them up to ridicule, forsooth! because unique and like themselves, and true, because always like themselves, to the latest lapse of affectation. Let us be sure, however quaintly the lacquer be laid on, there is real porcelain below in these reserves of old china, which we affectedly call sham only because it differs in texture and ornament from the delft cast in a common mould. The dowager was all vivacity, looking lightly on those limber heels age is so wont to decry, but alert, sensitively conscious of that pedestal of affected juvenescence, and bold with that old pioneer blood of hers that needs but a scratch to show the cruel, revengeful Indian fighter below. Silly Bob Nettles was romping by with Sudie--promenade all, around the porches, through the hall, and back to their places. The dowager had but time to intimate, "The young gentleman with Sue--Mr. Nettles, is it?--isn't he rather free?" and Mr. Brown to feel it rather, when they came by. Sue's hair was down, her eyes bright, cheeks flushed, her lips bubbling with laughter; and that unlucky Bob was singing,