She stayed a few weeks at the hotel of those days, a most comfortable one--for, though the building was of frame and the furniture old and shabby, travellers often say that the meals were better and the bed-linen cleaner and better aired than in the present imposing Dépôt Hotel--and finding no one willing or able to buy the Marcellus house at anything like its value, she one day astonished everybody by saying that the house was now withdrawn from sale and that she was going to live in it herself. What a sensation occurred when her furniture arrived! She had brought over all her elegant belongings from Paris, those being days when household effects which had been in use by Americans abroad for a year were passed free of duty at the custom-house. Even now you can scarcely find in any community a house more beautifully furnished than Mrs. Marcellus's. She still uses the things she brought from France, and never allows her head to be turned by any vagaries respecting house-decoration. Her pale-yellow satin drawing-room furniture is charming, a real reminiscence of Marie Antoinette's at the Little Trianon at Versailles. Bronzes and marbles of chaste and beautiful subjects, water-colors and oil-paintings signed by noted names, fresh flowers in lovely abundance at all seasons of the year,--oh, it is a rare home of beauty and culture! And the best of it is, as Mrs. Marcellus often tells us at her pleasant dinner-parties or her cozy Saturday evenings, that by living in Hurville she can enjoy this agreeable and ladylike mode of existence, can do what we know she does for the poor, can subscribe to all periodicals of the day in any way worthy, can entertain her friends often--to their great delight, all loudly exclaim--without being haunted by the slightest shadow of anxiety regarding her income. If she had continued to live in New York she would by this time probably be bankrupt, for a similar manner of living in that costly city would be a dozen times more expensive than it is in Hurville. As it is, she even lays up money; and when her daughters both married, as they did on the same day five years ago, Mrs. Marcellus astonished all the wedding-participants by announcing to them the growth of a plum to the credit of each which she had planted and preserved for them in the hothouse of an old reliable banker's safe in Boston.