Then Eleanor rose, and drawing her shawl round her preparatory to going, said shyly, "And what I came to tell you is, that the wedding will take place at Christmas." ITA ANIOL PROKOP. AN AMERICAN LADY'S OCCUPATIONS SEVENTY YEARS AGO. We are looking over sundry trunks and boxes, the careful and the careless gatherings of three generations. There are law-papers in dusty files; familiar gossipy letters from brothers and sisters and college chums; dignified letters from reverend judges and law-makers; letters bursting with scandalized Federalisms, and burning or melting with long-forgotten joys and sorrows. We have read some thousands of these papers, and begin to be very uncertain about the times we are living in. What indeed is this year of our Lord? We have a dim recollection that we have been wished a happy New Year in 1875, yet we are living and thinking with the boys and girls of 1776, who have grown to be the men and women of Jefferson's time. To make things more misty to our comprehension, we are sitting by a dormer window in a high, "hip-roofed" garret of a mansion built just before the Revolution, and the air is redolent of ancient memories. The very cobweb that swung across the window just now has a venerable appearance, entirely inconsistent with the fact that the housemaid's broom was supposed to have whisked across these beams but yesterday. But then the housemaids of to-day, as everybody knows, are, as a source of perplexity and vexation of spirit, always to be relied upon, but never to be relied upon for anything else. And with the thought we sigh for the "good old days" and the "good old servants" of our grandmothers. Happy grandmothers! so blessed in their simple, quiet lives, unvexed by ever-changing fashions and domestics! What did they know of trouble whose best silk gowns remained in fashion from year to year, and whose cooks never treated them to an empty breakfast-table, and a cool "I thought I'd be a-lavin' this marnin', mum"? Happy grandmothers! Thus thinking, we pick up a little rough paper-book with marbled covers from the corner of the old hair trunk where it was long ago thrown by some careless hand. The little tumbled book proves to be a diary. Not a record of a soul's strivings and pantings after a higher life, or a curiously minute inquiry into the possible reasons which induced the Almighty to allow Satan to afflict Job, but a simple daily note-book, the memoranda of a housekeeper. The old letters had been to us what the newspapers of to-day will be to the great-grandchildren of the present generation. The diary carried us back into the immediate home-life of seventy years ago.