Cousin Mary, living on Erin Hill, in her stepfather’s house, took _Graham’s Magazine_—_Godey’s_ only rival. She likewise subscribed for the _Saturday Evening Courier_, and exchanged it regularly with my mother for the _Saturday Evening Post_—all published in Philadelphia. The _New York Mirror_, edited by N. P. Willis, George P. Morris, and Theodore S. Fay, was another welcome guest in both families. For Sunday reading we had the _New York Observer_, _The Watchman and Observer_, _The Presbyterian_—religious weeklies that circulated in the neighborhood for a fortnight, and were then filed for future reference. We children had _Parley’s Magazine_ sent to us, as long ago as I can recollect, by our grandmother. After the death of her second husband, the good old deacon, and her removal to Virginia, which events were coeval with the Tayloe dynasty, our father subscribed for _Parley’s_. We had all the new books that he adjudged to be worth buying and reading, watching eagerly for anything from Dickens, Marryat, and Cooper, and devouring with avidity not excited by any novel, Stephens’s _Travels in Arabia Petrea_ and in _Central America_, Bruce’s _Travels in Abyssinia_, and the no less enchanting tales Mungo Park was telling the world of his adventures in the Dark Continent. “The chamber” was a big room on the first floor, and adjoined the dining-room—so big that the wide high-poster, curtained and ceiled with gayly figured chintz, in a far corner, left three-fourths of the floor-space unoccupied. My mother’s bureau (another heirloom) looked small beside the bed; a lounge was between the front windows; rocking-chairs stood here and there; thick curtains, matching the bed-hangings, shut out wintry gusts, and a great wood fire leaped and laughed upon the pipe-clayed hearth from the first of November to the middle of March. A blaze of dry sticks was kindled there every morning and evening up to July 4th. The younger children were dressed and undressed there on cool days. Our mother held, in advance of her contemporaries, that an open fire was a germ-killer. Why do I single out that particular engraving for a place in these reminiscences? It graced the first page of the November number of _Godey’s Lady’s Book_. The evening was wild with wind and blustering rain, the fire roaring defiance as the loosely fitting sashes rattled and the showers lashed the panes. There were five of us girls, and each had some bit of handiwork. To sit idle while the reading went on was almost a misdemeanor. Dorinda Moody, Virginia Lee Patterson, Musidora Owen, Mea, and myself were classmates and cronies. My mother was reader that evening, and as she opened the magazine at the frontispiece, Virginia Patterson and I called out: “Why, that is a picture of Miss Wilson!” We all leaned over the stand to look at the engraving, which my mother held up to general view. “It _is_ like her!” she assented.