While she was making her toilet we had an opportunity of learning something of Herbert, who, whether he were so or not, seemed much pleased with everything around him. Occasionally, however, I doubted his sincerity, for when Aunt Betsey was presented to him, he appeared quite as much delighted with her as with anything else, drawing his chair closely to her side, and asking her numberless questions about the best modes of making cheese and raising chickens, while all the time there was a peculiarly quizzical expression in his eyes, which were dark and very handsome, saving that the lids were too red to suit my ideas of beauty. To Anna and her _spit curls_ he took kindly, and ere his lady mother made her appearance a second time he had put his arm around her twice, telling her she should come to Boston sometime and go to school. A rustle of silk upon the stairs announced the descent of Aunt Charlotte, and with her nose slightly elevated, ready for any emergency, she entered the parlor, where she was introduced to Aunt Betsey, who, courtesying straight down, “hoped to see her well,” adding, that she “s’posed she’d come to the country to see how poor folks lived.” Falling back into the rocking-chair which Anna brought for her, Aunt Charlotte made no particular reply, save an occasional attack upon her hartshorn. Aunt Betsey, however, nothing daunted, endeavored to engage her in conversation by asking if “she knew Liza Ann Willcott, a tailoress girl, that boarded with a Miss Johnson, who used to live in Union, but who now lived in Boston.” Frowning majestically, Aunt Charlotte replied that she had not the honor of Miss Willcott’s acquaintance, whereupon Aunt Betsey advised her to make it by all means, assuring her that “Liza Ann was a first rate girl, and that Miss Johnson was the best kind of a neighbor, always willin’ to _lend_, or do a good turn”——