Aunt Charlotte, to whom I handed the note, consented to my going, and immediately after dinner, which that day was served at an earlier hour than usual, I started. Long and daily walks have always been to me a luxury, and so, though I had been but a few months in Boston, I was tolerably well acquainted with most of its localities, and had no trouble in finding the once stylish, but now rather dilapidated and gloomy looking block, in one part of which Dr. Clayton was keeping house. Since the night when I met him at the theatre, I had never seen him, and all that I knew of him was that he had left the Tremont. Subsequently, however, I heard the whole history of their proceedings—partly from the doctor, partly from Dell, and partly from other sources, and as a recital of it may not be wholly uninteresting to my readers, I will give it before proceeding with a description of my call. It seems that boarding at the Tremont was rather too expensive for a physician, whose patients were not so numerous as to be troublesome, and several times had the doctor proposed returning to his old place in Sturbridge, where everything was cheaper; but to this Dell objected, for she well knew it would be an admission that they could not succeed in Boston, and against this her pride revolted. “People at home,” she reasoned, “would never know how matters really were, and as long as she could keep up an appearance of gentility and upper-ten-dom with her former friends, she should do so,” preferring, like many others, almost absolute want in the city, to plenty in the country. From this, the reader is not to infer that the doctor was extremely poor; for when he first went to Boston he was worth about fifteen hundred dollars, which, in a country village, with a prudent wife, would have surrounded him with all the comforts of life, besides leaving him with something for that “rainy day,” about which everybody blessed with a careful grandmother has heard more or less.