Meantime, Helen, left with the two children alone in the house, would scrub, and scour, and cook, and sew, and sing songs, and tell stories,--stories of the good cheer of other days that once this barren house afforded, half of which she believed, and many of which she made up. Thus gradually left so much to herself and her fancies, while the others either detested their origin or laughed at it, Miss Helen had persuaded herself into a conviction that it was all a very fine thing, and was sure that they had by no means come to the end of such a tether, and that some day or other something was to turn up on it. There were the customary legends of every rich family for her to choose from; she might take that of the day when, after General Fotherington's funeral, the guests, returning from the grave, found the old gentleman there before them, storming up and down in a great pother opposite the portrait of his wife, long dead and gone, trying to shake the panel on which it was painted from its setting in the carved wood of the wall, so that half the world believed that the worthy, having failed to find his departed spouse in the spirit-land, had indignantly returned to loosen her ghost from the painting in which some cunning artist had imprisoned it, and the other half declared that certain deeds and records had been concealed between the panel and the chimney-bricks, which the General wished to dislodge; but, as no one knew of any deed or record missing, the matter had slipped by. Or, if Miss Helen's conjecture wearied on that, she might take the rumor concerning a Revolutionary Fotherington, who, being a noted Tory, had seen fit both to eat his cake and have it, and had accordingly buried a great pot of golden Spanish pieces in the garden, and marked the spot with the young slip of a St. Michael's pear-tree. There stood the old St. Michael's at this day, a dead trunk, having long since ceased to bear either fruit or blossom or leaf; and many a time had Helen persuaded Margaret and Frederick to take hoe and shovel and go with her to dig round the roots of the old St. Michael's. Once, after the first digging, the ancient tree surprised them by bursting into a cloud of blossoms, and bearing a crop of golden, juicy pears; but that was the last sign of life it ever gave, and all the gold they ever found. There, too, had been the wide, dark-eaved garrets full of moth-devoured relics of splendor; who knew what might be lying hidden in those vast hair-covered chests? They were there no longer now; for once, in an access of angry irreverence, Margaret had had them all dragged down, and had sold their contents to the rag-man, and had made by her speculation cloaks for themselves and a shawl for Frederick,--in the days when gentlemen condescended to lend to their stiff costume the graceful dignity of a dropping fold or two. But what treasures of parchment might not have been quilted into any one of those old brocaded