visits of the young people were less frequent; but the close friendship formed with Ease had never been loosened. Mr. Mullen's youth had vanished early; but he had remained single until well towards middle life. Scandal had made free with his name in connection with Mrs. Smithers, both before and after he had married a timid wife, whom, after the fashion of Browning's Duke, he expected "To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen At the proper place, in the proper minute, And die away the life between." A sweet woman, who lived again in her grand-daughter Ease, was Mrs. Mullen,--a flower requiring sunshine and love, and who was as surely chilled to death by the frosty smiles of her husband as the four-o'clocks by the rime of autumn. Dying she left him two children,--Tabitha, the eldest, "a little faithful copy of her sire;" and Agnes, quite as true to the mother-type. Tabitha the father had kept at home, and educated himself. She grew up so like him, that she almost seemed an image into which had been breathed his spirit. Tabitha Mullen was a woman of stately presence, with keen black eyes, and hair which had been like a raven's wing until time began to whiten it. She dressed always richly, wearing sumptuous apparel, rather because it was in keeping with her state as the only remaining representative of her name, than as if impelled thereto by any womanly vanity. She ruled her household with a rod of iron; and, from the boy who drove the cows afield, to the stately butler, the servants all stood in awe of her. This butler had once been a great scandal to the worthy people of Montfield; and even time had done little to change their feelings. He was one of Mr. Mullen's English innovations; and besides this objection, and the outrage of being a man-servant for indoor service, the butler was, in the minds of the village people, connected with the very questionable inversion of the natural order of things caused by five-o'clock dinners, and the still more outrageous habit of having wine at that meal. Miss Tabitha drank wine at dinner, and had it served by a butler in livery, because her father had done so before her. That Montfielders were shocked was a matter for which she cared no more than she did what missionary the King of Borrioboola-Gha ate for his breakfast. The absurdity of attempting to keep up the state of an old English mansion in a New-England village was a matter which the mistress of Mullen House did not choose to see; and that to which she chose to be blind she would not have perceived if illuminated by the concentrated light of a burning universe. So Mullen House and its mistress, its life and its state, existed in strange anachronism in the midst of the work-a-day world of Montfield. Not an easy woman to live with was Tabitha Mullen, as her niece had found. Agnes Mullen, the younger daughter, had been reared by the sister of her mother; had married a young music-teacher with no fortune save the