"Did you make those pretty pictures, mamma?" "No, my dear--a gentleman, an artist, made those for me--_I_ make pictures with a-b-c's." "Show me one of your pictures, mamma," said Nettie. Ruth took the child upon her lap, and read her the story of Gertrude. Nettie listened with her clear eyes fixed upon her mother's face. "Don't make her die--oh, please don't make her die, mamma," exclaimed the sensitive child, laying her little hand over her mother's mouth. Ruth smiled, and improvised a favorable termination to her story, more suitable to her tender-hearted audience. "That is nice," said Nettie, kissing her mother; "when I get to be a woman shall I write books, mamma?" "God forbid," murmured Ruth, kissing the child's changeful cheek; "God forbid," murmured she, musingly, as she turned over the leaves of her book; "no happy woman ever writes. From Harry's grave sprang 'Floy.'" CHAPTER LXXVIII. "You have a noble place here," said a gentleman to Ruth's brother, Hyacinth, as he seated himself on the piazza, and his eye lingered first upon the velvet lawn, (with its little clumps of trees) sloping down to the river, then upon the feathery willows now dipping their light green branches playfully into the water, then tossing them gleefully up to the sunlight; "a noble place," said he, as he marked the hazy outline of the cliffs on the opposite side, and the blue river which laved their base, flecked with many a snowy sail; "it were treason not to be poetical here; I should catch the infection myself, matter-of-fact as I am." "Do you see that steamer yonder, floating down the river, Lewis?" said Hyacinth. "Do you know her? No? well she is named 'Floy,' after my sister, by one of her literary admirers." "The ----! _your_ sister? '_Floy_'--your _sister_! why, everybody is going mad to know who she is." "Exactly," replied Hyacinth, running his white fingers through his curls; "'Floy' is my sister." "Why the deuce didn't you tell a fellow before? I have wasted more pens, ink, and breath, trying to find her out, than I can stop to tell you about now, and here you have kept as mum as a mouse all the time. What did you do it for?" "Oh, well," said Hyacinth, coloring a little, "'Floy' had an odd fancy for being _incog._, and I, being in her confidence, you know, was on honor to keep her secret." "But she _still wishes it kept_," said Lewis; "so her publishers, whom I have vainly pumped, tell me. So, as far as that goes, I don't see why you could not have told me before just as well as now." Hyacinth very suddenly became aware of "an odd craft in the river," and was apparently intensely absorbed looking at it through his spy-glass.