AUNT BRIDGET. “Very strange!” said Mr Atheling--he had just laid upon the breakfast-table a letter edged with black, which had startled them all for the moment into anxiety,--“very strange!” “What is very strange?--who is it, William?” asked Mrs Atheling, anxiously. “Do you remember how you spoke of her last night?--only last night--my Aunt Bridget, of whom we have not heard for years? I could almost be superstitious about this,” said Papa. “Poor old lady! she is gone at last.” Mrs Atheling read the letter eagerly. “And she spoke of us, then?--she was sorry. Who could have persuaded her against us, William?” said the good mother--“and wished you should attend her funeral. You will go?--surely you must go.” But as she spoke, Mrs Atheling paused and considered--travelling is not so easy a matter, when people have only two hundred a-year. “It would do her no pleasure now, Mary,” said Mr Atheling, with a momentary sadness. “Poor Aunt Bridget; she was the last of all the old generation; and now it begins to be our turn.” In the mean time, however, it was time for the respectable man of business to be on his way to his office. His wife brushed his hat with gravity, thinking upon his words. The old old woman who was gone, had left no responsibility behind her; but these children!--how could the father and the mother venture to die, and leave these young ones in the unfriendly world! Charlie had gone to his office an hour ago--other studies, heavier and more discouraging even than the grammars, lay in the big law-books of Mr Foggo’s office, to be conquered by this big boy. Throughout the day he had all the miscellaneous occupations which generally fall to the lot of the youngest clerk. Charlie said nothing about it to any one, but went in at these ponderous tomes in the morning. They were frightfully tough reading, and he was not given to literature; he shook his great fist at them, his natural enemies, and went in and conquered. These studies were pure pugilism so far as Charlie was concerned: he knocked down his ponderous opponent, mastered him, stowed away all his wisdom in his own prodigious memory, and replaced him on his shelf with triumph. “Now that old fellow’s done for,” said Charlie--and next morning the young student “went in” at the next. Agnes and Marian were partly in this secret, as they had been in the previous one; so these young ladies came down stairs at seven o’clock to make breakfast for Charlie. It was nine now, and the long morning began to merge into the ordinary day; but the girls arrested Mamma on the threshold of her daily business to make eager inquiry about the Aunt Bridget, of whom, the only one among all their relatives, they knew little but the name.