Dorcas looked wistfully and wishingly at the oval pin; but with no more notion of what she was looking at than the child who gazes into the heavens on a winter night. When she looked into the oval mirror, no dream of the centuries through which it had received on its surface fair and suffering faces, grave, noble, self-sacrificing men, and scenes of trial deep and agonizing,--no dream of the past disturbed the serene unconsciousness of her gaze. She looked at the large pearls that formed the long oval pin, and at the exquisite allegorical painting, which, in the quaint fashion of the time of its execution, was colored with the "ground hair" of the beloved; so materializing sentiment, and, as it were, getting as near as possible to the very heart's blood. Yet the old gold, the elaborate execution of the quaint classical device, and the fanciful arrangement of the braided hair interwoven with twisted gold letters, all told no tales to the observer, whose unwakened nature, indeed, asked no questions. The little room, so small that in these days a College of Physicians would at once condemn it, as a cradle of disease and death, had nevertheless for twenty years been the nightly abode of as perfect a piece of health as the country produced. Whatever might be wanting in height and space was amply made up in inevitable and involuntary ventilation. Health walked in at the wide cracks around the little window-frame, peeped about in all directions with the snow-flakes in winter and the ready breezes in summer, and settled itself permanently on the fresh cheeks and lips of the light sleeper and early riser. Beside the white-covered cot there stood a straight-backed, list-seated oaken chair, a mahogany chest of drawers that reached from floor to ceiling, and a little three-legged light-stand. Everything was covered with white, and the room was fragrant with the lavender and dried rose-leaves with which every drawer was scrupulously perfumed. There was no toilet-table, for Dorcas had use neither for perfumes nor ointment. No Kalydors and no Glycerines came within the category of her healthful experience. Alert and graceful, she neither burnt her fingers nor cut her hands, and had need therefore of no soothing salves or sirups; and as she did not totter in scrimped shoes or tight laces, and so did not fall and break her bones, she had no need even of that modern necessity in all well-regulated families, "Prepared Glue." There was no medicine-chest in Colonel Fox's house. Healthy, occupied, active, and wise--but not too wise--was Dorcas Fox. It is no proof that Dorcas was a beauty, that she looked often in the little mirror. Ugliness is quite as anxious as beauty on that point, and is even oftener found gazing with sad solicitude at itself, if haply there may be found some mollifying or mitigating circumstance, either in outline or expression. But Dorcas's face pleased herself and everybody else.