Annette smiled with a pleasant anticipation. She rather enjoyed a difference of opinion between the household powers. There was generally some small advantage in one way or another as a result. Reconciliations were sure to follow, and reconciliations brought laxities and favours--not infrequently gifts. She did not forget Sappha’s new piano--the white roses and the tear-stained face, and as a natural sequence--the piano. As they took their way to the Bowling Green madame noticed an unusual quiet in the streets, but Annette, to whom the Bowling Green represented New York, thought everything very lively. The musical exit from St. John’s supplied the conversation, or at least seasoned it with a just interesting acrimony, till the dinner hour arrived. The judge was always pleased to see his mother, and always placed her in his own seat at the table when she eat with them, and this loyal respect and kindness, though so often repeated, never failed to touch madame as if it was a new thing that very hour. So she spoke far more tolerantly than she intended, about the scene at St. John’s, and expended her little store of wrath upon an ordinance which the Common Council had just passed, making it unlawful for any one but those in actual service to beat drums or play fifes on the streets, except under great restrictions as to time. Madame indignantly declared such a law to be “a restriction on the liberty of the individual;” and she reminded her son how much of a sinner he himself had been, when the Revolutionary War was beginning. “You were then a lad of only ten years old, Gerardus, yet the drum was never out of your hands, unless you were playing the fife,” she said. “I am sorry to hear this, mother,” he answered. “The suffering that has been caused by such exhibitions of boyish patriotism is beyond our counting. The healthy have been made sick, the sick have been made worse, and in many cases, undoubtedly, they have died in consequence of the perpetual noise. Latterly these bands have taken to beating drums incessantly before the house of any one thought to be opposed to the war, and the general distress has compelled householders to beseech the Town Council for its interference.” “An old woman am I,” said madame, “but the noise never annoyed me.” “Mother, you are not an old woman, and you will never be old. If you see one hundred years, you will die young.” She put out her thin, brown hand towards her son at this compliment, and he laid his own all over it. Then she added a little defiantly: “More noise than ever we shall have in a day or two. Just nobody, is the Common Council. The new disease is noise, and the boys all have it.” “Well, then, mother, the law will make short work of it--there is a heavy fine and the watch-house for those who do not mind the law.” “Poor boys!” “I think we have had enough of that subject,” said Mrs. Bloommaert; “is there no other news, Gerardus?”