So, after various desultory wanderings, we returned home. Home! how I dreaded it, for I knew the power of association--the effect of localities and customary external habits on the feelings. You may take a careworn, dyspeptic, melancholy man out for a week's excursion, and he will show himself preeminent in all good fellowship. But as the familiar sights gradually open on him at returning, you may see the shadows flitting down upon his brow and entering his soul. How many good resolutions of change and reform--of breaking old associations and forming new ones--we make when absent from our usual haunts! How impossible it becomes to realize them when we re-occupy the familiar places! * * * * * But so it was, we reached home. All my anticipations were realized. The old spirit, the old manner, were revived in my wife. At this time an installment of pictures and statues from Italy came to hand. I welcomed them as angels of mercy. When I announced the arrival to my wife, a flush struggled to her cheek, and a radiance to her eye. 'Ha! you think,' said I in my communings, 'that Frank is to be present with you in his works, and that through them you may be in his presence. So you shall, but they shall become only an annoyance and a weariness,--for themselves and for him.' The statues and pictures were brought to the house and unpacked. My wife was almost tremulous with eagerness to behold them. I had taken care, however, to have a number of acquaintances present,--some of genuine artistic taste, some of only pretensions, and others utterly ignorant. As the various works were displayed, my artistic friends, as in courtesy bound, and as their merit really deserved, duly eulogized them, and the praises were echoed by the rest. Finally we came to a box which contained a label marked 'The statue of Hope Downcast.' 'Aha! master Frank,' thought I, 'so I have you at last.' I could see my wife quivering with the contest of feeling,--between her annoyance at the presence of visitors, and the necessity of controlling herself and uniting in their commendations. 'Hope Downcast' was raised to the perpendicular, and proved to be a beautiful life-size statue, representing a female figure standing on a rock, in a most dejected attitude, one foot unsandaled, her raiment torn, her hair loose, the fillet which confined it lying parted at her feet, the star upon the fillet deprived of some of its points, and the ordinary emblem of Hope, the anchor, broken at her side. The applicability of the conception to the history of Frank and my wife, I readily understood. My guests broke out into raptures, in which I joined, and, by continual appeals to my wife, constrained her to do the same. I also took the opportunity of inquiring the name of the artist, and requested my wife to express to him the entire satisfaction he had given in the execution of his commission.