The shanty to which Mary Margaret conducted her guest stood in a vacant lot, high up in the city. It was a rustic affair, composed of boards mingled with the odds and ends from old buildings, that Michael Dillon had been engaged in demolishing during his experience as a laboring man. Indeed, Michael was a very favorable specimen of metropolitan squatter sovereignty, and had succeeded in securing no inconsiderable means of creature comfort around him, though another man was owner of the soil. He had managed, when out of work, to wall in a little patch of land, in a rude, loose way, it is true, which he denominated the garden, and some dozen or two of fine cabbages, as many hills of potatoes, and a cucumber vine, where great, plethoric, yellow cucumbers were ripening for seeds, gave color and force to Michael’s assumption. In addition to these substantials, Mary Margaret had contributed her share of the useful and picturesque by planting nasturtians all along the low, stone wall, which clothed the rude structure with a sheet of gorgeous blossoms, and gave it the look of an immense garland flung upon the ground. Thus hedging her husband’s usefulness in with flowers, the province of a true woman, Mary Margaret had helped to win a gleam of the beautiful from the rude, stony soil from which Michael strove to wrest a portion of their daily food. I have often thought that true goodness, in a woman, at least, is always accompanied with glimmerings of fine taste. Certain it is, Mary Margaret had managed to impart no common show of rustic effect to her little, board shanty. Its door and simple window were entwined with morning-glories and scarlet runners that took the morning sunshine beautifully, and on a rainy day shed gleams of red and purple all over the front of the shanty, tangling themselves and peeping out in unexpected crevices even among the slabs on the roof. Indeed, they encroached on the province of a mockorange, that for two years had kept possession of the roof, and the sturdy vine was obliged to drop its golden fruit among the purple and red bells of the morning-glory, and even to creep off to the back of the shanty, where no one could see the richness and symmetry of its fruits. Then there was a sweet-briar bush indigenous to the soil, at one end of her dwelling, which Mary Margaret had pruned and caressed into profuse luxuriance; though it was dark, the scent of this bush greeted Catharine as she approached the shanty; with this pleasant sensation she entered her new home almost cheerfully. The shanty was divided by a board partition into two small rooms, not so untidy as to be repulsive, but rather close to one entering from the fresh night air. The anteroom contained a bed, in which Mary Margaret’s sterner half lay sound asleep, after a hard day’s toil beneath the hod.