This was perfectly easy for Rose, for her own inclinations were uninterested in the matter. Breaking up an old home, the home of many years—I had nearly said centuries, is not like a modern city May day flitting. A home like old Heath Hall, with its accumulations, its secretions of many years and many hearts, with its innumerable old closets, cupboards, wardrobes, escritoires, and “old oak chests,” with their inexhaustible treasures, relics, and curiosities—from the doublet and hose that the founder of the American branch of the family wore—with his point and ruffles and bonnet and plume—to the cocked hat and rusty sword of great-great-grandfather, and the hooped petticoat and high heeled shoes of his wife—from the first baby cap that the first American Churchill baby wore, to the lock of grey hair that was cut from his coffined head just before the lid was screwed down—from the veil that fell around the maiden at her bridal to the cap the grandmother died in—from the bullet extracted from the fiery-hearted son who had perished in battle, to the clerical black silk gown his gentle bosomed brother had worn in his ministry when he married, christened or blessed. Truly the organ of veneration must be largely developed in these old Maryland and Virginian families—all things linked with family associations are relics it would be little short of sacrilege to destroy. The cast off bridal wreath and veil that a northern or a city belle would generously and properly bestow upon some young sister or cousin, is gently lifted from her daughter’s brow by a Maryland mother—reverentially lifted as you have seen a minister raise the cloth from a communion table, and laid away a sacred treasure, a relic to be handled with awe and love by the children in future ages. The wardrobe of the dead that many northern and city families send to the proper destination, the backs of the ragged living, in Maryland and Virginia is carefully collected and packed away in chests and locked, and hermetically sealed as it were to moulder away to dust in long years. These old houses—how the very smell of their musty mysterious old closets and closely shaded rooms, for dreaming carries us back to the days when people did not understand that ventilation was necessary to health, to the days when we lay across grandmother’s soft lap, watching through our winking eyes grandmother’s dear good face, and, vibrating between angel dream land and her capped and spectacled face, dimly wondered what we were, and slipped from this vague feeling into sleep. These old houses have no antiquities carrying us back to the very ancient feudal times, it is true; but they have that which comes more warmly, _so_ warmly! home to the heart, all the signs of _long inhabitedness_. The old windows may creak in the wintry blast, and the wind whistle up from crevices at the very foot of the old mantel-pieces beside the blazing hickory fire, yet the heart is all the warmer for its