Dear Children: To-day something pleasant has happened. I have found a little room I never saw before, away off in the corner of a long entry; and will you believe it? there are the remains of a wood fire in it--real ashes, which I could blow about with my breath, only I do not like to disturb them, and a piece of burnt brand. Some one must have lived in this room, and perhaps not so very long ago. It is hung with flowered chintz curtains, like those around my bed at home. It made me so happy to see them, I kissed the flowers and the buds on them; and yet it made me sad, too, I longed so for my own little room. I lifted the curtains all around the walls, hoping to find a window, and found a little one in a corner, but the shutters were closed. I thought that it might overlook the lake and the hills, and that perhaps some little girl had once sat there with the soft breeze blowing upon her, and she had seen the dancing waves of the lake, and far across it our little brown house, which I would rather see now than the glancing waters I once loved so well. I pushed and pulled; I looked for a spring, and ran over all kinds of strange words in hopes to find one that would open it; but all in vain. There was no bar across the shutter, and yet it was firmly closed. Then I looked around the room. There was a small statue carved in wood of a boy, with an extinguished torch in one hand, stretching out the other as if he were groping in the darkness. There was another carving in wood of a child lying asleep, and an angel bending over it binding a wreath of roses on its head. I looked at this angel, with her softly-folded wings and loving face, for a long while, and at the little sleeping child, and thought, perhaps an angel is binding my head with roses while I sleep in this marble house, for my life here all seems like a sleep and a dream. There was nothing else in the room except a wooden footstool and a spinning wheel, the broken thread hanging upon it. On the walls was a picture of a child with a halo around its head. It might not be a very good painting, but the face was lovely, and seemed to say, “Come with me.” There was a little straw mat beneath this picture, as if some one had knelt before it; at least I did. Then I drew the footstool up, and sat near the ashes, on the hearth. I tried to imagine I was sitting by the fire at home, close to my mother's side, on my little footstool, while Mary, and the baby, and father were frolicking together, as they always do at night; but O, there was only the dead brand. And yet I would rather sit and look into those ashes, and think what a pleasant fire was once there, or might be, if rekindled, than gaze, as the lady does, into that hard, glittering fire, which is always the same.