After paying due homage to the magnificent scenery around us, our conversation took a more common-place turn, and, as we had met that day after a long separation, during which Julia had paid a visit to some of our old friends in the north, she detailed to me the many happy meetings and amusing incidents of her excursion. She had gone through a long narration of the sayings and doings of aunts and cousins, and had given me a full list of new members of several families which we remembered in their simple elements, when the fathers and mothers were girls and boys, innocent of all thoughts of matrimony, and ignorant of its joys and sorrows. She enumerated the births, deaths and marriages of a whole village, in each individual resident of which we had felt more or less interest in our early years, and detailed their various changes of fortune and situation. In fact she brought up many years' arrearages of information, to me of more importance than the result of the Kentucky election, or the fate of the prime match on the Union Course between the best horses of the north and south. The private history of the old associates of my youth, as thus narrated to me, might have afforded a moral to adorn a tale of much higher interest than this I am now writing. "And you saw my Aunt Deborah," said I. "Pray how does she look, and what did she say? I remember the eccentric old soul, as if the ten long years since I have seen her had been but as many months. Many a lecture did she utter on the extravagance, the impetuosity, and the recklessness of my boyhood; and much did she preach to me of prudence and moderation, I fear, in vain. Does she still remember my wild pranks?" "Oh yes--but her censure of your wildness was so mingled with praises of your good qualities, that I doubt whether she would have permitted another person to speak ill, even of those points in your character which she blamed the most." "Kind old woman! It was so when I was a boy. She was perpetually lecturing, and yet she was most kind to me. And somehow, in spite of her irksome admonitions, for which I had then no great relish, I soon discovered that I was a favorite with her." "On one point she was particularly urgent. She questioned me whether you had as yet learned the value of money, observing, that in your younger days you had been a good-for-nothing little spendthrift." "I hope you did not deceive the good old lady. It would be but fair that she should know that the prudence with which I was not born, has failed as yet of obtaining a lodgment in my head. It would have been a pity to deprive her of the glorious consolation of knowing that her predictions of my improvidence have been fully realized." "Well, I did not think it necessary to inform her of the full extent of your delinquency; but I admitted to her that you had not the gift of _saving_, which she admires so much." "She often told me that I would never acquire it."