The piano, too, is not only closed, but locked, for the flesh is weak, and I fear the temptation of the beautiful cold keys. It may be the baneful effect of a foreign education, but I cannot see that there would be any evil result from a little music on Sundays. However, we have a Dissenting church for a next-door neighbor, and the residents of Chappaqua are chiefly Quakers, who frown upon the piano as an ungodly instrument; so with a sigh, I replace in my portfolio that grand hymn that in 1672 saved the life of the singer, Stradella, from the assassin's knife, and a beautiful Ave Maria, solemn and chaste in its style as though written by St. Gregory himself, but composed and dedicated to me by mamma's friend, Professor F. L. Ritter. My pretty bits of fancy work with their bright-colored silks, the tiny needle-book worked while in Munich in an especially pretty stitch, and in the Bavarian colors--blue and white--and my Bavarian thimble--silver and amethyst--are put away in a bureau drawer, for although a Catholic, I do not imitate our Lutheran maid, who spends her Sundays in sewing and knitting. Plato and Kohlrausch, our week-day sustenance, do not come certainly under the head of Sunday reading, although I see nothing objectionable in them; but after all, one requires, I think, a change of literature on Sundays as well as a different dress, and an extra course at dinner. "What shall we do?" says Gabrielle. We have each written a letter or two, for Sunday is, I am sure, every one's letter-writing day, and now we put on our broad-brimmed garden hats, with their graceful trimmings of gauze and crape, and stroll off to the spicy pine grove, where we sit down on the dry spines, and Arthur repeats to us quaint bits from some of the rare old books he read in the British Museum three years ago, or entertains us with some of his own adventures when travelling on foot over beautiful France and Italy, and "Merrie England." Ida and I, however, wandered away from the others this morning, and strolled up to the dear old house in the woods where she passed her childhood. This is, to my mind, the sweetest and most picturesque spot upon the entire estate, and I do not wonder that Aunt Mary, with her keen love for the beautiful in Nature, her indifference to general society, and her devotion to her children, to study, and to reflection, preferred the quiet seclusion of her home shut in by evergreens, with the deep ravine, and the joyous little brook at her feet, to the most superb mansion that graces our magnificent Hudson. [Illustration: The House in the Woods.]