There is a peculiar fascination in these artless notices; one may read whole columns of such Paradises awaiting tenants, every morning in the journals. They are so rich in promise, so fertile in pleasant suggestion, it seems as if a person might spend a happy lifetime in the simple pursuit of renting and moving into them one after another. But, strange to say, for many months Mr. Virgil H. Templeton piped and nobody would dance! The causes of both health and education suffered serious neglect; nobody showed the least anxiety to teach young ladies in the commodious mansion built by the late Governor Gwynne; nobody wanted to establish a summer-resort within easy walking-distance of two lines of cars. Once in a while someone would come in, get the keys, and go out to inspect the place; but invariably "they laughed as they rode away," like the false knight in the ballad. It is possible that the disadvantages connected with living in it which the family had noticed, were, by some strange chance, apparent to would-be tenants also. Templeton did his best; he placarded the brick walls of the park; he changed and re-worded his advertisements; he even lowered the terms and promised repairs! All these measures were looked upon with strong disfavour by the family; and it is safe to say that no real-estate dealer before or since has ever come in for the share of bullying and badgering that that well-meaning man received. The two old Misses Gwynne, Arthur's daughters, put on their two old bonnets, and went down to Judge Lewis' office, where the unfortunate agent had a desk, declaiming loudly against the vulgarity of advertising their noble ancestral residence in the _common_ papers where every ragamuffin might read their names shamelessly printed. "Want me to go 'round and whisper it to everybody, I s'pose," said Templeton in a rage, when they had left. He was an excitable little man. Mrs. Horace Gwynne visited him with the information that she, for one, would never consent to the house being rented for less than two hundred. "Cents or dollars, ma'am?" asked Templeton politely sarcastic. "You're quite as likely to get one as the other." Steven Gwynne, as "queer" a body as one commonly sees at large without a keeper--he was a Southern sympathiser, and never cut his hair or beard after the fall of Vicksburg--ambushed Templeton in Judge Lewis' own room, to tell him roundly that what was good enough for Governor Gwynne was good enough for any damned upstart that wanted to rent his house, and that not one square inch of new wall-paper should go on those walls, so help him, if he, Steven Gwynne, had to camp on the doorstep with a shot-gun! The judge witnessed these passages-at-arms with mingled annoyance and amusement; it was a nuisance of course, he said; he was minded to evict Templeton a dozen times--but how it did enliven the dull legal round! The Gwynnes and their agent furnished that jolly and kind-hearted jurist with