Into this august retreat came daily one or another of the young fellow's connection with inquiries about that property which everyone of them called in all honesty and simplicity "my house"; and, after much futile advice, took their leave, commenting on the fact that he strongly resembled his grandfather, and adjuring him to "remember that he was a Gwynne." There were so many of them they gave the place a false air of bustle and business, to which Gwynne used, half in fun, to attribute his later success--"looked as if I was all balled up with work, you know, 'rising young lawyer,' and all the rest of it." But, indeed, I am afraid there were not many affairs of importance going forward among the calf-bound volumes, and Gwynne defaced more than one sheet of legal cap., with gross caricatures and idle verses. If the family took an interest in the fortunes of the house before, it was redoubled now. To have the place rented at all was a novelty; but to have it rented to personages of such opulence and distinction as the Pallinders satisfied the most exact standards; and the colonel's somewhat vague allusions to his design of ultimately buying it filled these sanguine souls with delight. Let me do them justice: they would one and all have indignantly refused thousands from people whom they deemed unworthy. Have we not seen them rejecting poor Silberberg's offer with contumely? But Colonel Pallinder with his Virginia accent and his large manner recalled a generation contemporary with Governor Gwynne himself, and the traditions of an antique and formal gentility. The Pallinders were the only people so far who had succeeded in residing in, and dispensing the hospitalities of the old Gwynne house without offence to its owners; I think the Gwynnes took a kind of vicarious pride in the spectacle. One after another, the entire family called upon them, appraised them, patronised them. They drank the colonel's fine sherry: they covertly eyed Mrs. Pallinder's suave beauty, and Mazie's bewildering toilettes; they were at first repelled and then overpowered by the rich tasteful changes in the ancient rooms; the peacock-blue plush and old-gold satin in the south parlour; the crimson wall-paper embossed with gilt figures the size of a cabbage in the dining-room; the grand piano in the north parlour and piano-lamp glorious with onyx slabs and pendant glass icicles of prisms--the Gwynnes saw all these things with an Indian stolidity in the presence of their tenants, but they came away pleased to the core. They went down to Gwynne's office--yes, even Mrs. Horace Gwynne went!--and both figuratively and literally patted him on the back. They were actually civil to Templeton! Old Steven Gwynne, who had been violently alarmed at first, supposing that these improvements and furnishings must be paid for by himself and the rest of the heirs, magically recovered his tranquillity so soon as he heard that Colonel Pallinder was doing