is worn close to the face; it is gray, of that peculiar kind which results from a mixture of very fair hairs with perfectly white ones. We can only see a little of it, however, on account of the cap. Although Mrs. Ogden is hard at work in her kitchen, making a potato-pie, and although it is not yet ten o'clock in the morning, she is dressed in what in any other person would be considered rather an extravagant manner, and in a manner certainly incongruous with her present occupation. It is a theory of hers that she is so exquisitely neat in all she does, that for her there is no danger in wearing any dress she chooses, either in her kitchen or elsewhere; and as she has naturally a love for handsome clothes, and an aversion to changing her dress in the middle of the day, she comes downstairs at five o'clock in the morning as if she had just dressed to receive a small dinner-party. The clothes that she wears just now _have_ in fact done duty at past dinner-parties, and are quite magnificent enough for a lady at the head of her table, cutting potato-pies instead of fabricating them, if only they were a little less shabby, and somewhat more in harmony with the prevailing fashion. Her dress is a fine-flowered satin, which a punster would at once acknowledge in a double sense if he saw the farinaceous scatterings which just now adorn it; and her cap is so splendid in ribbons that no writer of the male sex could aspire to describe it adequately. She wears an enormous cameo brooch, and a long gold chain whose fancy links are interrupted or connected by little glittering octagonal bars, like the bright glass bugles in her head-dress. The pattern of her satin is occasionally obscured by spots of grease, notwithstanding Mrs. Ogden's theory that she is too neat and careful to incur any risk of such accidents. One day her son Isaac had ventured to call his mother's attention to these spots, and to express an opinion that it might perhaps be as well to have two servants instead of one, and resign practical kitchen-work; or else that, if she _would_ be a servant herself, she ought to dress like one, and not expose her fine things to injury; but Mr. Isaac Ogden received such an answer as gave him no encouragement to renew his remonstrances on a subject so delicate. "My dresses," said Mrs. Ogden, "are paid for out of my own money, and I shall wear them when I like and where I like. If ever my son is applied to to pay my bills for me, he may try to teach me economy, but I'm 'appy to say that I'm not dependent upon him either for what I eat or for what I drink, or for any thing that I put on." The other brother, who lived under the same roof with Mrs. Ogden, and saw her every day, had a closer instinctive feeling of what might and might not be said to her, and would as soon have thought of suggesting any abdication, however temporary, of her splendors, as of suggesting to Queen Victoria that she might manage without the luxuries of her station.