of the rural imagination and shown in the names applied to many familiar objects.  The interior of the cottage was more tasteful and ambitious than that of the ordinary two-story dwellings.  In place of the prevailing hair-cloth covered furniture, the visitor had the satisfaction of seating himself upon a chair covered with some of the Widow’s embroidery, or a sofa luxurious with soft caressing plush.  The sporting tastes of the late Major showed in various prints on the wall:  Herring’s “Plenipotentiary,” the “red bullock” of the ’34 Derby; “Cadland” and “The Colonel”; “Crucifix”; “West-Australian,” fastest of modern racers; and ugly, game old “Boston,” with his straight neck and ragged hips; and gray “Lady Suffolk,” “extending” herself till she measured a rod, more or less, skimming along within a yard of the ground, her legs opening and shutting under her with a snap, like the four blades of a compound jack-knife.

These pictures were much more refreshing than those dreary fancy death-bed scenes, common in two-story country-houses, in which Washington and other distinguished personages are represented as obligingly devoting their last moments to taking a prominent part in a tableau, in which weeping relatives, attached servants, professional assistants, and celebrated personages who might by a stretch of imagination be supposed present, are grouped in the most approved style of arrangement about the chief actor’s pillow.

A single glazed bookcase held the family library, which was hidden from vulgar eyes by green silk curtains behind the glass.  It would have been instructive to get a look at it, as it always is to peep into one’s neighbor’s bookshelves.  From other sources and opportunities a partial idea of it has been obtained.  The Widow had inherited some books from her mother, who was something of a reader:  Young’s “Night-Thoughts”; “The Preceptor”; “The Task, a Poem,” by William Cowper; Hervey’s “Meditations”; “Alonzo and Melissa”; “Buccaneers of America”; “The Triumphs of Temper”; “La Belle Assemblee”; Thomson’s “Seasons”; and a few others.  The Major had brought in “Tom Jones” and “Peregrine Pickle”; various works by Mr. Pierce Egan; “Boxiana”; “The Racing Calendar”; and a “Book of Lively Songs and Jests.”  The Widow had added the Poems of Lord Byron and T. Moore; “Eugene Aram”; “The Tower of London,” by Harrison Ainsworth; some of Scott’s Novels; “The Pickwick Papers”; a volume of Plays, by W. Shakspeare; “Proverbial Philosophy”; “Pilgrim’s Progress”; “The Whole Duty of Man” (a present when she was married); with two celebrated religious works, one by William Law and the other by Philip Doddridge, which were sent her after her husband’s death, and which she had tried to read, but found that they did not agree with her.  Of course the bookcase held a few school manuals and compendiums, and one of Mr. Webster’s Dictionaries.  But the gilt-edged Bible always lay on the centre-table, next to the magazine with the fashion-plates and the scrapbook with pictures from old annuals and illustrated papers.