homeward too.  But now are her melancholy meditations cheered and her torpid blood warmed and her shoulders lightened of at least twenty ponderous years by a draught from the true fountain of youth in a case-bottle.  It is strange that men should deem that fount a fable, when its liquor fills more bottles than the Congress-water.—­Sip it again, good nurse, and see whether a second draught will not take off another score of years, and perhaps ten more, and show us in your high-backed chair the blooming damsel who plighted troths with Edward Fane.—­Get you gone, Age and Widowhood!—­Come back, unwedded Youth!—­But, alas! the charm will not work.  In spite of Fancy’s most potent spell, I can see only an old dame cowering over the fire, a picture of decay and desolation, while the November blast roars at her in the chimney and fitful showers rush suddenly against the window.

Yet there was a time when Rose Grafton—­such was the pretty maiden-name of Nurse Toothaker—­possessed beauty that would have gladdened this dim and dismal chamber as with sunshine.  It won for her the heart of Edward Fane, who has since made so great a figure in the world and is now a grand old gentleman with powdered hair and as gouty as a lord.  These early lovers thought to have walked hand in hand through life.  They had wept together for Edward’s little sister Mary, whom Rose tended in her sickness—­partly because she was the sweetest child that ever lived or died, but more for love of him.  She was but three years old.  Being such an infant, Death could not embody his terrors in her little corpse; nor did Rose fear to touch the dead child’s brow, though chill, as she curled the silken hair around it, nor to take her tiny hand and clasp a flower within its fingers.  Afterward, when she looked through the pane of glass in the coffin-lid and beheld Mary’s face, it seemed not so much like death or life as like a wax-work wrought into the perfect image of a child asleep and dreaming of its mother’s smile.  Rose thought her too fair a thing to be hidden in the grave, and wondered that an angel did not snatch up little Mary’s coffin and bear the slumbering babe to heaven and bid her wake immortal.  But when the sods were laid on little Mary, the heart of Rose was troubled.  She shuddered at the fantasy that in grasping the child’s cold fingers her virgin hand had exchanged a first greeting with mortality and could never lose the earthy taint.  How many a greeting since!  But as yet she was a fair young girl with the dewdrops of fresh feeling in her bosom, and, instead of “Rose”—­which seemed too mature a name for her half-opened beauty—­her lover called her “Rosebud.”