“But you are tired long ago, and you can easily imagine what comes after.  See!” and she turned a ring on her finger until I could catch the shimmer of its stone.  “That is how it ended; and though I did not accept it until the next spring in Rome, I shall always blame that night for the whole affair.  When I asked Fred why he took the trouble to follow me after the double snubbing I had given him, he said ‘I was worth it.’  But since we are engaged he teases me shamefully—­calls me doctor, hopes I intend to support him in comfort and ease, and says that it always was his ambition to be the husband of a strong-minded woman, and broadly hints about my experience in traveling being so useful to him.  And aunt?  When I first told her she looked so shocked and disappointed that I threw myself in her arms, saying I would not distress her for the world; that I would do anything she desired; that if she wished she might send Fred off, for I loved her best on earth.  But after some minutes of deep thought she looked at me quizzically and replied, ’You know, dear, I always said you must choose your career for yourself.’  Then seeing that I seemed hurt and ashamed, she kissed me and whispered, ’Love makes us selfish:  my affection for you has grown stronger than my ambition.  If you are happy, my Eleanor, I can wait patiently for the advancement of the rest of my sex.’”

Then Eleanor rose, and drawing her shawl round her preparatory to going, said shyly, “And what I came to tell you is, that the wedding will take place at Christmas.”

ITA ANIOL PROKOP.

AN AMERICAN LADY’S OCCUPATIONS SEVENTY YEARS AGO.

We are looking over sundry trunks and boxes, the careful and the careless gatherings of three generations.  There are law-papers in dusty files; familiar gossipy letters from brothers and sisters and college chums; dignified letters from reverend judges and law-makers; letters bursting with scandalized Federalisms, and burning or melting with long-forgotten joys and sorrows.  We have read some thousands of these papers, and begin to be very uncertain about the times we are living in.  What indeed is this year of our Lord?  We have a dim recollection that we have been wished a happy New Year in 1875, yet we are living and thinking with the boys and girls of 1776, who have grown to be the men and women of Jefferson’s time.

To make things more misty to our comprehension, we are sitting by a dormer window in a high, “hip-roofed” garret of a mansion built just before the Revolution, and the air is redolent of ancient memories.  The very cobweb that swung across the window just now has a venerable appearance, entirely inconsistent with the fact that the housemaid’s broom was supposed to have whisked across these beams but yesterday.  But then the housemaids of to-day, as everybody knows, are, as a source of perplexity and vexation of spirit, always to be relied upon, but never to be relied upon for anything else.  And with the thought we sigh for the “good old days” and the “good old servants” of our grandmothers.