Happy grandmothers! so blessed in their simple, quiet lives, unvexed by ever-changing fashions and domestics!  What did they know of trouble whose best silk gowns remained in fashion from year to year, and whose cooks never treated them to an empty breakfast-table, and a cool “I thought I’d be a-lavin’ this marnin’, mum”?  Happy grandmothers!

Thus thinking, we pick up a little rough paper-book with marbled covers from the corner of the old hair trunk where it was long ago thrown by some careless hand.  The little tumbled book proves to be a diary.  Not a record of a soul’s strivings and pantings after a higher life, or a curiously minute inquiry into the possible reasons which induced the Almighty to allow Satan to afflict Job, but a simple daily note-book, the memoranda of a housekeeper.  The old letters had been to us what the newspapers of to-day will be to the great-grandchildren of the present generation.  The diary carried us back into the immediate home-life of seventy years ago.

The diarist had been a fair and stately dame in her day, and it is easy to remove her from the frame where her portrait hangs on the walls of the south parlor, and fancy her seated in the same room before the crackling fire jotting down the memoranda of the day.  She is a pretty sight, we think, sitting in her straight-backed mahogany arm-chair, with her feet on the polished brass fender and her book resting on the little stand, which also holds the two tall silver candlesticks with their tall tallow candles, for wax candles are saved for gala-nights, when diaries are not in requisition.  She must have been nearly forty years old when she wrote in this little book, but we see her as her portrait shows her, very young-looking in spite of her stateliness, enhanced though it is by the high turban of embroidered muslin edged with soft lace falling over the clusters of fair curls on her temples, and by the black satin gown, short-waisted and scanty, relieved only by delicate lace frills, which shade the beautiful throat and the strong, white, shapely hands.  The shadow on her face as she gazes into the fire is not marvelous, for it is winter in her quiet Connecticut home; the post comes but twice a week; her husband is representing his State in Washington, and her only child is studying in distant Yale.  Perhaps, though, the shadow is not that of pure loneliness.  Is there not some perplexity in it?  And something also of vexation?  Yes, and it is the very vexation of spirit which—­in the face of Solomon’s venerable testimony to the contrary—­we had fancied to be peculiar to our own evil days.  Almost the first entry in this quaint little diary is to the effect that “Jim was sulky to-night and gave short answers.”  A little farther on we find that “Yesterday Jim went away without leave, and stayed all night;” which delinquency, being accompanied by a suspicion of drunkenness, caused the anxious dame to “send for General T——­ to come and give