SHEILA HALE.

THEE AND YOU.

A STORY OF OLD PHILADELPHIA.  IN TWO PARTS.—­I.

Once on a time I was leaning over a book of the costumes of forty years before, when a little lady said to me, “How ever could they have loved one another in such queer bonnets?” And now that since then long years have sped away, and the little critic is, alas! no longer young, haply her children, looking up at her picture by Sully in a turban and short waist; may have wondered to hear how in such disguise she too was fatal to many hearts, and set men by the ears, and was a toast at suppers in days when the waltz was coming in and the solemn grace of the minuet lingered in men’s manners.

And so it is, that, calling up anew the soft September mornings of which I would draw a picture before they fade away, with me also, from men’s minds, it is the quaintness of dress which first comes back to me, and I find myself wondering that in nankeen breeches and swallow-tailed blue coats with buttons of brass once lived men who, despite gnarled-rimmed beavers and much wealth of many-folded cravats, loved and were loved as well and earnestly as we.

I had been brought up in the austere quiet of a small New England town, where life was sad and manners grave, and when about eighteen served for a while in the portion of our army then acting in the North.  The life of adventure dissatisfied me with my too quiet home, and when the war ended I was glad to accept the offer of an uncle in China to enter his business house.  To prepare for this it was decided that I should spend six months with one of the great East India firms.  For this purpose I came to Philadelphia, and by and by found myself a boarder in an up-town street, in a curious household ruled over by a lady of the better class of the people called Friends.

For many days I was a lonely man among the eight or ten people who came down one by one at early hours to our breakfast-table and ate somewhat silently and went their several ways.  Mostly, we were clerks in the India houses which founded so many Philadelphia fortunes, but there were also two or three of whom we knew little, and who went and came as they liked.

It was a quiet lodging-house, where, because of being on the outskirts and away from the fashion and stir of the better streets, chiefly those came who could pay but little, and among them some of the luckless ones who are always to be found in such groups—­stranded folks, who for the most part have lost hope in life.  The quiet, pretty woman who kept the house was of an ancient Quaker stock which had come over long ago in a sombre Quaker Mayflower, and had by and by gone to decay, as the best of families will.  When I first saw her and some of her inmates it was on a pleasant afternoon early in September, and I recall even now the simple and quiet picture of the little back parlor where I sat down among them as a new guest.