know that poor Blanche died last winter of fever in Naples, but perhaps you do not know that she left me ten thousand pounds!  Fifty thousand dollars they count that in America, and I actually do not know what to do with it.  My aunt gives me a thousand a year for spending money, and when she dies, I shall have, as nearly as I can estimate it, half a million, which in this country makes a rich man.  If Bessie had not provided for old Anthony and Dorothy, I should care for them; but as she has, I believe I shall use the interest of Blanche’s money in paying for scholarships in India, and China, and Japan, and Greece, and I’ll call them the Blanche Trevellian and the Bessie McPherson scholarships.  That will please Bessie, for she is great on missions, both at home and abroad, and her kitchen is a regular soup-house in the winter, for every beggar in Boston knows Mrs. Grey Jerrold.  Jack, you don’t know what a lovely woman Bessie is.  Sweeter and prettier even than when she was a girl and you and I were both in love with her.  And Grey—­well, you ought to see how he worships her!  Why, she is never within his reach that he does not put his hands upon her, and if he thinks no one is looking on he always kisses her, and by Jove, she kisses him back as if she liked it!  And I—­well, I bear it now with a good deal of equanimity.  Eels, they say, can get used to being skinned, and so I am getting accustomed to think of Bessie as Grey’s wife instead of mine, and I really have quite an uncleish feeling for her children.  Indeed.  I intend to make them my heirs

    “And so good-by to you, old chap; with love to Flossie and the
    twins, from your Yankeefied friend,

    “NEIL McPHERSON.”

And now our story winds to a close, and we are dropping the curtain upon the characters, who go out one by one and pass from our sight forever.  In the cozy rectory Hannah Jerrold’s last days are passing happily and peacefully with the Rev. Charles Sanford, who loves her just as dearly and thinks her just as fair as on that night years and years ago, when she walked with him under the chestnut trees, and while her heart was breaking with its load of care and pain, sent him from her with no other explanation than that it could not be.

At Grey’s Park Lucy Grey lives her life of sweet unselfishness, looked up to by the villagers as the lady par excellence of the town, and idolized by the little ones from Boston, who know no spot quite as attractive as her house in the park.

Miss Betsey and Neil still scramble along together, he indolent at times and prone to lapse into his old habits of luxurious ease, for which she rates him sharply, though on the whole she pets him as she has never petted a human being before.