Well, one rainy Sunday evening, in 1855, just twelve days before Christmas, in the little town of Soitgoes, in Worcester County, Mass., Aunt Kindly and Uncle Nathan were sitting in their comfortable parlor before a bright wood-fire.  It was about eight o’clock, a stormy night; now it snowed a little, then it rained, then snowed again, seeming as if the weather was determined on some kind of storm, but had not yet made up its mind for snow, rain, or hail.  Now the wind roared in the chimney, and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her.  Tabby opened her yellow eyes suddenly, and erected her smellers, but finding it was only the wind and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and yawned, and then cuddled her head down so as to show her white throat, and went to sleep again.

Uncle Nathan and Aunt Kindly were brother and sister.  He was a little more than sixty, a fine, hale, hearty-looking, handsome man as you could find in a summer’s day, with white hair and a thoughtful, benevolent face, adorned with a full beard as white as his venerable head.  Aunt Kindly was five-and-forty or thereabouts; her face a little sad when you looked at it carelessly in its repose, but commonly it seemed cheerful, full of thought and generosity, and handsome withal; for, as her brother told her, “God administered to you the sacrement of beauty in your childhood, and you will walk all your life in the loveliness thereof.”

Uncle Nathan had been an India merchant from his twenty-fifth to about his fiftieth year, and had now, for some years, been living with his sister in his fine, large house,—­rich and well educated, devoting his life to study, works of benevolence, to general reform and progress.  It was he who had the first anti-slavery lecture delivered in the town, and actually persuaded Mr. Homer, the old minister, to let Mr. Garrison stand in the pulpit on a Wednesday night and preach deliverance unto the captives; but it could be done only once, for the clergymen of the neighborhood thought anti-slavery a desecration of their new wooden meeting-houses.  It was he, too, who asked Lucy Stone to lecture on woman’s rights, but the communicants thought it would not do to let a “woman speak in the church,” and so he gave it up.  All the country knew and loved him, for he was a natural overseer of the poor, and guardian of the widow and the orphan.  How many a girl in the Normal School every night put up a prayer of thanksgiving for him; how many a bright boy in Hanover and Cambridge was equally indebted for the means of high culture, and if not so thankful, why, Uncle Nathan knew that gratitude is too nice and delicate a plant to grow on common soil.  Once, when he was twenty-two or three, he was engaged to a young woman of Boston, while he was a clerk in a commission store.  But her father, a skipper from Beverly or Cape Cod, who continued vulgar while he