became rich, did not like the match.  “It won’t do,” said he, “for a poor young man to marry into one of our fust families; what is the use of aristocracy if no distinction is to be made, and our daughters are to marry Tom, Dick, and Harry?” But Amelia took the matter sorely to heart; she kept her love, yet fell into a consumption, and so wasted away; or, as one of the neighbors said, “she was executed on the scaffold of an upstart’s vulgarity.”  Nathan loved no woman in like manner afterwards, but after her death went to India, and remained years long.  When he returned and established his business in Boston, he looked after her relations, who had fallen into poverty.  Nay, out of the mire of infamy he picked up what might have been his nephews and nieces, and, by generous breeding, wiped off from them the stain of their illicit birth.  He never spoke of poor Amelia; but he kept a little locket in one end of his purse; none ever saw it but his sister, who often observed him sitting with it in his hand, hand hour by hour looking into the fire of a winter’s night, seeming to think of distant things.  She never spoke to him then, but left him alone with his recollections and his dreams.  Some of the neighbors said he “worshipped it;” others called it “a talisman.”  So indeed it was, and by its enchantment he became a young man once more, and walked through the moonlight to meet an angel, and with her enter their kingdom of heaven.  Truly it was a talisman; yet if you had looked at it, you would have seen nothing in it but a little twist of golden hairs tied together with a blue silken thread.

Aunt Kindly had never been married; yet once in her life, also, the right man seemed to offer, and the blossom of love opened with a dear prophetic fragrance in her heart.  But as her father was soon after struck with palsy, she told her lover they must wait a little while, for her first duty must be to the feeble old man.  But the impatient swain went off and pinned himself to the flightiest little humming-bird in all Soitgoes, and in a month was married, having a long life before him for bitterness and repentance.  After the father died, Kindly remained at home; and when Nathan returned, years after, they made one brotherly and sisterly household out of what might else have gladdened two connubial homes.  “Not every bud becomes a flower.”

Uncle Nathan sat there, his locket in his hand, looking into the fire; and as the wind roared in the chimney, and the brands crackled and snapped, he thought he saw faces in the fire; and when the sparks rose up in a little cloud, which the country children call “the people coming out of the meeting-house,” he thought he saw faces in the fire; they seemed to take the form of the boys and girls as he had lately seen them rushing out of the Union School-house, which held all the children in the village; and as he recognized one after the other, he began to wonder and conjecture what would be the history of this or that particular