It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness.  There was a flavor in his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while we smiled at them.  It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away among useless lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the picture of Leah, the handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the massive shelves that held the books he loved, to pack up the tube through which he used to study the silent stars, looking down at him like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of stupid half-consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes of men and women,—­and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to which his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain.  It was hard, but it had to be done.

And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore something of its old look.  The Koh-i-noor, as we named the gentleman with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that “little mill,” as the young fellow John called it, where he came off second best.  His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the landlady’s daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she “had valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the vows he had breathed,” speedily followed by another, inclosing the landlady’s bill.  The next morning he was missing, as were his limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it.  Three empty bottles of Mrs. Allen’s celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its word of honor as a bottle, that its former contents were “not a dye,” were all that was left to us of the Koh-i-noor.

From this time forward, the landlady’s daughter manifested a decided improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders.  She abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl.  She left off various articles of “jewelry.”  She began to help her mother in some of her household duties.  She became a regular attendant on the ministrations of a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to his meetin’ by witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a man and a woman a “gentleman” and a “lady,”—­a stroke of gentility which quite overcame her.  She even took a part in what she called a Sabbath school, though it was held on Sunday, and by no means on Saturday, as the name she intended to utter implied.  All this, which was very sincere, as I believe, on her part, and attended with a great improvement in her character, ended in her bringing home a young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as to stand up steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green spectacles, and dressed in black broadcloth.  His personal aspect, and a certain solemnity of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman; and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us boarders, one day, that “Sis had got a beau,”