“A game little devil she was, sure enough!”—­And as Dick spoke, he bared his wrist to look for the marks she had left on it:  two small white scars, where the two small sharp upper teeth had struck when she flashed at him with her eyes sparkling as bright as those glittering stones sewed up in the belt he wore.  “That’s a filly worth noosing!” said Dick to himself, as he looked in admiration at the sign of her spirit and passion.  “I wonder if she will bite at eighteen as she did at eight!  She shall have a chance to try, at any rate!”

Such was the self-sacrificing disposition with which Richard Venner, Esq., a passenger by the Condor from Valparaiso, set foot upon his native shore, and turned his face in the direction of Rockland, The Mountain, and the mansion-house.  He had heard something, from time to time, of his New-England relatives, and knew that they were living together as he left them.  And so he heralded himself to “My dear Uncle” by a letter signed “Your loving nephew, Richard Venner,” in which letter he told a very frank story of travel and mercantile adventure, expressed much gratitude for the excellent counsel and example which had helped to form his character and preserve him in the midst of temptation, inquired affectionately after his uncle’s health, was much interested to know whether his lively cousin who used to be his playmate had grown up as handsome as she promised to be, and announced his intention of paying his respects to them both at Rockland.  Not long after this came the trunks marked R. V. which he had sent before him, forerunners of his advent:  he was not going to wait for a reply or an invitation.

What a sound that is,—­the banging down of the preliminary trunk, without its claimant to give it the life which is borrowed by all personal appendages, so long as the owner’s hand or eye is on them!  If it announce the coming of one loved and longed for, how we delight to look at it, to sit down on it, to caress it in our fancies, as a lone exile walking out on a windy pier yearns towards the merchantman lying alongside, with the colors of his own native land at her peak, and the name of the port he sailed from long ago upon her stern!  But if it tell the near approach of the undesired, inevitable guest, what sound short of the muffled noises made by the undertakers as they turn the corners in the dim-lighted house, with low shuffle of feet and whispered cautions, carries such a sense of knocking-kneed collapse with it as the thumping down in the front entry of the heavy portmanteau, rammed with the changes of uncounted coming weeks?