Hyacinth Cottage was a pretty place enough, a little too much choked round with bushes, and too much overrun with climbing-roses, which, in the season of slugs and rose-bugs, were apt to show so brown about the leaves and so coleopterous about the flowers, that it might be questioned whether their buds and blossoms made up for these unpleasant animal combinations,—­especially as the smell of whale-oil soap was very commonly in the ascendant over that of the roses.  It had its patch of grass called “the lawn,” and its glazed closet known as “the conservatory,” according to that system of harmless fictions characteristic of the rural imagination and shown in the names applied to many familiar objects.  The interior of the cottage was more tasteful and ambitious than that of the ordinary two-story dwellings.  In place of the prevailing hair-cloth covered furniture, the visitor had the satisfaction of seating himself upon a chair covered with some of the Widow’s embroidery, or a sofa luxurious with soft caressing plush.  The sporting tastes of the late Major showed in various prints on the wall:  Herring’s “Plenipotentiary,” the “red bullock” of the ’34 Derby; “Cadland” and “The Colonel;” “Crucifix;” “West-Australian,” fastest of modern racers; and among native celebrities, ugly, game old “Boston,” with his straight neck and ragged hips; and gray “Lady Suffolk,” queen, in her day, not of the turf but of the track, “extending” herself till she measured a rod, more or less, skimming along within a yard of the ground, her legs opening and shutting under her with a snap, like the four blades of a compound jack-knife.

These pictures were much more refreshing than those dreary fancy death-bed scenes, common in two-story country-houses, in which Washington and other distinguished personages are represented as obligingly devoting their last moments to taking a prominent part in a tableau, in which weeping relatives, attached servants, professional assistants, and celebrated personages who might by a stretch of imagination be supposed present, are grouped in the most approved style of arrangement about the chief actor’s pillow.

A single glazed bookcase held the family library, which was hidden from vulgar eyes by green silk curtains behind the glass.  It would have been instructive to get a look at it, as it always is to peep into one’s neighbor’s book-shelves.  From other sources and opportunities a partial idea of it has been obtained.  The Widow had inherited some books from her mother, who was something of a reader:  Young’s “Night-Thoughts;” “The Preceptor;” “The Task, a Poem,” by William Cowper; Hervey’s “Meditations;” “Alonzo and Melissa;” “Buccaneers of America;” “The Triumphs of Temper;” “La Belle Assemblee;” Thomson’s “Seasons;” and a few others.  The Major had brought in “Tom Jones” and “Peregrine Pickle;” various works by Mr. Pierce Egan; “Boxiana,” “The Racing Calendar;” and a “Book of Lively Songs and Jests.”  The Widow had added the