they chattered, and chased each other up and down the trees, or leaped from branch to branch, gathering here and there a nut, and scudding away to their store houses in the hollow trees, providing in this season of plenty for the barrenness of the winter months.  I remember, too, how we gathered, in those same old autumnal days, hickory-nuts and butter-nuts by the bushel; and how pleasant it was in the long cold winter evenings, to sit around the great old kitchen fire-place, cracking the nuts we had gathered when the green, the yellow, the crimson, the brown, the grey, and the pale leaves were on the trees.  Pleasant evenings those seem to me now, as they come floating down on the current of memory from the long past, and dear are the faces of those that made up the tableaux as they were grouped around those winter fires.  Logs were blazing on the great hearth, and the pineknots, thrown at intervals on the fire, gave a bold and cheerful light throughout that capacious kitchen.  I remember how the winter wind went glancing over the house-top, whirling, and eddying, and moaning around the corners, hissing under the door and sending its cold breath in at every crevice; and how the windows rattled when the blast came fiercest, and how the smoke would sometimes whirl down the great chimney, I remember well where my father’s chair was always placed; and where my mother sat of those winter evenings, when her household cares were over for the day, plying her needle, or knitting, or darning stockings, or mending garments, for such employment was no dishonor to the matrons of those days.  With these for the leading figures, I remember how seven brothers and sisters were grouped around, and how the old house dog had a place in the corner, and how lovingly the cat nestled between his feet.  Cherished memories are these pleasant visions and they come to me often, vivid as realities.  But the dream vanishes, the vision fades away, and I think of the six pale, still faces as I saw them last, and of the names that are chiseled upon the cold marble that stands through the sunny spring-time, the heat of summer, the autumnal days, and the storms and tempests of winter, over the graves of the dead.”

CHAPTER XXVI.

A SURPRISE—­A SERENADE—­A VISIT FROM STRANGERS—­AN INVITATION TO BREAKFAST—­A FASHIONABLE HOUR AND A BOUNTIFUL BILL OF FARE.

The evening was calm, and the lake slept in stirless beauty before us.  The shadows of the mountains reached far out from the shore, lieing like a dark mantle upon the surface of the waters, above and beneath which the stars twinkled and glowed like the bright eyes of seraphs looking down from the arches above, and up from the depths below.  The moon in her brightness sailed majestically up into the sky, throwing her silver light across the bosom of the lake; millions of fireflies flashed their tiny torches along the reedy shore; the solemn voices of the night birds