and ornamented at the side with a luxuriant queen of the prairie, whose blossoms were turning their blushing faces to the rising sun.  This was the Bigelow house, the joint property of Mrs. Dr. Van Buren, nee Sophia Bigelow, who lived in Boston, and her sister, Miss Barbara Bigelow, the quaintest and kindest-hearted woman who ever bore the sobriquet of an old maid, and was aunt to everybody.  She was awake long before the whistle sounded across the river and along the meadow lands, where some of the workmen lived, and just as the robin, whose nest for four summers had been under the eaves where neither boy nor cat could reach it, brought the first worm to its clamorous young, she pushed the fringed curtain from her open window, and with her broad frilled cap still on her head, stood for a moment looking out upon the morning as it crept up the eastern sky.  “She will have a nice day for her wedding.  May her future life be as fair,” Aunt Barbara whispered softly, then kneeling before the window with her head bowed upon the sill, she prayed earnestly for God’s blessing on the bridal to take place that night beneath her roof, and upon the young girl who had been both a care and a comfort since the Christmas morning eighteen years before, when her half-sister Julia had come home to die, bringing with her the little Ethelyn, then but two years old.

Aunt Barbara’s prayers were always to the point.  She said what she had to say in the fewest possible words, wasting no time in repetition, and on this occasion she was briefer than usual, for the good woman had many things upon her mind this morning.  First, there was Betty to rouse and get into a state of locomotion, a good half hour’s work, as Aunt Barbara knew from a three years’ experience.  There was the “sponge” put to rise the previous night.  She must see if that had risen, and with her own hands mold the snowy breakfast rolls which Ethelyn liked so much.  There were the chambers to be inspected a second time, to ascertain if everything was in its place, and dinner to be prepared for the “Van Buren set” expected up from Boston, while last, though far from least, there was Ethelyn herself to waken when the clock should chime the hour of six, and this was a pleasure which good Aunt Barbara would not for the world have foregone.  Every morning for the last sixteen years, when Ethelyn was at home, she had gone to the pleasant, airy chamber where her darling slept, and bending over her had kissed her fair, glowing cheek, and so called her back from the dreamless slumber which otherwise might have been prolonged to an indefinite time, for Ethelyn did not believe in the maxim, “Early to bed and early to rise,” and always begged for a little more indulgence, even after the brown eyes unclosed and flashed forth a responsive greeting to the motherly face bending above them.