the place.  But we are all going there to live for the summer.  Mamma said we should keep house in an ‘apartment,’ and I was perfectly horrified, and I said, ‘Mamma, in one room?’ and then Louise and Mary laughed till I was quite angry; but mamma says that here an ‘apartment’ means a set of a good many rooms, quite enough to live in.  I don’t believe you can have patience to read this long letter; but I haven’t told you half; no, not one half of half.  Good-by, you darling aunty.  Alice.

“P.S.—­I wish you could just see mamma.  It isn’t only me that thinks she is so pretty; papa thinks so too.  He just sits and looks, and looks at her, till mamma doesn’t quite like it, and asks him to look at baby a little!”

Ellen’s first letter was short.  Her heart was too full.  She said at the end,—­

“I suppose you will both laugh and cry over Alice’s letter.  At first I thought of suppressing it.  But it gives you such a graphic picture of the whole scene that I shall let it go.  It is well that I had the excuse of the surprise for my behavior, but I myself doubt very much if I should have done any better, had I been prepared for their coming.

“God bless and thank you, dear Sally, for this last year, as I cannot.

“Ellen.”

These events happened many years ago.  My sister and I are now old women.  Her life has been from that time to this, one of the sunniest and most unclouded I ever knew.

John Gray is a hale old man; white-haired and bent, but clear-eyed and vigorous.  All the good and lovable and pure in his nature have gone on steadily increasing:  his love for his wife is still so full of sentiment and romance that the world remarks it.

His grandchildren will read these pages, no doubt, but they will never dream that it could have been their sweet and placid and beloved old grandmother who, through such sore straits in her youth, kept her husband!

Esther Wynn’s Love-Letters.

My uncle, Joseph Norton, lived in a very old house.  It was one of those many mansions in which that father of all sleepers, George Washington, once slept for two nights.  This, however, was before the house came into the possession of our family, and we seldom mentioned the fact.

The rooms were all square, and high; many of the walls were of wood throughout, panelled from the floor to the ceiling, and with curious china tiles set in around the fire-places.  In the room in which I always slept when I visited there, these wooden walls were of pale green; the tiles were of blue and white, and afforded me endless study and perplexity, being painted with a series of half-allegorical, half-historical, half-Scriptural representations which might well have puzzled an older head than mine.  The parlors were white, with gold ornaments; the library was of oak, with mahogany wainscoting, and so were the two great central halls, upper and lower.  The balustrade