As assistant-at-large I was summoned to the cellar, where Mrs. Cornelia Barclay of New York was evolving from a pan of flour and water that miracle in the pie department called puff paste.  This, it seems, can only be accomplished where the thermometer is below forty, and near a refrigerator where the compound can be kept cold until ready to be popped into the oven.  No jokes or nonsense here.  With queenly dignity the flour and water were gently compressed.  Here one hand must not know what the other doeth.  Bits of butter must be so deftly introduced that even the rolling pin may be unconscious of its work.  As the artist gave the last touch to an exquisite lemon pie, with a mingled expression of pride and satisfaction on her classic features, she ordered me to bear it to the oven.  In the transit I met Madam Belle.  “Don’t let that fall,” she said sneeringly.  Fortunately I did not, and returned in triumph to transport another.  I was then summoned to a consultation with the committee on toasts, consisting of James Cochrane, John Miller, and myself.  Mr. Miller had one for each guest already written, all of which we accepted and pronounced very good.

Strange to say, a most excellent dinner emerged from all this uproar and confusion.  The table, with its silver, china, flowers, and rich viands, the guests in satins, velvets, jewels, soft laces, and bright cravats, together reflecting all the colors of the prism, looked as beautiful as the rainbow after a thunderstorm.

Twenty years ago I made my last sad visit to that spot so rich with pleasant memories of bygone days.  A few relatives and family friends gathered there to pay the last tokens of respect to our noble cousin.  It was on one of the coldest days of gray December that we laid him in the frozen earth, to be seen no more.  He died from a stroke of apoplexy in New York city, at the home of his niece, Mrs. Ellen Cochrane Walter, whose mother was Mr. Smith’s only sister.  The journey from New York to Peterboro was cold and dreary, and climbing the hills from Canastota in an open sleigh, nine hundred feet above the valley, with the thermometer below zero, before sunrise, made all nature look as sombre as the sad errand on which we came.

Outside the mansion everything in its wintry garb was cold and still, and all within was silent as the grave.  The central figure, the light and joy of that home, had vanished forever.  He who had welcomed us on that threshold for half a century would welcome us no more.  We did what we could to dissipate the gloom that settled on us all.  We did not intensify our grief by darkening the house and covering ourselves with black crape, but wore our accustomed dresses of chastened colors and opened all the blinds that the glad sunshine might stream in.  We hung the apartment where the casket stood with wreaths of evergreens, and overhead we wove his favorite mottoes in living letters, “Equal rights for all!” “Rescue Cuba now!” The religious services