called “Three-Penny Winn.”  That he enjoyed the pleasantry, and clung to his sign, goes to show that he was a person who would ripen on further acquaintance, were further acquaintance now practicable.  His next-door neighbor, Mr. Leonard Serat, who kept a modest tailoring establishment, also tantalizes us a little with a dim intimation of originality.  He plainly was without literary prejudices, for on one face of his swinging sign was painted the word Taylor, and on the other Tailor.  This may have been a delicate concession to that part of the community—­the greater part, probably—­which would have spelled it with a y.

The building in which Messrs. Winn and Serat had their shops was the property of Nicholas Rousselet, a French gentleman of Demerara, the story of whose unconventional courtship of Miss Catherine Moffatt is pretty enough to bear retelling, and entitles him to a place in our limited collection of etchings.  M. Rousselet had doubtless already mad excursions into the pays de tendre, and given Miss Catherine previous notice of the state of his heart, but it was not until one day during the hour of service at the Episcopal church that he brought matters to a crisis by handing to Miss Moffatt a small Bible, on the fly-leaf of which he had penciled the fifth verse of the Second Epistle of John—­

     “And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I
     wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that
     which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.”

This was not to be resisted, at lease not by Miss Catherine, who demurely handed the volume back to him with a page turned down at the sixteenth verse in the first chapter of Ruth—­

“Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:  thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:  where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried:  the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”

Aside from this quaint touch of romance, what attaches me to the happy pair—­for the marriage was a fortunate one—­is the fact that the Rousselets made their home in the old Atkinson mansion, which stood directly opposite my grandfather’s house on Court Street and was torn down in my childhood, to my great consternation.  The building had been unoccupied for a quarter of a century, and was fast falling into decay with all its rich wood-carvings at cornice and lintel; but was it not full of ghosts, and if the old barracks were demolished, would not these ghosts, or some of them at least, take refuge in my grandfather’s house just across the way?  Where else could they bestow themselves so conveniently?  While the ancient mansion was in process of destruction, I used to peep round the corner of our barn at the workmen, and watch the indignant phantoms go soaring upward in spiral clouds of colonial dust.