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"Then why do you look for another?" "I am not going to another place."

"What, Mary, are you going to learn a trade?" "No, ma'am."

"Why, then, what do you mean to do ?"

"I expect to keep house myself, ma'am," said she, laughing and blushing.

"Oh ho!" said I, "that is it ;" and so, in two weeks, I lost the best little girl in the world: peac to her memory.

After this came an interregnum, which put me in mind of the chapter in Chronicles that I used to read with great delight when a child, where Basha, and Elah, and Tibni, and Zimri, and Omri, one after the other came on to the throne of Israel, all in the compass of half a dozen verses. We had one old woman who stayed a week, and went away with the misery in her tooth; one young woman who ran away and got married; one cook, who came at night and went off before light in the morning; one very clever girl, who stayed a month, and then went away because her mother was sick; another, who stayed six weeks, and was taken with the fever herself; and during all this time, who can speak the damage and destruction wrought in the domestic paraphernalia by passing through these multiplied hands?

What shall we do? Shall we go for slavery, or

shall we give up houses, have no furniture to take care of, keep merely a bag of meal, a porridgepot, and a pudding-stick, and sit in our tent door in real patriarchal independence? What shall we do?

LITTLE EDWARD.

WERE any of you born in New-England, in the good old catechising, church-going, schoolgoing, orderly times? If so, you may have seen my Uncle Abel; the most perpendicular, rectangular, upright, downright good man that ever laboured six days and rested on the seventh.

You remember his hard, weather-beaten countenance, where every line seemed drawn with "a pen of iron and the point of a diamond;" his considerate gray eyes, that moved over objects as if it were not best to be in a hurry about seeing; the circumspect opening and shutting of his mouth; his down-sitting and up-rising, all performed with conviction aforethought-in short, the whole ordering of his life and conversation, which was, according to the tenour of the military order, " to the right about face-forward, march!"

Now if you supposed, from all this triangularism of exterior, that this good man had nothing kindly within, you were much mistaken.

You often find the greenest grass under a snowdrift; and though my uncle's mind was not exactly of the flower-garden kind, still there was an abundance of wholesome and kindly vegetation there.

It is true, he seldom laughed, and never joked himself, but no man had a more serious and weighty conviction of what a good joke was in another; and when some exceeding witticism was dispensed in his presence, you might see Uncle Abel's face slowly relax into an expression of solemn satisfaction, and he would look at the author with a sort of quiet wonder, as if it was past his comprehension how such a thing could ever come into a man's head.

Uncle Abel, too, had some relish for the fine arts; in proof of which, I might adduce the. pleasure with which he gazed at the plate in his family Bible, the likeness whereof is neither in Heaven, nor on earth, nor under the earth. And he was also such an eminent musician, that he could go through the singing-book at one sitting without the least fatigue, beating time, like a windmill all the way.

He had, too, a liberal hand, though his liberality was all by the rule of three. He did to his neighbour exactly as he would be done by ; he loved some things in this world very sincere

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ly he loved his God much, but he honoured and feared him more; he was exact with others, he was more exact exact with himself, and he expected his God to be more exact still.

Everything in Uncle Abel's house was in the same time, place, manner, and form, from year's end to year's end. There was old Master Bose, a dog after my uncle's own heart, who always walked as if he were studying the multiplication-table. There was the old clock, forever ticking in the kitchen corner, with a picture on its face of the sun, forever setting behind a perpendicular row of poplar trees. There was the never-failing supply of red-peppers and onions hanging over the chimney. There, too, were the yearly hollyhocks and morning - glories morning-glories blooming about the windows. There was the "best room," with its sanded floor, the cupboard in one corner with its glass doors, the green asparagus-bushes in the chimney, and there was the stand with the Bible and almanac on it in another corner. There, too, was Aunt Betsey, who never looked any older, because she always looked as old as she could; who always dried her catnip and wormwood the last of September, and began to clean house the first of May. In short, this was the land of continuance. Old Time never took it into his head to

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