ng is ended,
and the minstrel be left harping at the empty air and wasting his
eloquence upon the stones.

Last year I was staying in an English country house on the borders of
Hertfordshire and Essex. It is not what is called a "romantic
neighborhood," but there are plenty of pretty places and some fine old
trees where the green lanes of Essex begin to undulate into the wooded
valleys of Herts. The name of the place where I was stopping is Carvel
Place, and the people who generally live in it are John Carvel, Esq.,
formerly member for the borough; Mary Carvel, his wife, who was a Miss
Dabstreak; Hermione Carvel, their daughter; and, when he is at home on
leave, Macaulay Carvel, their son, a young man who has been in the
diplomatic service several years, and who once had the good fortune to
be selected as private secretary to Lord Mavourneen, when that noble
diplomatist was sent on a special mission to India. Mrs. Carvel has a
younger sister, a spinster, thirty-eight years of age, who rejoices in
the name of Chrysophrasia. Her parents had christened their eldest
daughter Anne, their second Mary, and had regretted the simple
appellations bitterly, so that when a third little girl came into the
world, seven years afterwards, their latent love for euphony was poured
out upon her in a double measure at the baptismal font. Anne, eldest
sister of Mrs. Carvel and Miss Chrysophrasia Dabstreak, married a
Russian in the year 1850, and was never mentioned after the Crimean War,
until her son, Paul Patoff, being a diplomatist, made the acquaintance
of his first cousin in the person of Macaulay Carvel, who happened to
be third secretary in Berlin, when Paul passed through that capital, on
his return from a distant post in the East.

It is taken for granted that the Carvels have lived at Carvel Place
since the memory of man. I know very little of their family history; my
acquaintance with John Carvel is of comparatively recent date, and Miss
Chrysophrasia eyes me with evident suspicion, as being an American and
probably an adventurer. I cannot say that Carvel and I are precisely old
friends, but we enjoy each other's society, and have been of
considerable service to each other in the last ten years. There is a
certain kind of mutual respect, not untempered by substantial mutual
obligation, which very nearly approaches to friendship when the parties
concerned have common tastes and are not unsympathetic. John Carvel is a
man fifty y