orld of
sympathy. The great catastrophe of her life had affected the muscles of
her face so that although she enunciated her words very distinctly, she
had a slow, automatic way of moving her lips.

The room where the breakfast-table was set was the same that I had
entered first, on my arrival at Wallencamp. It was low and small, but
capable, as I learned afterward, of holding any amount of things and
people without ever seeming crowded. There was a cooking-stove in it, and
many other articles of modest worth, so artlessly scattered about as to
present a scene of the wildest and richest profusion.

Art was not entirely wanting, however. There was a ray of it on the wall
behind the stove-pipe, the companion-piece to "Bereavement," entitled
"Joy," and represented my heroine of the bed-chamber, reclining on a
rustic bench in rather an unflounced and melancholy condition. In one
place there hung a yellow family register, which was kept faithfully
supplied from week to week with a wreath of fresh evergreens. It was
headed by a woodcut representing a funeral, Grandma Keeler said; but
Grandpa Keeler afterwards informed me, aside, with much solemnity, that
it was a "marriage ceremony." Near the foot of the list of births,
marriages and deaths, I saw "Casindana Keeler; died, aged twenty."

We sat down at the table. There was a brief altercation between Dinslow
and Grace, the little Keelers, in which impromptu missiles, such as
spoons and knives and small tin-cups, were hurled across the table with
unguided wrath, and both infants yelled furiously.

Grandma had nearly succeeded in quieting them, when Madeline remarked to
Grandpa Keeler, in her lively and flippant style:--

"Come, pa, say your piece."

"How am I going to say anything?" inquired Grandpa, wrathfully, "in such
a bedlam?"

"Thar', now, thar'!" said Grandma Keeler, in her soothing tone; "It's all
quiet now and time we was eatin' breakfast, so ask the blessin', pa, and
don't let's have no more words about it."

Whereupon the old sea-captain bowed his head, and, with a decided touch
of asperity still lingering in his voice, sped through the lines:--

"God bless the food which now we take;
May it do us good, for Jesus' sake."

"Now, Dinnie," said Grandma Keeler, beguilingly; but it was not until
after much coaxing and threatening, and the promise of a spoonful of
sugar when it was over, that Dinslow was induced to solicit the same
blessing, in the same