crude, Sir! crude!" I afterwards learned the
estimation these men had for her.

"I never passed her house," said Mr. C----, "without stopping to pay my
respects to her. She had a powerful intellect in her younger
days.--power enough to make men overlook her coarseness. Many of our
caucuses were held in her drawing-rooms; she could keep a secret better
than most men; but she was too fond of petty sarcasm and intrigue to be
effective in any cause. We respected her, too, for her mental strength
only; in her most brilliant days, she was selfish and a miser."

The manner in which this latter trait of avarice showed itself, and its
struggle with her finer taste, were ludicrous enough,--for instance, in
her cheap servant's gown and old jewelry. One day she took me up to a
large chamber, filled with chests of drawers, in which were stowed away
the dresses she had worn for half a century.

"Every year I put away two, made in the current mode. I like to turn
them over, as you do to look at pictures, perhaps?"--unfolding heavy
velvets, brocades, and then, out of spicy red boxes, lifting fold after
fold of yellow old lace, daintily as a mother would caress a baby's
limbs.

But this woman never had children.

"It will be a precious legacy for some young beauty," I said,
thoughtlessly. "A warning one, too."

"Legacy? You look far ahead, young Sir!" her bony old hands shaking, as
she shut the boxes and locked them wickedly.

Yet in one of these upper rooms she had her tombstone,--a shaft of
Carrara marble, with a base containing niches, which she filled in her
younger and more generous days with finely wrought figures, but lately
with plaster groups purchased from itinerant image-vendors.

It was with little hope of success, therefore, that I broached the
subject of the Steadmans on the last day of my stay. I did it, however,
resolutely, affecting not to see that the old woman's face grew set at
the first mention of their names. She sat stiffly erect, and permitted
me to finish without a word of interruption. I did what I could,--showed
how a little present help would enable the brothers to start in life
utterly different men from their present selves,--stated in plain terms
the peril in which the woman stood, and the immediate necessity for aid.

"But little, Madam," I said,----"not more than the value of that least
ring on your finger, but immediate. It will save her life, in all
probability."

"Have you finished?" taki