ery five
minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of our bright-faced
genius are like the piquant sallies of a clever friend,--they do not
strike us as unreasonable.

When Jennie had laid down her brush, she said,--

"Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics."

"Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms," said I,
with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition.
"Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation."

"There papa goes with subjective and objective!" said Marianne. "For my
part, I never can remember which is which."

"I remember," said Jennie; "it's what our old nurse used to call
internal and _out_-ternal,--I always remember by that."

"Come, my dears," said my wife, "let your father read"; so I went on as
follows:--

I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill
Carberry to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to
introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed
fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to
losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what
strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed
into "that undiscovered country" of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn
our apprehensions.

"I'll tell you what, Chris," he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps
and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, "do you know what I chose
this house for? Because it's a social-looking house. Look there, now,"
he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors,--"look at those long
south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a
capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our
books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and
out like a sunbeam. I'm getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever
see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things
we'll have there! the nicest times,--everything free and easy, you
know,--just what I've always wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you
and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a
capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free
to come and go. And here now's the library,--fancy this full of books
and engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just
as you please and ask no questions,--all the same as if it were your