st work, would have been fit only to
provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It
is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes
which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in
our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual
vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of
death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right
seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better
remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought
his irreparable ruin far behind him.

The shock of Judge Pyncheon's death had a permanently invigorating and
ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous
man had been Clifford's nightmare. There was no free breath to be
drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first
effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Clifford's aimless flight,
was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into
his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to
nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he
recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to
display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it,
and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy
interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to
give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at
command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes,
that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison.

Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little
Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the
dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the
present, at the elegant country-seat of the late Judge Pyncheon.
Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where
the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of
egg-laying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience,
to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a
century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal
personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in
the parlor.

"The country-house is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan
goes," observed Holgra