circumstance
sometimes occurring even in New-England towns where neither law nor
custom unites to perpetuate property in certain family lines.

The Seymour house was a well-known, respected mansion for generations
back. Old Judge Seymour, the grandfather, was the lineal descendant of
Parson Seymour; the pastor who first came with the little colony of
Springdale, when it was founded as a church in the wilderness, amid
all the dangers of wild beasts and Indians.

This present Seymour mansion was founded on the spot where the
house of the first minister was built by the active hands of his
parishioners; and, from generation to generation, order, piety,
education, and high respectability had been the tradition of the
place.

The reader will come in with us, on this bright June morning, through
the grassy front yard, which has only the usual New-England fault of
being too densely shaded. The house we enter has a wide, cool hall
running through its centre and out into a back garden, now all aglow
with every beauty of June. The broad alleys of the garden showed
bright stores of all sorts of good old-fashioned flowers, well tended
and kept. Clumps of stately hollyhocks and scarlet peonies; roses of
every hue, purple, blush, gold-color, and white, were showering down
their leaves on the grassy turf; honeysuckles climbed and clambered
over arbors; and great, stately tufts of virgin-white lilies exalted
their majestic heads in saintly magnificence. The garden was Miss
Grace Seymour's delight and pride. Every root in it was fragrant with
the invisible blossoms of memory,--memories of the mother who loved
and planted and watched them before her, and the grandmother who had
cared for them before that. The spirit of these charming old-fashioned
gardens is the spirit of family love; and, if ever blessed souls from
their better home feel drawn back to any thing on earth, we think it
must be to their flower-garden.

Miss Grace had been up early, and now, with her garden hat on, and
scissors in hand, was coming up the steps with her white apron full
of roses, white lilies, meadow-sweets, and honeysuckle, for the
parlor-vases, when the servant handed her a letter.

"From John," she said, "good fellow;" and then she laid it on the
mantel-shelf of the parlor, while she busied herself in arranging her
flowers.

[Illustration: "From John, good fellow."]

"I must get these into water, or they will wilt," she said.

The large parlor w