.

(BORN, 1835.)

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AUNT PEN'S FUNERAL.

Poor Aunt Pen! I am sorry to say it, but for a person alive and
well--tolerably well and very much alive, that is--she did use to make
the greatest business of dying! Alive! why, when she was stretched out
on the sofa, after an agony of asthma, or indigestion, or whatever, and
had called us all about her with faltering and tears, and was apparently
at her last gasp, she would suddenly rise, like her own ghost, at the
sound of a second ringing of the door-bell, which our little renegade
Israel had failed to answer, and declare if she could only once lay
hands on Israel she would box his ears till they heard!

For the door-bell was, perhaps, among many, one of Aunt Pen's weakest
points. She knew everybody in town, as you might say. She was
exceedingly entertaining to everybody outside the family. She was a
great favorite with everybody. Countless gossips came to see her,
tinkling at the door-bell, and hated individually by Israel, brought her
all the news, heard all the previous ones had brought, admired her,
praised her, pitied her, listened to her, and went away leaving her in
such satisfied mood that she did not die any more that day. And as they
went away they always paused at the door to say to some one of us what a
cheerful invalid Aunt Pen had made herself, and what a nest of sunbeams
her room always was, and what a lesson her patience and endurance ought
to be. But, oh dear me, how very little they knew about it all!

We all lived together, as it happened; for when we children were left
alone with but a small income, Aunt Pen--who was also alone, and only
five years my senior--wrote word that we might as well come to her house
in the city, for it wouldn't make expenses more, and might make them
less if we divided them; and then, too, she said she would always be
sure of one out of three bright and reasonable nurses. Poor Aunt Pen!
perhaps she didn't find us either so bright or so reasonable as she had
expected; for we used to think that in her less degree she went on the
same principle with the crazy man who declared all the rest of the world
except himself insane.

In honest truth, as doctor after doctor was turned away by the impatient
and distempered woman up-stairs, each one took occasion to say to us
down-stairs that our aunt's illness was of that nature that all the
physic it required was to have her fancies humored, a