ing has an end--a consolation oftentimes--rhapsody, as well as
love, and so had that happy Christmas-time, when we were so merry,
when I first saw that master-piece of nature--my Destiny--Edgar
Elliott.

Anna and myself had been home but three weeks--three dreary years of
weeks, Anna said--when we received a letter containing the joyful
intelligence that Edgar Elliott, his aristocratic sister Jane, his
unaristocratic sister little Fanny, and Herbert Allen--a young
lieutenant, by the way, and, by the way, the red-hot flame of my
harem-scarem sister--would all four honor Dough-nut Hall, the name we
had playfully given our old homestead, with a speedy and long visit.

Joy and hope danced in our hearts when, clear and sunny, the promised
day at length had come, the snow five and a half feet deep--the
greatest depth of snow within the memory of the "oldest
inhabitant"--the mercury full ten degrees below zero. I had just
changed my dress for the fifth time, and sister Anna was offering me
this consolation, "I must say, Clara, that that is the most unbecoming
dress you have, you look like a perfect scare-crow," when the sound of
sleigh-bells coming up the avenue, sent my heart up in my throat, and
myself quicker than lightning down to the "hall-door," there to
welcome--not my darling Edgar and his proud, beautiful sister, and
Anna's Adonis lieutenant, and Brother Dick's pretty little Fanny--no,
none of these, oh, no! who but my long-visaged, good-for-nothing
cousin Jehoiakim Johnson.

"Fiddle-de-dee!" exclaimed a voice at my elbow; and my disappointed
sister skipped, with chattering teeth, back into the house.

The stage drove off, after depositing cousin Jehoiakim and a
Noah's-ark of a trunk.

"Wall, Cousin Clarry!" exclaimed he, springing toward me with one of
his own peculiar bear-like bounds. "How du you du? I guess you didn't
expect me this time, no how."

"I can't say that I did," said I; "but do come in, this air is enough
to freeze one."

"Wall, here I am again," said he, rubbing his great hands together
before the blazing hickory. "But if that _wasn't_ a tarnel cold drive;
and if this isn't a nation good fire, then I don't know. But how are
uncle and aunt, and Cousin Anna, and Dick, and little Harry?"

"All quite well. Where have you been since you left here, cousin?"

"Why I went right to Cousin Hezekiah's; but I did not stay there quite
two months, because little Prudence caught the brain fever, and I was