ing-table--alas! the flat-iron on its ring is as cold as the hand
that erst so deftly guided it. I bask before the old-fashioned
hospitable fireplace, capacious and embracing, and jolly with its
old-fashioned hickory blaze, and the fat old-fashioned kettle hung upon
the old-fashioned crane, swinging and singing of old-fashioned abundance
and good cheer. I behold the Madras turban, the white neckerchief
crossed over the bosom, the clumsy steel-bowed spectacles, the check
apron, and the old-fashioned love that is forever new. But they never
come again.

That kitchen was my hospital and my school,--as much better than the
whole round of select academies and classical institutes that my father
tried, and that tried me, as check aprons and love are more inculcating
than canes and quarterly bills; and however it may be with my head, my
heart never has forgotten the lessons I learned there. Thither, on the
nipping nights of winter, brought I my small fingers and toes, numbed
and aching with snow-balling and skating, to be tenderly rubbed before
the fire, or fondly folded in the motherly apron. Thither brought I an
extensive and various assortment of splinters and fresh cuts; thither my
impervious nose, to be lubricated with goose-grease, or my swollen angry
tonsils ("waxen kernels," Aunt Judy called them), to be mollified with
volatile liniment.

It was here that my own free mind, uncompelled by pedagogues and
unallured by prizes, first achieved a whole chapter in the Bible. Cook
and laundress and chambermaid were out for the evening; the table had
been cleared and covered with the fresh white cloth; and I, perched on
Aunt Judy's lap at the end next the fireplace, glided featly over the
short words, plunged pluckily through the long, (braced, as it were,
against the superior education and the spectacles behind me,) of the
first chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, from the Word that
was in the beginning, to the Hereafter of the glorified Son of man.
After which so large performance for so small a boy, we re-refreshed
ourselves with that cheerful hymn, in which Dr. Watts lyrically disposes
of the questions,

"And must this body die,
This mortal frame decay?
And must these active limbs of mine
Lie mouldering in the clay?"

For so infantile a heart, my darling old mammy had a wonderful lack of
active imagination, even in her religion; for there all was real and
actual to her. Her pleasures of m