t--was most edifying.

Amiable! Yes,--after her way. And a very noiseless sort of way it was,
too. For, though she had lived with the deacon for nearly a dozen
years, he had never known her to so far forget her propriety as to
indulge in anything more hearty and hilarious than the most decorous of
smiles, which smile was such a kind of illumination to her face as a
star of inconceivably small magnitude makes to the sky in trailing
across it.

[Illustration: "_Miranda belonged to that sisterhood commonly known as
spinsters._"]

Of her personal appearance I will say--nothing. Sacred let it be to
memory! If you ever saw her, or one like her, whether full front or
profile, whether sideways or edgewise, the vision, I am ready to swear,
remains with you vividly still. Let it suffice, then, when I observe
that Miss Miranda was not physically stout, and that the deacon's
standing joke was by no means a bad one when he described her as "not
actually burdened with fat." Yes, she was a very cleanly, very thin,
very prudent, very particular person, that never joined in any sports or
amusements; never joked or participated in any happy events in a happy,
joyous fashion, but lived unobtrusively, and, I may say, coldly, in her
own prim, cold, bloodless, little world.

"Gracious me!" exclaimed the deacon, as he looked at the package.
"Gracious me! what has got into Mirandy?" And he looked scrutinizingly
at the little, fine, thin, faintly-traced inscription on the package, as
if the writer had begrudged the ink that must be expended on the
letters, or from a subtle and mystic self-sympathy had made the
chirography faint, delicate, and attenuated as her own self.

"Gracious me!" reiterated Deacon Tubman, as he proceeded to untie the
knot in the pale blue ribbon smoothly bound around the package. "Who
ever knew Mirandy to make a present before?" and the deacon was so
surprised at what had taken place that, for a moment, he doubted the
evidence of his own senses. "And put it in my boot, too, ha, ha!" And
the deacon stopped undoing the parcel, and, lying back in the chair,
roared at the thought of the prim, modest, particular Miranda
perpetrating such a joke. And when the wrapping of the package was at
last undone, for every corner and crease of it was as carefully turned
and as sharply edged as if the smoothing iron had passed over
them,--will wonders ever cease in this startling world of ours?--out
dropped a night-cap! Yes, a night-