younger in the
inspiration of the great, good-natured town. They had first come to New
York on their wedding journey, but since that visit she had always let
him go alone on his business errands to the East; these had grown less
and less frequent, and he had not seen New York for ten or twelve years.
He could have waited as much longer, but he liked her pleasure in the
place, and with the homesickness always lurking at his heart he went
about with her to the amusements which she frequented, as she said, to
help Ellen take her mind off herself. At the play and the opera he
sat thinking of the silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its
leafless maples, and the life that was no more in it than if they had
all died out of it; and he could not keep down a certain resentment,
senseless and cruel, as if the poor girl were somehow to blame for their
exile. When he betrayed this feeling to his wife, as he sometimes must,
she scolded him for it, and then offered, if he really thought anything
like that, to go back to Tuskingum at once; and it ended in his having
to own himself wrong, and humbly promise that he never would let the
child dream how he felt, unless he really wished to kill her. He was
obliged to carry his self-punishment so far as to take Lottie very
sharply to task when she broke out in hot rebellion, and declared that
it was all Ellen's fault; she was not afraid of killing her sister; and
though she did not say it to her, she said it of her, that anybody else
could have got rid of that fellow without turning the whole family out
of house and home.

Lottie, in fact, was not having a bit good time in New York, which she
did not find equal in any way to Tuskingum for fun. She hated the dull
propriety of the hotel, where nobody got acquainted, and every one was
as afraid as death of every one else; and in her desolation she was
thrown back upon the society of her brother Boyne. They became friends
in their common dislike of New York; and pending some chance of bringing
each other under condemnation they lamented their banishment from
Tuskingum together. But even Boyne contrived to make the heavy time
pass more lightly than she in the lessons he had with a tutor, and the
studies of the city which he carried on. When the skating was not good
in Central Park he spent most of his afternoons and evenings at the
vaudeville theatres. None of the dime museums escaped his research,
and he conversed with freaks and monst