f these "indurated" sinners, in honor of his
distinguished services in lowering some tax-rate, in suppressing some
nuisance, in establishing some new municipal safeguard to life or
property. This blood in her may, in some measure, account for the vigor
and enthusiasm with which this old lady expressed her sense of the loss
the community had sustained in the death of President Lincoln, in April
of 1865.

Summoning two or three of us youngsters, and a dazed Irish maid fresh
from Castle Garden and a three weeks' voyage in the steerage of an ocean
steamer, she led us up to the top of the house, to one of those vast
old-time garrets that might have been--and in country inns occasionally
were--turned into ballrooms, with the aid of a few lights and sconces.
Here was stored the accumulated garmenture of the household for
generation upon generation; and as far as I could discover, every member
of that family had been born into a profound mourning that had continued
unto his or her latest day, unmitigated save for white shirts and
petticoats. These we bore down by great armfuls to the front portico,
and I remember that the operation took nearly an hour. When at length we
had covered the shaky warped floor of the long porch with the strange
heaps of black and white--linens, cottons, silks, bombazines, alpacas,
ginghams, every conceivable fabric, in fashion or out of fashion, that
could be bleached white or dyed black--the old lady arranged us in
working order, and, acting at once as directress and chief worker, with
incredible quickness and dexterity she rent these varied and multiform
pieces of raiment into broad strips, which she ingeniously twisted, two
or three together, stitching them at the ends to other sets of strips,
until she had formed immensely long rolls of black and white. Mounting a
tall ladder, with the help of the strongest and oldest of her
assistants, she wound the great tall white columns with these strips,
fastening them in huge spirals from top to bottom, black and white
entwined. Then she hung ample festoons between the pillars, and
contrived something painfully ambitious in the way of rosettes for the
cornice and frieze.

[Illustration]

Then we all went out in the street and gazed at the work of our hands.
The rosettes were a failure, and the old lady admitted it. I have
forgotten whether she said they looked "mangy," or "measly," or "peaky;"
but she conveyed her idea in some such graphic phrase. But I