t was the old home of the
Coopers, as Eleazer Cooper was entirely rich enough to indulge his
fancy in such matters. Accordingly, as he chose to live in the same
house where his father and his grandfather had dwelt before him, he
peremptorily, if quietly, refused all offers looking toward the
purchase of the lot of ground--though it was now worth five or six
times its former value.

As was said, it was a cheerful, pleasant home, impressing you when you
entered it with the feeling of spotless and all-pervading
cleanliness--a cleanliness that greeted you in the shining brass
door-knocker; that entertained you in the sitting room with its
stiff, leather-covered furniture, the brass-headed tacks whereof
sparkled like so many stars--a cleanliness that bade you farewell in
the spotless stretch of sand-sprinkled hallway, the wooden floor of
which was worn into knobs around the nail heads by the countless
scourings and scrubbings to which it had been subjected and which left
behind them an all-pervading faint, fragrant odor of soap and warm
water.

Eleazer Cooper and his wife were childless, but one inmate made the
great, silent, shady house bright with life. Lucinda Fairbanks, a
niece of Captain Cooper's by his only sister, was a handsome,
sprightly girl of eighteen or twenty, and a great favorite in the
Quaker society of the city.

It remains only to introduce the final and, perhaps, the most
important actor of the narrative--Lieut. James Mainwaring. During the
past twelve months or so he had been a frequent visitor at the Cooper
house. At this time he was a broad-shouldered, red-cheeked, stalwart
fellow of twenty-six or twenty-eight. He was a great social favorite,
and possessed the added romantic interest of having been aboard the
_Constitution_ when she fought the _Guerriere_, and of having, with
his own hands, touched the match that fired the first gun of that
great battle.

Mainwaring's mother and Eliza Cooper had always been intimate friends,
and the coming and going of the young man during his leave of absence
were looked upon in the house as quite a matter of course. Half a
dozen times a week he would drop in to execute some little commission
for the ladies, or, if Captain Cooper was at home, to smoke a pipe of
tobacco with him, to sip a dram of his famous old Jamaica rum, or to
play a rubber of checkers of an evening. It is not likely that either
of the older people was the least aware of the real cause of his