dingy as any old dead cloud with
the rain all shed out of it. I never see any of those old swains of
mine, without feeling profoundly thankful that I don't belong to him. I
shouldn't want to look over my husband's head in any sense. So they all
got wives and children, and I lived an old maid,--although I was
scarcely conscious of the state; for, if my own eyes or other people's
testimony were to be trusted, I didn't look old, and I'm quite sure I
didn't feel so. But I came to myself on my thirty-second birthday, an
old maid most truly, without benefit of clergy. And thereby hangs this
tale; for on that birthday I first made acquaintance with my last love.

Something like a month before, there had come to Huntsville two
gentlemen in search of game and quiet quarters for the summer. They soon
found that a hotel in a country village affords little seclusion; but
the woods were full of game, the mountain-brooks swarmed with trout too
fine to be given up, and they decided to take a house of their own.
After some search, they fixed on an old house, (I've forgotten whose
"folly" it was called,) full a mile and a half from town, standing upon
a mossy hill that bounded my fields, square and stiff and
weather-beaten, and without any protection except a ragged pine-tree
that thrust its huge limbs beneath the empty windows, as though it were
running away with a stolen house under its arm. The place was musty,
rat-eaten, and tenanted by a couple of ghosts, who thought a fever, once
quite fatal within the walls, no suitable discharge from the property,
and made themselves perfectly free of the quarters in properly weird
seasons. But money and labor cleared out all the cobwebs, (for ghosts
are but spiritual cobwebs, you know,) and the old house soon wore a
charming air of rustic comfort.

I used to look over sometimes, for it was full in view from my
chamber-windows, and see the sportsmen going off by sunrise with their
guns or fishing-rods, or lying, after their late dinner, stretched upon
the grass in front of the house, smoking and reading. Sometimes a
fragment of a song would be dropped down from the lazy wings of the
south wind, sometimes a long laugh filled all the summer air and
frightened the pinewood into echoes, and, altogether, the new neighbors
seemed to live an enviable life. They were very civil people, too; for,
though their nearest path out lay across my fields, and close by the
doorway, and they often stopped to buy