ily with weakness and the gradual wearing
away of the very power of life. Mary Crawford is a wife, and has been
since Wednesday, the twenty-sixth of November, 1862, on which day--the
day preceding the annual Thanksgiving--Richard Crawford religiously
believes that he repaid himself for all by-gone wrongs and
misunderstandings. For some cause, with which his past sufferings and
his changed domestic relations may have had more or less to do, he has
never yet joined the army of which he has always been thinking with a
longing desire. His pen has not been idle, even in his happiness--may
not that have done _his_ appointed work? It need scarcely be said that
the friendship between the people of the big house on the hill, and
those of the little Halstead house in the village, though for a time
interrupted by pride and neglect, has since been more warmly cemented
than ever before,--and that when little Susy marries the engineer, as
she will probably do before the summer closes, there will be no warmer
prayers put up for their happiness, than those uttered by two who have
trodden the same path but a little while before them.

* * * * *

We have not chosen to depict the storm which followed the sudden
departure of Colonel John Boadley Bancker from the house of Judge Owen,
near the Harlem River. That there _was_ a storm, is undeniable--such a
storm as the burly Judge had (and still retains) the faculty of getting
up at the shortest notice. One of those blind, indiscriminate storms,
which having no justice have no direction, and which consequently hurt
no one, though they offend all. Frank Wallace, for daring to play such a
masquerade in his house and offend a guest--Josephine Harris, for being
an accessory before or after the fact, to the plot (the pompous man
never knew which)--Emily for having been always a disobedient daughter
and a disgrace to the family, this event being another of the abundant
proofs thereof--Mrs. Owen and Aunt Martha for daring to live in the same
house where such things were about to occur, without preventing them,
whether they knew of the arrangement or not,--all received their share
in this blast of denunciation; and yet, strangely enough, all survived
it, and not one even quitted the house in disgust.

Colonel John Boadley Bancker has never since entered the house or held
any intercourse with its inmates. He would quite as soon, we suspect,
change places with Driesbach