t Dr.
Sanford has done wonders for me. How is your health now, Mrs. Fellows?"

"I have not been so well an entire summer in ten years. My daughter,
Mrs. Tarbox, was saying the other day that she wished she had my
strength. You know she is quite delicate," said Mary.

"Speaking of Dr. Sanford," said Henry, looking at Jessie, "he is really
a remarkable man. My son has such confidence in him that he seemed quite
relieved when I had passed my grand climacteric and could get on his
list. You know he takes no one under sixty-three. By the way, governor,"
he added, turning around with some ado, so as to face George, "I heard
he had been treating your rheumatism lately. Has he seemed to reach the
difficulty?"

"Remarkably," replied George, tenderly stroking his right knee in an
absent manner. "Why, don't you think I walked half the way home from my
office the other day when my carriage was late?"

"I wonder you dared venture it," said Jessie, with a shocked air. "What
if you had met with some accident!"

"That's what my son said," answered George. "He made me promise never
to try such a thing again; but I like to show them occasionally that I'm
good for something yet."

He said this with a "he, he," of senile complacency, ending in an
asthmatic cough, which caused some commotion in the company. Frank
got up and slapped him on the back, and Mary sent Annie for a glass of
water.

George being relieved, and quiet once more restored, Henry said to
Frank:--

"By the way, doctor, I want to congratulate you on your son's last book.
You must have helped him to the material for so truthful a picture of
American manners in the days when we were young. I fear we have not
improved much since then. There was a simplicity, a naturalness in
society fifty years ago, that one looks in vain for now. There was, it
seems to me, much less regard paid to money, and less of morbid social
ambition. Don't you think so, Mrs. Tyrrell?"

"It's just what I was saying only the other day," replied Nellie. "I'm
sure I don't know what we 're coming to nowadays. Girls had some modesty
when I was young," and she shook her head with its rows of white curls
with an air of mingled reprobation and despair.

"Did you attend Professor Merryweather's lecture last evening, Mrs.
Hyde?" asked Frank, adjusting his eye-glasses and fixing Jessie with
that intensity of look by which old persons have to make up for their
failing eyesight. "The hall was so near you