aid, rendered
the place too wretched.

Of course, an envious and sneering world said that she was tired of the
country, and wanted to marry again; but she little heeded its taunts;
and Anne, who hated her step-mother and could not live at home, was fain
to accompany her sister to the town where the Bluebeards have had for
many years a very large, genteel, old-fashioned house. So she went to
the town-house, where they lived and quarrelled pretty much as usual;
and though Anne often threatened to leave her, and go to a
boarding-house, of which there were plenty in the place, yet, after all,
to live with her sister, and drive out in the carriage with the footman
and coachman in mourning, and the lozenge on the panels, with the
Bluebeard and Shacabac arms quartered on it, was far more respectable,
and so the lovely sisters continued to dwell together.

* * * * *

For a lady under Mrs. Bluebeard's circumstances, the town-house has
other and peculiar advantages. Besides being an exceedingly spacious and
dismal brick building, with a dismal iron railing in front, and long,
dismal, thin windows, with little panes of glass, it looked out into the
churchyard, where, time out of mind, between two yew-trees, one of which
is cut into the form of a peacock, while the other represents a
dumb-waiter, it looked into the churchyard where the monument of the
late Bluebeard was placed over the family vault. It was the first thing
the widow saw from her bedroom window in the morning, and 'twas sweet to
watch at night, from the parlor, the pallid moonlight lighting up the
bust of the departed, and Virtue throwing great black shadows athwart
it. Polyanthuses, rhododendra, ranunculuses, and other flowers, with the
largest names and of the most delightful odors, were planted within the
little iron railing that enclosed the last resting-place of the
Bluebeards; and the beadle was instructed to half kill any little boys
who might be caught plucking these sweet testimonials of a wife's
affection.

Over the sideboard in the dining-room hung a full-length of Mr.
Bluebeard, by Ticklegill, R. A., in a militia uniform, frowning down
upon the knives and forks and silver trays. Over the mantel-piece he was
represented in a hunting costume, on his favorite horse; there was a
sticking-plaster silhouette of him in the widow's bedroom, and a
miniature in the drawing-room, where he was drawn in a gown of black and
gold, hol