study, that sanctum which even we children were not allowed to enter
except on special occasions, on a quiet winter evening, or, perhaps,
on as quiet a summer morning.

Uncle John had not always lived in the old house. We knew, that, after
Grandpapa's death, it had been shut up,--for my father's business
engagements would not allow my mother to reside in it, and Uncle John
had been for years among the Indians in the far Northwest. We had
heard of him sometimes, but we had never seen him, we hardly realized
that he was a living person, till one day he suddenly appeared among
us, rough-looking and uncouth in his hunter's dress, with his heavy
beard and his long hair, bringing with him his multifarious
assortment, so charming to our eyes, of buffalo-robes and elk-horns,
wolf-skins and Indian moccasins.

He staid with us that winter, and very merry and happy he seemed to us
at first;--looking back upon it now, I should call it, not happiness,
but excitement;--but as the winter passed on, even we children saw
that all was not right with him. He gradually withdrew himself from
the constant whirl of society in our house, and, by the spring, had
settled himself in the old home at Newport, adding to his old
furniture only his books, which he had been all winter collecting, and
the primitive _in_conveniences of his own room, which his rough
Western life had rendered indispensable to him. His study presented a
singular mixture of civilization and barbarism, and its very
peculiarities made it a delight to Alice and me. There were a few rare
engravings on the walls, hung between enormous antlers which supported
rough-looking rifles and uncouth hunting-shirts,--cases of elegantly
bound and valuable books, half hidden by heavy buffalo-robes marked
all over with strange-looking hieroglyphics which told the Indian