and my poor aunt Dall in that short, miserable space of time till he was
found.

My aunt Dall, of whom I now speak for the first time, was my mother's
sister, and had lived with us, I believe, ever since I was born. Her
name was Adelaide, but the little fellow whose adventure I have just
related, stumbling over this fine Norman appellation, turned it into
Idallidy, and then conveniently shortened it of its two extremities and
made it Dall, by which title she was called by us, and known to all our
friends, and beloved by all who ever spoke or heard it. Her story was as
sad a one as could well be; yet to my thinking she was one of the
happiest persons I have ever known, as well as one of the best. She was
my mother's second sister, and as her picture, taken when she was
twenty, shows (and it was corroborated by her appearance till upward of
fifty), she was extremely pretty. Obliged, as all the rest of her family
were, to earn her own bread, and naturally adopting the means of doing
so that they did, she went upon the stage; but I can not conceive that
her nature can ever have had any affinity with her occupation. She had a
robust and rather prosaic common-sense, opposed to any thing exaggerated
or sentimental, which gave her an excellent judgment of character and
conduct, a strong genial vein of humor which very often made her
repartees witty as well as wise, and a sunny sweetness of temper and
soundness of moral nature that made her as good as she was easy and
delightful to live with. Whenever any thing went wrong, and she was
"vexed past her patience," she used to sing; it was the only indication
by which we ever knew that she was what is termed "out of sorts." She
had found employment in her profession under the kindly protection of
Mr. Stephen Kemble, my father's brother, who lived for many years at
Durham, and was the manager of the theatre there, and, according to the
fashion of that time, traveled with his company, at stated seasons, to