When I have indulged such thoughts for a minute or two, I enter
the mansion, which is said to have been the gate-house only of
the original building, and find one being on whom time seems to
have made little impression; for the Aunt Margaret of to-day
bears the same proportional age to the Aunt Margaret of my early
youth that the boy of ten years old does to the man of (by'r
Lady!) some fifty-six years. The old lady's invariable costume
has doubtless some share in confirming one in the opinion that
time has stood still with Aunt Margaret.

The brown or chocolate-coloured silk gown, with ruffles of the
same stuff at the elbow, within which are others of Mechlin lace;
the black silk gloves, or mitts; the white hair combed back upon
a roll; and the cap of spotless cambric, which closes around the
venerable countenance--as they were not the costume of 1780, so
neither were they that of 1826; they are altogether a style
peculiar to the individual Aunt Margaret. There she still sits,
as she sat thirty years since, with her wheel or the stocking,
which she works by the fire in winter and by the window in
summer; or, perhaps, venturing as far as the porch in an
unusually fine summer evening. Her frame, like some well-
constructed piece of mechanics, still performs the operations for
which it had seemed destined--going its round with an activity
which is gradually diminished, yet indicating no probability that
it will soon come to a period.

The solicitude and affection which had made Aunt Margaret the
willing slave to the inflictions of a whole nursery, have now for
their object the health and comfort of one old and infirm man--