apartment down-stairs, where I found (over a substratum of history,
encyclopaedia, and family Bible) some worn old volumes of Godey's Lady's
Book, an early edition of Cooper's works; Scott, Bulwer, Macaulay,
Byron, and Tennyson, complete; some odd volumes of Victor Hugo, of the
elder Dumas, of Flaubert, of Gautier, and of Balzac; Clarissa, Lalla
Rookh, The Alhambra, Beulah, Uarda, Lucile, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ben-Hur,
Trilby, She, Little Lord Fauntleroy; and of a later decade, there were
novels about those delicately tangled emotions experienced by the
supreme few; and stories of adventurous royalty; tales of "clean-limbed
young American manhood;" and some thin volumes of rather precious verse.

'Twas amid these romantic scenes that I awaited the sound of the
lunch-bell (which for me was the announcement of breakfast), when I
arose from my first night's slumbers under Mrs. Apperthwaite's roof; and
I wondered if the books were a fair mirror of Miss Apperthwaite's mind
(I had been told that Mrs. Apperthwaite had a daughter). Mrs.
Apperthwaite herself, in her youth, might have sat to an illustrator of
Scott or Bulwer. Even now you could see she had come as near being
romantically beautiful as was consistently proper for such a timid,
gentle little gentlewoman as she was. Reduced, by her husband's
insolvency (coincident with his demise) to "keeping boarders," she did
it gracefully, as if the urgency thereto were only a spirit of quiet
hospitality. It should be added in haste that she set an excellent
table.

Moreover, the guests who gathered at her board were of a very attractive
description, as I decided the instant my eye fell upon the lady who sat
opposite me at lunch. I knew at once that she was Miss Apperthwaite, she
"went so," as they say, with her mother; nothing could have been more
suitable. Mrs. Apperthwaite was the kind of woman whom you would expect