and set apart for the Civil List, and what should be laid aside as a
Sinking Fund. Now my mother, true woman as she was, had a womanly love
of show in her own quiet way,--of making "a genteel figure" in the eyes
of the neighborhood; of seeing that sixpence not only went as far as
sixpence ought to go, but that, in the going, it should emit a mild but
imposing splendor,--not, indeed, a gaudy flash, a startling Borealian
coruscation, which is scarcely within the modest and placid
idiosyncracies of sixpence,--but a gleam of gentle and benign light,
just to show where a sixpence had been, and allow you time to say
"Behold!" before

"The jaws of darkness did devour it up."

Thus, as I once before took occasion to apprise the reader, we had
always held a very respectable position in the neighborhood round our
square brick house; been as sociable as my father's habits would permit;
given our little tea-parties, and our occasional dinners, and, without
attempting to vie with our richer associates, there had always been so
exquisite a neatness, so notable a housekeeping, so thoughtful a
disposition, in short, of all the properties indigenous to a well-spent
sixpence, in my mother's management, that there was not an old maid
within seven miles of us who did not pronounce our tea-parties to be
perfect; and the great Mrs. Rollick, who gave forty guineas a year to a
professed cook and housekeeper, used regularly, whenever we dined at
Rollick Hall, to call across the table to my mother (who therewith
blushed up to her ears) to apologize for the strawberry jelly. It is
true that when, on returning home, my mother adverted to that flattering
and delicate compliment, in a tone that revealed the self-conceit of the
human heart, my father--whether to sober his Kitty's vanity into a
proper and Christian mortification of spirit, or from that strange