"No less than five persons during the forenoon inquired for ginger-beer or root-beer, or any drink of a similar beverage, and obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in exceedingly bad humour. Three of them left the door open; but the other two pulled it so spitefully in going out, that it played the very deuce with Hepzibah's nerves. A round, bustling, fire-ruddy housewife of the neighbourhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast; and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave her customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this very capable housekeeper took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke:

"A cent shop and no yeast!' quoth she; that will never do! Who ever heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine will to-day. You had better shut up shop at once.'

"Well,' said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, 'perhaps I

had.'"

And so the day wears on. Some come obviously from curiosity, and the old lady loses her temper, and becomes more and more bewildered.

"Her final operation was with the little devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel. In her tribulation, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of the shop. She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put up the oaken bar across the door.

66

'During the latter process, an omnibus came to a standstill under the branches of the elm-tree. A gentleman alighted; but it was only to offer his hand to a young girl, whose slender figure nowise needing such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy little jump from the final one to the side-walk. She rewarded her cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on his own face as he re-entered the vehicle. The girl then turned towards the House of the Seven Gables; to the door of which meanwhile-not the shop-door, but the antique portal-the omnibus man had carried a light trunk and a

bandbox. First giving a sharp rap of the old iron knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the door-step and departed.

66 6 "Who can it be?' thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable. The girl must have mistaken the house.'

"She stole softly into the hall, and, herself invisible, gazed through the side-lights of the portal at the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for admittance into the gloomy old mansion. It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord.

"The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and so obedient to common rules as you at once recognise her to be, was widely in contrast at that moment with everything around her. The sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the timeworn framework of the door, none of these things belonged to her sphere. But even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the threshold. It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing open to admit her. The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in her first purposes, soon began to feel that the bolt ought to be shoved back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock.

"Can it be Phoebe ?' questioned she within herself. 'It must be little Phobe; for it can be nobody else; and there is a look of her father about her too! Well! she must have a night's lodging, I suppose, and to-morrow the child shall go back to her mother.'

"Phœbe Pyncheon slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glowing crimson light came flooding through the window and bathed the dingy ceiling and paper-hangings of its own hue. There were curtains to Phoebe's bed; a dark antique canopy and ponderous festoons, of a stuff that had been magnificent in its time but which now brooded over the girl like

a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere it was beginning to be day. The morning light, however, soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the new guest there with a bloom on her cheeks like the morning's own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as when an early breeze moves the foliage, the dawn kissed her brow. It was the caress which a dewy maiden—such as the dawn is immortally —gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes.

"At the touch of those lips of light, Phoebe quietly awoke, and for a moment did not recognise where she was, nor how those heavy curtains chanced to be festooned around her. Nothing indeed was absolutely plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever might happen next, it was proper first of all to get up and say her prayers. She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall stiff chairs; one of which stood close to her bedside, and looked as if some old-fashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had vanished only just in season to escape discovery.

“When Phœbe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a rose-bush in the garden. Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose. A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight or mildew at their hearts; but viewed at a fair distance, the whole rose-bush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer, together with the mould in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless, that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheon-she was Phoebe's great-great-grand-aunt-in soil which, reckoning only its cultivation as a garden-plat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of vegetable decay. Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth, the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator; nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebe's young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window. Hastening down the creaking and

carpetless staircase, she found her way into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and brought them to her chamber.

"Little Phœbe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favoured ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade. No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim, as it were, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, dusky chamber, which had been untenanted so long, except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and ghosts, that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to obliterate every trace of men's happier homes. What was precisely Phoebe's process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there; brought some articles of furniture to light, and dragged others into the shadow; looped up or let down a window-curtain; and in the course of half an hour had fully succeeded in throwing a kind and hospitable smile over the apartment.

"There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm. The bedchamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied experience as a scene of human life. Here had come the bridegroom with his bride; new immortals had here drawn their earliest breath; and here the old had died. But whether it were the white roses, or whatever the subtle influence might be, a person of delicate instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden's bedchamber, and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her sweet breath and happy thoughts."

There is a touch of Göthe's Margaret, the Margaret of "Faust," in the last paragraph. But Phoebe is a truly original conception. To quote her thousand prettinesses of thought and action, would be to copy half the volume. Suffice it that she stays with her good old cross cousin; and that, under her

auspices, the shop flourishes, and the tottering mansion loses half its gloom.

P.S.-I have just received an American reprint of Mr. Hawthorne's earliest volumes, "Twice Told Tales," two or three of which are as fine as his larger efforts-one especially, in which a story is told by a succession of unspoken sounds as clearly as it could have been by pictures. It is one of Messrs. Ticknor, Reed, and Field's beautiful editions, and the preface and portrait are most interesting. Nothing can exceed the modesty of that preface, and I am told that Mr. Hawthorne is astonished at his own reputation, and thinks himself the most over-rated man in America. Then that portrait-what a head! and he is said to be of the height and build of Daniel Webster. So much the better. It is well that a fine intellect should be fitly lodged; such harmony is amongst the best and rarest of natural gifts.

Mr. Hawthorne is engaged in another tale, and on a work for young people, which, from such a man, will probably prove quite as acceptable to children of a larger growth as to those for whom it is ostensibly written.

ANDREW MARVELL's very name suggests the idea of incorruptible patriotism. The well-known story of his refusing a court bribe, by calling his servant to prove that he had dined three times upon a shoulder of mutton, although probably apocryphal, serves to prove the notion universally entertained of the uncompromising member for Hull,-unassailable as Robespierre himself to all money temptations, and strong enough to have resisted the subtler temptations of power. His learning, too, is generally acknowledged. He shared with Milton the high and honourable office of Latin Secretary to the Lord Protector,-was the champion of the great poet's living reputation, the supporter of free principles against all assailants, and is praised even by Swift, not addicted to overpraise, for the keen wit and fiery eloquence of his polemical