loving-hearted, simple soul, slept on also in its white raiment. Perhaps Tempy herself stood near, and saw her own life and its surroundings with new understanding. Perhaps she herself was

the only watcher.

Later, by some hours, Sarah Ann Binson woke with a start. There was a pale light of dawn outside the small windows. Inside the kitchen the lamp burned dim. Mrs. Crowe awoke too.

"I think Tempy'd be the first to say 'twas just as well we both had some rest," she said, not without a guilty feeling.

Her companion went to the outer door, and opened it wide. The fresh air was none too cold, and the brook's voice was not nearly so loud as it had been in the midnight darkness. She could see the shapes of the hills, and the great shadows that lay across the lower country. The east was fast growing bright.

"Twill be a beautiful day for the funeral," she said, and turned again, with a sigh, to follow Mrs. Crowe up the stairs. The world seemed more and more empty without the kind face and helpful hands of Tempy Dent.

From Deephaven.

THE BRANDON HOUSE

Copyright 1877, by James R. Osgood & Co.

I

DO NOT know that the Brandon House is really very remarkable, but I never have been in one that interested me in the same way. Kate used to recount to select audiences at school some of her experiences with her Aunt Katharine; and it was popularly believed that she once carried down some indestructible picture-books when they were first in fashion, and the old lady basted them for her to hem round the edges at the rate of two a day. It may have been fabulous. It was impossible to imagine any children in the old place; everything was for grown people; even the stair railing was too high to slide down on. The chairs looked as if they had been put, at the furnishing of the house, in their places, and there they meant to remain. The carpets were particularly interesting; and I remember Kate's pointing out to me one day a great square figure in one, and telling me she used to keep house there with her dolls for lack of a better play-house, and if one of them chanced to fall outside the boundary stripe, it was immediately put to bed with a cold. It is a house with great possibilities; it might easily be

made charming. There are four very large rooms on the lower floor, and six above, a wide hall in each story, and a fascinating garret over the whole, where were many mysterious old chests. and boxes, in one of which we found Kate's grandmother's love-letters; and you may be sure the vista of rummages which Mr. Lancaster had laughed about was explored to its very end. Facing each other are two old secretaries, and one of them we ascertained to be the hiding-place of secret drawers, in which may be found valuable records deposited by ourselves one rainy day when we first explored it. We wrote, between us, a tragic 'journal' on some yellow old letter-paper we found in the desk. We put it in the most hidden drawer by itself, and flatter ourselves that it will be regarded with great interest some time or other. Of one of the front rooms, «< the best chamber," we stood rather in dread. It is very remarkable that there seem to be no ghost stories connected with any part of the house, particularly this. We are neither of us nervous; but there is certainly something dismal about the room. The huge curtained bed and immense easy-chairs, windows and everything, were draped in some old-fashioned kind of white cloth which always seemed to be waving and moving about of itself. The carpet was most singularly colored with dark reds and indescribable grays and browns; and the pattern, after a whole summer's study, could never be followed with one's eye. The paper was captured in a French prize somewhere some time in the last century; and part of the figure was shaggy, and therein little spiders found habitation, and went visiting their acquaintances across the shiny places. The color was an unearthly pink and a forbidding maroon, with dim white spots, which gave it the appearance of having molded. It made you low-spirited to look long in the mirror; and the great lounge one could not have cheerful associations with, after hearing that Miss Brandon herself did not like it, having seen so many of her relatives lie there dead. There were fantastic china ornaments from Bible subjects on the mantel; and the only picture was one of the Maid of Orleans, tied with an unnecessarily strong rope to a very stout stake. The best parlor we also rarely used, because all the portraits which hung there had for some unaccountable reason taken a violent dislike to us, and followed us suspiciously with their eyes. The furniture was stately and very uncomfortable, and there was something about the room which suggested an invisible funeral,

SAMUEL JOHNSON

(1709-1784)

BY GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL

AMUEL JOHNSON, the son of a bookseller, was born at Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, September 18th, 1709. He was educated mainly in the grammar school of that city; though perhaps the best part of his education he gave himself, in the free run which he had of the books in his father's shop. Lichfield was the literary centre of a large district. Old Michael Johnson supplied scholars with their folios, as well as less severe readers with romances, poems, essays, and pamphlets. It was in climbing up to search for some apples which young Samuel imagined his brother had hidden behind a large folio, that he came across the works of Petrarch, and fell to studying them. He was a mere child when, reading 'Hamlet' in his father's kitchen, he was so greatly scared by the ghost that he suddenly hurried up-stairs to the street door, that he might see people about him. With the memory of this terror fresh in his mind, he wrote many years afterwards: "He that peruses Shakespeare looks round him alarmed, and starts to find himself alone." He read with wonderful rapidity, ravenously as if he devoured the book, and what he read his powerful memory retained. He knew more books," said Adam Smith, "than any man alive."

At the age of nineteen he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, "the best qualified for the university that his tutor had ever known come there.» Thence he was driven by poverty after a residence of only fourteen months. During the next few years he lived partly by teaching. At the age of twenty-six he married. Two years later he went up to London with a half-finished tragedy in his pocket, and David Garrick as his companion. There for five-and-twenty years he lived the hard life of a poor scholar. His wife died after a long illness. "The melancholy of the day of her death hung long upon me," he recorded in his diary. His own body, though large and powerful, was not sound, and his mind was often overcast by melancholy. "My health," he said in his old age, "has been from my twentieth year such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease.» In this period of his life he did most of his work. He wrote the Debates of Parliament, which were wholly in form and mainly in