DOMESTIC PORTRAITS. 361 



zealous stamp) 'twas thou first set us on our hobby, and for 

 this alone we should revere and love thy memory. 



Two humbler personages hang, in their portraitures, beside 

 our uncle, humble, yet withal of vast importance in his house- 

 hold, which, for several years, had been without a mistress. 



One is the widower's housekeeper, the nurse of his little 

 Lucy, and once his own, old Dolly Dolly Dove than whom 

 no feathered parent of the dove-cot ever spread a wing more 

 tenderly over her cherished nestlings. Her hair, white nearly 

 as her full-bordered, high-crowned cap, and set in a few flat 

 curls upon her smooth round forehead, tells something of her 

 age ; yet of winter, excepting in this single snowy vestige, few 

 are the tokens that she bears about her, either in her plump, 

 full figure, or in her ruddy, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, small-fea- 

 tured face, glowing in the light of warm kind-heartedness, as 

 a flat Flemish landscape in the sunset of a summer's eve. 



The other portrait, a striking pendant to the last in the way 

 of contrast, as a shrunken pea-pod to a round ripe apple, as a 

 blasted pine-tree to a "hospitable oak/' as a dry walking- 

 branch caterpillar to a fat-bodied downy moth, is that which 

 preresents the figure of Dolly's fellow-servant, our uncle's 

 butler, valet, amanuensis, and librarian, eke our writing- 

 master (Lucy's and mine), the angular, bony, spindle-shanked, 

 high-shouldered, hard-featured, hard-minded, if not exactly 

 hard-hearted, Caleb Caligraph, who could never from his cradle 

 have looked young, and could never to his grave have appeared 



