ACHETA AND HIS COUSIN. 363 



kitchen order, to judge by the appearance of a silver cream- 

 pot, a bason of white sugar, and a large plum-cake in all the 

 integrity of its rotund form. 



Our interior is not entirely a picture of still life. Seated, 

 one on a low stool, the other on a wooden chair beside the 

 fire, are two children a little white-frocked girl of perhaps 

 nine or ten, fair, and looking fragile as a flower, and a boy 

 some three years older, and by his garb seeming, like herself, 

 a visitor only to the kitchen. The girl is as at Christmas 

 Christmas fifty years ago appeared onr little cousin Lucy \ 

 the boy is none other than ourself, when not the cricket, brown 

 and desiccate, but the verdant grasshopper (emblem of youth 

 and happiness) was our most befitting representative. 



At the period when the above scenes and persons were in- 

 vested with reality and life, the 23rd of December used to be 



I 



a red-letter day in our then short calendar. It was that on 

 which our uncle was accustomed to entertain a party of old 

 college friends ; and we and our cousin, our company super- 

 fluous in the parlour, were permitted to bestow it in the 

 kitchen, there to take tea with Dolly Dove and Caleb. The 

 former, indeed, as became her station in the minister's family, 

 was possessor of a peculiar nest, well lined and comfortable, 

 known as the housekeeper's room in part, also, Lucy's nur- 

 sery w ith its lofty linen-press and deep -shelved closets, into 

 whose sweet profundities we had often, with the flies, contrived 

 to penetrate; but on the anniversary in question, the subordi- 



