I HEN I have indulged such thoughts for a minute or 
y two, I enter the mansion which is said to have been 
^4 the gatehouse only of the original building, and find 
one being on whom time seems to have made little im¬ 
pression ; for the Aunt Margaret of to-day bears the 
A-xA same proportional age to the Aunt Margaret of my 
early youth that the boy of ten years old does to the 
man of some fifty-six years. The old lady’s invariable costume has, 
doubtless, some share in confirming one in the opinion that time has 
stood still with Aunt Margaret. 
The brown or chocolate-coloured silk gown, with ruffles of the same 
stuff at the elbow, within which are others of Mechlin lace; the black 
silk gloves or mitts; the white hair combed back upon a roll, and the 
cap of spotless cambric which closes round the venerable countenance, 
as they were not the costume of 1780, so neither were they that of 
1826;—they are altogether a style peculiar to the individual Aunt Mar¬ 
garet. There she still sits, as she sat thirty years ago, with her wheel, 
or the stocking which she works by the fire in winter, and by the 
window in summer; or, perhaps, venturing as far as the porch in an 
unusually fine summer evening. Her frame, like some well-constructed 
piece of mechanism, still performs the operations for which it had 
seemed destined, going its round with an activity which is gradually 
diminished, yet indicating no probability that it will soon come to a 
period. 
The solicitude and affection which had made Aunt Margaret the 
willing slave to the inflictions of a whole nursery, have now for their 
sole object the health and comfort of one old and infirm man, the last 
remaining relative of her family, and the only one who can still find 
interest in the traditional stores which she hoards, as some miser hides 
the gold which he desires no one shall enjoy after his death. 
Sir W . Scott. 
