and started out of her sleep a great tortoise-shell cat, that lay on
the rug which Aunt Kindly had made for her. Tabby opened her yellow eyes
suddenly, and erected her _smellers_, but finding it was only the wind
and not a mouse that made the noise, she stretched out a great paw and
yawned, and then cuddled her head down so as to show her white throat,
and went to sleep again.

Uncle Nathan and Aunt Kindly were brother and sister. He was a little
more than sixty, a fine, hale, hearty-looking, handsome man as you could
find in a summer's day, with white hair and a thoughtful, benevolent
face, adorned with a full beard as white as his venerable head. Aunt
Kindly was five-and-forty or thereabouts; her face a little sad when you
looked at it carelessly in its repose, but commonly it seemed cheerful,
full of thought and generosity, and handsome withal; for, as her brother
told her, "God administered to you the sacrement of beauty in your
childhood, and you will walk all your life in the loveliness thereof."

Uncle Nathan had been an India merchant from his twenty-fifth to about
his fiftieth year, and had now, for some years, been living with his
sister in his fine, large house,--rich and well educated, devoting his
life to study, works of benevolence, to general reform and progress. It
was he who had the first anti-slavery lecture delivered in the town,
and actually persuaded Mr. Homer, the old minister, to let Mr. Garrison
stand in the pulpit on a Wednesday night and preach deliverance unto
the captives; but it could be done only once, for the clergymen of the
neighborhood thought anti-slavery a desecration of their new wooden
meeting-houses. It was he, too, who asked Lucy Stone to lecture on
woman's rights, but the communicants thought it would not do to let a
"woman speak in the church," and so he gave it up. All the country knew
and loved him, for he was a natural overseer of the poor, and guardian