from brow to crown. You judge him, rightly, to be about forty. The house
is quiet, for it is half-past ten, and the children have long been gone
to bed. He opens the sitting-room door, but instead of seeing his wife,
as he expected, stitching with the nimblest of fingers by the light of
one candle, he finds her dispensing with the light of a candle
altogether. She is softly pacing up and down by the red firelight,
holding in her arms little Walter, the year-old baby, who looks over her
shoulder with large wide-open eyes, while the patient mother pats his
back with her soft hand, and glances with a sigh at the heap of large and
small stockings lying unmended on the table.

She was a lovely woman--Mrs. Amos Barton, a large, fair, gentle Madonna,
with thick, close, chestnut curls beside her well-rounded cheeks, and
with large, tender, short-sighted eyes. The flowing lines of her tall
figure made the limpest dress look graceful, and her old frayed black
silk seemed to repose on her bust and limbs with a placid elegance and
sense of distinction, in strong contrast with the uneasy sense of being
no fit, that seemed to express itself in the rustling of Mrs. Farquhar's
_gros de Naples_. The caps she wore would have been pronounced, when off
her head, utterly heavy and hideous--for in those days even fashionable
caps were large and floppy; but surmounting her long arched neck, and
mingling their borders of cheap lace and ribbon with her chestnut curls,
they seemed miracles of successful millinery. Among strangers she was shy
and tremulous as a girl of fifteen; she blushed crimson if any one
appealed to her opinion; yet that tall, graceful, substantial presence
was so imposing in its mildness, that men spoke to her with an agreeable
sensation of timidity.

Soothing, unspeakable charm of gentle womanhood! which supersedes all
acquisitions, all accomplishments. You would never have asked, at any