Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[186] strangers placed her anywhere from sixty to eighty. Her modest cottage, full of old furniture and pictures, was the resort of much that was fashionable on the days of her weekly receptions; costly equipages might be seen before the door; and if, during any particular season, she suspected a falling off in visitors, she would try some new device,--a beautiful girl sitting in a certain carved armchair beneath an emblazoned window, like Keats's Madeline, -or, when things grew desperate, a bench with a milk-pan and a pumpkin on the piazza, to give an innocently rural air. “My dear,” she said on that occasion, “I must try something: rusticity is the dodge for me” ; and so the piazza looked that summer like a transformation scene in “Cinderella,” with the fairy godmother not far off.

She inherited from her father in full the Bohemian temperament, and cultivated it so habitually through life that it was in full flower at a time when almost any other woman would have been repressed by age, poverty, and loneliness. At seventy or more she was still a born mistress of the revels, and could not be for five minutes in a house where a charade or a mask was going on without tapping at the most private door and plaintively imploring to be taken in as one of the conspirators. Once in, there