Sweet and pleasing the task to watch the unfledged nestlings while under a mother's fostering wing, but when they spread their wings and fly, where is the eye or pen that can follow them on their eager way?
Once more, but once, we will glance within the halls of Oakwood, and then will we bid them farewell, for our task will be done, and the last desires of fancy, we trust, to have appeased.
It was in the September of the year 1830 we closed our narrative.

Let us then, for one moment, imagine the veil of fancy is upraised on the first day of the year, 1838, and gaze within that self-same room, which twenty years before we had seen lighted up on a similar occasion, the anniversary of a new year, bright with youthful beauty, and enlivened by the silvery laugh of early childhood.

But few, very few, were the strangers that this night mingled with Mr.Hamilton's family.

It was not, as it had been twenty years previous, a children's ball on which we glance.

It was but the happy reunion of every member of that truly happy family, and the lovely, mirthful children there assembled were, with the exception of a very few, closely connected one with another by the near relationship of brothers, sisters, and cousins.