Stone lions guarded ours, but Etruscan
vases crowned the portals of Mrs. Stanbury and Mr. Bainrothe, filled
with blooming plants in the summer season, but bare and desolate and
gray enough in winter.
Mrs. Stanbury, our right-hand neighbor (ay, in every way right-handed),
was a widow lady of about thirty-five years of age. Her husband had been
a sea-captain, and, being cut off suddenly, had, with the exception of
the house she lived in, left her no estate. She owed her maintenance
chiefly to the liberality of his uncle, a gruff old bachelor of sixty or
more, who lived with and took care of her and her children in a way that
was both kindly and disagreeable. He was a bald-headed man (who
flourished a stout, gold-headed cane, I remember), with a florid,
healthy, and honest face and burly figure, engaged in some lucrative
city business, and entirely devoted to his nephew and niece, Mrs.
Stanbury's only children, the one fifteen and the other about twelve
years old at the time of my father's marriage.
Strangely enough, her own deepest interest, if not affection, seemed
centred at this period in her little orphan ward and nephew, George
Gaston, a child of nine years old, who had recently come into her hands;
singularly gifted and beautiful, but lamed for life, it was feared, and
a great sufferer physically from the effects of the fatal hip-disease
that had destroyed the strength and usefulness of one limb, and impaired
his constitution.
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