Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/201

 VII.

When, after a residence of thirteen years in other States, I returned to Massachusetts, in 1873, to make my home in Cambridge, so near to my old friend as to render correspondence more rare than ever, I found the Randall family sadly reduced in number. Anna had died in 1862, Mrs. Gumming in 1867, the venerable Mrs. Randall in 1868, and Governor Gumming in 1873. On May i, 1869, a little more than a year after their mother's death, John and Belinda broke up the old home in Harrison Avenue (so utterly different once from what that quarter was then rapidly becoming), and removed to Mount Pleasant, in Roxbury. Here, in a retired and almost rural district, they selected one of the attractive old houses of the place on Dennis street, at the corner of the now extended More- land street, and made it their home for twenty-three years. Even after John's death, notwithstanding the fact that this neighborhood, too, had been very disagreeably invaded. Miss Randall continued to live there two years longer, and then purchased, in 1894, the house on Moreland street numbered twenty-seven, where she died three years later.

In this quiet retreat the brother and sister, now all in all to each other, passed the long evening of their days in a very modest manner, indifferent to the fashionable world in which, if they had been so disposed, they had every right to shine. Education, culture, manners, taste, af- fluence, birth, they possessed what so many sigh for in vain ; but they lacked wholly what makes the many sigh for it — social ambition, the enjoyment of display, the vanity which makes the peacock strut. John Randall was

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