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+Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+(The Physician and Poet, not the Jurist, O. W. Holmes, Jr.)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Guardian Angel
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+Release Date: August 16, 2006 [EBook #2697]
+Last Updated: February 18, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GUARDIAN ANGEL ***
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+By Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+
+TO MY READERS.
+
+“A new Preface” is, I find, promised with my story. If there are any
+among my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the
+Moral appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and learn
+what I have to say here.
+
+This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
+remember, entitled “Elsie Venner.” Like that,--it is intended for two
+classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers of the
+“Morals” in Aesop and of this Preface.
+
+The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which some
+thought cruel, even on paper. It imagined an alien element introduced
+into the blood of a human being before that being saw the light. It
+showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with the ophidian
+characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during the pre-natal
+period. Whether anything like this ever happened, or was possible,
+mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest the limitations
+of human responsibility in a simple and effective way.
+
+The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
+experience. The successive development of inherited bodily aspects
+and habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see
+families grow up under their own eyes. The same thing happens, but less
+obviously to common observation, in the mental and moral nature. There
+is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic
+qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from
+generation to generation. Jonathan Edwards the younger tells the story
+of a brutal wretch in New Haven who was abusing his father, when the old
+man cried out, “Don't drag me any further, for I did n't drag my father
+beyond this tree.” [The original version of this often-repeated story
+may be found in Aristotle's Ethics, Book 7th, Chapter 7th.] I have
+attempted to show the successive evolution of some inherited qualities
+in the character of Myrtle Hazard, not so obtrusively as to disturb the
+narrative, but plainly enough to be kept in sight by the small class of
+preface-readers.
+
+If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
+higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
+learned ladies. If I should proclaim that they were protests against
+the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all human
+action from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the jealousy of
+the cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums. By saying nothing
+about it, the large majority of those whom my book reaches, not being
+preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them beyond the
+simple facts of the narrative.
+
+Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
+limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
+self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
+intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in our
+new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown of
+scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of nature into
+the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as much as in the
+bodily functions, without being accused of laying “all that we are evil
+in to a divine thrusting on,” we had better return at once to our
+old demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower House in his
+time-honored prerogatives.
+
+As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may
+be needed here to make some of my characters and statements appear
+probable. The long-pending question involving a property which had
+become in the mean time of immense value finds its parallel in the great
+De Haro land-case, decided in the Supreme Court while this story was in
+progress (May 14th, 1867). The experiment of breaking the child's
+will by imprisonment and fasting is borrowed from a famous incident,
+happening long before the case lately before one of the courts of
+a neighboring Commonwealth, where a little girl was beaten to death
+because she would not say her prayers. The mental state involving utter
+confusion of different generations in a person yet capable of forming
+a correct judgment on other matters, is almost a direct transcript
+from nature. I should not have ventured to repeat the questions of
+the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle Hazard about her family
+conditions, and their comments, had not a lady of fortune and position
+mentioned to me a similar circumstance in the school history of one of
+her own children. Perhaps I should have hesitated in reproducing Myrtle
+Hazard's “Vision,” but for a singular experience of his own related to
+me by the late Mr. Forceythe Willson.
+
+Gifted Hopkins (under various alliasis) has been a frequent
+correspondent of mine. I have also received a good many communications,
+signed with various names, which must have been from near female
+relatives of that young gentleman. I once sent a kind of encyclical
+letter to the whole family connection; but as the delusion under which
+they labor is still common, and often leads to the wasting of time,
+the contempt of honest study or humble labor, and the misapplication of
+intelligence not so far below mediocrity as to be incapable of affording
+a respectable return when employed in the proper direction, I thought
+this picture from life might also be of service. When I say that no
+genuine young poet will apply it to himself, I think I have so far
+removed the sting that few or none will complain of being wounded.
+
+It is lamentable to be forced to add that the Reverend Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker is only a softened copy of too many originals to whom, as a
+regular attendant upon divine worship from my childhood to the present
+time, I have respectfully listened, while they dealt with me and mine
+and the bulk of their fellow-creatures after the manner of their sect.
+If, in the interval between his first showing himself in my story and
+its publication in a separate volume, anything had occurred to make
+me question the justice or expediency of drawing and exhibiting such a
+portrait, I should have reconsidered it, with the view of retouching its
+sharper features. But its essential truthfulness has been illustrated
+every month or two, since my story has been in the course of
+publication, by a fresh example from real life, stamped in darker colors
+than any with which I should have thought of staining my pages.
+
+There are a great many good clergymen to one bad one, but a writer
+finds it hard to keep to the true proportion of good and bad persons in
+telling a story. The three or four good ministers I have introduced in
+this narrative must stand for many whom I have known and loved, and some
+of whom I count to-day among my most valued friends. I hope the best and
+wisest of them will like this story and approve it. If they cannot all
+do this, I know they will recognize it as having been written with a
+right and honest purpose.
+
+BOSTON, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+
+It is a quarter of a century since the foregoing Preface was written,
+and that is long enough to allow a story to be forgotten by the public,
+and very possibly by the writer of it also. I will not pretend that I
+have forgotten all about “The Guardian Angel,” but it is long since
+I have read it, and many of its characters and incidents are far from
+being distinct in my memory. There are, however, a few points which hold
+their place among my recollections. The revolt of Myrtle Hazard from the
+tyranny of that dogmatic dynasty now breaking up in all directions has
+found new illustrations since this tale was written. I need only refer
+to two instances of many. The first is from real life. Mr. Robert
+C. Adams's work, “Travels in Faith from Tradition to Reason,” is the
+outcome of the teachings of one of the most intransigeant of our New
+England Calvinists, the late Reverend Nehemiah Adams. For an example in
+fiction,--fiction which bears all the marks of being copied from real
+life,--I will refer to “The Story of an African Farm.” The boy's honest,
+but terrible outburst, “I hate God,” was, I doubt not, more acceptable
+in the view of his Maker than the lying praise of many a hypocrite who,
+having enthroned a demon as Lord of the Universe, thinks to conciliate
+his favor by using the phrases which the slaves of Eastern despots are
+in the habit of addressing to their masters. I have had many private
+letters showing the same revolt of reasoning natures against doctrines
+which shock the more highly civilized part of mankind in this nineteenth
+century and are leading to those dissensions which have long shown as
+cracks, and are fast becoming lines of cleavage in some of the largest
+communions of Protestantism.
+
+The principle of heredity has been largely studied since this story
+was written. This tale, like “Elsie Venner,” depends for its deeper
+significance on the ante-natal history of its subject. But the story
+was meant to be readable for those who did not care for its underlying
+philosophy. If it fails to interest the reader who ventures upon it,
+it may find a place on an unfrequented bookshelf in common with other
+“medicated novels.”
+
+Perhaps I have been too hard with Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of
+rhymesters to which he belongs. I ought not to forget that I too
+introduced myself to the reading world in a thin volume of verses; many
+of which had better not have been written, and would not be reprinted
+now, but for the fact that they have established a right to a place
+among my poems in virtue of long occupancy. Besides, although the
+writing of verses is often a mark of mental weakness, I cannot forget
+that Joseph Story and George Bancroft each published his little book,
+of rhymes, and that John Quincy Adams has left many poems on record, the
+writing of which did not interfere with the vast and important labors of
+his illustrious career.
+
+BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 7, 1891. O. W. H.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. AN ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+On Saturday, the 18th day of June, 1859, the “State Banner and Delphian
+Oracle,” published weekly at Oxbow Village, one of the principal centres
+in a thriving river-town of New England, contained an advertisement
+which involved the story of a young life, and stained the emotions of
+a small community. Such faces of dismay, such shaking of heads, such
+gatherings at corners, such halts of complaining, rheumatic wagons, and
+dried-up, chirruping chaises, for colloquy of their still-faced tenants,
+had not been known since the rainy November Friday, when old Malachi
+Withers was found hanging in his garret up there at the lonely house
+behind the poplars.
+
+The number of the “Banner and Oracle” which contained this advertisement
+was a fair specimen enough of the kind of newspaper to which it
+belonged. Some extracts from a stray copy of the issue of the date
+referred to will show the reader what kind of entertainment the paper
+was accustomed to furnish its patrons, and also serve some incidental
+purposes of the writer in bringing into notice a few personages who are
+to figure in this narrative.
+
+The copy in question was addressed to one of its regular
+subscribers,--“B. Gridley, Esq.” The sarcastic annotations at
+various points, enclosed in brackets and italicised that they may be
+distinguished from any other comments, were taken from the pencilled
+remarks of that gentleman, intended for the improvement of a member of
+the family in which he resided, and are by no means to be attributed to
+the harmless pen which reproduces them.
+
+Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons acquainted
+with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a schoolmaster,
+a college tutor, and afterwards for many years professor,--a man of
+learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such as are hardly to be
+found, except in old, unmarried students,--the double flowers of college
+culture, their stamina all turned to petals, their stock in the life
+of the race all funded in the individual. Being a man of letters, Byles
+Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary acquirements of the
+good people of the rural district where he resided, and, having known
+much of college and something of city life, was apt to smile at the
+importance they attached to their little local concerns. He was, of
+course, quite as much an object of rough satire to the natural observers
+and humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,--perhaps
+not in any village where a score or two of families are brought
+together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
+characters of a real-life stock company.
+
+The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
+worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire,
+whose handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored
+lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely groomed
+willow--hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were, monumental
+parlor. Her household consisted of herself, her son, nineteen years of
+age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small children, twins, left upon
+her doorstep when little more than mere marsupial possibilities, taken
+in for the night, kept for a week, and always thereafter cherished by
+the good soul as her own; also of Miss Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at
+school at the “Academy” in another part of the same town, a distant
+relative, boarding with her.
+
+What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to
+guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly to
+hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of the
+old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not believe a
+word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as to growl to
+himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the way about it.
+
+The leading article of the “Banner and Oracle” for June 18th must have
+been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked, several of
+the “metropolitan” journals of the date of June 15th and thereabout
+had evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some of his ideas
+before he gave them to the public. The Foreign News by the Europa at
+Halifax, 15th, was spread out in the amplest dimensions the type of the
+office could supply. More battles! The Allies victorious! The King and
+General Cialdini beat the Austrians at Palestro! 400 Austrians drowned
+in a canal! Anti-French feeling in Germany! Allgermine Zeiturg talks of
+conquest of Allsatia and Loraine and the occupation of Paris! [Vicious
+digs with a pencil through the above proper names.] Race for the Derby
+won by Sir Joseph Hawley's Musjid! [That's what England cares for!
+Hooray for the Darby! Italy be deedeed!] Visit of Prince Alfred to
+the Holy Land. Letter from our own Correspondent. [Oh! Oh! A West
+Minkville?] Cotton advanced. Breadstuffs declining.--Deacon Rumrill's
+barn burned down on Saturday night. A pig missing; supposed to have
+“fallen a prey to the devouring element.” [Got roasted.] A yellow
+mineral had been discovered on the Doolittle farm, which, by the report
+of those who had seen it, bore a strong resemblance to California gold
+ore. Much excitement in the neighborhood in consequence [Idiots! Iron
+pyrites!] A hen at Four Corners had just laid an egg measuring 7 by 8
+inches. Fetch on your biddies! [Editorial wit!] A man had shot an eagle
+measuring six feet and a half from tip to tip of his wings.--Crops
+suffering for want of rain [Always just so. “Dry times, Father Noah!”]
+The editors had received a liberal portion of cake from the happy couple
+whose matrimonial union was recorded in the column dedicated to Hymen.
+Also a superior article of [article of! bah!] steel pen from the
+enterprising merchant [shopkeeper] whose advertisement was to be found
+on the third page of this paper.--An interesting Surprise Party [cheap
+theatricals] had transpired [bah!] on Thursday evening last at the house
+of the Rev. Mr. Stoker. The parishioners had donated [donated! GIVE is
+a good word enough for the Lord's Prayer. DONATE our daily bread!] a
+bag of meal, a bushel of beans, a keg of pickles, and a quintal of
+salt-fish. The worthy pastor was much affected, etc., etc. [Of course.
+Call'em. SENSATION parties and done with it!] The Rev. Dr. Pemberton and
+the venerable Dr. Hurlbut honored the occasion with their presence.--We
+learn that the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, rector of St. Bartholomew's Chapel,
+has returned from his journey, and will officiate to-morrow.
+
+Then came strings of advertisements, with a luxuriant vegetation of
+capitals and notes of admiration. More of those PRIME GOODS! Full
+Assortments of every Article in our line! [Except the one thing you
+want!] Auction Sale. Old furniture, feather-beds, bed-spreads [spreads!
+ugh!], setts [setts!] crockery-ware, odd vols., ullage bbls. of this
+and that, with other household goods, etc., etc., etc.,--the etceteras
+meaning all sorts of insane movables, such as come out of their
+bedlam-holes when an antiquated domestic establishment disintegrates
+itself at a country “vandoo.”--Several announcements of “Feed,” whatever
+that may be,--not restaurant dinners, anyhow,--also of “Shorts,”--terms
+mysterious to city ears as jute and cudbear and gunnybags to such as
+drive oxen in the remote interior districts.--Then the marriage column
+above alluded to, by the fortunate recipients of the cake. Right
+opposite, as if for matrimonial ground-bait, a Notice that Whereas
+my wife, Lucretia Babb, has left my bed and board, I will not be
+responsible, etc., etc., from this date.--Jacob Penhallow (of the late
+firm Wibird and Penhallow) had taken Mr. William Murray Bradshaw into
+partnership, and the business of the office would be carried on as usual
+under the title Penhallow and Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law. Then came
+the standing professional card of Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, the medical patriarch of the town and his son. Following this,
+hideous quack advertisements, some of them with the certificates of
+Honorables, Esquires, and Clergymen.--Then a cow, strayed or stolen
+from the subscriber.--Then the advertisement referred to in our first
+paragraph:
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD has been missing from her home in this place since
+Thursday morning, June 16th. She is fifteen years old, tall and womanly
+for her age, has dark hair and eyes, fresh complexion, regular features,
+pleasant smile and voice, but shy with strangers. Her common dress was a
+black and white gingham check, straw hat, trimmed with green ribbon.
+It is feared she may have come to harm in some way, or be wandering
+at large in a state of temporary mental alienation. Any information
+relating to the missing child will be gratefully received and properly
+rewarded by her afflicted aunt,
+
+MISS SILENCE WITHERS, Residing at the Withers Homestead, otherwise known
+as “The Poplars,” in this village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. GREAT EXCITEMENT
+
+The publication of the advertisement in the paper brought the village
+fever of the last two days to its height. Myrtle Hazard's disappearance
+had been pretty well talked round through the immediate neighborhood,
+but now that forty-eight hours of search and inquiry had not found her,
+and the alarm was so great that the young girl's friends were willing
+to advertise her in a public journal, it was clear that the gravest
+apprehensions were felt and justified. The paper carried the tidings to
+many who had not heard it. Some of the farmers who had been busy all
+the week with their fields came into the village in their wagons on
+Saturday, and there first learned the news, and saw the paper, and the
+placards which were posted up, and listened, open-mouthed, to the whole
+story.
+
+Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and
+some stir in the neighboring settlements. Of course there was a great
+variety of comment, its character depending very much on the sense,
+knowledge, and disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young people
+who talked over the painful and mysterious occurrence.
+
+The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest. Nurse
+Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl when she
+was a little bright-eyed child, handed over “the baby” she was holding
+to another attendant, and got on her things to go straight up to The
+Poplars. She had been holding “the baby” these forty years and more,
+but somehow it never got to be more than a month or six weeks old. She
+reached The Poplars after much toil and travail. Mistress Fagan, Irish,
+house-servant, opened the door, at which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as
+she was in the habit of doing at the doors of those who sent for her.
+
+“Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?” asked Nurse Byloe.
+
+“Niver a blissed word,” said she. “Miss Withers is upstairs with Miss
+Bathsheby, a cryin' and a lamentin'. Miss Badlam's in the parlor. The
+men has been draggin' the pond. They have n't found not one thing, but
+only jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the gray cat,--it's
+them nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied round her neck and
+then drownded her.” [P. Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had a snarl of similar
+string in his pocket.]
+
+Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor. A woman was sitting
+there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself with the
+blackest of black fans.
+
+“Nuss Byloe, is that you? Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you, though
+we 're all in trouble. Set right down, Nuss, do. Oh, it's dreadful
+times!”
+
+A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was
+here called on for its function.
+
+Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of
+those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so
+fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they
+flatten under the subsiding person.
+
+The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin
+of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion at
+intervals for some years. She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more
+or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course
+she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with
+women. She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent headaches had thinned her
+locks somewhat of late years. Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray
+eye, a quick and restless glance, which rather avoided being met, gave
+the impression that she was a wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and,
+very possibly, crafty person.
+
+“I could n't help comin',” said Nurse Byloe, “we do so love our
+babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?”
+
+The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the possessive
+pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a speech.
+
+“I never tended children as you have, Nuss,” she said. “But I 've known
+Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she
+should have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above all
+things and desperately wicked,'”--and she wept.
+
+“Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?” said Nurse Byloe. “Y' don't think
+anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?”
+
+“Child!” said Cynthia Badlam,--“child enough to wear this very gown I
+have got on and not find it too big for her neither.” [It would have
+pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]
+
+The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange of
+intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty.
+Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the
+conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead
+to it as to the music of the spheres.
+
+Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together, through
+whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb growths
+of thought ripened in both their souls into articulate speech,
+consentingly, as the movement comes after the long stillness of a Quaker
+meeting.
+
+Their lips opened at the same moment. “You don't mean”--began Nurse
+Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.
+
+“They need n't drag the pond,” she said. “They need n't go beating the
+woods as if they were hunting a patridge,--though for that matter Myrtle
+Hazard was always more like a patridge than she was like a pullet.
+Nothing ever took hold of that girl,--not catechising, nor advising, nor
+punishing. It's that dreadful will of hers never was broke. I've always
+been afraid that she would turn out a child of wrath. Did y' ever watch
+her at meetin' playing with posies and looking round all the time of
+the long prayer? That's what I've seen her do many and many a time. I'm
+afraid--Oh dear! Miss Byloe, I'm afraid to say--what I'm afraid of. Men
+are so wicked, and young girls are full of deceit and so ready to listen
+to all sorts of artful creturs that take advantage of their ignorance
+and tender years.” She wept once more, this time with sobs that seemed
+irrepressible.
+
+“Dear suz!” said the nurse, “I won't believe no sech thing as wickedness
+about Myrtle Hazard. You mean she's gone an' run off with some
+good-for-nothin' man or other? If that ain't what y' mean, what do y'
+mean? It can't be so, Miss Badlam: she's one o' my babies. At any rate,
+I handled her when she fust come to this village,--and none o' my babies
+never did sech a thing. Fifteen year old, and be bringin' a whole family
+into disgrace! If she was thirty year old, or five-an'-thirty or more,
+and never'd had a chance to be married, and if one o' them artful
+creturs you was talkin' of got hold of her, then, to be sure,--why, dear
+me!--law! I never thought, Miss Badlam!--but then of course you could
+have had your pickin' and choosin' in the time of it; and I don't mean
+to say it's too late now if you felt called that way, for you're better
+lookin' now than some that's younger, and there's no accountin' for
+tastes.”
+
+A sort of hysteric twitching that went through the frame of Cynthia
+Badlam dimly suggested to the old nurse that she was not making her
+slightly indiscreet personality much better by her explanations. She
+stopped short, and surveyed the not uncomely person of the maiden lady
+sitting before her with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes, and
+one hand clenching the arm of the reeking-chair, as if some spasm
+had clamped it there. The nurse looked at her with a certain growing
+interest she had never felt before. It was the first time for some years
+that she had had such a chance, partly because Miss Cynthia had often
+been away for long periods,--partly because she herself had been busy
+professionally. There was no occasion for her services, of course, in
+the family at The Poplars; and she was always following round from place
+to place after that everlasting migratory six-weeks or less old baby.
+
+There was not a more knowing pair of eyes, in their way, in a circle of
+fifty miles, than those kindly tranquil orbs that Nurse Byloe fixed
+on Cynthia Badlam. The silver threads in the side fold of hair, the
+delicate lines at the corner of the eye, the slight drawing down at
+the angle of the mouth,--almost imperceptible, but the nurse dwelt upon
+it,--a certain moulding of the features as of an artist's clay model
+worked by delicate touches with the fingers, showing that time or pain
+or grief had had a hand in shaping them, the contours, the adjustment of
+every fold of the dress, the attitude, the very way of breathing, were
+all passed through the searching inspection of the ancient expert,
+trained to know all the changes wrought by time and circumstance. It
+took not so long as it takes to describe it, but it was an analysis of
+imponderables, equal to any of Bunsen's with the spectroscope.
+
+Miss Badlam removed her handkerchief and looked in a furtive,
+questioning way, in her turn, upon the nurse.
+
+“It's dreadful close here,--I'm 'most smothered,” Nurse Byloe said; and,
+putting her hand to her throat, unclasped the catch of the necklace of
+gold beads she had worn since she was a baby,--a bead having been added
+from time to time as she thickened. It lay in a deep groove of her large
+neck, and had not troubled her in breathing before, since the day when
+her husband was run over by an ox-team.
+
+At this moment Miss Silence Withers entered, followed by Bathsheba
+Stoker, daughter of Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+She was the friend of Myrtle, and had come to comfort Miss Silence, and
+consult with her as to what further search they should institute. The
+two, Myrtle's aunt and her friend, were as unlike as they could well
+be. Silence Withers was something more than forty years old, a shadowy,
+pinched, sallow, dispirited, bloodless woman, with the habitual look of
+the people in the funeral carriage which follows next to the hearse, and
+the tone in speaking that may be noticed in a household where one of its
+members is lying white and still in a cool, darkened chamber overhead.
+Bathsheba Stoker was not called handsome; but she had her mother's
+youthful smile, which was so fresh and full of sweetness that she seemed
+like a beauty while she was speaking or listening; and she could never
+be plain so long as any expression gave life to her features. In perfect
+repose, her face, a little prematurely touched by sad experiences,--for
+she was but seventeen years old,--had the character and decision stamped
+in its outlines which any young man who wanted a companion to warn,
+to comfort, and command him, might have depended on as warranting the
+courage, the sympathy, and the sense demanded for such a responsibility.
+She had been trying her powers of consolation on Miss Silence. It was a
+sudden freak of Myrtle's. She had gone off on some foolish but innocent
+excursion. Besides, she was a girl that would take care of herself;
+for she was afraid of nothing, and nimbler than any boy of her age, and
+almost as strong as any. As for thinking any bad thoughts about her,
+that was a shame; she cared for none of the young fellows that were
+round her. Cyprian Eveleth was the one she thought most of; but Cyprian
+was as true as his sister Olive, and who else was there?
+
+To all this Miss Silence answered only by sighing and moaning, For two
+whole days she had been kept in constant fear and worry, afraid every
+minute of some tragical message, perplexed by the conflicting advice
+of all manner of officious friends, sleepless of course through the two
+nights, and now utterly broken down and collapsed.
+
+Bathsheba had said all she could in the way of consolation, and hastened
+back to her mother's bedside, which she hardly left, except for the
+briefest of visits.
+
+“It's a great trial, Miss Withers, that's laid on you,” said Nurse
+Byloe.
+
+“If I only knew that she was dead, and had died in the Lord,” Miss
+Silence answered,--“if I only knew that but if she is living in sin, or
+dead in wrong--doing, what is to become of me?--Oh, what is to become of
+me when 'He maketh inquisition far blood'?”
+
+“Cousin Silence,” said Miss Cynthia, “it is n't your fault, if that
+young girl has taken to evil ways. If going to meeting three times every
+Sabbath day, and knowing the catechism by heart, and reading of good
+books, and the best of daily advice, and all needful discipline, could
+have corrected her sinful nature, she would never have run away from
+a home where she enjoyed all these privileges. It's that Indian blood,
+Cousin Silence. It's a great mercy you and I have n't got any of it in
+our veins! What can you expect of children that come from heathens and
+savages? You can't lay it to yourself, Cousin Silence, if Myrtle Hazard
+goes wrong”--
+
+“The Lord will lay it to me,--the Lord will lay it to me,” she moaned.
+“Did n't he say to Cain, 'Where is Abel, thy brother?'”
+
+Nurse Byloe was getting very red in the face. She had had about enough
+of this talk between the two women. “I hope the Lard 'll take care of
+Myrtle Hazard fust, if she's in trouble, 'n' wants help,” she said;
+“'n' then look out for them that comes next. Y' 're too suspicious, Miss
+Badlam; y' 're too easy to believe stories. Myrtle Hazard was as pretty
+a child and as good a child as ever I see, if you did n't rile her;
+'n' d' d y' ever see one o' them hearty lively children, that had n't
+a sperrit of its own? For my part, I'd rather handle one of 'em than a
+dozen o' them little waxy, weak-eyed, slim-necked creturs that always do
+what they tell 'em to, and die afore they're a dozen year old; and never
+was the time when I've seen Myrtle Hazard, sence she was my baby, but
+what it's always been, 'Good mornin', Miss Byloe,' and 'How do you do,
+Miss Byloe? I'm so glad to see you.' The handsomest young woman, too, as
+all the old folks will agree in tellin' you, s'ence the time o' Judith
+Pride that was,--the Pride of the County they used to call her, for her
+beauty. Her great-grandma, y' know, Miss Cynthy, married old King David
+Withers. What I want to know is, whether anything has been heerd, and
+jest what's been done about findin' the poor thing. How d' ye know she
+has n't fell into the river? Have they fired cannon? They say that busts
+the gall of drownded folks, and makes the corpse rise. Have they looked
+in the woods everywhere? Don't believe no wrong of nobody, not till y'
+must,--least of all of them that come o' the same folks, partly, and
+has lived with yo all their days. I tell y', Myrtle Hazard's jest as
+innocent of all what y' 've been thinkin' about,--bless the poor child;
+she's got a soul that's as clean and sweet-well, as a pond-lily when it
+fust opens of a mornin', without a speck on it no more than on the fust
+pond-lily God Almighty ever made!”
+
+That gave a turn to the two women's thoughts, and their handkerchiefs
+went up to their faces. Nurse Byloe turned her eyes quickly on Cynthia
+Badlam, and repeated her close inspection of every outline and every
+light and shadow in her figure. She did not announce any opinion as
+to the age or good looks or general aspect or special points of Miss
+Cynthia; but she made a sound which the books write humph! but which
+real folks make with closed lips, thus: m'!--a sort of half-suppressed
+labio-palato-nasal utterance, implying that there is a good deal which
+might be said, and all the vocal organs want to have a chance at it, if
+there is to be any talking.
+
+Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person that
+came was the old minister, of whom, and of his colleague, the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.
+
+The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers
+called him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country
+people--would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the
+village had not been so much older. A man over ninety is a great comfort
+to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme
+outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy
+must get by him before he can come near their camp. Dr. Hurlbut, at
+ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively little advanced;
+but the college catalogue showed that he must be seventy-five years old,
+if, as we may suppose, he was twenty at the time of his graduation.
+
+He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of
+his flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging his
+serene and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the measured
+dignity of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff, he was an
+imposing personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the occasion
+demanded it. His creed was of the sternest: he was looked up to as a
+bulwark against all the laxities which threatened New England theology.
+But it was a creed rather of the study and of the pulpit than of
+every-day application among his neighbors. He dealt too much in the
+lofty abstractions which had always such fascinations for the higher
+class of New England divines, to busy himself as much as he might have
+done with the spiritual condition of individuals. He had also a good
+deal in him of what he used to call the Old Man, which, as he confessed,
+he had never succeeded in putting off,--meaning thereby certain
+qualities belonging to humanity, as much as the natural gifts of the
+dumb creatures belong to them, and tending to make a man beloved by his
+weak and erring fellow-mortals.
+
+In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish,
+monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all that
+made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house bell. But
+Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of novelty than its
+forefathers. It wants change, and it loves young blood. Polyandry is
+getting to be the normal condition of the Church; and about the time a
+man is becoming a little overripe for the livelier human sentiments, he
+may be pretty sure the women are looking round to find him a colleague.
+In this way it was that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the
+colleague of the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.
+
+If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces--the
+charity, the sweetness of disposition, the humility--of Father
+Pemberton, he would have found a small remnant of the “Old Man,” as the
+good clergyman would have called it, which was never in harmony with the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker. The younger divine felt his importance, and made his
+venerable colleague feel that he felt it. Father Pemberton had a fair
+chance at rainy Sundays and hot summer-afternoon services; but the
+junior pushed him aside without ceremony whenever he thought there was
+like to be a good show in the pews. As for those courtesies which
+the old need, to soften the sense of declining faculties and failing
+attractions, the younger pastor bestowed them in public, but was
+negligent of them, to say the least, when not on exhibition.
+
+Good old Father Pemberton could not love this man, but he would not hate
+him, and he never complained to him or of him. It would have been of no
+use if he had: the women of the parish had taken up the Rev. Mr. Stoker;
+and when the women run after a minister or a doctor, what do the men
+signify?
+
+Why the women ran after him, some thought it was not hard to guess. He
+was not ill-looking, according to the village standard, parted his hair
+smoothly, tied his white cravat carefully, was fluent, plausible, had a
+gift in prayer, was considered eloquent, was fond of listening to their
+spiritual experiences, and had a sickly wife. This is what Byles Gridley
+said; but he was apt to be caustic at times.
+
+Father Pemberton visited his people but rarely. Like Jonathan Edwards,
+like David Osgood, he felt his call to be to study-work, and was
+impatient of the egotisms and spiritual megrims, in listening to which,
+especially from the younger females of his flock, his colleague had won
+the hearts of so many of his parishioners. His presence had a wonderful
+effect in restoring the despondent Miss Silence to her equanimity; for
+not all the hard divinity he had preached for half a century had spoiled
+his kindly nature; and not the gentle Melanchthon himself, ready to
+welcome death as a refuge from the rage and bitterness of theologians,
+was more in contrast with the disputants with whom he mingled, than
+the old minister, in the hour of trial, with the stern dogmatist in his
+study, forging thunderbolts to smite down sinners.
+
+It was well that there were no tithing-men about on that next day,
+Sunday; for it shone no Sabbath day for the young men within half a
+dozen miles of the village. They were out on Bear Hill the whole day,
+beating up the bushes as if for game, scaring old crows out of their
+ragged nests, and in one dark glen startling a fierce-eyed, growling,
+bobtailed catamount, who sat spitting and looking all ready to spring at
+them, on the tall tree where he clung with his claws unsheathed, until a
+young fellow came up with a gun and shot him dead. They went through and
+through the swamp at Musquash Hollow; but found nothing better than
+a wicked old snapping-turtle, evil to behold, with his snaky head and
+alligator tail, but worse to meddle with, if his horny jaws were near
+enough to spring their man-trap on the curious experimenter. At Wood-End
+there were some Indians, ill-conditioned savages in a dirty tent, making
+baskets, the miracle of which was that they were so clean. They had seen
+a young lady answering the description, about a week ago. She had bought
+a basket. Asked them if they had a canoe they wanted to sell.--Eyes like
+hers (pointing to a squaw with a man's hat on).
+
+At Pocasset the young men explored all the thick woods,--some who ought
+to have known better taking their guns, which made a talk, as one might
+well suppose it would. Hunting on a Sabbath day! They did n't mean to
+shoot Myrtle Hazard, did they? it was keenly asked. A good many said it
+was all nonsense, and a mere excuse to get away from meeting and have
+a sort of frolic on pretence that it was a work of necessity and mercy,
+one or both.
+
+While they were scattering themselves about in this way, some in
+earnest, some rejoicing in the unwonted license, lifting off for a
+little while that enormous Sabbath-day pressure which weighs like forty
+atmospheres on every true-born Puritan, two young men had been since
+Friday in search of the lost girl, each following a clue of his own, and
+determined to find her if she was among the living.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth made for the village of Mapleton, where his sister Olive
+was staying, trusting that, with her aid, he might get a clue to the
+mystery of Myrtle's disappearance.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw struck for a railroad train going to the great
+seaport, at a station where it stops for wood and water.
+
+In the mean time, a third young man, Gifted Hopkins by name, son of
+the good woman already mentioned, sat down, with tears in his eyes, and
+wrote those touching stanzas, “The Lost Myrtle,” which were printed in
+the next “Banner and Oracle,” and much admired by many who read them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. ANTECEDENTS.
+
+The Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town. It was built on
+the east bank of the river, a little above the curve which gave the name
+to Oxbow Village. It stood on an elevation, its west gable close to the
+river's edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the foot of the slope
+behind it, woods at the east, open to the south, with a great row of
+Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the house. The Hon. Selah
+Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the first colonists, built it
+for his own residence, in the early part of the last century. Deeply
+impressed with his importance in the order of things, he had chosen to
+place it a little removed from the cluster of smaller dwellings about
+the Oxbow; and with some vague fancy in his mind of the castles that
+overlook the Rhine and the Danube, he had selected this eminence on
+which to place his substantial gambrel roofed dwelling-house. Long
+afterwards a bay-window, almost a little room of itself, had been thrown
+out of the second story on the west side, so that it looked directly
+down on the river running beneath it. The chamber, thus half suspended
+in the air, had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard;
+and as the boys paddling about on the river would often catch glimpses,
+through the window, of the little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket she
+fancied in those days, one of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it a name
+which became current among the young people, and indeed furnished to
+Gifted Hopkins the subject of one of his earliest poems, to wit, “The
+Fire-hang-bird's Nest.”
+
+If we would know anything about the persons now living at the Withers
+Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late years,
+we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital antecedents. It
+is by no means certain that our individual personality is the single
+inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. Nay, there is recorded an
+experience of one of the living persons mentioned in this narrative,--to
+be given in full in its proper place, which, so far as it is received
+in evidence, tends to show that some, at least, who have long been dead,
+may enjoy a kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life,
+in these bodily tenements which we are in the habit of considering
+exclusively our own. There are many circumstances, familiar to common
+observers, which favor this belief to a certain extent. Thus, at one
+moment we detect the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some
+characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or
+others. There are times when our friends do not act like themselves, but
+apparently in obedience to some other law than that of their own proper
+nature. We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise us.
+Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in. No less than eight
+distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a single female
+mentioned by an ancient physician of unimpeachable authority. In this
+light we may perhaps see the meaning of a sentence, from a work which
+will be repeatedly referred to in this narrative, viz.: “This body in
+which we journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a
+private carriage, but an omnibus.”
+
+The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr to their faith
+before they were known as Puritans. The record was obscure in some
+points; but the portrait, marked “Ann Holyoake, burned by ye bloudy
+Papists, ano 15..” (figures illegible), was still hanging against
+the panel over the fireplace in the west parlor at The Poplars. The
+following words were yet legible on the canvas: “Thou hast made a
+covenant O Lord with mee and my Children forever.”
+
+The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a prayer
+she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled. There had
+always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of her descendants
+could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this solemn “covenant.”
+
+There had been also a legend in the family, that the martyred woman's
+spirit exercised a kind of supervision over her descendants; that she
+either manifested herself to them, or in some way impressed them, from
+time to time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast his
+lot with the emigrants,--of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant in the third
+generation, when the Indians were about to attack the settlement where
+she lived,--and of another, just before he was killed at Quebec.
+
+There was a remarkable resemblance between the features of Ann Holyoake,
+as shown in the portrait, and the miniature likeness of Myrtle's mother.
+Myrtle adopted the nearly obsolete superstition more readily on this
+account, and loved to cherish the fancy that the guardian spirit which
+had watched over her ancestors was often near her, and would be with her
+in her time of need.
+
+The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of
+that delusion. A careless expression in one of her letters, that “ye
+Parson was as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em,” had
+got abroad, and given great offence to godly people. There was no doubt
+that some odd “manifestations,” as they would be called nowadays, had
+taken place in the household when she was a girl, and that she presented
+many of the conditions belonging to what are at the present day called
+mediums.
+
+Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty,
+loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings,
+and to hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic
+sentiments at town-meetings and in the General Court. He loved to wear
+a crimson sash and a military cap with a large red feather, in which the
+village folk used to say he looked as “hahnsome as a piny,”--meaning a
+favorite flower of his, which is better spelt peony, and to which it was
+not unnatural that his admirers should compare him.
+
+If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough have
+sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who would
+have dropped into their places like posts into their holes, asking no
+questions of life, contented, like so many other honest folks, with the
+part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their wardrobe of flesh
+and bones being furnished them gratis, and nothing to do but to walk
+across the stage wearing it. But Major Gideon Withers, for some reason
+or other, married a slender, sensitive, nervous, romantic woman, which
+accounted for the fact that his son David, “King David,” as he was
+called in his time, had a very different set of tastes from his father,
+showing a turn for literature and sentiment in his youth, reading
+Young's “Night Thoughts,” and Thomson's “Seasons,” and sometimes in
+those early days writing verses himself to Celia or to Chloe, which
+sounded just as fine to him as Effie and Minnie sound to young people
+now, as Musidora, as Saccharissa, as Lesbia, as Helena, as Adah and
+Zillah, have all sounded to young people in their time,--ashes of roses
+as they are to us now, and as our endearing Scotch diminutives will be
+to others by and by.
+
+King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly because he was rich,
+and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew too old
+to write love-poems, married the famous beauty before mentioned, Miss
+Judith Pride, and the race came up again in vigor. Their son, Jeremy,
+took for his first wife a delicate, melancholic girl, who matured into a
+sad-eyed woman, and bore him two children, Malachi and Silence.
+
+When she died, he mourned for her bitterly almost a year, and then put
+on a ruffled shirt and went across the river to tell his grief to Miss
+Virginia Wild, there residing. This lady was said to have a few drops of
+genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain that her
+cheek had a little of the russet tinge which a Seckel pear shows on its
+warmest cheek when it blushes.--Love shuts itself up in sympathy like a
+knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily. All the rest followed in
+due order according to Nature's kindly programme.
+
+Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell desperately in
+love with the daughter of this second wife, married her, and carried her
+to India, where their first and only child was born, and received the
+name of Myrtle, as fitting her cradle in the tropics. So her earliest
+impressions,--it would not be exact to call them recollections,--besides
+the smiles of her father and mother, were of dusky faces, of loose white
+raiment, of waving fans, of breezes perfumed with the sweet exhalations
+of sandal-wood, of gorgeous flowers and glowing fruit, of shady
+verandas, of gliding palanquins, and all the languid luxury of the
+South. The pestilence which has its natural home in India, but has
+journeyed so far from its birth place in these later years, took her
+father and mother away, suddenly, in the very freshness of their early
+maturity. A relation of Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was
+returning to America on a visit, and the child was sent back, under her
+care, while still a mere infant, to her relatives at the old homestead.
+During the long voyage, the strange mystery of the ocean was wrought
+into her consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to have become a part
+of her being. The waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother;
+and, looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with
+tender care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the rhythm
+of their movement became a part of her, almost as much as her own pulse
+and breath.
+
+The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral traits which
+predominated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this child in
+embryo, waiting to come to maturity. It was as when several grafts,
+bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same
+stock. Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her
+father and mother, but all the ancestors who have been mentioned, and
+more or less obscurely many others, came uppermost in their time, before
+the absolute and total result of their several forces had found
+its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known as an
+individual. These inherited impulses were therefore many, conflicting,
+some of them dangerous. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil held
+mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her hands; but sweet
+and gracious influences were also born with her; and the battle of life
+was to be fought between them, God helping her in her need, and her own
+free choice siding with one or the other. The formal statement of this
+succession of ripening characteristics need not be repeated, but the
+fact must be borne in mind.
+
+This was the child who was delivered into the hands of Miss Silence
+Withers, her mother's half--sister, keeping house with her brother
+Malachi, a bachelor, already called Old Malachi, though hardly entitled
+by his years to such a venerable prefix. Both these persons had
+inherited the predominant traits of their sad-eyed mother. Malachi,
+the chief heir of the family property, was rich, but felt very poor. He
+owned this fine old estate of some hundreds of acres. He had moneys
+in the bank, shares in various companies, wood-lots in the town; and a
+large tract of Western land, the subject of a lawsuit which seemed as if
+it would never be settled, and kept him always uneasy.
+
+Some said he hoarded gold somewhere about the old house, but nobody knew
+this for a certainty. In spite of his abundant means, he talked much of
+poverty, and kept the household on the narrowest footing of economy.
+One Irishwoman, with a little aid from her husband now and then, did all
+their work; and the only company they saw was Miss Cynthia Badlam, who,
+as a relative, claimed a home with them whenever she was so disposed.
+
+The “little Indian,” as Malachi called her, was an awkward accession to
+the family. Silence Withers knew no more about children and their ways
+and wants than if she had been a female ostrich. Thus it was that she
+found it necessary to send for a woman well known in the place as the
+first friend whose acquaintance many of the little people of the town
+had made in this vale of tears.
+
+Thirty years of practice had taught Nurse Byloe the art of handling the
+young of her species with the soft firmness which one may notice in cats
+with their kittens,--more grandly in a tawny lioness mouthing her cubs.
+Myrtle did not know she was held; she only felt she was lifted, and
+borne up, as a cherub may feel upon a white-woolly cloud, and smiled
+accordingly at the nurse, as if quite at home in her arms.
+
+“As fine a child as ever breathed the breath of life. But where did them
+black eyes come from? Born in Injy,--that 's it, ain't it? No, it's her
+poor mother's eyes to be sure. Does n't it seem as if there was a
+kind of Injin look to 'em? She'll be a lively one to manage, if I know
+anything about childun. See her clinchin' them little fists!”
+
+This was when Miss Silence came near her and brought her rather severe
+countenance close to the child for inspection of its features. The
+ungracious aspect of the woman and the defiant attitude of the child
+prefigured in one brief instant the history of many long coming years.
+
+It was not a great while before the two parties in that wearing conflict
+of alien lives, which is often called education, began to measure
+their strength against each other. The child was bright, observing, of
+restless activity, inquisitively curious, very hard to frighten, and
+with a will which seemed made for mastery, not submission.
+
+The stern spinster to whose care this vigorous life was committed
+was disposed to discharge her duty to the girl faithfully and
+conscientiously; but there were two points in her character and belief
+which had a most important bearing on the manner in which she carried
+out her laudable intentions. First, she was one of that class of human
+beings whose one single engrossing thought is their own welfare,--in the
+next world, it is true, but still their own personal welfare. The Roman
+Church recognizes this class, and provides every form of specific to
+meet their spiritual condition. But in so far as Protestantism
+has thrown out works as a means of insuring future safety, these
+unfortunates are as badly off as nervous patients who have no drops,
+pills, potions, no doctors' rules, to follow. Only tell a poor creature
+what to do, and he or she will do it, and be made easy, were it a
+pilgrimage of a thousand miles, with shoes full of split peas instead of
+boiled ones; but if once assured that doing does no good, the drooping
+Little-faiths are left at leisure to worry about their souls, as
+the other class of weaklings worry about their bodies. The effect
+on character does not seem to be very different in the two classes.
+Metaphysicians may discuss the nature of selfishness at their leisure;
+if to have all her thoughts centring on the one point of her own
+well-being by and by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely
+selfish; and if we are offended with that form of egotism, it is no more
+than ten of the twelve Apostles were, as the reader may see by
+turning to the Gospel of St. Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the
+twenty-fourth verse.
+
+The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to carry out a
+theory which, whatever might be its success in other cases, did not work
+kindly in the case of Myrtle Hazard, but, on the contrary, developed a
+mighty spirit of antagonism in her nature, which threatened to end in
+utter lawlessness. Miss Silence started from the approved doctrine,
+that all children are radically and utterly wrong in all their motives,
+feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as they remain subject to their
+natural instincts. It was by the eradication, and not the education, of
+these instincts, that the character of the human being she was moulding
+was to be determined. The first great preliminary process, so soon
+as the child manifested any evidence of intelligent and persistent
+self-determination, was to break her will.
+
+There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion from the
+teaching of Priest Pemberton, but it required a colder and harder
+nature than his own to carry out many of his dogmas to their practical
+application. He wrought in the pure mathematics, so to speak, of
+theology, and left the working rules to the good sense and good feeling
+of his people.
+
+Miss Silence had been waiting for her opportunity to apply the great
+doctrine, and it came at last in a very trivial way.
+
+“Myrtle does n't want brown bread. Myrtle won't have brown bread. Myrtle
+will have white bread.”
+
+“Myrtle is a wicked child. She will have what Aunt Silence says she
+shall have. She won't have anything but brown bread.”
+
+Thereupon the bright red lip protruded, the hot blood mounted to her
+face, the child untied her little “tire,” got down from the table,
+took up her one forlorn, featureless doll, and went to bed without
+her supper. The next morning the worthy woman thought that hunger and
+reflection would have subdued the rebellious spirit. So there stood
+yesterday's untouched supper waiting for her breakfast. She would not
+taste it, and it became necessary to enforce that extreme penalty of
+the law which had been threatened, but never yet put in execution. Miss
+Silence, in obedience to what she felt to be a painful duty, without any
+passion, but filled with high, inexorable purpose, carried the child up
+to the garret, and, fastening her so that she could not wander about and
+hurt herself, left her to her repentant thoughts, awaiting the moment
+when a plaintive entreaty for liberty and food should announce that the
+evil nature had yielded and the obdurate will was broken.
+
+The garret was an awful place. All the skeleton-like ribs of the roof
+showed in the dim light, naked overhead, and the only floor to be
+trusted consisted of the few boards which bridged the lath and plaster.
+A great, mysterious brick tower climbed up through it,--it was the
+chimney, but it looked like a horrible cell to put criminals into. The
+whole place was festooned with cobwebs,--not light films, such as
+the housewife's broom sweeps away before they have become a permanent
+residence, but vast gray draperies, loaded with dust, sprinkled with
+yellow powder from the beams where the worms were gnawing day and night,
+the home of old, hairy spiders who had, lived there since they were eggs
+and would leave it for unborn spiders who would grow old and huge like
+themselves in it, long after the human tenants had left the mansion
+for a narrower home. Here this little criminal was imprisoned, six,
+twelve,--tell it not to mothers,--eighteen dreadful hours, hungry until
+she was ready to gnaw her hands, a prey to all childish imaginations;
+and here at her stern guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled,
+almost fainting, but sullen and unsubdued. The Irishwoman, poor stupid
+Kitty Fagan, who had no theory of human nature, saw her over the lean
+shoulders of the spinster, and, forgetting all differences of condition
+and questions of authority, rushed to her with a cry of maternal
+tenderness, and, with a tempest of passionate tears and kisses, bore her
+off to her own humble realm, where the little victorious martyr was fed
+from the best stores of the house, until there was as much danger from
+repletion as there had been from famine. How the experiment might have
+ended but for this empirical and most unphilosophical interference,
+there is no saying; but it settled the point that the rebellious nature
+was not to be subjugated in a brief conflict.
+
+The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities as
+she grew older. At the age of four years she was detected in making a
+cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time, and, on being reprimanded
+for so doing, laughed out loud, so as to be heard by Father Pemberton,
+who thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows upon the child, and,
+to his shame be it spoken, had such a sudden uprising of weak, foolish,
+grandfatherly feelings, that a mist came over his eyes, and he left
+out his “ninthly” altogether, thereby spoiling the logical sequence of
+propositions which had kept his large forehead knotty for a week.
+
+At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored picture of
+Major Gideon Withers in the crimson sash and the red feather of his
+exalted military office. It was then for the first time that her aunt
+Silence remarked a shade of resemblance between the child and the
+portrait. She had always, up to this time, been dressed in sad colors,
+as was fitting, doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but happening one
+day to see a small negro girl peacocking round in a flaming scarlet
+petticoat, she struck for bright colors in her own apparel, and carried
+her point at last. It was as if a ground-sparrow had changed her gray
+feathers for the burning plumage of some tropical wanderer; and it
+was natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth should have called her the
+fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the fire-hang-bird's nest,--using
+the country boy's synonyme for the Baltimore oriole.
+
+At ten years old she had one of those great experiences which give new
+meaning to the life of a child.
+
+Her uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking for her at one
+time, but of late years his delusions had gained upon him, and under
+their influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an
+extravagance. He was growing more and more solitary in his habits, more
+and more negligent of his appearance. He was up late at night, wandering
+about the house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his light being
+seen flitting from window to window, the story got about that the old
+house was haunted.
+
+One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the
+house. Her uncle had been gone since the day before. The two women were
+both away at the village. At such times the child took a strange delight
+in exploring all the hiding-places of the old mansion. She had the
+mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the dead and the living all to
+herself. What a fearful kind of pleasure in its silence and loneliness!
+The old clock that Marmaduke Storr made in London more than a hundred
+years ago was clicking the steady pulse-beats of its second century. The
+featured moon on its dial had lifted one eye, as if to watch the child,
+as it had watched so many generations of children, while the
+swinging pendulum ticked them along into youth, maturity, gray hairs,
+deathbeds,--ticking through the prayer at the funeral, ticking without
+grief through all the still or noisy woe of mourning,--ticking without
+joy when the smiles and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.
+She looked at herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.
+She pulled aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads
+of the house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it,
+and the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline,
+like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by the
+chisel.
+
+She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
+punishment. A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little
+higher than a man's head. Something was hanging from it,--an old
+garment, was it? She went bravely up and touched--a cold hand. She
+did what most children of that age would do,--uttered a cry and ran
+downstairs with all her might. She rushed out of the door and called to
+the man Patrick, who was doing some work about the place. What could be
+done was done, but it was too late.
+
+Uncle Malachi had made away with himself. That was plain on the face
+of thing. In due time the coroner's verdict settled it. It was not so
+strange as it seemed; but it made a great talk in the village and all
+the country round about. Everybody knew he had money enough, and yet he
+had hanged himself for fear of starving to death.
+
+For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some years before,
+leaving his property to his sister Silence, with the exception of a
+certain moderate legacy to be paid in money to Myrtle Hazard when she
+should arrive at the age of twenty years.
+
+The household seemed more chilly than ever after this tragical event.
+Its depressing influence followed the child to school, where she learned
+the common branches of knowledge. It followed her to the Sabbath-day
+catechisings, where she repeated the answers about the federal headship
+of Adam, and her consequent personal responsibilities, and other
+technicalities which are hardly milk for babes, perhaps as well as other
+children, but without any very profound remorse for what she could not
+help, so far as she understood the matter, any more than her sex or
+stature, and with no very clear comprehension of the phrases which the
+New England followers of the Westminster divines made a part of the
+elementary instruction of young people.
+
+At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly enough to attract the
+eyes of the youth and older boys, several of whom made advances towards
+her acquaintance. But the dreary discipline of the household had sunk
+into her soul, and she had been shaping an internal life for herself,
+which it was hard for friendship to penetrate. Bathsheba Stoker was
+chained to the bedside of an invalid mother. Olive Eveleth, a kind,
+true-hearted girl, belonged to another religious communion; and this
+tended to render their meetings less frequent, though Olive was still
+her nearest friend. Cyprian was himself a little shy, and rather held
+to Myrtle through his sister than by any true intimacy directly with
+herself. Of the other young men of the village Gifted Hopkins was
+perhaps the most fervent of her admirers, as he had repeatedly shown by
+effusions in verse, of which, under the thinnest of disguises, she was
+the object.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw, ten years older than herself, a young man of
+striking aspect and claims to exceptional ability, had kept his eye on
+her of late; but it was generally supposed that he would find a wife
+in the city, where he was in the habit of going to visit a fashionable
+relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place. She, at any rate,
+understood very well that he meant, to use his own phrase, “to go in for
+a corner lot,”--understanding thereby a young lady with possessions and
+without encumbrances. If the old man had only given his money to Myrtle,
+William Murray Bradshaw would have made sure of her; but she was not
+likely ever to get much of it. Miss Silence Withers, it was understood,
+would probably leave her money as the Rev. Mr. Stoker, her spiritual
+director, should indicate, and it seemed likely that most of it would go
+to a rising educational institution where certain given doctrines were
+to be taught through all time, whether disproved or not, and whether
+those who taught them believed them or not, provided only they would say
+they believed them.
+
+Nobody had promised to say masses for her soul if she made this
+disposition of her property, or pledged the word of the Church that she
+should have plenary absolution. But she felt that she would be making
+friends in Influential Quarters by thus laying up her treasure, and that
+she would be safe if she had the good-will of the ministers of her sect.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had nearly reached the age of fourteen, and, though not
+like to inherit much of the family property, was fast growing into a
+large dower of hereditary beauty. Always handsome, her features shaped
+themselves in a finer symmetry, her color grew richer, her figure
+promised a perfect womanly development, and her movements had the grace
+which high-breeding gives the daughter of a queen, and which Nature now
+and then teaches the humblest of village maidens. She could not long
+escape the notice of the lovers and flatterers of beauty, and the time
+of danger was drawing near.
+
+At this period of her life she made two discoveries which changed the
+whole course of her thoughts, and opened for her a new world of ideas
+and possibilities.
+
+Ever since the dreadful event of November, 1854, the garret had been a
+fearful place to think of, and still more to visit. The stories that
+the house was haunted gained in frequency of repetition and detail of
+circumstance. But Myrtle was bold and inquisitive, and explored its
+recesses at such times as she could creep among them undisturbed. Hid
+away close under the eaves she found an old trunk covered with dust and
+cobwebs. The mice had gnawed through its leather hinges, and, as it had
+been hastily stuffed full, the cover had risen, and two or three volumes
+had fallen to the floor. This trunk held the papers and books which her
+great-grandmother, the famous beauty, had left behind her, records of
+the romantic days when she was the belle of the county,--storybooks,
+memoirs, novels, and poems, and not a few love-letters,--a strange
+collection, which, as so often happens with such deposits in old
+families, nobody had cared to meddle with, and nobody had been willing
+to destroy, until at last they had passed out of mind, and waited for a
+new generation to bring them into light again.
+
+The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin. Under one of the
+boards which formed the imperfect flooring of the garret was hidden
+an old leather mitten. Instead of a hand, it had a fat fist of silver
+dollars, and a thumb of gold half-eagles.
+
+Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple and secluded
+maiden. The books were hers to read as much as any other's; the gold and
+silver were only a part of that small provision which would be hers by
+and by, and if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself. The tree of
+the knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into her lap, and,
+without any serpent to tempt her, she took thereof and did eat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M.
+
+The old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his outside presentment
+as one will find among five hundred college alumni as they file in
+procession. His strong, squared features, his formidable scowl, his
+solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his positive and as it were
+categorical stride, his slow, precise way of putting a statement,
+the strange union of trampling radicalism in some directions and
+high-stepping conservatism in others, which made it impossible to
+calculate on his unexpressed opinions, his testy ways and his generous
+impulses, his hard judgments and kindly actions, were characteristics
+that gave him a very decided individuality.
+
+He had all the aspects of a man of books. His study, which was the best
+room in Mrs. Hopkins's house, was filled with a miscellaneous-looking
+collection of volumes, which his curious literary taste had got together
+from the shelves of all the libraries that had been broken up during
+his long life as a scholar. Classics, theology, especially of the
+controversial sort, statistics, politics, law, medicine, science, occult
+and overt, general literature,--almost every branch of knowledge was
+represented. His learning was very various, and of course mixed up,
+useful and useless, new and ancient, dogmatic and rational,--like his
+library, in short; for a library gathered like his is a looking-glass in
+which the owner's mind is reflected.
+
+The common people about the village did not know what to make of such
+a phenomenon. He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the
+ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry cases
+into court for quarrelsome neighbors. What was he good for? Not a great
+deal, some of the wiseacres thought,--had “all sorts of sense but common
+sense,”--“smart mahn, but not prahctical.” There were others who read
+him more shrewdly. He knowed more, they said, than all the ministers put
+together, and if he'd stan' for Ripresentative they 'd like to vote for
+him,--they hed n't hed a smart mahn in the Gineral Court sence Squire
+Wibird was thar.
+
+They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with that
+of all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real scholar
+in his special line of study,--as all D. D.'s are supposed to be, or
+they would not have been honored with that distinguished title. But Mr.
+Byles Gridley not only had more learning than the deep-sea line of the
+bucolic intelligence could fathom; he had more wisdom also than they
+gave him credit for, even those among them who thought most of his
+abilities.
+
+In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against those
+of the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a reputation
+as “Master” Gridley, that he kept that title even after he had become
+a college tutor and professor. As a tutor he had to deal with many
+of these same boys, and others like them, in the still more vivacious
+period of their early college life. He got rid of his police duties when
+he became a professor, but he still studied the pupils as carefully as
+he used once to watch them, and learned to read character with a skill
+which might have fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents.
+But he loved quiet and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the
+market-place, whose stock in trade is a voice and a vocabulary. So
+it was that he had passed his life in the patient mechanical labor
+of instruction, leaving too many of his instincts and faculties in
+abeyance.
+
+The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to worldly
+wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed, than it
+does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as their blood
+grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with anything more
+practical than a gerund or a cosine. Master Gridley not only knew a good
+deal of human nature, but he knew how to keep his knowledge to himself
+upon occasion. He understood singularly well the ways and tendencies
+of young people. He was shrewd in the detection of trickery, and very
+confident in those who had once passed the ordeal of his well-schooled
+observing powers. He had no particular tendency to meddle with the
+personal relations of those about him; but if they were forced upon him
+in any way, he was like to see into them at least as quickly as any of
+his neighbors who thought themselves most endowed with practical skill.
+
+In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said
+a little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out to
+pasture. He felt that he had separated himself from human interests, and
+was henceforth to live in his books with the dead, until he should be
+numbered with them himself. He had chosen this quiet village as a
+place where he might pass his days undisturbed, and find a peaceful
+resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel was dry, and the
+sun lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would spread their
+many-colored counterpane over the bed where he would be taking his rest.
+It sometimes came over him painfully that he was never more to be of any
+importance to his fellow-creatures. There was nobody living to whom he
+was connected by any very near ties. He felt kindly enough to the good
+woman in whose house he lived; he sometimes gave a few words of counsel
+to her son; he was not unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed
+with great consideration to the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with
+no small interest the physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker,
+to whose sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a
+nostril dilating with ominous intensity of meaning. But he said sadly to
+himself, that his life had been a failure,--that he had nothing to show
+for it, and his one talent was ready in its napkin to give back to his
+Lord.
+
+He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many would
+hold of small significance. Though he had mourned for no lost love,
+at least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the pang
+of parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those joys and
+griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his private urn
+filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes. He was the father of a dead
+book.
+
+Why “Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.,” had not met
+with an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating
+public, it would take us too long to inquire in detail. Indeed; he
+himself was never able to account satisfactorily for the state of things
+which his bookseller's account made evident to him. He had read and
+re-read his work; and the more familiar he became with it, the less was
+he able to understand the singular want of popular appreciation of what
+he could not help recognizing as its excellences. He had a special copy
+of his work, printed on large paper and sumptuously bound. He loved to
+read in this, as people read over the letters of friends who have long
+been dead; and it might have awakened a feeling of something far removed
+from the ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have
+been heard. “That's a thought, now, for you!--See Mr. Thomas Babington
+Macaulay's Essay printed six years after thus book.” “A felicitous
+image! and so everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle had
+hit upon it.” “If this is not genuine pathos, where will you find it, I
+should like to know? And nobody to open the book where it stands written
+but one poor old man--in this generation, at least--in this generation!”
+ It may be doubted whether he would ever have loved his book with such
+jealous fondness if it had gone through a dozen editions, and everybody
+was quoting it to his face. But now it lived only for him; and to him it
+was wife and child, parent, friend, all in one, as Hector was all in all
+to his spouse. He never tired of it, and in his more sanguine moods he
+looked forward to the time when the world would acknowledge its merits,
+and his genius would find full recognition. Perhaps he was right: more
+than one book which seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers
+has had a resurrection when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only
+in the tombstone memory of antiquaries. Comfort for some of us, dear
+fellow-writer.
+
+It followed from the way in which he lived that he must have some means
+of support upon which he could depend. He was economical, if not over
+frugal in some of his habits; but he bought books, and took newspapers
+and reviews, and had money when money was needed; the fact being, though
+it was not generally known, that a distant relative had not long before
+died, leaving him a very comfortable property.
+
+His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings with the late
+legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow, which had naturally passed into
+the hands of the new partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw. He had entire
+confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the young man who
+had been recently associated in the business.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, commonly called by his last two names, was
+the son of a lawyer of some note for his acuteness, who marked out his
+calling for him in having him named after the great Lord Mansfield.
+Murray Bradshaw was about twenty-five years old, by common consent
+good-looking, with a finely formed head, a searching eye, and a
+sharp-cut mouth, which smiled at his bidding without the slightest
+reference to the real condition of his feeling at the moment. This was
+a great convenience; for it gave him an appearance of good-nature at
+the small expense of a slight muscular movement which was as easy as
+winking, and deceived everybody but those who had studied him long and
+carefully enough to find that this play of his features was what a watch
+maker would call a detached movement.
+
+He had been a good scholar in college, not so much by hard study as
+by skilful veneering, and had taken great pains to stand well with the
+Faculty, at least one of whom, Byles Gridley, A. M., had watched him
+with no little interest as a man with a promising future, provided he
+were not so astute as to outwit and overreach himself in his excess of
+contrivance. His classmates could not help liking him; as to loving him,
+none of them would have thought of that. He was so shrewd, so keen, so
+full of practical sense, and so good-humored as long as things went on
+to his liking, that few could resist his fascination. He had a way of
+talking with people about what they were interested in, as if it were
+the one matter in the world nearest to his heart. But he was commonly
+trying to find out something, or to produce some impression, as a
+juggler is working at his miracle while he keeps people's attention by
+his voluble discourse and make-believe movements. In his lightest talk
+he was almost always edging towards a practical object, and it was an
+interesting and instructive amusement to watch for the moment at which
+he would ship the belt of his colloquial machinery on to the tight
+pulley. It was done so easily and naturally that there was hardly a sign
+of it. Master Gridley could usually detect the shifting action, but the
+young man's features and voice never betrayed him.
+
+He was a favorite with the other sex, who love poetry and romance, as
+he well knew, for which reason he often used the phrases of both, and in
+such a way as to answer his purpose with most of those whom he wished
+to please. He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of life: he was
+not handicapped with any burdensome ideals. He took everything at its
+marked value. He accepted the standard of the street as a final fact for
+to-day, like the broker's list of prices.
+
+His whole plan of life was laid out. He knew that law was the best
+introduction to political life, and he meant to use it for this end.
+He chose to begin his career in the country, so as to feel his way more
+surely and gradually to its ultimate aim; but he had no intention of
+burning his shining talents in a grazing district, however tall its
+grass might grow. His business was not with these stiff-jointed,
+slow-witted graziers, but with the supple, dangerous, far-seeing men who
+sit scheming by the gas-light in the great cities, after all the lamps
+and candles are out from the Merrimac to the Housatonic. Every strong
+and every weak point of those who might probably be his rivals were laid
+down on his charts, as winds and currents and rocks are marked on those
+of a navigator. All the young girls in the country, and not a few in the
+city, with which, as mentioned, he had frequent relations, were on his
+list of possible availabilities in the matrimonial line of speculation,
+provided always that their position and prospects were such as would
+make them proper matches for so considerable a person as the future Hon.
+William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Master Gridley had made a careful study of his old pupil since they had
+resided in the same village. The old professor could not help admiring
+him, notwithstanding certain suspicious elements in his character; for
+after muddy village talk, a clear stream of intelligent conversation was
+a great luxury to the hard-headed scholar. The more he saw of him,
+the more he learned to watch his movements, and to be on his guard in
+talking with him. The old man could be crafty, with all his simplicity,
+and he had found out that under his good-natured manner there often
+lurked some design more or less worth noting, and which might involve
+other interests deserving protection.
+
+For some reason or other the old Master of Arts had of late experienced
+a certain degree of relenting with regard to himself, probably brought
+about by the expressions of gratitude from worthy Mrs. Hopkins for acts
+of kindness to which he himself attached no great value. He had been
+kind to her son Gifted; he had been fatherly with Susan Posey,
+her relative and boarder; and he had shown himself singularly and
+unexpectedly amiable with the little twins who had been adopted by
+the good woman into her household. In fact, ever since these little
+creatures had begun to toddle about and explode their first consonants,
+he had looked through his great round spectacles upon them with a
+decided interest; and from that time it seemed as if some of the human
+and social sentiments which had never leafed or flowered in him, for
+want of their natural sunshine, had begun growing up from roots which
+had never lost their life. His liking for the twins may have been an
+illustration of that singular law which old Dr. Hurlbut used to lay
+down, namely, that at a certain period of life, say from fifty to
+sixty and upward, the grand-paternal instinct awakens in bachelors, the
+rhythms of Nature reaching them in spite of her defeated intentions;
+so that when men marry late they love their autumn child with a twofold
+affection,--father's and grandfather's both in one.
+
+However this may be, there is no doubt that Mr. Byles Gridley was
+beginning to take a part in his neighbors' welfare and misfortunes, such
+as could hardly have been expected of a man so long lost in his books
+and his scholastic duties. And among others, Myrtle Hazard had come in
+for a share of his interest. He had met her now and then in her walks to
+and from school and meeting, and had been taken with her beauty and her
+apparent unconsciousness of it, which he attributed to the forlorn kind
+of household in which she had grown up. He had got so far as to talk
+with her now and then, and found himself puzzled, as well he might be,
+in talking with a girl who had been growing into her early maturity in
+antagonism with every influence that surrounded her.
+
+“Love will reach her by and by,” he said, “in spite of the dragons up at
+the den yonder.
+
+    “'Centum fronte oculos, centum cervice gerebat
+     Argus, et hos unus saepe fefellit amor.'”
+
+But there was something about Myrtle,--he hardly knew whether to call it
+dignity, or pride, or reserve, or the mere habit of holding back
+brought about by the system of repression under which she had been
+educated,--which kept even the old Master of Arts at his distance. Yet
+he was strongly drawn to her, and had a sort of presentiment that he
+might be able to help her some day, and that very probably she would
+want his help; for she was alone in the world, except for the dragons,
+and sure to be assailed by foes from without and from within.
+
+He noticed that her name was apt to come up in his conversations with
+Murray Bradshaw; and, as he himself never introduced it, of course the
+young man must have forced it, as conjurers force a card, and with some
+special object. This set him thinking hard; and, as a result of it, he
+determined the next time Mr. Bradshaw brought her name up to set him
+talking.
+
+So he talked, not suspecting how carefully the old man listened.
+
+“It was a demonish hard case,” he said, “that old Malachi had left
+his money as he did. Myrtle Hazard was going to be the handsomest girl
+about, when she came to her beauty, and she was coming to it mighty
+fast. If they could only break that will, but it was no use trying. The
+doctors said he was of sound mind for at least two years after making
+it. If Silence Withers got the land claim, there'd be a pile, sure
+enough. Myrtle Hazard ought to have it. If the girl had only inherited
+that property--whew? She'd have been a match for any fellow. That old
+Silence Withers would do just as her minister told her,--even chance
+whether she gives it to the Parson-factory, or marries Bellamy Stoker,
+and gives it to him after his wife's dead. He'd take it if he had to
+take her with it. Earn his money, hey, Master Gridley?”
+
+“Why, you don't seem to think very well of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker?” said Mr. Gridley, smiling.
+
+“Think well of him? Too fond of using the Devil's pitchfork for my
+fancy! Forks over pretty much all the world but himself and his lot
+into--the bad place, you know; and toasts his own cheese with it with
+very much the same kind of comfort that other folks seem to take in that
+business. Besides, he has a weakness for pretty saints--and sinners.
+That's an odd name he has. More belle amie than Joseph about him, I
+rather guess!”
+
+The old professor smiled again. “So you don't think he believes all the
+mediaeval doctrines he is in the habit of preaching, Mr. Bradshaw?”
+
+“No, sir; I think he belongs to the class I have seen described
+somewhere. 'There are those who hold the opinion that truth is only safe
+when diluted,--about one fifth to four fifths lies,--as the oxygen of
+the air is with its nitrogen. Else it would burn us all up.'”
+
+Byles Gridley colored and started a little. This was one of his own
+sayings in “Thoughts on the Universe.” But the young man quoted it
+without seeming to suspect its authorship.
+
+“Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?”
+
+“I don't remember. Some paper, I rather think. It's one of those good
+things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em. Sounds
+like Coleridge.”
+
+“That's what I call a compliment worth having,” said Byles Gridley to
+himself, when he got home. “Let me look at that passage.”
+
+He took down “Thoughts on the Universe,” and got so much interested,
+reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell,
+and Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down to
+tea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. THE TWINS.
+
+Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that tea
+was waiting. He rather liked Susan Posey. She was a pretty creature,
+slight, blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the second or
+third grade, effective at picnics and by moonlight,--the kind of girl
+that very young men are apt to remember as their first love. She had a
+taste for poetry, and an admiration of poets; but, what was better, she
+was modest and simple, and a perfect sister and mother and grandmother
+to the two little forlorn twins who had been stranded on the Widow
+Hopkins's doorstep.
+
+These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three years
+old. A few words will make us acquainted with them. Nothing had ever
+been known of their origin. The sharp eyes of all the spinsters had
+been through every household in the village and neighborhood, and not
+a suspicion fixed itself on any one. It was a dark night when they were
+left; and it was probable that they had been brought from another town,
+as the sound of wheels had been heard close to the door where they were
+found, had stopped for a moment, then been heard again, and lost in the
+distance.
+
+How the good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been
+briefly mentioned. At first nobody thought they would live a day, such
+little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem. But the young doctor
+came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in cotton-wool,
+and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-teaspoonfuls of milk
+given them, and after being kept alive in this way, like the young of
+opossums and kangaroos, they came to a conclusion about which they did
+not seem to have made up their thinking-pulps for some weeks, namely, to
+go on trying to cross the sea of life by tugging at the four-and-twenty
+oars which must be pulled day and night until the unknown shore is
+reached, and the oars lie at rest under the folded hands.
+
+As it was not very likely that the parents who left their offspring
+round on doorsteps were of saintly life, they were not presented for
+baptism like the children of church-members. Still, they must have names
+to be known by, and Mrs. Hopkins was much exercised in the matter. Like
+many New England parents, she had a decided taste for names that were
+significant and sonorous. That which she had chosen for her oldest
+child, the young poet, was either a remarkable prophecy, or it had
+brought with it the endowments it promised. She had lost, or, in her
+own more pictorial language, she had buried, a daughter to whom she had
+given the names, at once of cheerful omen and melodious effect, Wealthy
+Amadora.
+
+As for them poor little creturs, she said, she believed they was rained
+down out o' the skies, jest as they say toads and tadpoles come. She
+meant to be a mother to 'em for all that, and give 'em jest as good
+names as if they was the governor's children, or the minister's. If Mr.
+Gridley would be so good as to find her some kind of a real handsome
+Chris'n name for 'em, she'd provide 'em with the other one. Hopkinses
+they shall be bred and taught, and Hopkinses they shall be called. Ef
+their father and mother was ashamed to own 'em, she was n't. Couldn't
+Mr. Gridley pick out some pooty sounding names from some of them great
+books of his. It's jest as well to have 'em pooty as long as they don't
+cost any more than if they was Tom and Sally.
+
+A grim smile passed over the rugged features of Byles Gridley. “Nothing
+is easier than that, Mrs. Hopkins,” he said. “I will give you two very
+pretty names that I think will please you and other folks. They're new
+names, too. If they shouldn't like to keep them, they can change them
+before they're christened, if they ever are. Isosceles will be just the
+name for the boy, and I'm sure you won't find a prettier name for the
+girl in a hurry than Helminthia.”
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was delighted with the dignity and novelty of these two
+names, which were forthwith adopted. As they were rather long for common
+use in the family, they were shortened into the easier forms of Sossy
+and Minthy, under which designation the babes began very soon to thrive
+mightily, turning bread and milk into the substance of little sinners at
+a great rate, and growing as if they were put out at compound interest.
+
+This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles
+Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by
+Miss Susan Posey.
+
+“I am coming, my dear,” he said,--which expression quite touched Miss
+Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from
+the delicious page he was reading. It was not the living child that was
+kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a trivial
+use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.
+
+Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his
+eye was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of
+papers. Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him.
+Could that be a copy of “Thoughts on the Universe”? He watched his
+opportunity, and got a hurried sight of the volume. His own treatise,
+sure enough! Leaves Uncut. Opened of itself to the one hundred and
+twentieth page. The axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted--he did not
+remember from what,--“sounded like Coleridge”--was staring him in the
+face from that very page. When he remembered how he had pleased himself
+with that compliment the other day, he blushed like a school-girl; and
+then, thinking out the whole trick,--to hunt up his forgotten book, pick
+out a phrase or two from it, and play on his weakness with it, to win
+his good opinion,--for what purpose he did not know, but doubtless to
+use him in some way,--he grinned with a contempt about equally divided
+between himself and the young schemer.
+
+“Ah ha!” he muttered scornfully. “Sounds like Coleridge, hey? Niccolo
+Macchiavelli Bradshaw!”
+
+From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with
+even more suspicion than before. Yet he would not forego his company and
+conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and this
+trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way of
+flattering his brother plenipotentiary. Who could say? Some time or
+other he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty with
+just such a trick. Shallower men than he had gone out as ministers of
+the great Republic. At any rate, the fellow was worth watching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. THE USE OF SPECTACLES.
+
+The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he
+lived for knowing everything that was going on. He rather enjoyed it;
+and sometimes amused himself with surprising his simple-hearted landlady
+and her boarders with the unaccountable results of his sagacity. One
+thing was quite beyond her comprehension. She was perfectly sure that
+Mr. Gridley could see out of the back of his head, just as other people
+see with their natural organs. Time and again he had told her what
+she was doing when his back was turned to her, just as if he had been
+sitting squarely in front of her. Some laughed at this foolish notion;
+but others, who knew more of the nebulous sciences, told her it was
+like's not jes' so. Folks had read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their
+stomachs, 'n' why should n't they see out o' the backs o' their heads?
+
+Now there was a certain fact at the bottom of this belief of Mrs.
+Hopkins; and as it world be a very small thing to make a mystery of so
+simple a matter, the reader shall have the whole benefit of knowing all
+there is in it,--not quite yet, however, of knowing all that came of it.
+It was not the mirror trick, of course, which Mrs. Felix Lorraine and
+other dangerous historical personages have so long made use of. It was
+nothing but this: Mr. Byles Gridley wore a pair of formidable spectacles
+with large round glasses. He had often noticed the reflection of objects
+behind him when they caught their images at certain angles, and had got
+the habit of very often looking at the reflecting surface of one or the
+other of the glasses, when he seemed to be looking through them. It put
+a singular power into his possession, which might possibly hereafter
+lead to something more significant than the mystification of the Widow
+Hopkins.
+
+A short time before Myrtle Hazard's disappearance, Mr. Byles Gridley had
+occasion to call again at the office of Penhallow and Bradshaw on some
+small matter of business of his own. There were papers to look over, and
+he put on his great round-glassed spectacles. He and Mr. Penhallow sat
+down at the table, and Mr. Bradshaw was at a desk behind them. After
+sitting for a while, Mr. Penhallow seemed to remember something he had
+meant to attend to, for he said all at once: “Excuse me, Mr. Gridley.
+Mr. Bradshaw, if you are not busy, I wish you would look over this
+bundle of papers. They look like old receipted bills and memoranda of no
+particular use; but they came from the garret of the Withers place, and
+might possibly have something that would be of value. Look them over,
+will you, and see whether there is anything there worth saving.”
+
+The young man took the papers, and Mr. Penhallow sat down again at the
+table with Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+This last-named gentleman felt just then a strong impulse to observe
+the operations of Murray Bradshaw. He could not have given any very good
+reason for it, any more than any of us can for half of what we do.
+
+“I should like to examine that conveyance we were speaking of once
+more,” said he. “Please to look at this one in the mean time, will you,
+Mr. Penhallow?”
+
+Master Gridley held the document up before him. He did not seem to find
+it quite legible, and adjusted his spectacles carefully, until they were
+just as he wanted them. When he had got them to suit himself, sitting
+there with his back to Murray Bradshaw, he could see him and all his
+movements, the desk at which he was standing, and the books in the
+shelves before him,--all this time appearing as if he were intent upon
+his own reading.
+
+The young man began in a rather indifferent way to look over the papers.
+He loosened the band round them, and took them up one by one, gave a
+careless glance at them, and laid them together to tie up again when
+he had gone through them. Master Gridley saw all this process, thinking
+what a fool he was all the time to be watching such a simple proceeding.
+Presently he noticed a more sudden movement: the young man had found
+something which arrested his attention, and turned his head to see if
+he was observed. The senior partner and his client were both apparently
+deep in their own affairs. In his hand Mr. Bradshaw held a paper folded
+like the others, the back of which he read, holding it in such a way
+that Master Gridley saw very distinctly three large spots of ink upon
+it, and noticed their position. Murray Bradshaw took another hurried
+glance at the two gentlemen, and then quickly opened the paper. He ran
+it over with a flash of his eye, folded it again, and laid it by itself.
+With another quick turn of his head, as if to see whether he were
+observed or like to be, he reached his hand out and took a volume down
+from the shelves. In this volume he shut the document, whatever it was,
+which he had just taken out of the bundle, and placed the book in a very
+silent and as it were stealthy way back in its place. He then gave a
+look at each of the other papers, and said to his partner: “Old bills,
+old leases, and insurance policies that have run out. Malachi seems to
+have kept every scrap of paper that had a signature to it.”
+
+“That 's the way with the old misers, always,” said Mr. Penhallow.
+
+Byles Gridley had got through reading the document he held,--or
+pretending to read it. He took off his spectacles.
+
+“We all grow timid and cautious as we get old, Mr. Penhallow.” Then
+turning round to the young man, he slowly repeated the lines,
+
+   “'Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
+     Quaerit et inventis miser abstinet, ac timet uti;
+     Vel quod res omnes timide, gelideque ministrat'
+
+“You remember the passage, Mr. Bradshaw?”
+
+While he was reciting these words from Horace, which he spoke slowly
+as if he relished every syllable, he kept his eyes on the young man
+steadily, but with out betraying any suspicion. His old habits as a
+teacher made that easy.
+
+Murray Bradshaw's face was calm as usual, but there was a flush on
+his cheek, and Master Gridley saw the slight but unequivocal signs of
+excitement.
+
+“Something is going on inside there,” the old man said to himself. He
+waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw got up
+and left the office. As soon as he and the senior partner were alone,
+Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in his library.
+There stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis,--the
+fine Elzevir edition of 1664. It was bound in parchment, and thus
+readily distinguishable at a glance from all the books round it. Now
+Mr. Penhallow was not much of a Latin scholar, and knew and cared
+very little about the civil law. He had fallen in with this book at
+an auction, and bought it to place in his shelves with the other
+“properties” of the office, because it would look respectable. Anything
+shut up in one of those two octavos might stay there a lifetime without
+Mr. Penhallow's disturbing it; that Master Gridley knew, and of course
+the young man knew it too.
+
+We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in
+the lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the knight's
+zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to ourselves we
+are not after the thing coveted. Put a lump of sugar in a canary-bird's
+cage, and the small creature will illustrate the instinct for the
+benefit of inquirers or sceptics. Byles Gridley went to the other side
+of the room and took a volume of Reports from the shelves. He put it
+back and took a copy of “Fearne on Contingent Remainders,” and looked at
+that for a moment in an idling way, as if from a sense of having nothing
+to do. Then he drew the back of his forefinger along the books on the
+shelf, as if nothing interested him in them, and strolled to the shelf
+in front of the desk at which Murray Bradshaw had stood. He took down
+the second volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis, turned the leaves over
+mechanically, as if in search of some title, and replaced it.
+
+He looked round for a moment. Mr. Penhallow was writing hard at his
+table, not thinking of him, it was plain enough. He laid his hand on the
+FIRST volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis. There was a document shut up
+in it. His hand was on the book, whether taking it out or putting
+it back was not evident, when the door opened and Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw entered.
+
+“Ah, Mr. Gridley,” he said, “you are not studying the civil law, are
+you?” He strode towards him as he spoke, his face white, his eyes fixed
+fiercely on him.
+
+“It always interests me, Mr. Bradshaw,” he answered, “and this is a fine
+edition of it. One may find a great many valuable things in the Corpus
+Juris Civilis.”
+
+He looked impenetrable, and whether or not he had seen more than Mr.
+Bradshaw wished him to see, that gentleman could not tell. But there
+stood the two books in their place, and when, after Master Gridley had
+gone, he looked in the first volume, there was the document he had shut
+up in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. MYRTLE'S LETTER--THE YOUNG MEN'S PURSUIT.
+
+“You know all about it, Olive?” Cyprian Eveleth said to his sister,
+after a brief word of greeting.
+
+“Know of what, Cyprian?”
+
+“Why, sister, don't you know that Myrtle Hazard is missing,--gone!--gone
+nobody knows where, and that we are looking in all directions to find
+her?”
+
+Olive turned very pale and was silent for a moment. At the end of that
+moment the story seemed almost old to her. It was a natural ending of
+the prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her earliest years.
+When she got large and strong enough, she broke out of jail,--that was
+all. The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or later, whether it is a
+wooden or an iron one. Olive felt as if she had dimly foreseen just
+such a finishing to the tragedy of the poor girl's home bringing-up. Why
+could not she have done something to prevent it? Well,--what shall we do
+now, and as it is?--that is the question.
+
+“Has she left no letter,--no explanation of her leaving in this way?”
+
+“Not a word, so far as anybody in the village knows.”
+
+“Come over to the post-office with me; perhaps we may find a letter. I
+think we shall.”
+
+Olive's sagacity and knowledge of her friend's character had not misled
+her. She found a letter from Myrtle to herself, which she opened and
+read as here follows:
+
+MY DEAREST OLIVE:--Think no evil of me for what I have done. The
+fire-hang-bird's nest, as Cyprian called it, is empty, and the poor bird
+is flown.
+
+I can live as I have lived no longer. This place is chilling all the
+life out of me, and I must find another home. It is far, far away, and
+you will not hear from me again until I am there. Then I will write to
+you.
+
+You know where I was born,--under a hot sun and in the midst of strange,
+lovely scenes that I seem still to remember. I must visit them again:
+my heart always yearns for them. And I must cross the sea to get
+there,--the beautiful great sea that I have always longed for and that
+my river has been whispering about to me ever so many years. My life is
+pinched and starved here. I feel as old as aunt Silence, and I am only
+fifteen,--a child she has called me within a few days. If this is to be
+a child, what is it to be a woman?
+
+I love you dearly,--and your brother is almost to me as if he were mine.
+I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,--yes, and the old man that has
+spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to give you
+pain,--to leave you all,--but my way of life is killing me, and I am too
+young to die. I cannot take the comfort with you, my dear friends, that
+I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of ice in my heart, and all
+the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.
+
+I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive. Do you remember
+how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to flee into
+Egypt? I have had a dream like that, Olive. There is an old belief in
+our family that the spirit of one who died many generations ago watches
+over some of her descendants. They say it led our first ancestor to come
+over here when it was a wilderness. I believe it has appeared to others
+of the family in times of trouble. I have had a strange dream at any
+rate, and the one I saw, or thought I saw, told me to leave this place.
+Perhaps I should have stayed if it had not been for that, but it seemed
+like an angel's warning.
+
+Nobody will know how I have gone, or which way I have taken. On Monday,
+you may show this letter to my friends, not before. I do not think they
+will be in danger of breaking their hearts for me at our house. Aunt
+Silence cares for nothing but her own soul, and the other woman hates
+me, I always thought. Kitty Fagan will cry hard. Tell her perhaps I
+shall come back by and by. There is a little box in my room, with some
+keepsakes marked,--one is for poor Kitty. You can give them to the right
+ones. Yours is with them.
+
+Good-by, dearest. Keep my secret, as I told you, till Monday. And if you
+never see me again, remember how much I loved you. Never think hardly
+of me, for you have grown up in a happy home, and do not know how much
+misery can be crowded into fifteen years of a young girl's life. God be
+with you!
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+Olive could not restrain her tears, as she handed the letter to Cyprian.
+“Her secret is as safe with you as with me,” she said. “But this is
+madness, Cyprian, and we must keep her from doing herself a wrong.
+
+“What she means to do, is to get to Boston, in some way or other, and
+sail for India. It is strange that they have not tracked her. There is
+no time to be lost. She shall not go out into the world in this way,
+child that she is. No; she shall come back, and make her home with us,
+if she cannot be happy with these people. Ours is a happy and a cheerful
+home, and she shall be to me as a younger sister, and your sister too,
+Cyprian. But you must see her; you must leave this very hour; and you
+may find her. Go to your cousin Edward, in Boston, at once; tell him
+your errand, and get him to help you find our poor dear sister. Then
+give her the note I will write, and say I know your heart, Cyprian, and
+I can trust that to tell you what to say.”
+
+In a very short time Cyprian Eveleth was on his way to Boston. But
+another, keener even in pursuit than he, was there before him.
+
+Ever since the day when Master Gridley had made that over-curious
+observation of the young lawyer's proceedings at the office, Murray
+Bradshaw had shown a far livelier interest than before in the conditions
+and feelings of Myrtle Hazard. He had called frequently at The Poplars
+to talk over business matters, which seemed of late to require a deal
+of talking. He had been very deferential to Miss Silence, and had
+wound himself into the confidence of Miss Badlam. He found it harder to
+establish any very near relations with Myrtle, who had never seemed to
+care much for any young man but Cyprian Eveleth, and to care for him
+quite as much as Olive's brother as for any personal reason. But he
+carefully studied Myrtle's tastes and ways of thinking and of life, so
+that, by and by, when she should look upon herself as a young woman,
+and not as a girl, he would have a great advantage in making her more
+intimate acquaintance.
+
+Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother's in India. She
+talked at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes
+which might well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions. She made
+herself a rude hammock,--such as are often used in hot climates,--and
+swung it between two elms. Here she would lie in the hot summer days,
+and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India had sent
+her,--the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw her into
+day-dreams, which were almost like trances.
+
+These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
+presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned for
+himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue and cry,
+and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away if he could
+help it.
+
+The first fact was this. He found among the copies of the city newspaper
+they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a square had been
+cut out. He procured another copy of this paper of the same date, and
+found that the piece cut out was an advertisement to the effect that
+the A 1 Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to sail from Boston for
+Calcutta, on the 20th of June.
+
+The second fact was the following. On the window-sill of her little
+hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found some
+threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the wood.
+They were Myrtle's of course. A simpleton might have constructed a
+tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had cast herself
+from the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had been thrust out
+after a struggle, of which this shred from her tresses was the dreadful
+witness,--and so on. Murray Bradshaw did not stop to guess and wonder.
+He said nothing about it, but wound the shining threads on his finger,
+and, as soon as he got home, examined them with a magnifier. They had
+been cut off smoothly, as with a pair of scissors. This was part of a
+mass of hair, then, which had been shorn and thrown from the window.
+Nobody would do that but she herself. What would she do it for? To
+disguise her sex, of course. The other inferences were plain enough.
+
+The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, and concluded
+that he would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river, and scour
+the woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport town from
+which she would without doubt sail if she had formed the project he
+thought on the whole most probable.
+
+Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to catch
+the train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of the
+missing girl nearer home. In the cars he made the most suggestive
+inquiries he could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly conductor's memory.
+Had any young fellow been on the train within a day or two, who had
+attracted his notice? Smooth, handsome face, black eyes, short black
+hair, new clothes, not fitting very well, looked away when he paid his
+fare, had a soft voice like a woman's,--had he seen anybody answering
+to some such description as this? The gentlemanly conductor had not
+noticed,--was always taking up and setting down way-passengers,--might
+have had such a young man aboard,--there was two or three students one
+day in the car singing college songs,--he did n't care how folks looked
+if they had their tickets ready,--and minded their own business,--and,
+so saying, he poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was
+reclining with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
+provoke in lovely woman,--“Fare!”
+
+It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel, where
+they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby, with
+nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and anything but
+clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable and mean, and
+to undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in the office, who,
+while he shoves the book round to you for your name, is making a hasty
+calculation as to how high up he can venture to doom you. But Murray
+Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more than made up for by the
+air and tone which imply the habit of being attended to. The clerk saw
+that in a glance, and, as he looked at the name and address in the book,
+spoke sharply in the explosive dialect of his tribe,--
+
+“Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!”
+
+When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he appeared
+in his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable countenance
+and gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two stories higher, where
+he found himself in a room not much better than a garret, feeling lonely
+enough, for he did not know he had an acquaintance in the same house.
+The two young men were in and out so irregularly that it was not very
+strange that they did not happen to meet each other.
+
+The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in the
+city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward. He was not
+only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and its ways,
+and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian's motives, his own were
+of such intensity that he thought of nothing else by day, and dreamed
+of nothing else by night. He went to work, therefore, in the most
+systematic manner. He first visited the ship Swordfish, lying at her
+wharf, saw her captain, and satisfied himself that as yet nobody at all
+corresponding to the description of Myrtle Hazard had been seen by any
+person on board. He visited all the wharves, inquiring on every vessel
+where it seemed possible she might have been looking about. Hotels,
+thoroughfares, every place where he might hear of her or meet her, were
+all searched. He took some of the police into his confidence, and had
+half a dozen pairs of eyes besides his own opened pretty widely, to
+discover the lost girl.
+
+On Sunday, the 19th, he got the first hint which encouraged him to think
+he was on the trail of his fugitive. He had gone down again to the wharf
+where the Swordfish, advertised to sail the next day, was lying.
+The captain was not on board, but one of the mates was there, and he
+addressed his questions to him, not with any great hope of hearing
+anything important, but determined to lose no chance, however small.
+He was startled with a piece of information which gave him such an
+exquisite pang of delight that he could hardly keep the usual quiet of
+his demeanor. A youth corresponding to his description of Myrtle Hazard
+in her probable disguise had been that morning on board the Swordfish,
+making many inquires as to the hour at which she was to sail, and who
+were to be the passengers, and remained some time on board, going all
+over the vessel, examining her cabin accommodations, and saying he
+should return to-morrow before she sailed,--doubtless intending to take
+passage in her, as there was plenty of room on board. There could be
+little question, from the description, who this young person was. It was
+a rather delicate--looking, dark--haired youth, smooth-faced, somewhat
+shy and bashful in his ways, and evidently excited and nervous. He
+had apparently been to look about him, and would come back at the last
+moment, just as the vessel was ready to sail, and in an hour or two be
+beyond the reach of inquiry.
+
+Murray Bradshaw returned to his hotel, and, going to his chamber,
+summoned all his faculties in state council to determine what course he
+should follow, now that he had the object of his search certainly within
+reaching distance. There was no danger now of her eluding him; but the
+grave question arose, what was he to do when he stood face to face with
+her. She must not go,--that was fixed. If she once got off in that ship,
+she might be safe enough; but what would become of certain projects in
+which he was interested,--that was the question. But again, she was no
+child, to be turned away from her adventure by cajolery, or by any such
+threats as common truants would find sufficient to scare them back to
+their duty. He could tell the facts of her disguise and the manner of
+her leaving home to the captain of the vessel, and induce him to send
+her ashore as a stray girl, to be returned to her relatives. But this
+would only make her furious with him; and he must not alienate her from
+himself, at any rate. He might plead with her in the name of duty,
+for the sake of her friends, for the good name of the family. She had
+thought all these things over before she ran away. What if he should
+address her as a lover, throw himself at her feet, implore her to pity
+him and give up her rash scheme, and, if things came to the very worst,
+offer to follow her wherever she went, if she would accept him in the
+only relation that would render it possible. Fifteen years old,--he
+nearly ten years older,--but such things had happened before, and this
+was no time to stand on trifles.
+
+He worked out the hypothesis of the matrimonial offer as he would have
+reasoned out the probabilities in a law case he was undertaking.
+
+1. He would rather risk that than lose all hold upon her. The girl was
+handsome enough for his ambitious future, wherever it might carry him.
+She came of an honorable family, and had the great advantage of being
+free from a tribe of disagreeable relatives, which is such a drawback
+on many otherwise eligible parties. To these considerations were to be
+joined other circumstances which we need not here mention, of a nature
+to add greatly to their force, and which would go far of themselves to
+determine his action.
+
+2. How was it likely she would look on such an extraordinary
+proposition? At first, no doubt, as Lady Anne looked upon the advances
+of Richard. She would be startled, perhaps shocked. What then? She could
+not help feeling flattered at such an offer from him,--him, William
+Murray Bradshaw, the rising young man of his county, at her feet, his
+eyes melting with the love he would throw into them, his tones subdued
+to their most sympathetic quality, and all those phrases on his
+lips which every day beguile women older and more discreet than this
+romantic, long-imprisoned girl, whose rash and adventurous enterprise
+was an assertion of her womanhood and her right to dispose of herself as
+she chose. He had not lived to be twenty-five years old without knowing
+his power with women. He believed in himself so thoroughly, that his
+very confidence was a strong promise of success.
+
+3. In case all his entreaties, arguments, and offers made no impression,
+should he make use of that supreme resource, not to be employed save
+in extreme need, but which was of a nature, in his opinion, to shake a
+resolution stronger than this young girl was like to oppose to it? That
+would be like Christian's coming to his weapon called All-prayer, he
+said to himself, with a smile that his early readings of Bunyan should
+have furnished him an image for so different an occasion. The question
+was one he could not settle till the time came,--he must leave it to the
+instinct of the moment.
+
+The next morning found him early waking after a night of feverish
+dreams. He dressed himself with more than usual care, and walked down to
+the wharf where the Swordfish was moored. The ship had left the wharf,
+and was lying out in the stream: A small boat had just reached her,
+and a slender youth, as he appeared at that distance, climbed, not
+over-adroitly, up the vessel's side.
+
+Murray Bradshaw called to a boatman near by and ordered the man to row
+him over as fast as he could to the vessel lying in the stream. He had
+no sooner reached the deck of the Swordfish than he asked for the young
+person who had just been put on board.
+
+“He is in the cabin, sir, just gone down with the captain,” was the
+reply.
+
+His heart beat, in spite of his cool temperament, as he went down the
+steps leading to the cabin. The young person was talking earnestly with
+the captain, and, on his turning round, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had
+the pleasure of recognizing his young friend, Mr. Cyprian Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+Look at the flower of a morning-glory the evening before the dawn which
+is to see it unfold. The delicate petals are twisted into a spiral,
+which at the appointed hour, when the sunlight touches the hidden
+springs of its life, will uncoil itself and let the day into the chamber
+of its virgin heart. But the spiral must unwind by its own law, and the
+hand that shall try to hasten the process will only spoil the blossom
+which would have expanded in symmetrical beauty under the rosy fingers
+of morning.
+
+We may take a hint from Nature's handling of the flower in dealing with
+young souls, and especially with the souls of young girls, which, from
+their organization and conditions, require more careful treatment than
+those of their tougher-fibred brothers. Many parents reproach themselves
+for not having enforced their own convictions on their children in the
+face of every inborn antagonism they encountered. Let them not be too
+severe in their self-condemnation. A want of judgment in this matter
+has sent many a young person to Bedlam, whose nature would have opened
+kindly enough if it had only been trusted to the sweet influences
+of morning sunshine. In such cases it may be that the state we call
+insanity is not always an unalloyed evil. It may take the place of
+something worse, the wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but
+subject to the perpetual interferences of another mind governed by
+laws alien and hostile to its own. Insanity may perhaps be the only
+palliative left to Nature in this extremity. But before she comes to
+that, she has many expedients. The mind does not know what diet it
+can feed on until it has been brought to the starvation point. Its
+experience is like that of those who have been long drifting about
+on rafts or in long-boats. There is nothing out of which it will not
+contrive to get some sustenance. A person of note, long held captive for
+a political offence, is said to have owed the preservation of his reason
+to a pin, out of which he contrived to get exercise and excitement by
+throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor of his dungeon, and then
+hunting for it in a series of systematic explorations until he had found
+it.
+
+Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would have
+been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if Providence,
+which in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected agencies, had not
+made a special provision for her mental welfare. She was in that arid
+household as the prophet in the land where there was no dew nor rain
+for these long years. But as he had the brook Cherith, and the bread and
+flesh in the morning and the bread and flesh in the evening which the
+ravens brought him, so she had the river and her secret store of books.
+
+The river was light and life and music and companionship to her. She
+learned to row herself about upon it, to swim boldly in it, for it had
+sheltered nooks but a little way above The Poplars. But there was more
+than that in it,--it was infinitely sympathetic. A river is strangely
+like a human soul. It has its dark and bright days, its troubles from
+within, and its disturbances from without. It often runs over ragged
+rocks with a smooth surface, and is vexed with ripples as it slides over
+sands that are level as a floor. It betrays its various moods by aspects
+which are the commonplaces of poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles
+and frowns. Its face is full of winking eyes, when the scattering
+rain-drops first fall upon it, and it scowls back at the storm-cloud, as
+with knitted brows, when the winds are let loose. It talks, too, in its
+own simple dialect, murmuring, as it were, with busy lips all the way
+to the ocean, as children seeking the mother's breast and impatient of
+delay. Prisoners who know what a flower or an insect has been to them
+in their solitary cell, invalids who have employed their vacant minds
+in studying the patterns of paper-hangings on the walls of their
+sick-chambers, can tell what the river was to the lonely, imaginative
+creature who used to sit looking into its depths, hour after hour, from
+the airy height of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+
+Of late a thought had mingled with her fancies which had given to the
+river the aspect of something more than a friend and a companion. It
+appeared all at once as a Deliverer. Did not its waters lead, after long
+wanderings, to the great highway of the world, and open to her the gates
+of those cities from which she could take her departure unchallenged
+towards the lands of the morning or of the sunset? Often, after a
+freshet, she had seen a child's miniature boat floating down on its side
+past her window, and traced it in imagination back to some crystal brook
+flowing by the door of a cottage far up a blue mountain in the distance.
+So she now began to follow down the stream the airy shallop that held
+her bright fancies. These dreams of hers were colored by the rainbows
+of an enchanted fountain,--the books of adventure, the romances, the
+stories which fortune had placed in her hands,--the same over which the
+heart of the Pride of the County had throbbed in the last century, and
+on the pages of some of which the traces of her tears might still be
+seen.
+
+The literature which was furnished for Myrtle's improvement was chiefly
+of a religious character, and, however interesting and valuable to those
+to whom it was adapted, had not been chosen with any wise regard to its
+fitness for her special conditions. Of what use was it to offer books
+like the “Saint's Rest” to a child whose idea of happiness was in
+perpetual activity? She read “Pilgrim's Progress,” it is true, with
+great delight. She liked the idea of travelling with a pack on one's
+back, the odd shows at the House of the interpreter, the fighting, the
+adventures, the pleasing young ladies at the palace the name of which
+was Beautiful, and their very interesting museum of curiosities. As for
+the allegorical meaning, it went through her consciousness like a peck
+of wheat through a bushel measure with the bottom out, without touching.
+
+But the very first book she got hold of out of the hidden treasury threw
+the “Pilgrim's Progress” quite into the shade. It was the story of
+a youth who ran away and lived on an island,--one Crusoe,--a homely
+narrative, but evidently true, though full of remarkable adventures.
+There too was the history, coming much nearer home, of Deborah Sampson,
+the young woman who served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, with a
+portrait of her in man's attire, looking intrepid rather than lovely. A
+virtuous young female she was, and married well, as she deserved to, and
+raised a family with as good a name as wife and mother as the best of
+them. But perhaps not one of these books and stories took such hold of
+her imagination as the tale of Rasselas, which most young persons
+find less entertaining than the “Vicar of Wakefield,” with which it is
+nowadays so commonly bound up. It was the prince's discontent in the
+Happy Valley, the iron gate opening to the sound of music, and closing
+forever on those it admitted, the rocky boundaries of the imprisoning
+valley, the visions of the world beyond, the projects of escape, and
+the long toil which ended in their accomplishment, which haunted her
+sleeping and waking. She too was a prisoner, but it was not in the Happy
+Valley. Of the romances and the love-letters we must take it for granted
+that she selected wisely, and read discreetly; at least we know nothing
+to the contrary.
+
+There were mysterious reminiscences and hints of her past coming over
+her constantly. It was in the course of the long, weary spring before
+her disappearance, that a dangerous chord was struck which added to
+her growing restlessness. In an old closet were some seashells and
+coral-fans, and dried star-fishes and sea, horses, and a natural mummy
+of a rough-skinned dogfish. She had not thought of them for years, but
+now she felt impelled to look after them. The dim sea odors which still
+clung to them penetrated to the very inmost haunts of memory, and called
+up that longing for the ocean breeze which those who have once breathed
+and salted their blood with it never get over, and which makes the
+sweetest inland airs seem to them at last tame and tasteless. She held a
+tigershell to her ear, and listened to that low, sleepy murmur, whether
+in the sense or in the soul we hardly know, like that which had so often
+been her lullaby,--a memory of the sea, as Landor and Wordsworth have
+sung.
+
+“You are getting to look like your father,” Aunt Silence said one day;
+“I never saw it before. I always thought you took after old Major
+Gideon Withers. Well, I hope you won't come to an early grave like poor
+Charles,--or at any rate, that you may be prepared.”
+
+It did not seem very likely that the girl was going out of the world
+at present, but she looked Miss Silence in the face very seriously, and
+said, “Why not an early grave, Aunt, if this world is such a bad place
+as you say it is?”
+
+“I'm afraid you are not fit for a better.”
+
+She wondered if Silence Withers and Cynthia Badlam were just ripe for
+heaven.
+
+For some months Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as was said, had been
+an habitual visitor at The Poplars, had lived there as a permanent
+resident. Between her and Silence Withers, Myrtle Hazard found no rest
+for her soul. Each of them was for untwisting the morning-glory without
+waiting for the sunshine to do it. Each had her own wrenches and pincers
+to use for that purpose. All this promised little for the nurture and
+admonition of the young girl, who, if her will could not be broken by
+imprisonment and starvation at three years old, was not likely to be
+over-tractable to any but gentle and reasonable treatment at fifteen.
+
+Aunt Silence's engine was responsibility,--her own responsibility, and
+the dreadful consequences which would follow to her, Silence, if Myrtle
+should in any way go wrong. Ever since her failure in that moral coup
+d'etat by which the sinful dynasty of the natural self-determining power
+was to be dethroned, her attempts in the way of education had been a
+series of feeble efforts followed by plaintive wails over their utter
+want of success. The face she turned upon the young girl in her solemn
+expostulations looked as if it were inscribed with the epitaphs of hope
+and virtue. Her utterances were pitched in such a forlorn tone, that
+the little bird in his cage, who always began twittering at the sound of
+Myrtle's voice, would stop in his song, and cock his head with a look of
+inquiry full of pathos, as if he wanted to know what was the matter, and
+whether he could do anything to help.
+
+The specialty of Cynthia Badlam was to point out all the dangerous and
+unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and this
+young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up examples of
+those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil end, to present
+the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the lively girl's
+apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion that a bright
+example of excellence stood before her in the irreproachable relative
+who addressed her. Especially with regard to the allurements which the
+world offers to the young and inexperienced female, Miss Cynthia Badlam
+was severe and eloquent. Sometimes poor Myrtle would stare, not seeing
+the meaning of her wise caution, sometimes look at Miss Cynthia with a
+feeling that there was something about her that was false and forced,
+that she had nothing in common with young people, that she had no pity
+for them, only hatred of their sins, whatever these might be,--a hatred
+which seemed to extend to those sources of frequent temptation, youth
+and beauty, as if they were in themselves objectionable.
+
+Both the lone women at The Poplars were gifted with a thin vein of
+music. They gave it expression in psalmody, of course, in which Myrtle,
+who was a natural singer, was expected to bear her part. This would have
+been pleasantry if the airs most frequently selected had been cheerful
+or soothing, and if the favorite hymns had been of a sort to inspire a
+love for what was lovely in this life, and to give some faint foretaste
+of the harmonies of a better world to come. But there is a fondness
+for minor keys and wailing cadences common to the monotonous chants
+of cannibals and savages generally, to such war-songs as the wild,
+implacable “Marseillaise,” and to the favorite tunes of low--spirited
+Christian pessimists. That mournful “China,” which one of our most
+agreeable story-tellers has justly singled out as the cry of despair
+itself, was often sung at The Poplars, sending such a sense of utter
+misery through the house, that poor Kitty Fagan would cross herself,
+and wring her hands, and think of funerals, and wonder who was going
+to die,--for she fancied she heard the Banshee's warning in those most
+dismal ululations.
+
+On the first Saturday of June, a fortnight before her disappearance,
+Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and came
+home with her hands full of leaves and blossoms. Silence Withers looked
+at them as if they were a kind of melancholy manifestation of frivolity
+on the part of the wicked old earth. Not that she did not inhale their
+faint fragrance with a certain pleasure, and feel their beauty as none
+whose souls are not wholly shriveled and hardened can help doing, but
+the world was, in her estimate, a vale of tears, and it was only by a
+momentary forgetfulness that she could be moved to smile at anything.
+
+Miss Cynthia, a sharper-edged woman, had formed the habit of crushing
+everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost
+odious, as flower-de-luces do when handled roughly. “There's a worm in
+that leaf, Myrtle. He has rolled it all round him, and hidden himself
+from sight; but there is a horrid worm in it, for all it is so young and
+fresh. There is a worm in every young soul, Myrtle.”
+
+“But there is not a worm in every leaf, Miss Cynthia. Look,” she said,
+“all these are open, and you can see all over and under them, and there
+is nothing there. Are there never any worms in the leaves after they get
+old and yellow, Miss Cynthia?”
+
+That was a pretty fair hit for a simple creature of fifteen, but perhaps
+she was not so absolutely simple as one might have thought.
+
+It was on the evening of this same day that they were sitting together.
+The sweet season was opening, and it seemed as if the whispering of the
+leaves, the voices of the birds, the softness of the air, the young life
+stirring in everything, called on all creatures to join the universal
+chorus of praise that was going up around them.
+
+“What shall we sing this evening?” said Miss Silence.
+
+“Give me one of the books, if you please, Cousin Silence,” said Miss
+Cynthia. “It is Saturday evening. Holy time has begun. Let us prepare
+our minds for the solemnities of the Sabbath.”
+
+She took the book, one well known to the schools and churches of this
+nineteenth century.
+
+“Book Second. Hymn 44. Long metre. I guess 'Putney' will be as good a
+tune as any to sing it to.”
+
+The trio began,--
+
+         “With holy fear, and humble song,”
+
+and got through the first verse together pretty well. Then came the
+second verse:
+
+         “Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+          The land of horror and despair,
+          Justice has built a dismal hell,
+          And laid her stores of vengeance there.”
+
+Myrtle's voice trembled a little in singing this verse, and she hardly
+kept up her part with proper spirit.
+
+“Sing out, Myrtle,” said Miss Cynthia, and she struck up the third
+verse:
+
+         “Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+          Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+          And darts t' inflict immortal pains,
+          Dyed in the blood of damned souls.”
+
+This last verse was a duet, and not a trio. Myrtle closed her lips while
+it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a look of
+anger and disgust. The hunted soul was at bay.
+
+“I won't sing such words,” she said, “and I won't stay here to hear them
+sung. The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and I am not
+going to sing them. You can't scare me into being good with your cruel
+hymn-book!”
+
+She could not swear: she was not a boy. She would not cry: she felt
+proud, obdurate, scornful, outraged. All these images, borrowed from the
+holy Inquisition, were meant to frighten her--and had simply irritated
+her. The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but not
+penetrating, only enrages. It was a moment of fearful danger to her
+character, to her life itself.
+
+Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to
+her hanging chamber. She threw open the window and looked down into
+the stream. For one moment her head swam with the sudden, overwhelming,
+almost maddening thought that came over her,--the impulse to fling
+herself headlong into those running waters and dare the worst these
+dreadful women had threatened her with. Something she often thought
+afterwards it was an invisible hand held her back during that brief
+moment, and the paroxysm--just such a paroxysm as throws many a young
+girl into the Thames or the Seine--passed away. She remained looking, in
+a misty dream, into the water far below. Its murmur recalled the whisper
+of the ocean waves. And through the depths it seemed as if she saw into
+that strange, half--remembered world of palm-trees and white robes and
+dusky faces, and amidst them, looking upon her with ineffable love and
+tenderness, until all else faded from her sight, the face of a fair
+woman,--was it hers, so long, long dead, or that dear young mother's who
+was to her less a recollection than a dream?
+
+Could it have been this vision that soothed her, so that she unclasped
+her hands and lifted her bowed head as if she had heard a voice
+whispering to her from that unknown world where she felt there was a
+spirit watching over her? At any rate, her face was never more serene
+than when she went to meeting with the two maiden ladies on the
+following day, Sunday, and heard the Rev. Mr. Stoker preach a sermon
+from Luke vii. 48, which made both the women shed tears, but especially
+so excited Miss Cynthia that she was in a kind of half-hysteric
+condition all the rest of the day.
+
+After that Myrtle was quieter and more docile than ever before. Could it
+be, Miss Silence thought, that the Rev. Mr. Stoker's sermon had touched
+her hard heart? However that was, she did not once wear the stormy look
+with which she had often met the complaining remonstrances Miss Silence
+constantly directed against all the spontaneous movements of the
+youthful and naturally vivacious subject of her discipline.
+
+June is an uncertain month, as everybody knows, and there were frosts
+in many parts of New England in the June of 1859. But there were also
+beautiful days and nights, and the sun was warm enough to be fast
+ripening the strawberries,--also certain plans which had been in flower
+some little time. Some preparations had been going on in a quiet way, so
+that at the right moment a decisive movement could be made. Myrtle knew
+how to use her needle, and always had a dexterous way of shaping
+any article of dress or ornament,--a natural gift not very rare, but
+sometimes very needful, as it was now.
+
+On the morning of the 15th of June she was wandering by the shores of
+the river, some distance above The Poplars, when a boat came drifting
+along by her, evidently broken loose from its fastenings farther up
+the stream. It was common for such waifs to show themselves after heavy
+rains had swollen the river. They might have run the gauntlet of nobody
+could tell how many farms, and perhaps passed by half a dozen towns
+and villages in the night, so that, if of common, cheap make, they were
+retained without scruple, by any who might find them, until the owner
+called for them, if he cared to take the trouble.
+
+Myrtle took a knife from her pocket, cut down a long, slender sapling,
+and coaxed the boat to the side of the bank. A pair of old oars lay
+in the bottom of the boat; she took one of these and paddled it into
+a little cove, where it could lie hid among the thick alders. Then
+she went home and busied herself about various little matters more
+interesting to her than to us.
+
+She was never more amiable and gracious than on this day. But she looked
+often at the clock, as they remembered afterwards, and studied over
+a copy of the Farmer's Almanac which was lying in the kitchen, with a
+somewhat singular interest. The days were nearly at their longest, the
+weather was mild, the night promised to be clear and bright.
+
+The household was, to all appearance, asleep at the usual early hour.
+When all seemed quiet, Myrtle lighted her lamp, stood before her mirror,
+and untied the string that bound her long and beautiful dark hair, which
+fell in its abundance over her shoulders and below her girdle.
+
+She lifted its heavy masses with one hand, and severed it with a strong
+pair of scissors, with remorseless exaction of every wandering curl,
+until she stood so changed by the loss of that outward glory of her
+womanhood, that she felt as if she had lost herself and found a brother
+she had never seen before.
+
+“Good-by, Myrtle!” she said, and, opening her window very gently, she
+flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them for a
+few moments as they floated down the stream. Then she dressed herself in
+the character of her imaginary brother, took up the carpet-bag in
+which she had placed what she chose to carry with her, stole softly
+down-stairs, and let herself out of a window on the lower floor,
+shutting it very carefully so as to be sure that nobody should be
+disturbed.
+
+She glided along, looking all about her, fearing she might be seen
+by some curious wanderer, and reached the cove where the boat she had
+concealed was lying. She got into it, and, taking the rude oars, pulled
+herself into the middle of the swollen stream. Her heart beat so that
+it seemed to her as if she could hear it between the strokes of the oar.
+The lights were not all out in the village, and she trembled lest she
+should see the figure of some watcher looking from the windows in
+sight of which she would have to pass, and that a glimpse of this boat
+stealing along at so late an hour might give the clue to the secret of
+her disappearance, with which the whole region was to be busied in the
+course of the next day.
+
+Presently she came abreast of The Poplars. The house lay so still, so
+peaceful,--it would wake to such dismay! The boat slid along beneath her
+own overhanging chamber.
+
+“No song to-morrow from the Fire-hang-bird's Nest!” she said. So she
+floated by the slumbering village, the flow of the river carrying her
+steadily on, and the careful strokes of the oars adding swiftness to her
+flight.
+
+At last she came to the “Broad Meadows,” and knew that she was alone,
+and felt confident that she had got away unseen. There was nothing,
+absolutely nothing, to point out which way she had gone. Her boat came
+from nobody knew where, her disguise had been got together at different
+times in such a manner as to lead to no suspicion, and not a human being
+ever had the slightest hint that she had planned and meant to carry out
+the enterprise which she had now so fortunately begun.
+
+Not till the last straggling house had been long past, not till the
+meadows were stretched out behind her as well as before her, spreading
+far off into the distance on each side, did she give way to the sense of
+wild exultation which was coming fast over her. But then, at last,
+she drew a long, long breath, and, standing up in the boat, looked all
+around her. The stars were shining over her head and deep down beneath
+her. The cool wind came fresh upon her cheek over the long grassy
+reaches. No living thing moved in all the wide level circle which lay
+about her. She had passed the Red Sea, and was alone in the Desert.
+
+She threw down her oars, lifted her hands like a priestess, and her
+strong, sweet voice burst into song,--the song of the Jewish maiden when
+she went out before the chorus of, women and sang that grand solo, which
+we all remember in its ancient words, and in their modern paraphrase,
+
+    “Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea!
+     Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free!”
+
+The poor child's repertory was limited to songs of the religious sort
+mainly, but there was a choice among these. Her aunt's favorites, beside
+“China,” already mentioned, were “Bangor,” which the worthy old New
+England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-east city
+called after it, and “Windsor,” and “Funeral Hymn.” But Myrtle was in no
+mood for these. She let off her ecstasy in “Balerma,” and “Arlington,”
+ and “Silver Street,” and at last in that most riotous of devotional
+hymns, which sounds as if it had been composed by a saint who had a
+cellar under his chapel,--“Jordan.” So she let her wild spirits run
+loose; and then a tenderer feeling stole over her, and she sang herself
+into a more tranquil mood with the gentle music of “Dundee.” And again
+she pulled quietly and steadily at her oars, until she reached the
+wooded region through which the river winds after leaving the “Broad
+Meadows.”
+
+The tumult in her blood was calmed, yet every sense and faculty
+was awake to the manifold delicious, mysterious impressions of that
+wonderful June night, The stars were shining between the tall trees, as
+if all the jewels of heaven had been set in one belt of midnight sky.
+The voices of the wind, as they sighed through the pines, seemed like
+the breath of a sleeping child, and then, as they lisped from the soft,
+tender leaves of beeches and maples, like the half-articulate whisper of
+the mother hushing all the intrusive sounds that might awaken it. Then
+came the pulsating monotone of the frogs from a far-off pool, the harsh
+cry of an owl from an old tree that overhung it, the splash of a mink or
+musquash, and nearer by, the light step of a woodchuck, as he cantered
+off in his quiet way to his hole in the nearest bank. The laurels were
+just coming into bloom,--the yellow lilies, earlier than their fairer
+sisters, pushing their golden cups through the water, not content, like
+those, to float on the surface of the stream that fed them, emblems of
+showy wealth, and, like that, drawing all manner of insects to feed
+upon them. The miniature forests of ferns came down to the edge of the
+stream, their tall, bending plumes swaying in the night breeze. Sweet
+odors from oozing pines, from dewy flowers, from spicy leaves, stole out
+of the tangled thickets, and made the whole scene more dream-like with
+their faint, mingled suggestions.
+
+By and by the banks of the river grew lower and marshy, and in place of
+the larger forest-trees which had covered them stood slender tamaracks,
+sickly, mossy, looking as if they had been moon-struck and were out
+of their wits, their tufts of leaves staring off every way from
+their spindling branches. The winds came cool and damp out of the
+hiding-places among their dark recesses. The country people about here
+called this region the “Witches' Hollow,” and had many stories about
+the strange things that happened there. The Indians used to hold their
+“powwows,” or magical incantations, upon a broad mound which rose out of
+the common level, and where some old hemlocks and beeches formed a dark
+grove, which served them as a temple for their demon-worship. There were
+many legends of more recent date connected with this spot, some of them
+hard to account for, and no superstitious or highly imaginative person
+would have cared to pass through it alone in the dead of the night, as
+this young girl was doing.
+
+She knew nothing of all these fables and fancies. Her own singular
+experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by
+anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious by
+those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to them.
+We are at liberty to report many things without attempting to explain
+them, or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact that so they
+were told us. The reader will find Myrtle's “Vision,” as written out at
+a later period from her recollections, at the end of this chapter.
+
+The night was passing, and she meant to be as far away as possible from
+the village she had left, before morning. But the boat, like all craft
+on country rivers, was leaky, and she had to work until tired, bailing
+it out, before she was ready for another long effort. The old tin
+measure, which was all she had to bail with, leaked as badly as the
+boat, and her task was a tedious one. At last she got it in good trim,
+and sat down to her oars with the determination to pull steadily as long
+as her strength would hold out.
+
+Hour after hour she kept at her work, sweeping round the long bends
+where the river was hollowing out one bank and building new shore on the
+opposite one, so as gradually to shift its channel; by clipper-shaped
+islands, sharp at the bows looking up stream, sharp too at the stern,
+looking down,--their shape solving the navigator's problem of least
+resistance, as a certain young artist had pointed out; by slumbering
+villages; by outlying farm-houses; between cornfields where the young
+plants were springing up in little thready fountains; in the midst of
+stumps where the forest had just been felled; through patches, where the
+fire of the last great autumnal drought had turned all the green beauty
+of the woods into brown desolation; and again amidst broad expanses of
+open meadow stretching as far as the eye could reach in the uncertain
+light. A faint yellow tinge was beginning to stain the eastern horizon.
+Her boat was floating quietly along, for she had at last taken in her
+oars, and she was now almost tired out with toil and excitement. She
+rested her head upon her hands, and felt her eyelids closing in spite of
+herself. And now there stole upon her ear a low, gentle, distant murmur,
+so soft that it seemed almost to mingle with the sound of her own
+breathing, but so steady, so uniform, that it soothed her to sleep, as
+if it were the old cradle-song the ocean used to sing to her, or the
+lullaby of her fair young mother.
+
+So she glided along, slowly, slowly, down the course of the winding
+river, and the flushing dawn kindled around her as she slumbered, and
+the low, gentle murmur grew louder and louder, but still she slept,
+dreaming of the murmuring ocean.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII. MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.
+
+“A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of June
+15, 1859. Written out at the request of a friend from my recollections.
+
+“The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told
+since, Witches' Hollow. I had never been there before, and did not know
+that it was called so, or anything about it.
+
+“The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of
+hill or mound that rose out of the low meadows. I saw a burning cross
+lying on the slope of that mound. It burned with a pale greenish light,
+and did not waste, though I watched it for a long time, as the boat I
+was in moved slowly with the current and I had stopped rowing.
+
+“I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking
+at this cross. I think my eyes were open when I saw these other
+appearances, but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.
+
+“I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures
+moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were
+outside of myself.
+
+“The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement, as
+if without any effort. They made many gestures, and seemed to speak,
+but I cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its meaning in
+some other way.
+
+“I knew the faces of some of these figures. They were the same I have
+seen in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house where
+I was brought up, called The Poplars. I saw my father and my mother as
+they look in the two small pictures; also my grandmother, and her father
+and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who lived a great
+while ago. All of these have been long dead, and the longer they had
+been dead the less like substance they looked and the more like shadows,
+so that the oldest was like one's breath of a frosty morning, but shaped
+like the living figure.
+
+“There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be
+moving as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath! I thought they
+wanted to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which I
+seemed to see as it were empty of myself and of these other selves, like
+a sponge that has water pressed out of it.
+
+“Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
+others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost in
+my own life.
+
+“My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than any
+of the rest. Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have become a
+part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over the life
+they had led, on the sea and in strange countries.
+
+“Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a
+very strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard
+sometimes, though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I
+used to read in the graveyard. It seemed to me that there was something
+about his life that I did not want to make a part of mine, but that
+there was some right he had in me through my being of his blood, and
+so his health and his strength went all through me, and I was always
+to have what was left of his life in that shadow-like shape, forming a
+portion of mine.
+
+“So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that
+famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to be
+called the Pride of the County.
+
+“And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait
+marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors, and
+was before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the witchcraft
+trials.
+
+“There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-dress
+of feathers. She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw something of my
+own features in her face.
+
+“It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our
+blood who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me, and
+was in some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence with me
+since, as if she lived again in me; but not always,--only at times,--and
+then I feel borne up as if I could do anything in the world. I had a
+feeling as if she were my guardian and protector.
+
+“It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not mentioned, do
+really live over some part of their past lives in my life. I do not
+understand it all, and perhaps it can be accounted for in some way I
+have not thought of. I write it down as nearly as I can give it from
+memory, by request, and if it is printed at this time had rather have
+all the real names withheld.
+
+“MYRTLE HAZARD.”
+
+
+NOTE BY THE FRIEND.
+
+“This statement must be accounted for in some way, or pass into the
+category of the supernatural. Probably it was one of those intuitions,
+with objective projection, which sometimes come to imaginative young
+persons, especially girls, in certain exalted nervous conditions. The
+study of the portraits, with the knowledge of some parts of the history
+of the persons they represented, and the consciousness of instincts
+inherited in all probability from these same ancestors, formed the basis
+of Myrtle's 'Vision.' The lives of our progenitors are, as we know,
+reproduced in different proportions in ourselves. Whether they as
+individuals have any consciousness of it, is another matter. It is
+possible that they do get a second as it were fractional life in us. It
+might seem that many of those whose blood flows in our veins struggle
+for the mastery, and by and by one or more get the predominance, so that
+we grow to be like father, or mother, or remoter ancestor, or two
+or more are blended in us, not to the exclusion, however, it must be
+understood, of a special personality of our own, about which these
+others are grouped. Independently of any possible scientific value,
+this 'Vision' serves to illustrate the above-mentioned fact of common
+experience, which is not sufficiently weighed by most moralists.
+
+“How much it may be granted to certain young persons to see, not in
+virtue of their intellectual gifts, but through those direct channels
+which worldly wisdom may possibly close to the luminous influx, each
+reader must determine for himself by his own standards of faith and
+evidence.
+
+“One statement of the narrative admits of a simple natural explanation,
+which does not allow the lovers of the marvellous to class it with the
+quasi-miraculous appearance seen by Colonel Gardiner, and given in
+full by Dr. Doddridge in his Life of that remarkable Christian soldier.
+Decaying wood is often phosphorescent, as many readers must have seen
+for themselves. The country people are familiar with the sight of it in
+wild timber-land, and have given it the name of 'Fox-fire.' Two trunks
+of trees in this state, lying across each other, will account for the
+fact observed, and vindicate the truth of the young girl's story without
+requiring us to suppose any exceptional occurrence outside of natural
+laws.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND BEGINS HIS ANSWER.
+
+It was already morning when a young man living in the town of Alderbank,
+after lying awake for an hour thinking the unutterable thoughts that
+nineteen years of life bring to the sleeping and waking dreams of young
+people, rose from his bed, and, half dressing himself, sat down at his
+desk, from which he took a letter, which he opened and read. It was
+written in a delicate, though hardly formed female hand, and crossed
+like a checker-board, as is usual with these redundant manuscripts. The
+letter was as follows:
+
+OXBOW VILLAGE, June 13, 1859.
+
+MY DEAREST CLEMENT,--You was so good to write me such a sweet little bit
+of a letter,--only, dear, you never seem to be in quite so good spirits
+as you used to be. I wish your Susie was with you to cheer you up; but
+no, she must be patient, and you must be patient too, for you are so
+ambitious! I have heard you say so many times that nobody could be a
+great artist without passing years and years at work, and growing pale
+and lean with thinking so hard. You won't grow pale and lean, I hope;
+for I do so love to see that pretty color in your cheeks you have always
+had ever since I have known you; and besides, I do not believe you
+will have to work so very hard to do something great,--you have so much
+genius, and people of genius do such beautiful things with so little
+trouble. You remember those beautiful lines out of our newspaper I
+sent you? Well, Mr. Hopkins told me he wrote those lines in one evening
+without stopping! I wish you could see Mr. Hopkins,--he is a very
+talented person. I cut out this little piece about him from the paper
+on purpose to show you,--for genius loves genius,--and you would like to
+hear him read his own poetry,--he reads it beautifully. Please send this
+piece from the paper back, as I want to put it in my scrapbook, under
+his autograph:--
+
+“Our young townsman, Mr. Gifted Hopkins, has proved himself worthy of
+the name he bears. His poetical effusions are equally creditable to his
+head and his heart, displaying the highest order of genius and powers
+of imagination and fancy hardly second to any writer of the age. He is
+destined to make a great sensation in the world of letters.”
+
+Mrs. Hopkins is the same good soul she always was. She is very proud
+of her son, as is natural, and keeps a copy of everything he writes. I
+believe she cries over them every time she reads them. You don't know
+how I take to little Sossy and Minthy, those two twins I have written to
+you about before. Poor little creatures,--what a cruel thing it was in
+their father and mother not to take care of them! What do you think? Old
+bachelor Gridley lets them come up into his room, and builds forts and
+castles for them with his big books! “The world's coming to an end,”
+ Mrs. Hopkins said the first time he did so. He looks so savage with
+that scowl of his, and talks so gruff when he is scolding at things in
+general, that nobody would have believed he would have let such little
+things come anywhere near him. But he seems to be growing kind to all of
+us and everybody. I saw him talking to the Fire-hang-bird the other day.
+You know who the Fire-hang-bird is, don't you? Myrtle Hazard her name
+is. I wish you could see her. I don't know as I do, though. You would
+want to make a statue of her, or a painting, I know. She is so handsome
+that all the young men stand round to see her come out of meeting. Some
+say that Lawyer Bradshaw is after her; but my! he is ten years older
+than she is. She is nothing but a girl, though she looks as if she was
+eighteen. She lives up at a place called The Poplars, with an old woman
+that is her aunt or something, and nobody seems to be much acquainted
+with her except Olive Eveleth, who is the minister's daughter at Saint
+Bartholomew's Church. She never has beauxs round her, as some young
+girls do--they say that she is not happy with her aunt and another
+woman that stays with her, and that is the reason she keeps so much to
+herself. The minister came to see me the other day,--Mr. Stoker his name
+is. I was all alone, and it frightened me, for he looks, oh, so solemn
+on Sundays! But he called me “My dear,” and did n't say anything horrid,
+you know, about my being such a dreadful, dreadful sinner, as I have
+heard of his saying to some people,--but he looked very kindly at me,
+and took my hand, and laid his hand on my shoulder like a brother, and
+hoped I would come and see him in his study. I suppose I must go, but I
+don't want to. I don't seem to like him exactly.
+
+I hope you love me as well as ever you did. I can't help feeling
+sometimes as if you was growing away from me,--you know what I
+mean,--getting to be too great a person for such a small person as I am.
+
+I know I can't always understand you when you talk about art, and that
+you know a great deal too much for such a simple girl as I am. Oh, if I
+thought I could never make you happy!... There, now! I am almost ashamed
+to send this paper so spotted. Gifted Hopkins wrote some beautiful
+verses one day on “A Maiden Weeping.” He compared the tears falling from
+her eyes to the drops of dew which one often sees upon the flowers in
+the morning. Is n't it a pretty thought?
+
+I wish I loved art as well as I do poetry; but I am afraid I have not so
+much taste as some girls have. You remember how I liked that picture in
+the illustrated magazine, and you said it was horrid. I have been afraid
+since to like almost anything, for fear you should tell me some time or
+other it was horrid. Don't you think I shall ever learn to know what is
+nice from what is n't?
+
+Oh, dear Clement, I wish you would do one thing to please me. Don't say
+no, for you can do everything you try to,--I am sure you can. I want you
+to write me some poetry,--just three or four little verses TO SUZIE. Oh,
+I should feel so proud to have some lines written all on purpose for me.
+Mr. Hopkins wrote some the other day, and printed them in the paper, “To
+M----e.” I believe he meant them for Myrtle,--the first and last letter
+of her name, you see, “M” and “e.”
+
+Your letter was a dear one, only so short! I wish you would tell me
+all about what you are doing at Alderbank. Have you made that model of
+Innocence that is to have my forehead, and hair parted like mine! Make
+it pretty, do, that is a darling.
+
+Now don't make a face at my letter. It is n't a very good one, I know;
+but your poor little Susie does the best she can, and she loves you so
+much!
+
+Now do be nice and write me one little bit of a mite of a poem,--it will
+make me just as happy!
+
+I am very well, and as happy as I can be when you are away.
+
+Your affectionate SUSIE.
+
+(Directed to Mr. Clement Lindsay, Alderbank.)
+
+The envelope of this letter was unbroken, as was before said, when
+the young man took it from his desk. He did not tear it with the hot
+impatience of some lovers, but cut it open neatly, slowly, one would say
+sadly. He read it with an air of singular effort, and yet with a
+certain tenderness. When he had finished it, the drops were thick on his
+forehead; he groaned and put his hands to his face, which was burning
+red.
+
+This was what the impulse of boyhood, years ago, had brought him to! He
+was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of fastidious
+taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue eyes, his
+commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every change of
+thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not improbably claim
+that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter had spoken,--the
+strange, divine, dread gift of genius.
+
+This poor, simple, innocent, trusting creature, so utterly incapable
+of coming into any true relation with his aspiring mind, his large and
+strong emotions,--this mere child, all simplicity and goodness, but
+trivial and shallow as the little babbling brooklet that ran by his
+window to the river, to lose its insignificant being in the swift
+torrent he heard rushing over the rocks,--this pretty idol for a weak
+and kindly and easily satisfied worshipper, was to be enthroned as the
+queen of his affections, to be adopted as the companion of his labors!
+The boy, led by the commonest instinct, the mere attraction of biped
+to its female, which accident had favored, had thrown away the dearest
+possession of manhood,--liberty,--and this bauble was to be his lifelong
+reward! And yet not a bauble either, for a pleasing person and a gentle
+and sweet nature, which had once made her seem to him the very paragon
+of loveliness, were still hers. Alas! her simple words were true,--he
+had grown away from her. Her only fault was that she had not grown with
+him, and surely he could not reproach her with that.
+
+“No,” he said to himself, “I will never leave her so long as her heart
+clings to me. I have been rash, but she shall not pay the forfeit.
+And if I may think of myself, my life need not be wretched because she
+cannot share all my being with me. The common human qualities are more
+than all exceptional gifts. She has a woman's heart; and what talent of
+mine is to be named by the love a true woman can offer in exchange for
+these divided and cold affections? If it had pleased God to mate me with
+one more equal in other ways, who could share my thoughts, who could
+kindle my inspiration, who had wings to rise into the air with me as
+well as feet to creep by my side upon the earth,--what cannot such a
+woman do for a man!
+
+“What! cast away the flower I took in the bud because it does not show
+as I hoped it would when it opened? I will stand by my word; I will be
+all as a man that I promised as a boy. Thank God, she is true and
+pure and sweet. My nest will be a peaceful one; but I must take wing
+alone,--alone.”
+
+He drew one long sigh, and the cloud passed from his countenance. He
+must answer that letter now, at once. There were reasons, he thought,
+which made it important. And so, with the cheerfulness which it was
+kind and becoming to show, so far as possible, and yet with a little
+excitement on one particular point, which was the cause of his writing
+so promptly, he began his answer.
+
+ALDERBANK, Thursday morning, June 16, 1859.
+
+MY DEAR SUSIE,--I have just been reading your pleasant letter; and if
+I do not send you the poem you ask for so eloquently, I will give you a
+little bit of advice, which will do just as well,--won't it, my dear?
+I was interested in your account of various things going on at Oxbow
+Village. I am very glad you find young Mr. Hopkins so agreeable a
+friend. His poetry is better than some which I see printed in the
+village papers, and seems generally unexceptionable in its subjects and
+tone. I do not believe he is a dangerous companion, though the habit of
+writing verse does not always improve the character. I think I have seen
+it make more than one of my acquaintances idle, conceited, sentimental,
+and frivolous,--perhaps it found them so already. Don't make too much
+of his talent, and particularly don't let him think that because he can
+write verses he has nothing else to do in this world. That is for his
+benefit, dear, and you must skilfully apply it.
+
+Now about yourself. My dear Susie, there was something in your letter
+that did not please me. You speak of a visit from the Rev. Mr. Stoker,
+and of his kind, brotherly treatment, his cordiality of behavior, and
+his asking you to visit him in his study. I am very glad to hear you say
+that you “don't seem to like him.” He is very familiar, it seems to me,
+for so new an acquaintance. What business had he to be laying his hand
+on your shoulder? I should like to see him try these free-and-easy ways
+in my presence! He would not have taken that liberty, my dear! No, he
+was alone with you, and thought it safe to be disrespectfully familiar.
+I want you to maintain your dignity always with such persons, and I beg
+you not to go to the study of this clergyman, unless some older friend
+goes with you on every occasion, and sits through the visit. I must
+speak plainly to you, my dear, as I have a right to. If the minister
+has anything of importance to say, let it come through the lips of some
+mature person. It may lose something of the fervor with which it would
+have been delivered at first hand, but the great rules of Christian life
+are not so dependent on the particular individual who speaks them, that
+you must go to this or that young man to find out what they are. If to
+any man, I should prefer the old gentleman whom you have mentioned in
+your letters, Father Pemberton. You understand me, my dear girl, and the
+subject is not grateful. You know how truly I am interested in all that
+relates to you,--that I regard you with an affection which--
+
+     HELP!  HELP!  HELP!
+
+A cry as of a young person's voice was heard faintly, coming from the
+direction of the river. Something in the tone of it struck to his heart,
+and he sprang as if he had been stabbed. He flung open his chamber
+window and leaped from it to the ground. He ran straight to the bank
+of the river by the side of which the village of Alderbank was built, a
+little farther down the stream than the house in which he was living.
+
+Everybody that travels in that region knows the beautiful falls which
+break the course of the river just above the village; narrow and swift,
+and surrounded by rocks of such picturesque forms that they are sought
+and admired by tourists. The stream was now swollen, and rushed in
+a deep and rapid current over the ledges, through the rocky straits,
+plunging at last in tumult and foam, with loud, continuous roar, into
+the depths below the cliff from which it tumbled.
+
+A short distance above the fall there projected from the water a rock
+which had, by parsimonious saving during a long course of years, hoarded
+a little soil, out of which a small tuft of bushes struggled to support
+a decent vegetable existence. The high waters had nearly submerged it,
+but a few slender twigs were seen above their surface.
+
+A skiff was lying close to this rock, between it and the brink of the
+fall, which was but a few rods farther down. In the skiff was a youth
+of fourteen or fifteen years, holding by the slender twigs, the boat
+dragging at them all the time, and threatening to tear them away and go
+over the fall. It was not likely that the boy would come to shore alive
+if it did. There were stories, it is true, that the Indians used to
+shoot the fall in their canoes with safety; but everybody knew that at
+least three persons had been lost by going over it since the town was
+settled; and more than one dead body had been found floating far down
+the river, with bruises and fractured bones, as if it had taken the same
+fatal plunge.
+
+There was no time to lose. Clement ran a little way up the river-bank,
+flung off his shoes, and sprang from the bank as far as he could leap
+into the water. The current swept him toward the fall, but he worked
+nearer and nearer the middle of the stream. He was making for the rock,
+thinking he could plant his feet upon it and at the worst hold the boat
+until he could summon other help by shouting. He had barely got his feet
+upon the rock, when the twigs by which the boy was holding gave way. He
+seized the boat, but it dragged him from his uncertain footing, and
+with a desperate effort he clambered over its side and found himself its
+second doomed passenger.
+
+There was but an instant for thought.
+
+“Sit still,” he said, “and, just as we go over, put your arms round me
+under mine, and don't let go for your life!”
+
+He caught up the single oar, and with a few sharp paddle-strokes brought
+the skiff into the blackest centre of the current, where it was deepest,
+and would plunge them into the deepest pool.
+
+“Hold your breath! God save us! Now!”
+
+They rose, as if with one will, and stood for an instant, the arms of
+the younger closely embracing the other as he had directed.
+
+A sliding away from beneath them of the floor on which they stood, as
+the drop fails under the feet of a felon. A great rush of air, and a
+mighty, awful, stunning roar,--an involuntary gasp, a choking flood of
+water that came bellowing after them, and hammered them down into
+the black depths so far that the young man, though used to diving and
+swimming long distances underwater, had well-nigh yielded to the fearful
+need of air, and sucked in his death in so doing.
+
+The boat came up to the surface, broken in twain, splintered, a load
+of firewood for those who raked the river lower down. It had turned
+crosswise, and struck the rocks. A cap rose to the surface, such a
+one as boys wear,--the same that boy had on. And then--after how many
+seconds by the watch cannot be known, but after a time long enough,
+as the young man remembered it, to live his whole life over in
+memory--Clement Lindsay felt the blessed air against his face, and,
+taking a great breath, came to his full consciousness. The arms of
+the boy were still locked around him as in the embrace of death. A few
+strokes brought him to the shore, dragging his senseless burden with
+him.
+
+He unclasped the arms that held him so closely encircled, and laid the
+slender form of the youth he had almost died to save gently upon the
+grass. It was as if dead. He loosed the ribbon that was round the neck,
+he tore open the checked shirt--
+
+The story of Myrtle Hazard's sex was told; but she was deaf to his cry
+of surprise, and no blush came to her cold cheek. Not too late, perhaps,
+to save her,--not too late to try to save her, at least!
+
+He placed his lips to hers, and filled her breast with the air from his
+own panting chest. Again and again he renewed these efforts, hoping,
+doubting, despairing,--once more hoping, and at last, when he had almost
+ceased to hope, she gasped, she breathed, she moaned, and rolled her
+eyes wildly round her, she was born again into this mortal life.
+
+He caught her up in his arms, bore her to the house, laid her on a sofa,
+and, having spent his strength in this last effort, reeled and fell, and
+lay as one over whom have just been whispered the words,
+
+“He is gone.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS LETTER--WHAT CAME OF IT.
+
+The first thing Clement Lindsay did, when he was fairly himself again,
+was to finish his letter to Susan Posey. He took it up where it left
+off, “with an affection which----” and drew a long dash, as above. It
+was with great effort he wrote the lines which follow, for he had got
+an ugly blow on the forehead, and his eyes were “in mourning,” as the
+gentlemen of the ring say, with unbecoming levity.
+
+“An adventure! Just as I was writing these last words, I heard the
+cry of a young person, as it sounded, for help. I ran to the river and
+jumped in, and had the pleasure of saving a life. I got some bruises
+which have laid me up for a day or two; but I am getting over them very
+well now, and you need not worry about me at all. I will write again
+soon; so pray do not fret yourself, for I have had no hurt that will
+trouble me for any time.”
+
+Of course, poor Susan Posey burst out crying, and cried as if her heart
+would break. Oh dear! Oh dear! what should she do! He was almost killed,
+she knew he was, or he had broken some of his bones. Oh dear! Oh dear!
+She would go and see him, there!--she must and would. He would die, she
+knew he would,--and so on.
+
+It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human element
+in Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme trouble, should
+think of him as a counsellor. But the wonderful relenting kind of look
+on his grave features as he watched the little twins tumbling about his
+great books, and certain marks of real sympathy he had sometimes shown
+for her in her lesser woes, encouraged her, and she went straight to his
+study, letter in hand. She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful
+sanctuary.
+
+“Come in, Susan Posey,” was its answer, in a pleasant tone. The old
+master knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand on
+the panel.
+
+What a sight! 'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a Sebastopol
+which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and the terrible
+Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile manifestations of the
+most singular character. He was actually discharging a large sugar-plum
+at the postern gate, which having been left unclosed, the missile would
+certainly have reached one of the garrison, when he paused as the door
+opened, and the great round spectacles and four wide, staring infants'
+eyes were levelled at Miss Susan Posey.
+
+She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at this
+manifestation. The old man had emptied his shelves of half their folios
+to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had seated the two
+delighted and uproarious babes. There was his Cave's “Historia
+Literaria,” and Sir Walter Raleigh's “History of the World,” and a whole
+array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book
+of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates
+of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one
+side and Fox's “Acts and Monuments” on the other,--an odd collection, as
+folios from lower shelves are apt to be.
+
+The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that
+it fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the
+garrison had been on short rations for some time.
+
+He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble. “What now, Susan
+Posey, my dear?”
+
+“O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble! What shall I do? What shall I do?”
+
+She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way
+that Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their
+adventure.
+
+“So Mr. Clement Lindsay has been saving a life, has he, and got some
+hard knocks doing it, hey, Susan Posey? Well, well, Clement Lindsay is a
+brave fellow, and there is no need of hiding his name, my child. Let
+me take the letter again a moment, Susan Posey. What is the date of it?
+June 16th. Yes,--yes,--yes!”
+
+He read the paragraph over again, and the signature too, if he wanted
+to; for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to those
+round spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not unbecoming
+blush, opened the fold of the letter before she handed it back.
+
+“No, no, Susan Posey. He will come all right. His writing is steady, and
+if he had broken any bones he would have mentioned it. It's a thing his
+wife will be proud of, if he is ever married, Susan Posey,” (blushes,)
+“and his children too,” (more blushes running up to her back hair,) “and
+there 's nothing to be worried about. But I'll tell you what, my dear,
+I've got a little business that calls me down the river tomorrow, and
+I shouldn't mind stopping an hour at Alderbank and seeing how our young
+friend Clement Lindsay is; and then, if he was going to have a long
+time of it, why we could manage it somehow that any friend who had
+any special interest in him could visit him, just to while away the
+tiresomeness of being sick. That's it, exactly. I'll stop at Alderbank,
+Susan Posey. Just clear up these two children for me, will you, my dear?
+Isosceles, come now,--that 's a good child. Helminthia, carry these
+sugar-plums down--stairs for me, and take good care of them, mind!”
+
+It was a case of gross bribery and corruption, for the fortress was
+immediately, evacuated on the receipt of a large paper of red and white
+comfits, and the garrison marched down--stairs much like conquerors,
+under the lead of the young lady, who was greatly eased in mind by the
+kind words and the promise of Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+But he, in the mean time, was busy with thoughts she did not suspect. “A
+young person,” he said to himself,--“why a young person? Why not say a
+boy, if it was a boy? What if this should be our handsome truant?--'June
+16th, Thursday morning!'--About time to get to Alderbank by the river, I
+should think. None of the boats missing? What then? She may have made
+a raft, or picked up some stray skiff. Who knows? And then got
+shipwrecked, very likely. There are rapids and falls farther along the
+river. It will do no harm to go down there and look about, at any rate.”
+
+On Saturday morning, therefore, Mr. Byles Gridley set forth to procure
+a conveyance to make a visit, as he said, down the river, and perhaps be
+gone a day or two. He went to a stable in the village, and asked if they
+could let him have a horse.
+
+The man looked at him with that air of native superiority which the
+companionship of the generous steed confers on all his associates, down
+to the lightest weight among the jockeys.
+
+“Wal, I hain't got nothin' in the shape of a h'oss, Mr. Gridley. I've
+got a mare I s'pose I could let y' have.”
+
+“Oh, very well,” said the old master, with a twinkle in his eye as sly
+as the other's wink,--he had parried a few jokes in his time,--“they
+charge half-price for mares always, I believe.”
+
+That was a new view of the subject. It rather took the wind out of the
+stable-keeper, and set a most ammoniacal fellow, who stood playing with
+a currycomb, grinning at his expense. But he rallied presently.
+
+“Wal, I b'lieve they do for some mares, when they let 'em to some folks;
+but this here ain't one o' them mares, and you ain't one o' them folks.
+All my cattle's out but this critter, 'n' I don't jestly want to
+have nobody drive her that ain't pretty car'ful,--she's faast, I tell
+ye,--don't want no whip.--How fur d' d y' want t' go?”
+
+Mr. Gridley was quite serious now, and let the man know that he wanted
+the mare and a light covered wagon, at once, to be gone for one or two
+days, and would waive the question of sex in the matter of payment.
+
+Alderbank was about twenty miles down the river by the road. On arriving
+there, he inquired for the house where a Mr. Lindsay lived. There was
+only one Lindsay family in town,--he must mean Dr. William Lindsay. His
+house was up there a little way above the village, lying a few rods back
+from the river.
+
+He found the house without difficulty, and knocked at the door. A
+motherly-looking woman opened it immediately, and held her hand up as if
+to ask him to speak and move softly.
+
+“Does Mr. Clement Lindsay live here?”
+
+“He is staying here for the present. He is a nephew of ours. He is in
+his bed from an injury.”
+
+“Nothing very serious, I hope?”
+
+“A bruise on his head,--not very bad, but the doctor was afraid of
+erysipelas. Seems to be doing well enough now.”
+
+“Is there a young person here, a stranger?”
+
+“There is such a young person here. Do you come with any authority to
+make inquiries?”
+
+“I do. A young friend of mine is missing, and I thought it possible I
+might learn something here about it. Can I see this young person?”
+
+The matron came nearer to Byles Gridley, and said: “This person is a
+young woman disguised as a boy. She was rescued by my nephew at the risk
+of his life, and she has been delirious ever since she has recovered
+her consciousness. She was almost too far gone to be resuscitated,
+but Clement put his mouth to hers and kept her breathing until her own
+breath returned and she gradually came to.”
+
+“Is she violent in her delirium?”
+
+“Not now. No; she is quiet enough, but wandering,--wants to know where
+she is, and whose the strange faces are,--mine and my husband's,--that
+'s Dr. Lindsay,--and one of my daughters, who has watched with her.”
+
+“If that is so, I think I had better see her. If she is the person I
+suspect her to be, she will know me; and a familiar face may bring back
+her recollections and put a stop to her wanderings. If she does not know
+me, I will not stay talking with her. I think she will, if she is the
+one I am seeking after. There is no harm in trying.”
+
+Mrs. Lindsay took a good long look at the old man. There was no
+mistaking his grave, honest, sturdy, wrinkled, scholarly face. His voice
+was assured and sincere in its tones. His decent black coat was just
+what a scholar's should be,--old, not untidy, a little shiny at the
+elbows with much leaning on his study-table, but neatly bound at the
+cuffs, where worthy Mrs. Hopkins had detected signs of fatigue and come
+to the rescue. His very hat looked honest as it lay on the table. It had
+moulded itself to a broad, noble head, that held nothing but what was
+true and fair, with a few harmless crotchets just to fill in with, and
+it seemed to know it.
+
+The good woman gave him her confidence at once. “Is the person you are
+seeking a niece or other relative of yours?”
+
+(Why did not she ask if the girl was his daughter? What is that look of
+paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers and
+old nurses know so well in men and in women?)
+
+“No, she is not a relative. But I am acting for those who are.”
+
+“Wait a moment and I will go and see that the room is all right.”
+
+She returned presently. “Follow me softly, if you please. She is
+asleep,--so beautiful,--so innocent!”
+
+Byles Gridley, Master of Arts, retired professor, more than sixty years
+old, childless, loveless, stranded in a lonely study strewed with wrecks
+of the world's thought, his work in life finished, his one literary
+venture gone down with all it held, with nobody to care for him but
+accidental acquaintances, moved gently to the side of the bed and looked
+upon the pallid, still features of Myrtle Hazard. He strove hard against
+a strange feeling that was taking hold of him, that was making his face
+act rebelliously, and troubling his eyes with sudden films. He made a
+brief stand against this invasion. “A weakness,--a weakness!” he said to
+himself. “What does all this mean? Never such a thing for these twenty
+years! Poor child! poor child!--Excuse me, madam,” he said, after a
+little interval, but for what offence he did not mention. A great deal
+might be forgiven, even to a man as old as Byles Gridley, looking
+upon such a face,--so lovely, yet so marked with the traces of recent
+suffering, and even now showing by its changes that she was struggling
+in some fearful dream. Her forehead contracted, she started with a
+slight convulsive movement, and then her lips parted, and the cry
+escaped from them,--how heart-breaking when there is none to answer
+it,--“Mother!”
+
+Gone back again through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood to
+that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she uttered was
+answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of clinging lips, the
+embrace of caressing arms!
+
+“It is better to wake her,” Mrs. Lindsay said; “she is having a troubled
+dream. Wake up, my child, here is a friend waiting to see you.”
+
+She laid her hand very gently on Myrtle's forehead. Myrtle opened her
+eyes, but they were vacant as yet.
+
+“Are we dead?” she said. “Where am I? This is n't heaven--there are
+no angels--Oh, no, no, no! don't send me to the other place--fifteen
+years,--only fifteen years old--no father, no mother--nobody loved
+me. Was it wicked in me to live?” Her whole theological training was
+condensed in that last brief question.
+
+The old man took her hand and looked her in the face, with a wonderful
+tenderness in his squared features. “Wicked to live, my dear? No
+indeed! Here! look at me, my child; don't you know your old friend Byles
+Gridley?”
+
+She was awake now. The sight of a familiar countenance brought back a
+natural train of thought. But her recollection passed over everything
+that had happened since Thursday morning.
+
+“Where is the boat I was in?” she said. “I have just been in the water,
+and I was dreaming that I was drowned. Oh! Mr. Gridley, is that you? Did
+you pull me out of the water?”
+
+“No, my dear, but you are out of it, and safe and sound: that is the
+main point. How do you feel now you are awake?”
+
+She yawned, and stretched her arms and looked round, but did not answer
+at first. This was all natural, and a sign that she was coming right.
+She looked down at her dress. It was not inappropriate to her sex, being
+a loose gown that belonged to one of the girls in the house.
+
+“I feel pretty well,” she answered, “but a little confused. My boat will
+be gone, if you don't run and stop it now. How did you get me into dry
+clothes so quick?”
+
+Master Byles Gridley found himself suddenly possessed by a large and
+luminous idea of the state of things, and made up his mind in a moment
+as to what he must do. There was no time to be lost. Every day, every
+hour, of Myrtle's absence was not only a source of anxiety and a cause
+of useless searching but it gave room for inventive fancies to imagine
+evil. It was better to run some risk of injury to health, than to have
+her absence prolonged another day.
+
+“Has this adventure been told about in the village, Mrs. Lindsay?”
+
+“No, we thought it best to wait until she could tell her own story,
+expecting her return to consciousness every hour, and thinking there
+might be some reason for her disguise which it would be kinder to keep
+quiet about.”
+
+“You know nothing about her, then?”
+
+“Not a word. It was a great question whether to tell the story and make
+inquiries; but she was safe, and could hardly bear disturbance, and, my
+dear sir, it seemed too probable that there was some sad story behind
+this escape in disguise, and that the poor child might need shelter and
+retirement. We meant to do as well as we could for her.”
+
+“All right, Mrs. Lindsay. You do not know who she is, then?”
+
+“No, sir, and perhaps it is as well that I should not know. Then I shall
+not have to answer any questions about it.”
+
+“Very good, madam,--just as it should be. And your family, are they as
+discreet as yourself?”
+
+“Not one word of the whole story has been or will be told by any one of
+us. That was agreed upon among us.”
+
+“Now then, madam. My name, as you heard me say, is Byles Gridley. Your
+husband will know it, perhaps; at any rate I will wait until he comes
+back. This child is of good family and of good name. I know her well,
+and mean, with your kind help, to save her from the consequences which
+her foolish adventure might have brought upon her. Before the bells ring
+for meeting to-morrow morning this girl must be in her bed at her home,
+at Oxbow Village, and we must keep her story to ourselves as far as may
+be. It will all blow over, if we do. The gossips will only know that she
+was upset in the river and cared for by some good people,--good people
+and sensible people too, Mrs. Lindsay. And now I want to see the young
+man that rescued my friend here,--Clement Lindsay, I have heard his name
+before.”
+
+Clement was not a beauty for the moment, but Master Gridley saw well
+enough that he was a young man of the right kind. He knew them at sight,
+fellows with lime enough in their bones and iron enough in their blood
+to begin with,--shapely, large-nerved, firm-fibred and fine-fibred, with
+well-spread bases to their heads for the ground-floor of the faculties,
+and well-vaulted arches for the upper range of apprehensions and
+combinations. “Plenty of basements,” he used to say, “without attics
+and skylights. Plenty of skylights without rooms enough and space enough
+below.” But here was “a three-story brain,” he said to himself as he
+looked at it, and this was the youth who was to find his complement in
+our pretty little Susan Posey! His judgment may seem to have been hasty,
+but he took the measure of young men of twenty at sight from long and
+sagacious observation, as Nurse Byloe knew the “heft” of a baby the
+moment she fixed her old eyes on it.
+
+Clement was well acquainted with Byles Gridley, though he had never seen
+him, for Susan's letters had had a good deal to say about him of late.
+It was agreed between them that the story should be kept as quiet
+as possible, and that the young girl should not know the name of her
+deliverer,--it might save awkward complications. It was not likely
+that she would be disposed to talk of her adventure, which had ended so
+disastrously, and thus the whole story would soon die out.
+
+The effect of the violent shock she had experienced was to change the
+whole nature of Myrtle for the time. Her mind was unsettled: she
+could hardly recall anything except the plunge over the fall. She was
+perfectly docile and plastic,--was ready to go anywhere Mr. Gridley
+wanted her to go, without any sign of reluctance. And so it was agreed
+that he should carry her back in his covered wagon that very night. All
+possible arrangements were made to render her journey comfortable. The
+fast mare had to trot very gently, and the old master would stop and
+adjust the pillows from time to time, and administer the restoratives
+which the physician had got ready, all as naturally and easily as if he
+had been bred a nurse, vastly to his own surprise, and with not a little
+gain to his self-appreciation. He was a serviceable kind of body on
+occasion, after all, was he not, hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to
+himself.
+
+At half past four o'clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the
+stray lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the slumbering
+household to receive back the wanderer.
+
+It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such amorphous
+guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a tempest of
+petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented herself at the
+door.
+
+But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking bundle
+of clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or break in
+silence. When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave face of the
+old master, she thought it was all over with the poor girl she loved,
+and that this was the undertaker's wagon bringing back only what had
+once been Myrtle Hazard. She screamed aloud,--so wildly that Myrtle
+lifted her head from the pillow against which she had rested it, and
+started forward.
+
+The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it was
+the girl she loved, and not her ghost. Then it all came over her,--she
+had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by night, and been
+rescued by the brave old man who had brought her back. What crying and
+kisses and prayers and blessings were poured forth, in a confusion
+of which her bodily costume was a fitting type, those who know the
+vocabulary and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race may imagine better
+than we could describe it.
+
+The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative. There
+were awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she was
+to have could be settled. What they were, it is needless to suggest; but
+while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her “responsibility”
+ was removed, then with a fair share of pity and kindness, and other
+lukewarm emotions,--while Miss Badlam waited for an explanation before
+giving way to her feelings,--Mr. Gridley put the essential facts before
+them in a few words. She had gone down the river some miles in her boat,
+which was upset by a rush of the current, and she had come very near
+being drowned. She was got out, however, by a person living near by,
+and cared for by some kind women in a house near the river, where he had
+been fortunate enough to discover her.--Who cut her hair off? Perhaps
+those good people,--she had been out of her head. She was alive and
+unharmed, at any rate, wanting only a few days' rest. They might be very
+thankful to get her back, and leave her to tell the rest of her story
+when she had got her strength and memory, for she was not quite herself
+yet, and might not be for some days.
+
+And so there she was at last laid in her own bed, listening again to
+the ripple of the waters beneath her, Miss Silence sitting on one side
+looking as sympathetic as her insufficient nature allowed her to look;
+the Irishwoman uncertain between delight at Myrtle's return and sorrow
+for her condition; and Miss Cynthia Badlam occupying herself about
+house-matters, not unwilling to avoid the necessity of displaying her
+conflicting emotions.
+
+Before he left the house, Mr. Gridley repeated the statement in the
+most precise manner,--some miles down the river--upset and nearly
+drowned--rescued almost dead--brought to and cared for by kind women in
+the house where he, Byles Gridley, found her. These were the facts, and
+nothing more than this was to be told at present. They had better be
+made known at once, and the shortest and best way would be to have
+it announced by the minister at meeting that forenoon. With their
+permission, he would himself write the note for Mr. Stoker to read, and
+tell the other ministers that they might announce it to their people.
+
+The bells rang for meeting, but the little household at The Poplars did
+not add to the congregation that day. In the mean time Kitty Fagan had
+gone down with Mr. Byles Gridley's note, to carry it to the Rev. Mr.
+Stoker. But, on her way, she stopped at the house of one Mrs. Finnegan,
+a particular friend of hers; and the great event of the morning
+furnishing matter for large discourse, and various social allurements
+adding to the fascination of having a story to tell, Kitty Fagan forgot
+her note until meeting had begun and the minister had read the text of
+his sermon. “Bless my soul! and sure I 've forgot ahl about the letter!”
+ she cried all at once, and away she tramped for the meeting-house. The
+sexton took the note, which was folded, and said he would hand it up to
+the pulpit after the sermon,--it would not do to interrupt the preacher.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, as was said, a somewhat remarkable gift in
+prayer,--an endowment by no means confined to profoundly spiritual
+persons,--in fact, not rarely owing much of its force to a strong animal
+nature underlying the higher attributes. The sweet singer of Israel
+would never have written such petitions and such hymns if his manhood
+had been less complete; the flavor of remembered frailties could not
+help giving a character to his most devout exercises, or they would not
+have come quite home to our common humanity. But there is no gift more
+dangerous to the humility and sincerity of a minister. While his spirit
+ought to be on its knees before the throne of grace, it is too apt to be
+on tiptoe, following with admiring look the flight of its own rhetoric.
+The essentially intellectual character of an extemporaneous composition
+spoken to the Creator with the consciousness that many of his creatures
+are listening to criticise or to admire, is the great argument for set
+forms of prayer.
+
+The congregation on this particular Sunday was made up chiefly of women
+and old men. The young men were hunting after Myrtle Hazard. Mr. Byles
+Gridley was in his place, wondering why the minister did not read his
+notice before the prayer. This prayer, was never reported, as is the
+questionable custom with regard to some of these performances, but it
+was wrought up with a good deal of rasping force and broad pathos. When
+he came to pray for “our youthful sister, missing from her pious home,
+perhaps nevermore to return to her afflicted relatives,” and the women
+and old men began crying, Byles Gridley was on the very point of getting
+up and cutting short the whole matter by stating the simple fact that
+she had got back, all right, and suggesting that he had better pray for
+some of the older and tougher sinners before him. But on the whole it
+would be more decorous to wait, and perhaps he was willing to hear what
+the object of his favorite antipathy had to say about it. So he waited
+through the prayer. He waited through the hymn, “Life is the time”--He
+waited to hear the sermon.
+
+The minister gave out his text from the Book of Esther, second chapter,
+seventh verse: “For she had neither father nor mother, and the maid was
+fair and beautiful.” It was to be expected that the reverend gentleman,
+who loved to produce a sensation, would avail himself of the excitable
+state of his audience to sweep the key-board of their emotions, while,
+as we may, say, all the stops were drawn out. His sermon was from notes;
+for, though absolutely extemporaneous composition may be acceptable to
+one's Maker, it is not considered quite the thing in speaking to one's
+fellow-mortals. He discoursed for a time on the loss of parents, and on
+the dangers to which the unfortunate orphan is exposed. Then he spoke of
+the peculiar risks of the tender female child, left without its natural
+guardians. Warming with his subject, he dilated with wonderful unction
+on the temptations springing from personal attractions. He pictured the
+“fair and beautiful” women of Holy Writ, lingering over their names with
+lover-like devotion. He brought Esther before his audience, bathed and
+perfumed for the royal presence of Ahasuerus. He showed them the sweet
+young Ruth, lying down in her innocence at the feet of the lord of the
+manor. He dwelt with special luxury on the charms which seduced the
+royal psalmist,--the soldier's wife for whom he broke the commands of
+the decalogue, and the maiden for whose attentions, in his cooler years,
+he violated the dictates of prudence and propriety. All this time Byles
+Gridley had his stern eyes on him. And while he kindled into passionate
+eloquence on these inspiring themes, poor Bathsheba, whom her mother had
+sent to church that she might get a little respite from her home duties,
+felt her blood growing cold in her veins, as the pallid image of the
+invalid wife, lying on her bed of suffering, rose in the midst of
+the glowing pictures which borrowed such warmth from her husband's
+imagination.
+
+The sermon, with its hinted application to the event of the past week,
+was over at last. The shoulders of the nervous women were twitching with
+sobs. The old men were crying in their vacant way. But all the while
+the face of Byles Gridley, firm as a rock in the midst of this lachrymal
+inundation, was kept steadily on the preacher, who had often felt the
+look that came through the two round glasses searching into the very
+marrow of his bones.
+
+As the sermon was finished, the sexton marched up through the broad
+aisle and handed the note over the door of the pulpit to the clergyman,
+who was wiping his face after the exertion of delivering his discourse.
+Mr. Stoker looked at it, started, changed color,--his vision of “The
+Dangers of Beauty, a Sermon printed by Request,” had vanished,--and
+passed the note to Father Pemberton, who sat by him in the pulpit. With
+much pains he deciphered its contents, for his eyes were dim with
+years, and, having read it, bowed his head upon his hands in silent
+thanksgiving. Then he rose in the beauty of his tranquil and noble old
+age, so touched with the message he had to proclaim to his people, that
+the three deep furrows on his forehead, which some said he owed to
+the three dogmas of original sin, predestination, and endless torment,
+seemed smoothed for the moment, and his face was as that of an angel
+while he spoke.
+
+“Sisters and Brethren,--Rejoice with us, for we have found our lamb
+which had strayed from the fold. This our daughter was dead and is alive
+again; she was lost and is found. Myrtle Hazard, rescued from great
+peril of the waters, and cared for by good Samaritans, is now in her
+home. Thou, O Lord, who didst let the water-flood overflow her, didst
+not let the deep swallow her up, nor the pit shut its mouth upon her.
+Let us return our thanks to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the
+God of Jacob, who is our God and Father, and who hath wrought this great
+deliverance.”
+
+After his prayer, which it tried him sorely to utter in unbroken tones,
+he gave out the hymn,
+
+    “Lord, thou hast heard thy servant cry,
+     And rescued from the grave;”
+
+but it was hardly begun when the leading female voice trembled and
+stopped,--and another,--and then a third,--and Father Pemberton, seeing
+that they were all overcome, arose and stretched out his arms, and
+breathed over them his holy benediction.
+
+The village was soon alive with the news. The sexton forgot the
+solemnity of the Sabbath, and the bell acted as if it was crazy,
+tumbling heels over head at such a rate, and with such a clamor, that a
+good many thought there was a fire, and, rushing out from every quarter,
+instantly caught the great news with which the air was ablaze.
+
+A few of the young men who had come back went even further in their
+demonstrations. They got a small cannon in readiness, and without
+waiting for the going down of the sun, began firing rapidly, upon which
+the Rev. Mr. Stoker sallied forth to put a stop to this violation of
+the Sabbath. But in the mean time it was heard on all the hills, far and
+near. Some said they were firing in the hope of raising the corpse;
+but many who heard the bells ringing their crazy peals guessed what had
+happened. Before night the parties were all in, one detachment bearing
+the body of the bob-tailed catamount swung over a pole, like the
+mighty cluster of grapes from Eshcol, and another conveying with wise
+precaution that monstrous snapping-turtle which those of our friends who
+wish to see will find among the specimens marked Chelydra, Serpentine in
+the great collection at Cantabridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. VEXED WITH A DEVIL.
+
+It was necessary at once to summon a physician to advise as to the
+treatment of Myrtle, who had received a shock, bodily and mental, not
+lightly to be got rid of, and very probably to be followed by serious
+and varied disturbances. Her very tranquillity was suspicious, for there
+must be something of exhaustion in it, and the reaction must come sooner
+or later.
+
+Old Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut, at the age of ninety-two, very deaf, very nearly
+blind, very feeble, liable to odd lapses of memory, was yet a wise
+counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases, and on rare occasions was
+still called upon to exercise his ancient skill. Here was a case in
+which a few words from him might soothe the patient and give confidence
+to all who were interested in her. Miss Silence Withers went herself to
+see him.
+
+“Miss Withers, father, wants to talk with you about her niece, Miss
+Hazard,” said Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut.
+
+“Miss Withers, Miss Withers?--Oh, Silence Withers,--lives up at The
+Poplars. How's the Deacon, Miss Withers?” [Ob. 1810.]
+
+“My grandfather is not living, Dr. Hurlbut,” she screamed into his ear.
+
+“Dead, is he? Well, it isn't long since he was with us; and they come
+and go,--they come and go. I remember his father, Major Gideon Withers.
+He had a great red feather on training-days,--that was what made me
+remember him. Who did you say was sick and wanted to see me, Fordyce?”
+
+“Myrtle Hazard, father,--she has had a narrow escape from drowning, and
+it has left her in a rather nervous state. They would like to have you
+go up to The Poplars and take a look at her. You remember Myrtle Hazard?
+She is the great-granddaughter of your old friend the Deacon.”
+
+He had to wait a minute before his thoughts would come to order; with
+a little time, the proper answer would be evolved by the slow automatic
+movement of the rusted mental machinery.
+
+After the silent moment: “Myrtle Hazard, Myrtle Hazard,--yes, yes, to
+be sure! The old Withers stock,--good constitutions,--a little apt to be
+nervous, one or two of 'em. I've given 'em a good deal of valerian and
+assafoetida,--not quite so much since the new blood came in. There is
+n't the change in folks people think,--same thing over and over again.
+I've seen six fingers on a child that had a six-fingered great-uncle,
+and I've seen that child's grandchild born with six fingers. Does this
+girl like to have her own way pretty well, like the rest of the family?”
+
+“A little too well, I suspect, father. You will remember all about her
+when you come to see her and talk with her. She would like to talk with
+you, and her aunt wants to see you too; they think there's nobody like
+the 'old Doctor'.”
+
+He was not too old to be pleased with this preference, and said he was
+willing to go when they were ready. With no small labor of preparation
+he was at last got to the house, and crept with his son's aid up to the
+little room over the water, where his patient was still lying.
+
+There was a little too much color in Myrtle's cheeks and a glistening
+lustre in her eyes that told of unnatural excitement. It gave a strange
+brilliancy to her beauty, and might have deceived an unpractised
+observer. The old man looked at her long and curiously, his imperfect
+sight excusing the closeness of his scrutiny.
+
+He laid his trembling hand upon her forehead, and then felt her pulse
+with his shriveled fingers. He asked her various questions about
+herself, which she answered with a tone not quite so calm as natural,
+but willingly and intelligently. They thought she seemed to the old
+Doctor to be doing very well, for he spoke cheerfully to her, and
+treated her in such a way that neither she nor any of those around her
+could be alarmed. The younger physician was disposed to think she was
+only suffering from temporary excitement, and that it would soon pass
+off.
+
+They left the room to talk it over.
+
+“It does not amount to much, I suppose, father,” said Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut. “You made the pulse about ninety,--a little hard,--did n't you;
+as I did? Rest, and low diet for a day or two, and all will be right,
+won't it?”
+
+Was it the feeling of sympathy, or was it the pride of superior
+sagacity, that changed the look of the old man's wrinkled features?
+“Not so fast,--not so fast, Fordyce,” he said. “I've seen that look on
+another face of the same blood,--it 's a great many years ago, and she
+was dead before you were born, my boy,--but I've seen that look, and
+it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now. I see some
+danger of a brain fever. And if she doesn't have that, then look out for
+some hysteric fits that will make mischief. Take that handkerchief off
+of her head, and cut her hair close, and keep her temples cool, and put
+some drawing plasters to the soles of her feet, and give her some of my
+pilulae compositae, and follow them with some doses of sal polychrest.
+I've been through it all before--in that same house. Live folks are only
+dead folks warmed over. I can see 'em all in that girl's face, Handsome
+Judith, to begin with. And that queer woman, the Deacon's mother,--there
+'s where she gets that hystericky look. Yes, and the black-eyed woman
+with the Indian blood in her,--look out for that,--look out for that.
+And--and--my son, do you remember Major Gideon Withers?” [Ob. 1780.]
+
+“Why no, father, I can't say that I remember the Major; but I know the
+picture very well. Does she remind you of him?”
+
+He paused again, until the thoughts came slowly straggling, up to the
+point where the question left him. He shook his head solemnly, and
+turned his dim eyes on his son's face.
+
+“Four generations--four generations; man and wife,--yes, five
+generations, for old Selah Withers took me in his arms when I was a
+child, and called me 'little gal,' for I was in girl's clothes,--five
+generations before this Hazard child I 've looked on with these old
+eyes. And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every one
+of 'em in this child's face, it's the forehead of this one, and it's
+the eyes of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look that
+I remember in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that same
+voice before--yes, yes as long ago as when I was first married; for I
+remember Rachel used to think I praised Handsome Judith's voice more
+than it deserved,--and her face too, for that matter. You remember
+Rachel, my first wife,--don't you, Fordyce?”
+
+“No, father, I don't remember her, but I know her portrait.” (As he was
+the son of the old Doctor's second wife, he could hardly be expected to
+remember her predecessor.)
+
+The old Doctor's sagacity was not in fault about the somewhat
+threatening aspect of Myrtle's condition. His directions were followed
+implicitly; for with the exception of the fact of sluggishness rather
+than loss of memory, and of that confusion of dates which in slighter
+degrees is often felt as early as middle-life, and increases in most
+persons from year to year, his mind was still penetrating, and his
+advice almost as trustworthy, as in his best days.
+
+It was very fortunate that the old Doctor ordered Myrtle's hair to be
+cut, and Miss Silence took the scissors and trimmed it at once. So,
+whenever she got well and was seen about, there would be no mystery
+about the loss of her locks,--the Doctor had been afraid of brain fever,
+and ordered them to cut her hair.
+
+Many things are uncertain in this world, and among them the effect of
+a large proportion of the remedies prescribed by physicians. Whether it
+was by the use of the means ordered by the old Doctor, or by the
+efforts of nature, or by both together, at any rate the first danger was
+averted, and the immediate risk from brain fever soon passed over.
+But the impression upon her mind and body had been too profound to be
+dissipated by a few days' rest. The hysteric stage which the wise old
+man had apprehended began to manifest itself by its usual signs, if
+anything can be called usual in a condition the natural order of which
+is disorder and anomaly.
+
+And now the reader, if such there be, who believes in the absolute
+independence and self-determination of the will, and the consequent
+total responsibility of every human being for every irregular nervous
+action and ill-governed muscular contraction, may as well lay down
+this narrative, or he may lose all faith in poor Myrtle Hazard, and all
+patience with the writer who tells her story.
+
+The mental excitement so long sustained, followed by a violent shock to
+the system, coming just at the period of rapid development, gave rise
+to that morbid condition, accompanied with a series of mental and moral
+perversions, which in ignorant ages and communities is attributed to the
+influence of evil spirits, but for the better-instructed is the malady
+which they call hysteria. Few households have ripened a growth of
+womanhood without witnessing some of its manifestations, and its
+phenomena are largely traded in by scientific pretenders and religious
+fanatics. Into this cloud, with all its risks and all its humiliations,
+Myrtle Hazard is about to enter. Will she pass through it unharmed,
+or wander from her path, and fall over one of those fearful precipices
+which lie before her?
+
+After the ancient physician had settled the general plan of treatment,
+its details and practical application were left to the care of his son.
+Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut was a widower, not yet forty years old, a man of a
+fine masculine aspect and a vigorous nature. He was a favorite with his
+female patients,--perhaps many of them would have said because he was
+good-looking and pleasant in his manners, but some thought in virtue of
+a special magnetic power to which certain temperaments were impressible,
+though there was no explaining it. But he himself never claimed any
+such personal gift, and never attempted any of the exploits which some
+thought were in his power if he chose to exercise his faculty in that
+direction. This girl was, as it were, a child to him, for he had seen
+her grow up from infancy, and had often held her on his knee in her
+early years. The first thing he did was to get her a nurse, for he saw
+that neither of the two women about her exercised a quieting influence
+upon her nerves. So he got her old friend, Nurse Byloe, to come and take
+care of her.
+
+The old nurse looked calm enough at one or two of his first visits, but
+the next morning her face showed that something had been going wrong.
+“Well, what has been the trouble, Nurse?” the Doctor said, as soon as he
+could get her out of the room.
+
+“She's been attackted, Doctor, sence you been here, dreadful. It's them
+high stirricks, Doctor, 'n' I never see 'em higher, nor more of 'em.
+Laughin' as ef she would bust. Cryin' as ef she'd lost all her friends,
+'n' was a follerin' their corpse to their graves. And spassums,--sech
+spassums! And ketchin' at her throat, 'n' sayin' there was a great ball
+a risin' into it from her stommick. One time she had a kind o' lockjaw
+like. And one time she stretched herself out 'n' laid jest as stiff as
+ef she was dead. And she says now that her head feels as ef a nail had
+been driv' into it,--into the left temple, she says, and that's what
+makes her look so distressed now.”
+
+The Doctor came once more to her bedside. He saw that her forehead
+was contracted, and that she was evidently suffering from severe pain
+somewhere.
+
+“Where is your uneasiness, Myrtle?” he asked.
+
+She moved her hand very slowly, and pressed it on her left temple.
+He laid his hand upon the same spot, kept it there a moment, and then
+removed it. She took it gently with her own, and placed it on her temple
+again. As he sat watching her, he saw that her features were growing
+easier, and in a short time her deep, even breathing showed that she was
+asleep.
+
+“It beats all,” the old nurse said. “Why, she's been a complainin' ever
+sence daylight, and she hain't slep' not a wink afore, sence twelve
+o'clock las' night! It's j es' like them magnetizers,--I never heerd you
+was one o' them kind, Dr. Hurlbut.”
+
+“I can't say how it is, Nurse,--I have heard people say my hand was
+magnetic, but I never thought of its quieting her so quickly. No sleep
+since twelve o'clock last night, you say?”
+
+“Not a wink, 'n' actin' as ef she was possessed a good deal o' the time.
+You read your Bible, Doctor, don't you? You're pious? Do you remember
+about that woman in Scriptur' out of whom the Lord cast seven devils?
+Well, I should ha' thought there was seventy devils in that gal last
+night, from the way she carr'd on. And now she lays there jest as
+peaceful as a new-born babe,--that is, accordin' to the sayin' about
+'em; for as to peaceful new-born babes, I never see one that come t'
+anything, that did n't screech as ef the haouse was afire 'n' it wanted
+to call all the fire-ingines within ten mild.”
+
+The Doctor smiled, but he became thoughtful in a moment. Did he possess
+a hitherto unexercised personal power, which put the key of this young
+girl's nervous system into his hands? The remarkable tranquillizing
+effect of the contact of his hand with her forehead looked like an
+immediate physical action.
+
+It might have been a mere coincidence, however. He would not form an
+opinion until his next visit.
+
+At that next visit it did seem as if some of Nurse Byloe's seventy
+devils had possession of the girl. All the strange spasmodic movements,
+the chokings, the odd sounds, the wild talk, the laughing and crying,
+were in full blast. All the remedies which had been ordered seemed to
+have been of no avail. The Doctor could hardly refuse trying his quasi
+magnetic influence, and placed the tips of his fingers on her forehead.
+The result was the same that had followed the similar proceeding the
+day before,--the storm was soon calmed, and after a little time she fell
+into a quiet sleep, as in the first instance.
+
+Here was an awkward affair for the physician, to be sure! He held
+this power in his hands, which no remedy and no other person seemed to
+possess. How long would he be chained to her; and she to him, and
+what would be the consequence of the mysterious relation which must
+necessarily spring up between a man like him, in the plenitude of vital
+force, of strongly attractive personality, and a young girl organized
+for victory over the calmest blood and the steadiest resistance?
+
+Every day after this made matters worse. There was something almost
+partaking of the miraculous in the influence he was acquiring over her.
+His “Peace, be still!” was obeyed by the stormy elements of this young
+soul, as if it had been a supernatural command. How could he resist the
+dictate of humanity which called him to make his visits more frequent,
+that her intervals of rest might be more numerous? How could he refuse
+to sit at her bedside for a while in the evening, that she might be
+quieted, instead of beginning the night sleepless and agitated?
+
+The Doctor was a man of refined feeling as well as of principle, and he
+had besides a sacred memory in the deepest heart of his affections. It
+was the common belief in the village that he would never marry again,
+but that his first and only love was buried in the grave of the wife
+of his youth. It did not easily occur to him to suspect himself of any
+weakness with regard to this patient of his, little more than a child
+in years. It did not at once suggest itself to him that she, in her
+strange, excited condition, might fasten her wandering thoughts upon
+him, too far removed by his age, as it seemed, to strike the fancy of a
+young girl under almost any conceivable conditions.
+
+Thus it was that many of those beautiful summer evenings found him
+sitting by his patient, the river rippling and singing beneath them, the
+moon shining over them, sweet odors from the thickets on the banks
+of the stream stealing in on the soft air that came through the open
+window, and every time they were thus together, the subtile influence
+which bound them to each other bringing them more and more into
+inexplicable harmonies and almost spiritual identity.
+
+But all this did not hinder the development of new and strange
+conditions in Myrtle Hazard. Her will was losing its power. “I cannot
+help it”--the hysteric motto--was her constant reply. It is not pleasant
+to confess the truth, but she was rapidly undergoing a singular change
+of her moral nature. She had been a truthful child. If she had kept
+her secret about what she had found in the garret, she thought she was
+exercising her rights, and she had never been obliged to tell any lies
+about it.
+
+But now she seemed to have lost the healthy instincts for veracity and
+honesty. She feigned all sorts of odd symptoms, and showed a wonderful
+degree of cunning in giving an appearance of truth to them. It became
+next to impossible to tell what was real and what was simulated. At
+one time she could not be touched ever so lightly without shrinking and
+crying out. At another time she would squint, and again she would be
+half paralyzed for a time. She would pretend to fast for days, living on
+food she had concealed and took secretly in the night.
+
+The nurse was getting worn out. Kitty Fagan would have had the priest
+come to the house and sprinkle it with holy water. The two women
+were beginning to get nervous themselves. The Rev. Mr. Stoker said in
+confidence to Miss Silence, that there was reason to fear she might have
+been given over for a time to the buffetings of Satan, and that perhaps
+his (Mr. Stoker's) personal attentions might be useful in that case. And
+so it appeared that the “young doctor” was the only being left with whom
+she had any complete relations and absolute sympathy. She had become so
+passive in his hands that it seemed as if her only healthy life was, as
+it were, transmitted through him, and that she depended on the transfer
+of his nervous power, as the plant upon the light for its essential
+living processes.
+
+The two young men who had met in so unexpected a manner on board
+the ship Swordfish had been reasonably discreet in relating their
+adventures. Myrtle Hazard may or may not have had the plan they
+attributed to her; however that was, they had looked rather foolish when
+they met, and had not thought it worth while to be very communicative
+about the matter when they returned. It had at least given them a chance
+to become a little better acquainted with each other, and it was an
+opportunity which the elder and more artful of the two meant to turn to
+advantage.
+
+Of all Myrtle's few friends only one was in the habit of seeing her
+often during this period, namely, Olive Eveleth, a girl so quiet and
+sensible that she, if anybody, could be trusted with her. But Myrtle's
+whole character seemed to have changed, and Olive soon found that she
+was in some mystic way absorbed into another nature. Except when the
+physician's will was exerted upon her, she was drifting without any
+self-directing power, and then any one of those manifold impulses which
+would in some former ages have been counted as separate manifestations
+on the part of distinct demoniacal beings might take possession of her.
+Olive did little, therefore, but visit Myrtle from time to time to learn
+if any change had occurred in her condition. All this she reported to
+Cyprian, and all this was got out of him by Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+That gentleman was far from being pleased with the look of things as
+they were represented. What if the Doctor, who was after all in the
+prime of life and younger-looking than some who were born half a dozen
+years after him, should get a hold on this young woman,--girl now, if
+you will, but in a very few years certain to come within possible, nay,
+not very improbable, matrimonial range of him? That would be pleasant,
+wouldn't it? It had happened sometimes, as he knew, that these
+magnetizing tricks had led to infatuation on the part of the subjects
+of the wonderful influence. So he concluded to be ill and consult the
+younger Dr. Hurlbut, and incidentally find out how the land lay.
+
+The next question was, what to be ill with. Some not ungentlemanly
+malady, not hereditary, not incurable, not requiring any obvious change
+in habits of life. Dyspepsia would answer the purpose well enough: so
+Mr. Murray Bradshaw picked up a medical book and read ten minutes or
+more for that complaint. At the end of this time he was an accomplished
+dyspeptic; for lawyers half learn a thing quicker than the members of
+any other profession.
+
+He presented himself with a somewhat forlorn countenance to Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, as suffering from some of the less formidable symptoms of
+that affection. He got into a very interesting conversation with him,
+especially about some nervous feelings which had accompanied his attack
+of indigestion. Thence to nervous complaints in general. Thence to the
+case of the young lady at The Poplars whom he was attending. The Doctor
+talked with a certain reserve, as became his professional relations with
+his patient; but it was plain enough that, if this kind of intercourse
+went on much longer, it would be liable to end in some emotional
+explosion or other, and there was no saying how it would at last turn
+out.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was afraid to meddle directly. He knew something more
+about the history of Myrtle's adventure than any of his neighbors,
+and, among other things, that it had given Mr. Byles Gridley a peculiar
+interest in her, of which he could take advantage. He therefore artfully
+hinted his fears to the old man, and left his hint to work itself out.
+
+However suspicious Master Gridley was of him and his motives, he thought
+it worth while to call up at The Poplars and inquire for himself of the
+nurse what was this new relation growing up between the physician and
+his young patient.
+
+She imparted her opinion to him in a private conversation with great
+freedom. “Sech doin's! sech doin's! The gal's jest as much bewitched as
+ever any gal was sence them that was possessed in Scriptur'. And every
+day it 's wus and wus. Ef that Doctor don't stop comin', she won't
+breathe without his helpin' her to before long. And, Mr. Gridley, I
+don't like to say so,--but I can't help thinkin' he's gettin' a little
+bewitched too. I don't believe he means to take no kind of advantage of
+her; but, Mr. Gridley, you've seen them millers fly round and round a
+candle, and you know how it ginerally comes out. Men is men and gals is
+gals. I would n't trust no man, not ef he was much under a hundred year
+old,--and as for a gal--!”
+
+“Mulieri ne mortuae quidem credendum est,” said Mr. Gridley. “You
+wouldn't trust a woman even if she was dead, hey, Nurse?”
+
+“Not till she was buried, 'n' the grass growin' a foot high over her,”
+ said Nurse Byloe, “unless I'd know'd her sence she was a baby. I've
+know'd this one sence she was two or three year old; but this gal ain't
+Myrtle Hazard no longer,--she's bewitched into somethin' different. I'll
+tell ye what, Mr. Gridley; you get old Dr. Hurlbut to come and see her
+once a day for a week, and get the young doctor to stay away. I'll resk
+it. She 'll have some dreadful tantrums at fust, but she'll come to it
+in two or three, days.”
+
+Master Byles Gridley groaned in spirit. He had come to this village to
+end his days in peace, and here he was just going to make a martyr
+of himself for the sake of a young person to whom he was under no
+obligation, except that he had saved her from the consequences of her
+own foolish act, at the expense of a great overturn of all his domestic
+habits. There was no help for it. The nurse was right, and he must
+perform the disagreeable duty of letting the Doctor know that he was
+getting into a track which might very probably lead to mischief, and
+that he must back out as fast as he could.
+
+At 2 P. M. Gifted Hopkins presented the following note at the Doctor's
+door:
+
+“Mr. Byles Gridley would be much obliged to Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut if he
+would call at his study this evening.”
+
+“Odd, is n't it, father, the old man's asking me to come and see him?
+Those old stub-twist constitutions never want patching.”
+
+“Old man! old man! Who's that you call old,--not Byles Gridley, hey?
+Old! old! Sixty year, more or less! How old was Floyer when he died,
+Fordyce? Ninety-odd, was n't it? Had the asthma though, or he'd have
+lived to be as old as Dr. Holyoke,--a hundred year and over. That's old.
+But men live to be a good deal more than that sometimes. What does Byles
+Gridley want of you, did you say?”
+
+“I'm sure I can't tell, father; I'll go and find out.” So he went over
+to Mrs. Hopkins's in the evening, and was shown up into the study.
+
+Master Gridley treated the Doctor to a cup of such tea as bachelors
+sometimes keep hid away in mysterious caddies. He presently began asking
+certain questions about the grand climacteric, which eventful period of
+life he was fast approaching. Then he discoursed of medicine, ancient
+and modern, tasking the Doctor's knowledge not a little, and evincing a
+good deal of acquaintance with old doctrines and authors.
+
+He had a few curious old medical books in his library, which he said he
+should like to show Dr. Hurlbut.
+
+“There, now! What do you say to this copy of Joannes de Ketam, Venice,
+1522? Look at these woodcuts,--the first anatomical pictures ever
+printed, Doctor, unless these others of Jacobus Berengarius are older!
+See this scene of the plague-patient, the doctor smelling at his
+pouncet-box, the old nurse standing square at the bedside, the young
+nurse with the bowl, holding back and turning her head away, and the old
+burial-hag behind her, shoving her forward, a very curious book, Doctor,
+and has the first phrenological picture in it ever made. Take a look,
+too, at my Vesalius,--not the Leyden edition, Doctor, but the one with
+the grand old original figures,--so good that they laid them to Titian.
+And look here, Doctor, I could n't help getting this great
+folio Albinus, 1747,--and the nineteenth century can't touch it,
+Doctor,--can't touch it for completeness and magnificence, so all the
+learned professors tell me! Brave old fellows, Doctor, and put their
+lives into their books as you gentlemen don't pretend to do nowadays.
+And good old fellows, Doctor,--high-minded, scrupulous, conscientious,
+punctilious,--remembered their duties to man and to woman, and felt all
+the responsibilities of their confidential relation to families. Did you
+ever read the oldest of medical documents,--the Oath of Hippocrates?”
+
+The Doctor thought he had read it, but did not remember much about it.
+
+“It 's worth reading, Doctor,--it's worth remembering; and, old as it
+is, it is just as good to-day as it was when it was laid down as a
+rule of conduct four hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was
+delivered. Let me read it to you, Dr. Hurlbut.”
+
+There was something in Master Gridley's look that made the Doctor feel a
+little nervous; he did not know just what was coming.
+
+Master Gridley took out his great Hippocrates, the edition of Foesius,
+and opened to the place. He turned so as to face the Doctor, and read
+the famous Oath aloud, Englishing it as he went along. When he came
+to these words which follow, he pronounced them very slowly and with
+special emphasis.
+
+“My life shall be pure and holy.”
+
+“Into whatever house I enter, I will go for the good of the patient:
+
+“I will abstain from inflicting any voluntary injury, and from leading
+away any, whether man or woman, bond or free.”
+
+The Doctor changed color as he listened, and the moisture broke out on
+his forehead.
+
+Master Gridley saw it, and followed up his advantage. “Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, are you not in danger of violating the sanctities of your
+honorable calling, and leading astray a young person committed to your
+sacred keeping?”
+
+While saying these words, Master Gridley looked full upon him, with a
+face so charged with grave meaning, so impressed with the gravity of his
+warning accents, that the Doctor felt as if he were before some dread
+tribunal, and remained silent. He was a member of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's
+church, and the words he had just listened to were those of a sinful old
+heathen who had never heard a sermon in his life; but they stung
+him, for all that, as the parable of the prophet stung the royal
+transgressor.
+
+He spoke at length, for the plain honest words had touched the right
+spring of consciousness at the right moment; not too early, for he now
+saw whither he was tending,--not too late, for he was not yet in the
+inner spirals of the passion which whirls men and women to their doom in
+ever-narrowing coils, that will not unwind at the command of God or man.
+
+He spoke as one who is humbled by self-accusation, yet in a manly way,
+as became his honorable and truthful character.
+
+“Master Gridley,” he said, “I stand convicted before you. I know
+too well what you are thinking of. It is true, I cannot continue my
+attendance on Myrtle--on Miss Hazard, for you mean her--without peril
+to both of us. She is not herself. God forbid that I should cease to be
+myself! I have been thinking of a summer tour, and I will at once set
+out upon it, and leave this patient in my father's hands. I think he
+will find strength to visit her under the circumstances.”
+
+The Doctor went off the next morning without saying a word to Myrtle
+Hazard, and his father made the customary visit in his place.
+
+That night the spirit tare her, as may well be supposed, and so the
+second night. But there was no help for it: her doctor was gone, and the
+old physician, with great effort, came instead, sat by her, spoke kindly
+to her, left wise directions to her attendants, and above all assured
+them that, if they would have a little patience, they would see all this
+storm blow over.
+
+On the third night after his visit, the spirit rent her sore, and came
+out of her, or, in the phrase of to-day, she had a fierce paroxysm,
+after which the violence of the conflict ceased, and she might be called
+convalescent so far as that was concerned.
+
+But all this series of nervous disturbances left her in a very
+impressible and excitable condition. This was just the state to invite
+the spiritual manipulations of one of those theological practitioners
+who consider that the treatment of all morbid states of mind short
+of raving madness belongs to them and not to the doctors. This same
+condition was equally favorable for the operations of any professional
+experimenter who would use the flame of religious excitement to light
+the torch of an earthly passion. So many fingers that begin on the black
+keys stray to the white ones before the tune is played out!
+
+If Myrtle Hazard was in charge of any angelic guardian, the time was at
+hand when she would need all celestial influences; for the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker was about to take a deep interest in her spiritual
+welfare.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. SKIRMISHING.
+
+“So the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has called upon you, Susan Posey, has
+he? And wants you to come and talk religion with him in his study, Susan
+Posey, does he? Religion is a good thing, my dear, the best thing in the
+world, and never better than when we are young, and no young people need
+it more than young girls. There are temptations to all, and to them as
+often as to any, Susan Posey. And temptations come to them in places
+where they don't look for them, and from persons they never thought
+of as tempters. So I am very glad to have your thoughts called to the
+subject of religion. 'Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.'
+
+“But Susan Posey, my dear, I think you hard better not break in upon
+the pious meditations of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker in his private
+study. A monk's cell and a minister's library are hardly the places for
+young ladies. They distract the attention of these good men from their
+devotions and their sermons. If you think you must go, you had better
+take Mrs. Hopkins with you. She likes religious conversation, and it
+will do her good too, and save a great deal of time for the minister,
+conversing with two at once. She is of discreet age, and will tell you
+when it is time to come away,--you might stay too long, you know. I've
+known young persons stay a good deal too long at these interviews,--a
+great deal too long, Susan Posey!”
+
+Such was the fatherly counsel of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+Susan was not very quick of apprehension, but she could not help seeing
+the justice of Master Gridley's remark, that for a young person to go
+and break in on the hours that a minister requires for his studies,
+without being accompanied by a mature friend who would remind her when
+it was time to go, would be taking an unfair advantage of his kindness
+in asking her to call upon him. She promised, therefore, that she would
+never go without having Mrs. Hopkins as her companion, and with this
+assurance her old friend rested satisfied.
+
+It is altogether likely that he had some deeper reason for his advice
+than those with which he satisfied the simple nature of Susan Posey.
+Of that it will be easier to judge after a glance at the conditions and
+character of the minister and his household.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, in addition to the personal advantages already
+alluded to, some other qualities which might prove attractive to many
+women. He had, in particular, that art of sliding into easy intimacy
+with them which implies some knowledge of the female nature, and, above
+all, confidence in one's powers. There was little doubt, the gossips
+maintained, that many of the younger women of his parish would have been
+willing, in certain contingencies, to lift for him that other end of his
+yoke under which poor Mrs. Stoker was fainting, unequal to the burden.
+
+That lady must have been some years older than her husband,--how many we
+need not inquire too curiously,--but in vitality she had long passed
+the prime in which he was still flourishing. She had borne him five
+children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three of them.
+Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of village life
+wearied her; the parishioners expected too much of her as the minister's
+wife; she had wanted more fresh air and more cheerful companionship; and
+her thoughts had fed too much on death and sin,--good bitter tonics to
+increase the appetite for virtue, but not good as food and drink for the
+spirit.
+
+But there was another grief which lay hidden far beneath these obvious
+depressing influences. She felt that she was no longer to her
+husband what she had been to him, and felt it with something of
+self-reproach,--which was a wrong to herself, for she had been a true
+and tender wife. Deeper than all the rest was still another feeling,
+which had hardly risen into the region of inwardly articulated thought,
+but lay unshaped beneath all the syllabled trains of sleeping or waking
+consciousness.
+
+The minister was often consulted by his parishioners upon spiritual
+matters, and was in the habit of receiving in his study visitors who
+came with such intent. Sometimes it was old weak-eyed Deacon Rumrill,
+in great iron-bowed spectacles, with hanging nether lip and tremulous
+voice, who had got his brain onto a muddle about the beast with two
+horns, or the woman that fled into the wilderness, or other points not
+settled to his mind in Scott's Commentary. The minister was always very
+busy at such times, and made short work of his deacon's doubts. Or it
+might be that an ancient woman, a mother or a grandmother in Israel,
+came with her questions and her perplexities to her pastor; and it was
+pretty certain that just at that moment he was very deep in his next
+sermon, or had a pressing visit to make.
+
+But it would also happen occasionally that one of the tenderer ewe-lambs
+of the flock needed comfort from the presence of the shepherd. Poor
+Mrs. Stoker noticed, or thought she noticed, that the good man had more
+leisure for the youthful and blooming sister than for the more discreet
+and venerable matron or spinster. The sitting was apt to be longer; and
+the worthy pastor would often linger awhile about the door, to speed the
+parting guest, perhaps, but a little too much after the fashion of young
+people who are not displeased with each other, and who often find it
+as hard to cross a threshold single as a witch finds it to get over
+a running stream. More than once, the pallid, faded wife had made an
+errand to the study, and, after a keen look at the bright young cheeks,
+flushed with the excitement of intimate spiritual communion, had gone
+back to her chamber with her hand pressed against her heart, and the
+bitterness of death in her soul.
+
+The end of all these bodily and mental trials was, that the minister's
+wife had fallen into a state of habitual invalidism, such as only
+women, who feel all the nerves which in men are as insensible as
+telegraph-wires, can experience.
+
+The doctor did not know what to make of her case,--whether she would
+live or die,--whether she would languish for years, or, all at once,
+roused by some strong impression, or in obedience to some unexplained
+movement of the vital forces, take up her bed and walk. For her bed
+had become her home, where she lived as if it belonged to her organism.
+There she lay, a not unpleasing invalid to contemplate, always looking
+resigned, patient, serene, except when the one deeper grief was stirred,
+always arrayed with simple neatness, and surrounded with little tokens
+that showed the constant presence with her of tasteful and thoughtful
+affection. She did not know, nobody could know, how steadily, how
+silently all this artificial life was draining the veins and blanching
+the cheek of her daughter Bathsheba, one of the everyday, air-breathing
+angels without nimbus or aureole who belong to every story which lets
+us into a few households, as much as the stars and the flowers belong to
+everybody's verses.
+
+Bathsheba's devotion to her mother brought its own reward, but it was
+not in the shape of outward commendation. Some of the more censorious
+members of her father's congregation were severe in their remarks upon
+her absorption in the supreme object of her care. It seems that this had
+prevented her from attending to other duties which they considered more
+imperative. They did n't see why she shouldn't keep a Sabbath-school
+as well as the rest, and as to her not comin' to meetin' three times
+on Sabbath day like other folks, they couldn't account for it, except
+because she calculated that she could get along without the means of
+grace, bein' a minister's daughter. Some went so far as to doubt if she
+had ever experienced religion, for all she was a professor. There was
+a good many indulged a false hope. To this, others objected her life of
+utter self-denial and entire surrender to her duties towards her mother
+as some evidence of Christian character. But old Deacon Rumrill put down
+that heresy by showing conclusively from Scott's Commentary on Romans
+xi. 1-6, that this was altogether against her chance of being called,
+and that the better her disposition to perform good works, the more
+unlikely she was to be the subject of saving grace. Some of these severe
+critics were good people enough themselves, but they loved active work
+and stirring companionship, and would have found their real cross if
+they had been called to sit at an invalid's bedside.
+
+As for the Rev. Mr. Stoker, his duties did not allow him to give so
+much time to his suffering wife as his feelings would undoubtedly
+have prompted. He therefore relinquished the care of her (with great
+reluctance we may naturally suppose) to Bathsheba, who had inherited
+not only her mother's youthful smile, but that self-forgetfulness
+which, born with some of God's creatures, is, if not “grace,” at least a
+manifestation of native depravity which might well be mistaken for it.
+
+The intimacy of mother and daughter was complete, except on a single
+point. There was one subject on which no word ever passed between them.
+The excuse of duties to others was by a tacit understanding a mantle
+to cover all short-comings in the way of attention from the husband and
+father, and no word ever passed between them implying a suspicion of the
+loyalty of his affections. Bathsheba came at last so to fill with her
+tenderness the space left empty in the neglected heart, that her mother
+only spoke her habitual feeling when she said, “I should think you were
+in love with me, my darling, if you were not my daughter.”
+
+This was a dangerous state of things for the minister. Strange
+suggestions and unsafe speculations began to mingle with his dreams
+and reveries. The thought once admitted that another's life is becoming
+superfluous and a burden, feeds like a ravenous vulture on the soul.
+Woe to the man or woman whose days are passed in watching the hour-glass
+through which the sands run too slowly for longings that are like a
+skulking procession of bloodless murders! Without affirming such horrors
+of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, it would not be libellous to say that his fancy
+was tampering with future possibilities, as it constantly happens with
+those who are getting themselves into training for some act of folly,
+or some crime, it may be, which will in its own time evolve itself as an
+idea in the consciousness, and by and by ripen into fact.
+
+It must not be taken for granted that he was actually on the road to
+some fearful deed, or that he was an utterly lost soul. He was ready to
+yield to temptation if it came in his way; he would even court it, but
+he did not shape out any plan very definitely in his mind, as a more
+desperate sinner would have done. He liked the pleasurable excitement of
+emotional relations with his pretty lambs, and enjoyed it under the name
+of religious communion. There is a border land where one can stand on
+the territory of legitimate instincts and affections, and yet be so
+near, the pleasant garden of the Adversary, that his dangerous fruits
+and flowers are within easy reach. Once tasted, the next step is like
+to be the scaling of the wall. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was very fond of this
+border land. His imagination was wandering over it too often when his
+pen was travelling almost of itself along the weary parallels of the
+page before him. All at once a blinding flash would come over him the
+lines of his sermon would run together, the fresh manuscript would
+shrivel like a dead leaf, and the rows of hard-hearted theology on the
+shelves before him, and the broken-backed Concordance, and the Holy Book
+itself, would fade away as he gave himself up to the enchantment of his
+delirious dream.
+
+The reader will probably consider it a discreet arrangement that pretty
+Susan Posey should seek her pastor in grave company. Mrs. Hopkins
+willingly consented to the arrangement which had been proposed, and
+agreed to go with the young lady on her visit to the Rev. Mr. Stoker's
+study. They were both arrayed in their field-day splendors on this
+occasion. Susan was lovely in her light curls and blue ribbons, and the
+becoming dress which could not help betraying the modestly emphasized
+crescendos and gently graded diminuendos of her figure. She was as round
+as if she had been turned in a lathe, and as delicately finished as if
+she had been modelled for a Flora. She had naturally an airy toss of the
+head and a springy movement of the joints, such as some girls study in
+the glass (and make dreadful work of it), so that she danced all over
+without knowing it, like a little lively bobolink on a bulrush. In
+short, she looked fit to spoil a homily for Saint Anthony himself.
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was not less perfect in her somewhat different style. She
+might be called impressive and imposing in her grand-costume, which she
+wore for this visit. It was a black silk dress, with a crape shawl, a
+firmly defensive bonnet, and an alpaca umbrella with a stern-looking and
+decided knob presiding as its handle. The dried-leaf rustle of her silk
+dress was suggestive of the ripe autumn of life, bringing with it those
+golden fruits of wisdom and experience which the grave teachers of
+mankind so justly prefer to the idle blossoms of adolescence.
+
+It is needless to say that the visit was conducted with the most perfect
+propriety in all respects. Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take upon
+herself a large share of the conversation. The minister, on the other
+hand, would have devoted himself more particularly to Miss Susan, but,
+with a very natural make-believe obtuseness, the good woman drew his
+fire so constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly any of his
+insinuating looks, reached the tender object at which they were aimed.
+It is probable that his features or tones betrayed some impatience at
+having thus been foiled of his purpose, for Mrs. Hopkins thought he
+looked all the time as if he wanted to get rid of her. The three parted,
+therefore, not in the best humor all round. Mrs. Hopkins declared she'd
+see the minister in Jericho before she'd fix herself up as if she was
+goin' to a weddin' to go and see him again. Why, he did n't make any
+more of her than if she'd been a tabby-cat. She believed some of these
+ministers thought women's souls dried up like peas in a pod by the time
+they was forty year old; anyhow, they did n't seem to care any great
+about 'em, except while they was green and tender. It was all Miss
+Se-usan, Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-usan, my dear! but as for her, she might
+jest as well have gone with her apron on, for any notice he took of
+her. She did n't care, she was n't goin' to be left out when there was
+talkin' goin' on, anyhow.
+
+Susan Posey, on her part, said she did n't like him a bit. He looked
+so sweet at her, and held his head on one side,--law! just as if he had
+been a young beau! And,--don't tell,--but he whispered that he wished
+the next time I came I wouldn't bring that Hopkins woman!
+
+It would not be fair to repeat what the minister said to himself; but we
+may own as much as this, that, if worthy Mrs. Hopkins had heard it,
+she would have treated him to a string of adjectives which would have
+greatly enlarged his conceptions of the female vocabulary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. BATTLE.
+
+In tracing the history of a human soul through its commonplace nervous
+perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations, there is
+danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject of such
+weakness. It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses of a young girl;
+but you who remember when_______ _________, only fifteen years old,
+untouched by passion, unsullied in name, was found in the shallow brook
+where she had sternly and surely sought her death,--(too true! too
+true!--ejus animae Jesu miserere!--but a generation has passed since
+then,)--will not smile so scornfully.
+
+Myrtle Hazard no longer required the physician's visits, but her mind
+was very far from being poised in the just balance of its faculties. She
+was of a good natural constitution and a fine temperament; but she
+had been overwrought by all that she had passed through, and, though
+happening to have been born in another land, she was of American
+descent. Now, it has long been noticed that there is something in the
+influences, climatic or other, here prevailing, which predisposes to
+morbid religious excitement. The graver reader will not object to
+seeing the exact statement of a competent witness belonging to a by-gone
+century, confirmed as it is by all that we see about us.
+
+“There is no Experienced Minister of the Gospel who hath not in the
+Cases of Tempted Souls often had this Experience, that the ill Cases of
+their distempered Bodies are the frequent Occasion and Original of their
+Temptations.” “The Vitiated Humours in many Persons, yield the Steams
+whereinto Satan does insinuate himself, till he has gained a sort of
+Possession in them, or at least an Opportunity to shoot into the Mind as
+many Fiery Darts as may cause a sad Life unto them; yea, 't is well if
+Self-Murder be not the sad end into which these hurried. People are
+thus precipitated. New England, a country where Splenetic Maladies
+are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded
+Numberless Instances, of even pious People, who have contracted these
+Melancholy Indispositions which have unhinged them from all Service or
+Comfort; yea, not a few Persons have been hurried thereby to lay Violent
+Hands upon themselves at the last. These are among the unsearchable
+Judgments of God!”
+
+Such are the words of the Rev. Cotton Mather.
+
+The minister had hardly recovered from his vexatious defeat in the
+skirmish where the Widow Hopkins was his principal opponent, when he
+received a note from Miss Silence Withers, which promised another and
+more important field of conflict. It contained a request that he
+would visit Myrtle Hazard, who seemed to be in a very excitable and
+impressible condition, and who might perhaps be easily brought under
+those influences which she had resisted from her early years, through
+inborn perversity of character.
+
+When the Rev. Mr. Stoker received this note, he turned very pale,--which
+was a bad sign. Then he drew a long breath or two, and presently a flush
+tingled up to his cheek, where it remained a fixed burning glow. This
+may have been from the deep interest he felt in Myrtle's spiritual
+welfare; but he had often been sent for by aged sinners in more
+immediate peril, apparently, without any such disturbance of the
+circulation.
+
+To know whether a minister, young or still in flower; is in safe or
+dangerous paths, there are two psychometers, a comparison between
+which will give as infallible a return as the dry and wet bulbs of the
+ingenious “Hygrodeik.” The first is the black broadcloth forming the
+knees of his pantaloons; the second, the patch of carpet before his
+mirror. If the first is unworn and the second is frayed and threadbare,
+pray for him. If the first is worn and shiny, while the second keeps its
+pattern and texture, get him to pray for you.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker should have gone down on his knees then and there,
+and sought fervently for the grace which he was like to need in the
+dangerous path just opening before him. He did not do this; but he stood
+up before his looking-glass and parted his hair as carefully as if he
+had been separating the saints of his congregation from the sinners, to
+send the list to the statistical columns of a religious newspaper. He
+selected a professional neckcloth, as spotlessly pure as if it had been
+washed in innocency, and adjusted it in a tie which was like the
+white rose of Sharon. Myrtle Hazard was, he thought, on the whole, the
+handsomest girl he had ever seen; Susan Posey was to her as a buttercup
+from the meadow is to a tiger-lily. He, knew the nature of the nervous
+disturbances through which she had been passing, and that she must be in
+a singularly impressible condition. He felt sure that he could establish
+intimate spiritual relations with her by drawing out her repressed
+sympathies, by feeding the fires of her religious imagination, by
+exercising all those lesser arts of fascination which are so familiar to
+the Don Giovannis, and not always unknown to the San Giovannis.
+
+As for the hard doctrines which he used to produce sensations with in
+the pulpit, it would have been a great pity to worry so lovely a girl,
+in such a nervous state, with them. He remembered a savory text
+about being made all things to all men, which would bear application
+particularly well to the case of this young woman. He knew how to weaken
+his divinity, on occasion, as well as an old housewife to weaken her
+tea, lest it should keep people awake.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker was a man of emotions. He loved to feel his heart
+beat; he loved all the forms of non-alcoholic drunkenness, which are so
+much better than the vinous, because they taste themselves so keenly,
+whereas the other (according to the statement of experts who are
+familiar with its curious phenomena) has a certain sense of unreality
+connected with it. He delighted in the reflex stimulus of the excitement
+he produced in others by working on their feelings. A powerful preacher
+is open to the same sense of enjoyment--an awful, tremulous, goose-flesh
+sort of state, but still enjoyment--that a great tragedian feels when he
+curdles the blood of his audience.
+
+Mr. Stoker was noted for the vividness of his descriptions of the
+future which was in store for the great bulk of his fellow-townsmen and
+fellow-worlds-men. He had three sermons on this subject, known to all
+the country round as the sweating sermon, the fainting sermon, and
+the convulsion-fit sermon, from the various effects said to have been
+produced by them when delivered before large audiences. It might be
+supposed that his reputation as a terrorist would have interfered with
+his attempts to ingratiate himself with his young favorites. But the
+tragedian who is fearful as Richard or as Iago finds that no hindrance
+to his success in the part of Romeo. Indeed, women rather take to
+terrible people; prize-fighters, pirates, highwaymen, rebel generals,
+Grand Turks, and Bluebeards generally have a fascination for the sex;
+your virgin has a natural instinct to saddle your lion. The fact,
+therefore, that the young girl had sat under his tremendous pulpitings,
+through the sweating sermon, the fainting sermon, and the convulsion-fit
+sermon, did not secure her against the influence of his milder
+approaches.
+
+Myrtle was naturally surprised at receiving a visit from him; but she
+was in just that unbalanced state in which almost any impression is
+welcome. He showed so much interest, first in her health, then in her
+thoughts and feelings, always following her lead in the conversation,
+that before he left her she felt as if she had made a great discovery;
+namely, that this man, so formidable behind the guns of his wooden
+bastion, was a most tenderhearted and sympathizing person when he
+came out of it unarmed. How delightful he was as he sat talking in the
+twilight in low and tender tones, with respectful pauses of listening,
+in which he looked as if he too had just made a discovery,--of an angel,
+to wit, to whom he could not help unbosoming his tenderest emotions, as
+to a being from another sphere!
+
+It was a new experience to Myrtle. She was all ready for the spiritual
+manipulations of an expert. The excitability which had been showing
+itself in spasms and strange paroxysms had been transferred to those
+nervous centres, whatever they may be, cerebral or ganglionic, which
+are concerned in the emotional movements of the religious nature. It was
+taking her at an unfair disadvantage, no doubt. In the old communion,
+some priest might have wrought upon her while in this condition, and
+we might have had at this very moment among us another Saint Theresa or
+Jacqueline Pascal. She found but a dangerous substitute in the spiritual
+companionship of a saint like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+People think the confessional is unknown in our Protestant churches.
+It is a great mistake. The principal change is, that there is no screen
+between the penitent and the father confessor. The minister knew his
+rights, and very soon asserted them. He gave aunt Silence to understand
+that he could talk more at ease if he and his young disciple were left
+alone together. Cynthia Badlam did not like this arrangement. She was
+afraid to speak about it; but she glared at them aslant, with the look
+of a biting horse when his eyes follow one sideways until they are all
+white but one little vicious spark of pupil.
+
+It was not very long before the Rev. Mr. Stoker had established pretty
+intimate relations with the household at The Poplars. He had reason to
+think, he assured Miss Silence, that Myrtle was in a state of mind which
+promised a complete transformation of her character. He used the phrases
+of his sect, of course, in talking with the elderly lady; but the
+language which he employed with the young girl was free from those
+mechanical expressions which would have been like to offend or disgust
+her.
+
+As to his rougher formulae, he knew better than to apply them to a
+creature of her fine texture. If he had been disposed to do so, her
+simple questions and answers to his inquiries would have made it
+difficult. But it was in her bright and beautiful eyes, in her handsome
+features, and her winning voice, that he found his chief obstacle. How
+could he look upon her face in its loveliness, and talk to her as if
+she must be under the wrath and curse of God for the mere fact of
+her existence? It seemed more natural and it certainly was more
+entertaining, to question her in such a way as to find out what kind of
+theology had grown up in her mind as the result of her training in the
+complex scheme of his doctrinal school. And as he knew that the merest
+child, so soon as it begins to think at all, works out for itself
+something like a theory of human nature, he pretty soon began sounding
+Myrtle's thoughts on this matter.
+
+What was her own idea; he would be pleased to know, about her natural
+condition as one born of a sinful race, and her inherited liabilities on
+that account?
+
+Myrtle smiled like a little heathen, as she was, according to the
+standard of her earlier teachings. That kind of talk used to worry her
+when she was a child, sometimes. Yes, she remembered its coming back to
+her in a dream she had, when--when--(She did not finish her sentence.)
+Did he think she hated every kind of goodness and loved every kind of
+evil? Did he think she was hateful to the Being who made her?
+
+The minister looked straight into the bright, brave, tender eyes, and
+answered, “Nothing in heaven or on earth could help loving you, Myrtle!”
+
+Pretty well for a beginning!
+
+Myrtle saw nothing but pious fervor in this florid sentiment. But as
+she was honest and clear-sighted, she could not accept a statement which
+seemed so plainly in contradiction with his common teachings, without
+bringing his flattering assertion to the test of another question.
+
+Did he suppose, she asked, that any persons could be Christians, who
+could not tell the day or the year of their change from children of
+darkness to children of light.
+
+The shrewd clergyman, whose creed could be lax enough on occasion, had
+provided himself with authorities of all kinds to meet these awkward
+questions in casuistical divinity. He had hunted up recipes for
+spiritual neuralgia, spasms, indigestion, psora, hypochondriasis, just
+as doctors do for their bodily counterparts.
+
+To be sure they could. Why, what did the great Richard Baxter say in his
+book on Infant Baptism? That at a meeting of many eminent Christians,
+some of them very famous ministers, when it was desired that every one
+should give an account of the time and manner of his conversion, there
+was but one of them all could do it. And as for himself, Mr. Baxter
+said, he could not remember the day or the year when he began to be
+sincere, as he called it. Why, did n't President Wheelock say to a
+young man who consulted him, that some persons might be true Christians
+without suspecting it?
+
+All this was so very different from the uncompromising way in which
+religious doctrines used to be presented to the young girl from the
+pulpit, that it naturally opened her heart and warmed her affections.
+Remember, if she needs excuse, that the defeated instincts of a strong
+nature were rushing in upon her, clamorous for their rights, and that
+she was not yet mature enough to understand and manage them. The paths
+of love and religion are at the fork of a road which every maiden
+travels. If some young hand does not open the turnpike gate of the
+first, she is pretty sure to try the other, which has no toll-bar. It is
+also very commonly noticed that these two paths, after diverging awhile,
+run into each other. True love leads many wandering souls into the
+better way. Nor is it rare to see those who started in company for the
+gates of pearl seated together on the banks that border the avenue to
+that other portal, gathering the roses for which it is so famous.
+
+It was with the most curious interest that the minister listened to
+the various heresies into which her reflections had led her. Somehow or
+other they did not sound so dangerous coming from her lips as when they
+were uttered by the coarser people of the less rigorous denominations,
+or preached in the sermons of heretical clergymen. He found it
+impossible to think of her in connection with those denunciations of
+sinners for which his discourses had been noted. Some of the sharp old
+church-members began to complain that his exhortations were losing their
+pungency. The truth was, he was preaching for Myrtle Hazard. He was
+getting bewitched and driven beside himself by the intoxication of his
+relations with her.
+
+All this time she was utterly unconscious of any charm that she was
+exercising, or of being herself subject to any personal fascination.
+She loved to read the books of ecstatic contemplation which he furnished
+her. She loved to sing the languishing hymns which he selected for
+her. She loved to listen to his devotional rhapsodies, hardly knowing
+sometimes whether she were in the body, or out of the body, while he
+lifted her upon the wings of his passion-kindled rhetoric. The time came
+when she had learned to listen for his step, when her eyes glistened at
+meeting him, when the words he uttered were treasured as from something
+more than a common mortal, and the book he had touched was like a
+saintly relic. It never suggested itself to her for an instant that this
+was anything more than such a friendship as Mercy might have cultivated
+with Great-Heart. She gave her confidence simply because she was very
+young and innocent. The green tendrils of the growing vine must wind
+round something.
+
+The seasons had been changing their scenery while the events we have
+told were occurring, and the loveliest days of autumn were now shining.
+To those who know the “Indian summer” of our Northern States, it is
+needless to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the
+soul. The stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if
+the planet were sleeping, like a top, before it begins to rock with the
+storms of autumn. All natures seem to find themselves more truly in
+its light; love grows more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees
+farther back into the past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet
+harvests the ripe thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verses by his
+winter fireside.
+
+The minister had got into the way of taking frequent walks with Myrtle,
+whose health had seemed to require the open air, and who was fast
+regaining her natural look. Under the canopy of the scarlet, orange,
+and crimson leaved maples, of the purple and violet clad oaks, of the
+birches in their robes of sunshine, and the beeches in their clinging
+drapery of sober brown, they walked together while he discoursed of
+the joys of heaven, the sweet communion of kindred souls, the ineffable
+bliss of a world where love would be immortal and beauty should never
+know decay. And while she listened, the strange light of the leaves
+irradiated the youthful figure of Myrtle, as when the stained window
+let in its colors on Madeline, the rose-bloom and the amethyst and the
+glory.
+
+“Yes! we shall be angels together,” exclaimed the Rev. Mr. Stoker. “Our
+souls were made for immortal union. I know it; I feel it in every throb
+of my heart. Even in this world you are as an angel to me, lifting me
+into the heaven where I shall meet you again, or it will not be heaven.
+Oh, if on earth our communion could have been such as it must be
+hereafter! O Myrtle, Myrtle!”
+
+He stretched out his hands as if to clasp hers between them in the
+rapture of his devotion. Was it the light reflected from the glossy
+leaves of the poison sumach which overhung the path that made his cheek
+look so pale? Was he going to kneel to her?
+
+Myrtle turned her dark eyes on him with a simple wonder that saw an
+excess of saintly ardor in these demonstrations, and drew back from it.
+
+“I think of heaven always as the place where I shall meet my mother,”
+ she said calmly.
+
+These words recalled the man to himself for a moment and he was silent.
+Presently he seated himself on a stone. His lips were tremulous as he
+said, in a low tone, “Sit down by me, Myrtle.”
+
+“No,” she answered, with something which chilled him in her voice, “we
+will not stay here any longer; it is time to go home.”
+
+“Full time!” muttered Cynthia Badlam, whose watchful eyes had been upon
+them, peering through a screen of yellow leaves, that turned her face
+pale as if with deadly passion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. FLANK MOVEMENT.
+
+Miss Cynthia Badlam was in the habit of occasionally visiting the Widow
+Hopkins. Some said but then people will talk, especially in the country,
+where they have not much else to do, except in haying-time. She had
+always known the widow, long before Mr. Gridley came there to board, or
+any other special event happened in her family. No matter what people
+said.
+
+Miss Badlam called to see Mrs. Hopkins, then, and the two had a long
+talk together, of which only a portion is on record. Here are such
+fragments as have been preserved.
+
+“What would I do about it? Why, I'd put a stop to such carry'n's on,
+mighty quick, if I had to tie the girl to the bedpost, and have a
+bulldog that world take the seat out of any pair of black pantaloons
+that come within forty rod of her,--that's what I'd do about it! He
+undertook to be mighty sweet with our Susan one while, but ever sence
+he's been talkin' religion with Myrtle Hazard he's let us alone. Do as
+I did when he asked our Susan to come to his study,--stick close to your
+girl and you 'll put a stop to all this business. He won't make love to
+two at once, unless they 're both pretty young, I 'll warrant. Follow
+her round, Miss Cynthy, and keep your eyes on her.”
+
+“I have watched her like a cat, Mrs. Hopkins, but I can't follow her
+everywhere,--she won't stand what Susan Posey 'll stand. There's no use
+our talking to her,--we 've done with that at our house. You never know
+what that Indian blood of hers will make her do. She's too high-strung
+for us to bit and bridle. I don't want to see her name in the paper
+again, alongside of that” (She did not finish the sentence.) “I'd rather
+have her fished dead out of the river, or find her where she found her
+uncle Malachi!”
+
+“You don't think, Miss Cynthy, that the man means to inveigle the girl
+with the notion of marryin' her by and by, after poor Mrs. Stoker's dead
+and gone?”
+
+“The Lord in heaven forbid!” exclaimed Miss Cynthia, throwing up her
+hands. “A child of fifteen years old, if she is a woman to look at!”
+
+“It's too bad,--it's too bad to think of, Miss Cynthy; and there's that
+poor woman dyin' by inches, and Miss Bathsheby settin' with her day
+and night, she has n't got a bit of her father in her, it's all her
+mother,--and that man, instead of bein' with her to comfort her as any
+man ought to be with his wife, in sickness and in health, that's what he
+promised. I 'm sure when my poor husband was sick.... To think of that
+man goin' about to talk religion to all the prettiest girls he can find
+in the parish, and his wife at home like to leave him so soon,--it's a
+shame,--so it is, come now! Miss Cynthy, there's one of the best men and
+one of the learnedest men that ever lived that's a real friend of Myrtle
+Hazard, and a better friend to her than she knows of,--for ever sence he
+brought her home, he feels jest like a father to her,--and that man is
+Mr. Gridley, that lives in this house. It's him I 'll speak to about the
+minister's carry'in's on. He knows about his talking sweet to our Susan,
+and he'll put things to rights! He's a master hand when he does once
+take hold of anything, I tell you that! Jest get him to shet up them
+books of his, and take hold of anybody's troubles, and you'll see how he
+'ll straighten 'em out.”
+
+There was a pattering of little feet on the stairs, and the two small
+twins, “Sossy” and “Minthy,” in the home dialect, came hand in hand
+into the room, Miss Susan leaving them at the threshold, not wishing to
+interrupt the two ladies, and being much interested also in listening to
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who was reading some of his last poems to her, with
+great delight to both of them.
+
+The good woman rose to take them from Susan, and guide their uncertain
+steps. “My babies, I call 'em, Miss Cynthy. Ain't they nice children?
+Come to go to bed, little dears? Only a few minutes, Miss Cynthy.”
+
+She took them into the bedroom on the same floor, where they slept,
+and, leaving the door open, began undressing them. Cynthia turned her
+rocking-chair round so as to face the open door. She looked on while
+the little creatures were being undressed; she heard the few words they
+lisped as their infant prayer, she saw them laid in their beds, and
+heard their pretty good-night.
+
+A lone woman to whom all the sweet cares of maternity have been denied
+cannot look upon a sight like this without feeling the void in her
+own heart where a mother's affection should have nestled. Cynthia sat
+perfectly still, without rocking, and watched kind Mrs. Hopkins at her
+quasi parental task. A tear stole down her rigid face as she saw the
+rounded limbs of the children bared in their white beauty, and their
+little heads laid on the pillow. They were sleeping quietly when Mrs.
+Hopkins left the room for a moment on some errand of her own. Cynthia
+rose softly from her chair, stole swiftly to the bedside, and printed a
+long, burning kiss on each of their foreheads.
+
+When Mrs. Hopkins came back, she found the maiden lady sitting in her
+place just as she left her, but rocking in her chair and sobbing as one
+in sudden pangs of grief.
+
+“It is a great trouble, Miss Cynthy,” she said,--“a great trouble to
+have such a child as Myrtle to think of and to care for. If she was
+like our Susan Posey, now!--but we must do the best we can; and if Mr.
+Gridley once sets himself to it, you may depend upon it he 'll make it
+all come right. I wouldn't take on about it if I was you. You let me
+speak to our Mr. Gridley. We all have our troubles. It is n't everybody
+that can ride to heaven in a C-spring shay, as my poor husband used to
+say; and life 's a road that 's got a good many thank-you-ma'ams to go
+bumpin' over, says he.”
+
+Miss Badlam acquiesced in the philosophical reflections of the late Mr.
+Ammi Hopkins, and left it to his widow to carry out her own suggestion
+in reference to consulting Master Gridley. The good woman took the first
+opportunity she had to introduce the matter, a little diffusely, as is
+often the way of widows who keep boarders.
+
+“There's something going on I don't like, Mr. Gridley. They tell me that
+Minister Stoker is following round after Myrtle Hazard, talking religion
+at her jest about the same way he'd have liked to with our Susan, I
+calculate. If he wants to talk religion to me or Silence Withers,--well,
+no, I don't feel sure about Silence,--she ain't as young as she used
+to be, but then ag'in she ain't so fur gone as some, and she's got
+money,--but if he wants to talk religion with me, he may come and
+welcome. But as for Myrtle Hazard, she's been sick, and it's left her
+a little flighty by what they say, and to have a minister round her all
+the time ravin' about the next world as if he had a latch-key to the
+front door of it, is no way to make her come to herself again. I 've
+seen more than one young girl sent off to the asylum by that sort of
+work, when, if I'd only had 'em, I'd have made 'em sweep the stairs, and
+mix the puddin's, and tend the babies, and milk the cow, and keep 'em
+too busy all day to be thinkin' about themselves, and have 'em dress up
+nice evenin's and see some young folks and have a good time, and go to
+meetin' Sundays, and then have done with the minister, unless it was
+old Father Pemberton. He knows forty times as much about heaven as that
+Stoker man does, or ever 's like to,--why don't they run after him, I
+should like to know? Ministers are men, come now; and I don't want to
+say anything against women, Mr. Gridley, but women are women, that's the
+fact of it, and half of 'em are hystericky when they're young; and I've
+heard old Dr. Hurlbut say many a time that he had to lay in an extra
+stock of valerian and assafaetida whenever there was a young minister
+round,--for there's plenty of religious ravin', says he, that's nothin'
+but hysterics.”
+
+[Mr. Fronde thinks that was the trouble with Bloody Queen Mary, but the
+old physician did not get the idea from him.]
+
+“Well, and what do you propose to do about the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker and his young proselyte, Miss Myrtle Hazard?” said Mr. Gridley,
+when Mrs. Hopkins at last gave him a chance to speak.
+
+“Mr. Gridley,”--Mrs. Hopkins looked full upon him as she spoke,--“people
+used to say that you was a good man and a great man and one of the
+learnedest men alive, but that you didn't know much nor care for much
+except books. I know you used to live pretty much to yourself when you
+first came to board in this house. But you've been very good to my son;
+... and if Gifted lives till you... till you are in... your grave... he
+will write a poem--I know he will--that will tell your goodness to babes
+unborn.”
+
+[Here Master Gridley groaned, and repeated to himself silently,
+
+    “Scindentur vestes gemmae frangentur et aurum,
+     Carmina quam tribuent fama perennis erit.”
+
+All this inwardly, and without interrupting the worthy woman's talk.]
+
+“And if ever Gifted makes a book,--don't say anything about it, Mr.
+Gridley, for goodness' sake, for he wouldn't have anybody know it, only
+I can't help thinking that some time or other he will print a book,--and
+if he does, I know whose name he'll put at the head of it,--'Dedicated
+to B. G., with the gratitude and respect--' There, now, I had n't any
+business to say a word about it, and it's only jest in case he does, you
+know. I'm sure you deserve it all. You've helped him with the best of
+advice. And you've been kind to me when I was in trouble. And you've
+been like a grandfather” [Master Gridley winced,--why could n't the
+woman have said father?--that grand struck his ear like a spade
+going into the gravel] “to those babes, poor little souls! left on my
+door-step like a couple of breakfast rolls,--only you know it's the
+baker left then. I believe in you, Mr. Gridley, as I believe in my Maker
+and in Father Pemberton,--but, poor man, he's old, and you won't be old
+these twenty years yet.”
+
+[Master Gridley shook his head as if to say that was n't so, but felt
+comforted and refreshed.]
+
+“You've got to help Myrtle Hazard again. You brought her home when she
+come so nigh drowning. You got the old doctor to go and see her when she
+come so nigh being bewitched with the magnetism and nonsense, whatever
+they call it, and the young doctor was so nigh bein' crazy, too. I know,
+for Nurse Byloe told me all about it. And now Myrtle's gettin' run away
+with by that pesky Minister Stoker. Cynthy Badlam was here yesterday
+crying and sobbing as if her heart would break about it. For my part, I
+did n't think Cynthy cared so much for the girl as all that, but I saw
+her takin' on dreadfully with my own eyes. That man's like a hen-hawk
+among the chickens, first he picks up one, and then he picks up another.
+I should like to know if nobody but young folks has souls to be saved,
+and specially young women!”
+
+“Tell me all you know about Myrtle Hazard and Joseph Bellamy Stoker,”
+ said Master Gridley.
+
+Thereupon that good lady related all that Miss Badlam had imparted to
+her, of which the reader knows the worst, being the interview of which
+the keen spinster had been a witness, having followed them for the
+express purpose of knowing, in her own phrase, what the minister was up
+to.
+
+It is not to be supposed that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet kindness
+of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best of her
+adventure. He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to consider
+himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the thought
+that he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been in the way
+of considering himself, might perhaps do something even more important
+than his previous achievement to save this young girl from the dangers
+that surrounded her. He loved his classics and his old books; he took
+an interest, too, in the newspapers and periodicals that brought the
+fermenting thought and the electric life of the great world into his
+lonely study; but these things just about him were getting strong hold
+on him, and most of all the fortunes of this beautiful young woman. How
+strange! For a whole generation he had lived in no nearer relation to
+his fellow-creatures than that of a half-fossilized teacher; and all at
+once he found himself face to face with the very most intense form of
+life, the counsellor of threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled
+loveliness. What business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of
+which he had said in “Thoughts on the Universe,”--“Every man leads or is
+led by something that goes on four legs.”
+
+Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes
+all human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of
+dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he
+were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an
+extra gallon of air at every breath, Then--you who have written a book
+that holds your heart-leaves between its pages will understand the
+movement--he took down “Thoughts on the Universe” for a refreshing
+draught from his own wellspring. He opened as chance ordered it, and his
+eyes fell on the following passage:
+
+“The true American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch,
+the Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.'
+A homely utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and
+hierarchies. These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that some
+things can NOT be done as well as others.”
+
+“There, now!” he said, talking to himself in his usual way, “is n't that
+good? It always seems to me that I find something to the point when I
+open that book. 'Some things can be done as well as others,' can they?
+Suppose I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle Hazard? I
+think I may say I am old and incombustible enough to be trusted. She
+does not seem to be a safe neighbor to very inflammable bodies?”
+
+Myrtle was sitting in the room long known as the Study, or the Library,
+when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her. Miss
+Cynthia, who received him, led him to this apartment and left him alone
+with Myrtle. She welcomed him very cordially, but colored as she did
+so,--his visit was a surprise. She was at work on a piece of embroidery.
+Her first instinctive movement was to thrust it out of sight with the
+thought of concealment; but she checked this, and before the blush of
+detection had reached her cheek, the blush of ingenuous shame for her
+weakness had caught and passed it, and was in full possession. She sat
+with her worsted pattern held bravely in sight, and her cheek as bright
+as its liveliest crimson.
+
+“Miss Cynthia has let me in upon you,” he said, “or I should not have
+ventured to disturb you in this way. A work of art, is it, Miss Myrtle
+Hazard?”
+
+“Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridley,--for my pastor.”
+
+“Oh! oh! That is well. A good old man. I have a great regard for the
+Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. I wish all ministers were as good and simple
+and pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. And I wish all the
+young people thought as much about their elders as you do, Miss Myrtle
+Hazard. We that are old love little acts of kindness. You gave me
+more pleasure than you knew of, my dear, when you worked that handsome
+cushion for me. The old minister will be greatly pleased,--poor old
+man!”
+
+“But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father
+Pemberton. They are for--Mr. Stoker.”
+
+“The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker! He is not an old man, the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker. He may perhaps be a widower before a great while.--Does
+he know that you are working those slippers for him?”
+
+“Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley. I meant them for a surprise to him. He has
+been so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I thought
+anybody did. He is so different from what I thought; he makes religion
+so perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would agree with him, if
+they could only hear him talk.”
+
+“Greatly interested in the souls of his people, is n't he?”
+
+“Too much, almost, I am afraid. He says he has been too hard in his
+sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his hearers
+enough.”
+
+“Don't you think he worries himself about the souls of young women
+rather more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?”
+
+There was something in the tone of this question that helped its
+slightly sarcastic expression. Myrtle's jealousy for her minister's
+sincerity was roused.
+
+“How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley? I am sure I wish you or anybody
+could have heard him talk as I have. There is no age in souls, he says;
+and I am sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or young.”
+
+“No age in souls,--no age in souls. Souls of forty as young as souls of
+fifteen; that 's it.” Master Gridley did not say this loud. But he did
+speak as follows: “I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev. Joseph
+Bellamy Stoker's love of being useful to people of all ages. You have
+had comfort in his companionship, and there are others who might be very
+glad to profit by it. I know a very excellent person who has had trials,
+and is greatly interested in religious conversation. Do you think he
+would be willing to let this friend of mine share in the privileges of
+spiritual intercourse which you enjoy?”
+
+There was but one answer possible. Of course he would.
+
+“I hope it is so, my dear young lady. But listen to me one moment.
+I love you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your
+own--grandfather.” (There was moral heroism in that word.) “I love you
+as if you were of my own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer
+me, I mean to keep watch against all dangers that threaten you in mind,
+body, or estate. You may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt me; but
+until you say you distrust me, when any trouble comes near you, you
+will find me there. Now, my dear child, you ought to know that the
+Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has the reputation of being too fond of
+prosecuting religious inquiries with young and handsome women.”
+
+Myrtle's eyes fell,--a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.
+
+“He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,--a very
+pretty girl, as you know.”
+
+Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.
+
+“I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about
+with him. He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death, and
+cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother's blood if nature did not tell
+her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first good-looking
+young woman he can get to listen to him.”
+
+Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.
+
+“Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man
+alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?”
+
+“Of course I would,” said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts, her
+shame, her pride, were all excited. “Who is your friend, Mr. Gridley?”
+
+“An excellent woman,--Mrs. Hopkins. You know her, Gifted Hopkins's
+mother, with whom I am residing. Shall the minister be given to
+understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?”
+
+Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations. “As you
+say,” she answered. “Is there nobody that I can trust, or is everybody
+hunting me like a bird?” She hid her face in her hands.
+
+“You can trust me, my dear,” said Byles Gridley. “Take your needle, my
+child, and work at your pattern,--it will come out a rose by and by.
+Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken patiently, and
+the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery. You can trust
+me. Good-by, my dear.”
+
+“Let her finish the slippers,” the old man said to himself as he trudged
+home, “and make 'em big enough for Father Pemberton. He shall have his
+feet in 'em yet, or my name is n't Byles Gridley!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.
+
+Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had ceased
+to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long entry of
+the old mansion. Then she went to her little chamber and sat down in
+a sort of revery. She could not doubt his sincerity, and there was
+something in her own consciousness which responded to the suspicions
+he had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses of the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other words
+which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest lessons
+and our sharpest rebukes. The hint another gives us finds whole trains
+of thought which have been getting themselves ready to be shaped in
+inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch of a burning
+syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for a spark to
+become letters of fire.
+
+The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his
+“developing” room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of
+the truth just mentioned. There is nothing to be seen on the glass
+just taken from the camera. But there is a potential, though invisible,
+picture hid in the creamy film which covers it. Watch him as he pours a
+wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought which is at once a
+surprise and a charm,--the sudden appearance of your own features where
+a moment before was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty.
+
+In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had called
+up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in the
+consciousness of Myrtle Hazard. It was not merely their significance,
+it was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting time. If they
+had been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was taking the first
+stitch on the embroidered slippers, they would have been as useless as
+the artist's developing solution on a plate which had never been exposed
+in the camera. But she had been of late in training for her lesson in
+ways that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has
+shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps
+hear this one which follows more cheerfully. The physician in the
+Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow
+handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was
+the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so
+much consequence as the fact that he did at any rate get well.
+
+These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had
+given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just
+now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms. And so it
+happened that, while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and
+emotional elements of her nature which responded to the keys he loved
+to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the
+mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky,
+had been quietly doing their work. The color was fast returning to
+her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her thoughts gradually
+resolving themselves into the harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily
+and mental health. It needed but the timely word from the fitting lips
+to change the whole programme of her daily mode of being. The word
+had been spoken. She saw its truth; but how hard it is to tear away
+a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy intimate! How hard for
+any!--but for a girl so young, and who had as yet found so little to
+love and trust, how cruelly hard!
+
+She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her eyes were fixed
+on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting. It was a
+very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by
+the first emigrant of her race. The legs and arms were curiously
+turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half
+repulsive. Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later
+date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed
+to flatten by its weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of
+the ugly creature. Over this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful
+ancestress, her neck and arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except
+for a bracelet on the left wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the
+ample folds of a rich crimson brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other
+portrait, which was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa
+to trustful souls of the Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures
+while she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung
+up in her chamber.
+
+The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
+constellations which she had seen shining brightly almost overhead in
+the early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in
+the very attitude in which she was sitting hours before. Her lamp had
+burned out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber. She
+started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by long
+remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a great
+fear seized her, and she sprang for a match. It broke with the quick
+movement she made to kindle it, and she snatched another as if a fiend
+were after her. It flashed and went out. Oh the terror, the terror! The
+darkness seemed alive with fearful presences. The lurid glare of her own
+eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain. She tried one more match; it
+kindled as it should, and she lighted another lamp. Her first impulse
+was to assure herself that nothing was changed in the familiar objects
+around her. She held the lamp up to the picture of Judith Pride. The
+beauty looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of lofty recognition
+in her eyes; but there she was, as always. She turned the light upon the
+pale face of the martyr-portrait. It looked troubled and faded, as it
+seemed to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
+childhood. Then she threw the light on the old chair, and, shuddering,
+caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and
+the flattened reptiles on which it stood.
+
+In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting
+there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors.
+Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of
+life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been what is called,
+in our poor language, dead. One came in all the glory of her ripened
+beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid
+animal equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the
+lusty lovers of complete muliebrity. The other,--how delicate, how
+translucent, how aerial she seemed! yet real and true to the lineaments
+of her whom the young girl looked upon as her hereditary protector.
+
+The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of loathing and scorn,
+pointed to one of the reptiles beneath the feet of the chair. And while
+Myrtle's eyes followed hers, the flattened and half-crushed creature
+seemed to swell and spread like his relative in the old fable, like
+the black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size, and at last of
+colossal proportions. And, fearful to relate, the batrachian features
+humanized themselves as the monster grew, and, shaping themselves more
+and more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle saw in them a hideous
+likeness of--No! no! it was too horrible, was that the face which had
+been so close to hers but yesterday? were those the lips, the breath
+from which had stirred her growing curls as he leaned over her while
+they read together some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as
+much like a love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A shadow of
+disgust--the natural repugnance of loveliness for deformity-ran all
+through her, and she shrieked, as she thought, and threw herself at the
+feet of that other figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and
+then a cold thin hand seemed to take hers. The warm life went out of
+her, and she was to herself as a dimly conscious shadow that glided with
+passive acquiescence wherever it was led. Presently she found herself in
+a half-lighted apartment, where there were books on the shelves around,
+and a desk with loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little mirror with
+a worn bit of carpet before it. And while she looked, a great serpent
+writhed in through the half-open door, and made the circuit of the room,
+laying one huge ring all round it, and then, going round again, laid
+another ring over the first, and so on until he was wound all round the
+room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow in the centre;
+and then the serpent seemed to arch his neck in the air, and bring his
+head close down to Myrtle's face; and the features were not those of
+a serpent, but of a man, and it hissed out the words she had read that
+very day in a little note which said, “Come to my study to-morrow, and
+we will read hymns together.”
+
+Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and the
+two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in their own.
+Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to their influence,
+and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for each would have
+led her her own way,--whither she knew not. It was the strife of her
+“Vision,” only in another form,--the contest of two lives her blood
+inherited for the mastery of her soul. The might of beauty conquered.
+Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the lovely phantom, which
+seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished fire of life, and so like
+herself as she would grow to be when noon should have ripened her into
+maturity.
+
+Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
+corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes,
+which seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness. Then
+came a confused sense of eager search for something that she knew was
+hidden, whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards of a floor,
+or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in a forgotten
+drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but somewhere there
+was something which she was to find, and which, once found, was to be
+her talisman. She was in the midst of this eager search when she awoke.
+
+The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her fears
+she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what meaning
+there was in this frightfully real dream. Her courage came back as her
+senses assured her that all around her was natural, as when she left it.
+She determined to follow the lead of the strange hint her nightmare had
+given her.
+
+In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
+upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and large
+drawers below. “That desk is yours, Myrtle,” her uncle Malachi had once
+said to her; “and there is a trick or two about it that it will pay you
+to study.” Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about the mystery of
+the old desk. All the little drawers, of which there were a considerable
+number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as she thought, she had
+carefully examined. She determined to make one more trial. It was the
+dead of the night, and this was a fearful old place to be wandering
+about; but she was possessed with an urgent feeling which would not let
+her wait until daylight.
+
+She stole like a ghost from her chamber. She glided along the narrow
+entries as she had seemed to move in her dream. She opened the folding
+doors of the great upright desk. She had always before examined it by
+daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the little drawers out,
+she had never thoroughly explored the recesses which received them.
+But in her new-born passion of search, she held her light so as to
+illuminate all these deeper spaces. At once she thought she saw the
+marks of pressure with a finger. She pressed her own finger on this
+place, and, as it yielded with a slight click, a small mahogany pilaster
+sprang forward, revealing its well-kept secret that it was the mask of a
+tall, deep, very narrow drawer. There was something heavy in it, and,
+as Myrtle turned it over, a golden bracelet fell into her hand. She
+recognized it at once as that which had been long ago the ornament of
+the fair woman whose portrait hung in her chamber. She clasped it upon
+her wrist, and from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of
+the lovely phantom who had been with her in her dream.
+
+“The old man walked last night, God save us!” said Kitty Fagan to Biddy
+Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious discovery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. VICTORY.
+
+It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an
+unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination
+tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who
+goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her
+fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles
+Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the
+grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the “properties” with
+which her own mind had wrought up this scenic show.
+
+The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so
+easy to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the
+hour when she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist. She
+felt a sudden loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a saint.
+A young girl's caprice? Possibly. A return of the natural instincts of
+girlhood with returning health? Perhaps so. An impression produced by
+her dream? An effect of an influx from another sphere of being? The
+working of Master Byles Gridley's emphatic warning? The magic of her new
+talisman?
+
+We may safely leave these questions for the present. As we have to tell,
+not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should have done
+it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it would be
+to lay bare all the springs of her action. Until this period, she had
+hardly thought of herself as a born beauty. The flatteries she had
+received from time to time were like the chips and splinters under the
+green wood, when the chill women pretended to make a fire in the best
+parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of burning themselves out, hardly
+warming, much less kindling, the fore-stick and the back-log.
+
+Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to
+look upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet. Its suggestions
+betrayed themselves in one of her first movements. Nothing could be
+soberer than the cut of the dresses which the propriety of the severe
+household had established as the rule of her costume. But the girl was
+no sooner out of bed than a passion came over her to see herself in that
+less jealous arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century
+had insisted on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She
+rolled up the sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and
+neck, and glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back
+to the glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many
+things untaught. She did not say in so many words, “I too am a beauty,”
+ but she could mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions of
+feature and form which had made the original of the picture before her
+famous. The same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded
+neck, the same more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely
+shaped arms and hands, and something very like the same features
+startled her by their identity in the permanent image of the canvas and
+the fleeting one of the mirror.
+
+The world was hers then,--for she had not read romances and love-letters
+without finding that beauty governs it in all times and places. Who was
+this middle-aged minister that had been hanging round her and talking to
+her about heaven, when there was not a single joy of earth that she had
+as yet tasted? A man that had been saying all his fine things to Miss
+Susan Posey, too, had he, before he had bestowed his attentions on her?
+And to a dozen other girls, too, nobody knows who!
+
+The revulsion was a very sadden one. Such changes of feeling are apt
+to be sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with, and
+Myrtle was not of a temperament or an age to act with much deliberation
+where a pique came in to the aid of a resolve. Master Gridley guessed
+sagaciously what would be the effect of his revelation, when he told her
+of the particular attentions the minister had paid to pretty Susan Posey
+and various other young women.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully that morning, and
+made himself as captivating as his professional costume allowed. He had
+drawn down the shades of his windows so as to let in that subdued light
+which is merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments, and wheeled
+up his sofa so that two could sit at the table and read from the same
+book.
+
+At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain feverish
+impatience, casting a glance now and then at the mirror as he passed
+it. At last the bell rang, and he himself went to answer it, his heart
+throbbing with expectation of meeting his lovely visitor.
+
+Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the bearer of sealed
+despatches. Mistress Kitty Fagan was the young lady's substitute, and
+she delivered into the hand of the astonished clergyman the following
+missive:
+
+TO THE REV. MR. STOKER.
+
+Reverend Sir,--I shall not come to your study this day. I do not feel
+that I have any more need of religious counsel at this time, and I am
+told by a friend that there are others who will be glad to hear you talk
+on this subject. I hear that Mrs. Hopkins is interested in religious
+subjects, and would have been glad to see you in my company. As I cannot
+go with her, perhaps Miss Susan Posey will take my place. I thank you
+for all the good things you have said to me, and that you have given me
+so much of your company. I hope we shall sing hymns together in heaven
+some time, if we are good enough, but I want to wait for that awhile,
+for I do not feel quite ready. I am not going to see you any more alone,
+reverend sir. I think this is best, and I have good advice. I want
+to see more of young people of my own age, and I have a friend, Mr.
+Gridley, who I think is older than you are, that takes an interest in
+me; and as you have many others that you must be interested in, he can
+take the place of a father better than you can do. I return to you the
+hymn-book, I read one of those you marked, and do not care to read any
+more.
+
+Respectfully yours,
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this awkwardly
+written, but tolerably intelligible letter. What could he do about it?
+It would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot Byles Gridley,
+and strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which homicides he felt at
+the moment that he could have committed. And here he was in a frantic
+paroxysm, and the next day was Sunday, and his morning's discourse was
+unwritten. His savage mediaeval theology came to his relief, and
+he clutched out of a heap of yellow manuscripts his well-worn
+“convulsion-fit” sermon. He preached it the next day as if it did his
+heart good, but Myrtle Hazard did not hear it, for she had gone to St.
+Bartholomew's with Olive Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. SAINT AND SINNER
+
+It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid
+wife improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
+beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the physician
+advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life by
+going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful companionship.
+She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive Eveleth; and as
+Myrtle wanted to see young people, and had her own way now as never
+before, the three girls often met at the parsonage. Thus they became
+more and more intimate, and grew more and more into each other's
+affections.
+
+These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to be
+found in all our towns and villages. Olive had been carefully trained,
+and at the proper age confirmed. Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in
+due time startled and converted. Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve,
+with many impulses like those of the other two girls, and some that
+required more watching. She was not so safe, perhaps, as either of the
+other girls, for this world or the next; but she was on some accounts
+more interesting, as being a more genuine representative of that
+inexperienced and too easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of
+our race, whom we must after all accept as embodying the creative idea
+of woman, and who might have been alive and happy now (though at a great
+age) but for a single fatal error.
+
+The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's father,
+was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man,
+with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a
+safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his
+sermons kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon
+the soil. Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, as
+into her bodily and intellectual developments, which one might
+suppose was the natural order of things in a well-regulated
+Christian--household, where the children are brought up in the nurture
+and admonition of the Lord.
+
+Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with vague
+apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious phrases and
+graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age of fourteen
+years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very commonly
+considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the formation of
+religious character. It began with a shivering sense of enormous guilt,
+inherited and practised from her earliest infancy. Just as every breath
+she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the air with carbonic acid,
+so her every thought and feeling had been tainting the universe with
+sin. This spiritual chill or rigor had in due order been followed by the
+fever-flush of hope, and that in its turn had ushered in the last stage,
+the free opening of all the spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation
+of self-surrender.
+
+Good Christians are made by many very different processes. Bathsheba had
+taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was genuine, in
+spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not understand that the
+spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was the same as that which
+poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the feet of her Lord, and led her
+forth at early dawn with the other Mary to visit his sepulchre.
+
+Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-worn
+formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity, hateful
+to the Father in Heaven who made her. She had grown up in antagonism
+with all that surrounded her. She had been talked to about her corrupt
+nature and her sinful heart, until the words had become an offence and
+an insult. Bathsheba knew her father's fondness for young company too
+well to suppose that his intercourse with Myrtle had gone beyond the
+sentimental and poetical stage, and was not displeased when she found
+that there was some breach between them. Myrtle herself did not profess
+to have passed through the technical stages of the customary spiritual
+paroxysm. Still, the gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her
+and judged her kindly. She was modest enough to think that perhaps the
+natural state of some girls might be at least as good as her own after
+the spiritual change of which she had been the subject. A manifest
+heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.
+
+The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine of
+Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before grace
+in the election of a wife; because, saith he, “it will be a hard Task,
+where the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire
+Conquest whilst Life lasteth.” An opinion apparently entertained by many
+modern ecclesiastics, and one which may be considered very encouraging
+to those young ladies of the politer circles who have a fancy for
+marrying bishops and other fashionable clergymen. Not of course that
+“grace” is so rare a gift among the young ladies of the upper social
+sphere; but they are in the habit of using the word with a somewhat
+different meaning from that which the good Bishop attached to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. VILLAGE POET.
+
+It was impossible for Myrtle to be frequently at Olive's without often
+meeting Olive's brother, and her reappearance with the bloom on her
+cheek was a signal which her other admirers were not likely to overlook
+as a hint to recommence their flattering demonstrations; and so it was
+that she found herself all at once the centre of attraction to three
+young men with whom we have made some acquaintance, namely, Cyprian
+Eveleth, Gifted Hopkins, and Murray Bradshaw.
+
+When the three girls were together at the house of Olive, it gave
+Cyprian a chance to see something of Myrtle in the most natural way.
+Indeed, they all became used to meeting him in a brotherly sort of
+relation; only, as he was not the brother of two of them, it gave him
+the inside track, as the sporting men say, with reference to any rivals
+for the good-will of either of these. Of course neither Bathsheba nor
+Myrtle thought of him in any other light than as Olive's brother, and
+would have been surprised with the manifestation on his part of any
+other feeling, if it existed. So he became very nearly as intimate with
+them as Olive was, and hardly thought of his intimacy as anything more
+than friendship, until one day Myrtle sang some hymns so sweetly that
+Cyprian dreamed about her that night; and what young person does not
+know that the woman or the man once idealized and glorified in the
+exalted state of the imagination belonging to sleep becomes dangerous
+to the sensibilities in the waking hours that follow? Yet something drew
+Cyprian to the gentler and more subdued nature of Bathsheba, so that
+he often thought, like a gayer personage than himself, whose divided
+affections are famous in song, that he could have been blessed to share
+her faithful heart, if Myrtle had not bewitched him with her unconscious
+and innocent sorceries. As for poor, modest Bathsheba, she thought
+nothing of herself, but was almost as much fascinated by Myrtle as if
+she had been one of the sex she was born to make in love with her.
+
+The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
+Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins. This young gentleman had the enormous
+advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical endowment.
+No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist the youth or
+man who addresses her in verse. The thought that she is the object of a
+poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition more completely than
+all that wealth or office or social eminence can offer. Do the young
+millionnaires and the members of the General Court get letters from
+unknown ladies, every day, asking for their autographs and photographs?
+Well, then!
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very depth
+of his soul. Could he not confer that immortality so dear to the human
+heart? Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the “Banner and Oracle” gave
+him already “an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame,” to quote its own
+words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius, of which these spring
+blossoms were the promise. It was a most formidable battery, then, which
+Cyprian's first rival opened upon the fortress of Myrtle's affections.
+
+His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-playful
+bet with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he would bag
+a girl within twelve months of date who should unite three desirable
+qualities, specified in the bet, in a higher degree than any one of the
+five who were on the matrimonial programme which she had laid out for
+him,--and Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to win the bet. When a
+young fellow like him, cool and clever, makes up his mind to bring down
+his bird, it is no joke, but a very serious and a tolerably
+certain piece of business. Not being made a fool of by any boyish
+nonsense,--passion and all that,--he has a great advantage. Many a
+woman rejects a man because he is in love with her, and accepts another
+because he is not. The first is thinking too much of himself and his
+emotions,--the other makes a study of her and her friends, and learns
+what ropes to pull. But then it must be remembered that Murray Bradshaw
+had a poet for his rival, to say nothing of the brother of a bosom
+friend.
+
+The qualities of a young poet are so exceptional, and such interesting
+objects of study, that a narrative like this can well afford to linger
+awhile in the delineation of this most envied of all the forms of
+genius. And by contrasting the powers and limitations of two such young
+persons as Gifted Hopkins and Cyprian Eveleth, we may better appreciate
+the nature of that divine inspiration which gives to poetry the
+superiority it claims over every other form of human expression.
+
+Gifted Hopkins had shown an ear for rhythm, and for the simpler forms of
+music, from his earliest childhood. He began beating with his heels
+the accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender age,--a
+habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself, as,
+though it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that which
+is beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and emphasize by
+vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the tune of Auld
+Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive when a large number of
+boots join in the performance. He showed a remarkable talent for playing
+on one of the less complex musical instruments, too limited in compass
+to satisfy exacting ears, but affording excellent discipline to those
+who wish to write in the simpler metrical forms,--the same which summons
+the hero from his repose and stirs his blood in battle.
+
+By the time he was twelve years old he was struck with the pleasing
+resemblance of certain vocal sounds which, without being the same,
+yet had a curious relation which made them agree marvellously well
+in couples; as eyes with skies; as heart with art, also with part and
+smart; and so of numerous others, twenty or thirty pairs, perhaps, which
+number he considerably increased as he grew older, until he may have had
+fifty or more such pairs at his command.
+
+The union of so extensive a catalogue of words which matched each other,
+and of an ear so nice that it could tell if there were nine or eleven
+syllables in an heroic line, instead of the legitimate ten, constituted
+a rare combination of talents in the opinion of those upon whose
+judgment he relied. He was naturally led to try his powers in the
+expression of some just thought or natural sentiment in the shape of
+verse, that wonderful medium of imparting thought and feeling to his
+fellow-creatures which a bountiful Providence had made his rare and
+inestimable endowment.
+
+It was at about this period of his life, that is to say, when he was of
+the age of thirteen, or we may perhaps say fourteen years, for we do
+not wish to overstate his precocity, that he experienced a sensation so
+entirely novel, that, to the best of his belief, it was such as no other
+young person had ever known, at least in anything like the same degree.
+This extraordinary emotion was brought on by the sight of Myrtle Hazard,
+with whom he had never before had any near relations, as they had been
+at different schools, and Myrtle was too reserved to be very generally
+known among the young people of his age.
+
+Then it was that he broke forth in his virgin effort, “Lines to M----e,”
+ which were published in the village paper, and were claimed by all
+possible girls but the right one; namely, by two Mary Annes, one
+Minnie, one Mehitable, and one Marthie, as she saw fit to spell the name
+borrowed from her who was troubled about many things.
+
+The success of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to
+the hymn-books as “common metre,” was such as to convince the youth
+that, whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time to
+obtain a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true destiny was
+the glorious career of a poet. It was a most pleasing circumstance,
+that his mother, while she fully recognized the propriety of his being
+diligent in the prosaic line of business to which circumstances had
+called him, was yet as much convinced as he himself that he was destined
+to achieve literary fame. She had read Watts and Select Hymns all
+through, she said, and she did n't see but what Gifted could make the
+verses come out jest as slick, and the sound of the rhymes jest as
+pooty, as Izik Watts or the Selectmen, whoever they was,--she was sure
+they couldn't be the selectmen of this town, wherever they belonged.
+It is pleasant to say that the young man, though favored by nature with
+this rarest of talents, did not forget the humbler duties that Heaven,
+which dresses few singing-birds in the golden plumes of fortune, had
+laid upon him. After having received a moderate amount of instruction
+at one of the less ambitious educational institutions of the town,
+supplemented, it is true, by the judicious and gratuitous hints of
+Master Gridley, the young poet, in obedience to a feeling which did him
+the highest credit, relinquished, at least for the time, the Groves of
+Academus, and offered his youth at the shrine of Plutus, that is, left
+off studying and took to business. He became what they call a “clerk” in
+what they call a “store” up in the huckleberry districts, and kept such
+accounts as were required by the business of the establishment. His
+principal occupation was, however, to attend to the details of commerce
+as it was transacted over the counter. This industry enabled him, to
+his great praise be it spoken, to assist his excellent parent, to clothe
+himself in a becoming manner, so that he made a really handsome figure
+on Sundays and was always of presentable aspect, likewise to purchase
+a book now and then, and to subscribe for that leading periodical which
+furnishes the best models to the youth of the country in the various
+modes of composition.
+
+Though Master Gridley was very kind to the young man, he was rather
+disposed to check the exuberance of his poetical aspirations. The truth
+was, that the old classical scholar did not care a great deal for modern
+English poetry. Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap from the Greek
+Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation of spirits; but
+he did not think very much of “your Keatses, and your Tennysons, and the
+whole Hasheesh crazy lot,” as he called the dreamily sensuous idealists
+who belong to the same century that brought in ether and chloroform.
+He rather shook his head at Gifted Hopkins for indulging so largely in
+metrical composition.
+
+“Better stick to your ciphering, my young friend,” he said to him, one
+day. “Figures of speech are all very well, in their way; but if you
+undertake to deal much in them, you'll figure down your prospects into
+a mighty small sum. There's some danger that it will take all the
+sense out of you, if you keep writing verses at this rate. You young
+scribblers think any kind of nonsense will do for the public, if it
+only has a string of rhymes tacked to it. Cut off the bobs of your kite,
+Gifted Hopkins, and see if it does n't pitch, and stagger, and come down
+head-foremost. Don't write any stuff with rhyming tails to it that won't
+make a decent show for itself after you've chopped all the rhyming tails
+off. That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins. Is there any book you would like
+to have out of my library? Have you ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?”
+
+He had tried, the young man answered, on the recommendation of Cyprian
+Eveleth, but had found it rather hard reading.
+
+Master Gridley lifted his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that some
+had called Spenser the poet's poet. “What a pity,” he said to himself,
+“that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that William Murray
+Bradshaw! What's the reason, I wonder, that all the little earthen pots
+blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at such a great rate,
+while the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do all their simmering
+inside?”
+
+That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth and
+all their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone. The smiles of woman,
+in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre. Fame
+beckoned him upward from her templed steep. The rhymes which rose before
+him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on which he would
+climb to a heaven of-glory.
+
+Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
+anticipations of success. “All up with the boy, if he's going to take to
+rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar and weighing
+out pounds of tea. Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end in. Poets, to be
+sure! Sausage-makers! Empty skins of old phrases,--stuff 'em with odds
+and ends of old thoughts that never were good for anything,--cut 'em up
+in lengths and sell'em to fools! “And if they ain't big fools enough to
+buy 'em, give'em away; and if you can't do that, pay folks to take'em.
+Bah! what a fine style of genius common-sense is! There's a passage in
+the book that would fit half these addle-headed rhymesters. What is
+that saying of mine about “squinting brains?”
+
+He took down “Thoughts on the Universe,” and read:--
+
+                    “Of Squinting Brains.
+
+“Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen who
+squint with their brains. It is an infirmity in one of the eyes, making
+the two unequal in power, that makes men squint. Just so it is an
+inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men idiots and
+others rascals. I knows a fellow whose right half is a genius, but his
+other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a friend perfectly
+honest on one side, but who was sent to jail because the other had
+an inveterate tendency in the direction of picking pockets and
+appropriating aes alienum.”
+
+All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.
+
+The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins had
+never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice might,
+to a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative nature.
+Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover of lonely
+walks,--one who listened for the whispers of Nature and watched her
+shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over everything.
+But Cyprian had never shown the talent or the inclination for writing in
+verse.
+
+He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being somewhat
+older, and having had the advantage of academic and college culture,
+often gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his powers, such
+as genius frequently requires at the hands of humbler intelligences.
+Cyprian was incapable of jealousy; and although the name of Gifted
+Hopkins was getting to be known beyond the immediate neighborhood, and
+his autograph had been requested by more than one young lady living in
+another county, he never thought of envying the young poet's spreading
+popularity.
+
+That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor may
+be inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed himself
+in his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one which was held
+at the “store” where he officiated as “clerk.”
+
+“I become more and more assured, Cyprian,” he said, leaning over the
+counter, “that I was born to be a poet. I feel it in my marrow. I must
+succeed. I must win the laurel of fame. I must taste the sweets of”--
+
+“Molasses,” said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that moment,
+bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, “ma wants three gills of
+molasses.”
+
+Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure. He served
+the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness, made an
+entry on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.
+
+“Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian. The very last piece I wrote was copied
+in two papers. It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and--don't think I am
+too vain--one young lady has told me that it reminded her of Pollok. You
+never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?”
+
+“I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises, and
+a letter now and then. Do you find it an easy and pleasant exercise to
+make rhymes?”
+
+Pleasant! Poetry is to me a delight and a passion. I never know what
+I am going to write when I sit down. And presently the rhymes begin
+pounding in my brain,--it seems as if there were a hundred couples of
+them, paired like so many dancers,--and then these rhymes seem to take
+possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in all sorts of
+beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the verses run measuring
+themselves out like”--
+
+“Ribbins,--any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins? Five eighths of a yard,
+if you please, Mr. Hopkins. How's your folks?” Then, in a lower tone,
+“Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were sweet pooty.”
+
+Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid of
+certain brass nails on the counter. He gave good measure, not prodigal,
+for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very moderate strain
+on the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with a contempt of
+infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its genial mood.
+
+The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those bewitching
+glances which the young poet--let us rather say the poet, without making
+odious distinctions--is in the confirmed habit of receiving from dear
+woman.
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: “I do not know where this talent, as my
+friends call it, of mine, comes from. My father used to carry a chain
+for a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the house he
+used to measure land with. I don't see why that should make me a poet.
+My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so are other young
+men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical genius. But wherever I
+got it, it comes as easy to me to write in verse as to write in prose,
+almost. Don't you ever feel a longing to send your thoughts forth in
+verse, Cyprian?”
+
+“I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often,” Cyprian
+answered; “but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have
+words that seem fitting to clothe them. I have imagined a great many
+poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any kind.
+Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'? If you have ever
+heard her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and unversed poetry.”
+
+“I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme
+or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were
+painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can
+you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is
+neither a regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme? Of
+course you can't. I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in
+verse: nothing can be too beautiful for it.”
+
+Cyprian left the conversation at this point. It was getting more
+suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the
+matter over better with Olive. Just then a little boy came in, and
+bargained with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed
+against his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost
+equal to that of the young poet reciting his own verses.
+
+“A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry,” Cyprian
+said, as he left the “store.” “All in one note, pretty much. Not a great
+many tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and one or two more
+like them. But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt it is as
+exciting to Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius to express
+itself in a poem.”
+
+Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting. He loved too well the sweet
+intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies
+of Milton. These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted
+Hopkins.
+
+Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his
+friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of
+modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences
+of rhyme. He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of
+childhood, its simplicity, its reverence. It seemed as if nothing of all
+that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for there
+was no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and all else
+he could not help idealizing into its own conception of itself, so to
+speak. He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the flower, and the
+root as well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his capacity of affection
+or admiration on the blossom or bud upon which his friend the poet
+lavished the wealth of his verse. Thus Nature took him into her
+confidence. She loves the men of science well, and tells them all her
+family secrets,--who is the father of this or that member of the group,
+who is brother, sister, cousin, and so on, through all the circle of
+relationship. But there are others to whom she tells her dreams; not
+what species or genus her lily belongs to, but what vague thought it has
+when it dresses in white, or what memory of its birthplace that is
+which we call its fragrance. Cyprian was one of these. Yet he was not
+a complete nature. He required another and a wholly different one to
+be the complement of his own. Olive came as near it as a sister could,
+but--we must borrow an old image--moonlight is no more than a cold and
+vacant glimmer on the sun-dial, which only answers to the great flaming
+orb of day. If Cyprian could but find some true, sweet-tempered,
+well-balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those special imaginative
+gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to him in the
+intense reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and adorn her
+existence,--how she could direct and chasten and elevate the character
+of all his thoughts and actions!
+
+“Bathsheba,” said Olive, “it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more
+and more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard. He has never got over the fancy
+he took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and called
+her the fire-hang-bird. Wouldn't they suit each other by and by, after
+Myrtle has come to herself and grown into a beautiful and noble woman,
+as I feel sure she will in due time?”
+
+“Myrtle is very lovely,” Bathsheba answered, “but is n't she a little
+too--flighty--for one like your brother? Cyprian isn't more like
+other young men than Myrtle is like other young girls. I have thought
+sometimes--I wondered whether out-of-the-way people and common ones do
+not get along best together. Does n't Cyprian want some more
+every-day kind of girl to keep him straight? Myrtle is beautiful,
+beautiful,--fascinates everybody. Has Mr. Bradshaw been following after
+her lately? He is taken with her too. Didn't you ever think she would
+have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at last? He looks to me like a man
+that would hold on desperately as a lover.”
+
+If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl, hardly
+sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or nineteen, it
+would have been plain sailing enough for Murray Bradshaw. But he knew
+what a distance their ages seemed just now to put between them,--a
+distance which would grow practically less and less with every year,
+and he did not wish to risk anything so long as there was no danger of
+interference. He rather encouraged Gifted Hopkins to write poetry to
+Myrtle. “Go in, Gifted,” he said, “there's no telling what may come of
+it,” and Gifted did go in at a great rate.
+
+Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with
+a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of
+Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron
+or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle
+was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as
+she had been by the religious fervors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+
+He spoke well of Cyprian Eveleth. A good young man,--limited, but
+exemplary. Would succeed well as rector of a small parish. That required
+little talent, but a good deal of the humbler sort of virtue. As for
+himself, he confessed to ambition,--yes, a great deal of ambition.
+A failing, he supposed, but not the worst of failings. He felt the
+instinct to handle the larger interests of society. The village would
+perhaps lose sight of him for a time; but he meant to emerge sooner or
+later in the higher spheres of government or diplomacy. Myrtle must keep
+his secret. Nobody else knew it. He could not help making a confidant of
+her,--a thing he had never done before with any other person as to his
+plans in life. Perhaps she might watch his career with more interest
+from her acquaintance with him. He loved to think that there was
+one woman at least who would be pleased to hear of his success if
+he succeeded, as with life and health he would,--who would share his
+disappointment if fate should not favor him.--So he wound and wreathed
+himself into her thoughts.
+
+It was not very long before Myrtle began to accept the idea that she
+was the one person in the world whose peculiar duty it was to sympathize
+with the aspiring young man whose humble beginnings she had the honor
+of witnessing. And it is not very far from being the solitary confidant,
+and the single source of inspiration, to the growth of a livelier
+interest, where a young man and a young woman are in question.
+
+Myrtle was at this time her own mistress as never before. The three
+young men had access to her as she walked to and from meeting and in her
+frequent rambles, besides the opportunities Cyprian had of meeting her
+in his sister's company, and the convenient visits which, in connection
+with the great lawsuit, Murray Bradshaw could make, without question, at
+The Poplars.
+
+It was not long before Cyprian perceived that he could never pass a
+certain boundary of intimacy with Myrtle. Very pleasant and sisterly
+always she was with him; but she never looked as if she might mean more
+than she said, and cherished a little spark of sensibility which might
+be fanned into the flame of love. Cyprian felt this so certainly that he
+was on the point of telling his grief to Bathsheba, who looked to him
+as if she would sympathize as heartily with him as his own sister, and
+whose sympathy would have a certain flavor in it,--something which one
+cannot find in the heart of the dearest sister that ever lived. But
+Bathsheba was herself sensitive, and changed color when Cyprian ventured
+a hint or two in the direction of his thought, so that he never got so
+fax as to unburden his heart to her about Myrtle, whom she admired so
+sincerely that she could not have helped feeling a great interest in his
+passion towards her.
+
+As for Gifted Hopkins, the roses that were beginning to bloom fresher
+and fresher every day in Myrtle's cheeks unfolded themselves more and
+more freely, to speak metaphorically, in his song. Every week she would
+receive a delicately tinted note with lines to “Myrtle awaking,” or to
+“Myrtle retiring,” (one string of verses a little too Musidora-ish, and
+which soon found itself in the condition of a cinder, perhaps reduced
+to that state by spontaneous combustion,) or to “The Flower of the
+Tropics,” or to the “Nymph of the River-side,” or other poetical alias,
+such as bards affect in their sieges of the female heart.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was of a sanguine temperament. As he read and re-read his
+verses it certainly seemed to him that they must reach the heart of
+the angelic being to whom they were addressed. That she was slow in
+confessing the impression they made upon her, was a favorable sign; so
+many girls called his poems “sweet pooty,” that those charming words,
+though soothing, no longer stirred him deeply. Myrtle's silence showed
+that the impression his verses had made was deep. Time would develop her
+sentiments; they were both young; his position was humble as yet; but
+when he had become famous through the land-oh blissful thought!--the
+bard of Oxbow Village would bear a name that any woman would be proud
+to assume, and the M. H. which her delicate hands had wrought on the
+kerchiefs she wore would yet perhaps be read, not Myrtle Hazard, but
+Myrtle Hopkins.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. SUSAN'S YOUNG MAN.
+
+There seems no reasonable doubt that Myrtle Hazard might have made a
+safe thing of it with Gifted Hopkins, (if so inclined,) provided that
+she had only been secured against interference. But the constant habit
+of reading his verses to Susan Posey was not without its risk to so
+excitable a nature as that of the young poet. Poets were always capable
+of divided affections, and Cowley's “Chronicle” is a confession that
+would fit the whole tribe of them. It is true that Gifted had no right
+to regard Susan's heart as open to the wiles of any new-comer. He knew
+that she considered herself, and was considered by another, as pledged
+and plighted. Yet she was such a devoted listener, her sympathies were
+so easily roused, her blue eyes glistened so tenderly at the least
+poetical hint, such as “Never, oh never,” “My aching heart,” “Go, let
+me weep,”--any of those touching phrases out of the long catalogue which
+readily suggests itself, that her influence was getting to be such
+that Myrtle (if really anxious to secure him) might look upon it
+with apprehension, and the owner of Susan's heart (if of a jealous
+disposition) might have thought it worth while to make a visit to Oxbow
+Village to see after his property.
+
+It may seem not impossible that some friend had suggested as much as
+this to the young lady's lover.
+
+The caution would have been unnecessary, or at least premature. Susan
+was loyal as ever to her absent friend. Gifted Hopkins had never yet
+presumed upon the familiar relations existing between them to attempt to
+shake her allegiance. It is quite as likely, after all, that the young
+gentleman about to make his appearance in Oxbow Village visited the
+place of his own accord, without a hint from anybody. But the fact
+concerns us more than the reason of it, just now.
+
+“Who do you think is coming, Mr. Gridley? Who do you think is coming?”
+ said Susan Posey, her face covered with a carnation such as the first
+season may see in a city belle, but not the second.
+
+“Well, Susan Posey, I suppose I must guess, though I am rather slow at
+that business. Perhaps the Governor. No, I don't think it can be the
+Governor, for you would n't look so happy if it was only his Excellency.
+It must be the President, Susan Posey,--President James Buchanan. Have
+n't I guessed right, now, tell me, my dear?”
+
+“O Mr. Gridley, you are too bad,--what do I care for governors and
+presidents? I know somebody that's worth fifty million thousand
+presidents,--and he 's coming,--my Clement is coming,” said Susan, who
+had by this time learned to consider the awful Byles Gridley as her next
+friend and faithful counsellor.
+
+Susan could not stay long in the house after she got her note informing
+her that her friend was soon to be with her. Everybody told everything
+to Olive Eveleth, and Susan must run over to the parsonage to tell her
+that there was a young gentleman coming to Oxbow Village; upon which
+Olive asked who it was, exactly as if she did not know; whereupon Susan
+dropped her eyes and said, “Clement,--I mean Mr. Lindsay.”
+
+That was a fair piece of news now, and Olive had her bonnet on five
+minutes after Susan was gone, and was on her way to Bathsheba's,--it was
+too bad that the poor girl who lived so out of the world shouldn't
+know anything of what was going on in it. Bathsheba had been in all the
+morning, and the Doctor had said she must take the air every day; so
+Bathsheba had on her bonnet a little after Olive had gone, and walked
+straight up to The Poplars to tell Myrtle Hazard that a certain young
+gentleman, Clement Lindsay, was coming to Oxbow Village.
+
+It was perhaps fortunate that there was no special significance to
+Myrtle in the name of Clement Lindsay. Since the adventure which had
+brought these two young persons together, and, after coming so near a
+disaster, had ended in a mere humiliation and disappointment, and
+but for Master Gridley's discreet kindness might have led to foolish
+scandal, Myrtle had never referred to it in any way. Nobody really knew
+what her plans had been except Olive and Cyprian, who had observed a
+very kind silence about the whole matter. The common version of the
+story was harmless, and near enough to the truth,--down the river,--boat
+upset,--pulled out,--taken care of by some women in a house farther
+down,--sick, brain fever,--pretty near it, anyhow,--old Dr. Hurlbut
+called in,--had her hair cut,--hystericky, etc., etc.
+
+Myrtle was contented with this statement, and asked no questions, and it
+was a perfectly understood thing that nobody alluded to the subject in
+her presence. It followed from all this that the name of Clement Lindsay
+had no peculiar meaning for her. Nor was she like to recognize him as
+the youth in whose company she had gone through her mortal peril, for
+all her recollections were confused and dreamlike from the moment when
+she awoke and found herself in the foaming rapids just above the fall,
+until that when her senses returned, and she saw Master Byles Gridley
+standing over her with that look of tenderness in his square features
+which had lingered in her recollection, and made her feel towards him as
+if she were his daughter.
+
+Now this had its advantage; for as Clement was Susan's young man, and
+had been so for two or three years, it would have been a great pity
+to have any such curious relations established between him and Myrtle
+Hazard as a consciousness on both sides of what had happened would
+naturally suggest.
+
+“Who is this Clement Lindsay, Bathsheba?” Myrtle asked.
+
+“Why, Myrtle, don't you remember about Susan Posey's is-to-be,--the
+young man that has been well, I don't know, but I suppose engaged to her
+ever since they were children almost?”
+
+“Yes, yes, I remember now. Oh dear! I have forgotten so many things, I
+should think I had been dead and was coming back to life again. Do you
+know anything about him, Bathsheba? Did n't somebody say he was very
+handsome? I wonder if he is really in love with Susan Posey. Such a
+simple thing? I want to see him. I have seen so few young men.”
+
+As Myrtle said these words, she lifted the sleeve a little on her left
+arm, by a half-instinctive and half-voluntary movement. The glimmering
+gold of Judith Pride's bracelet flashed out the yellow gleam which has
+been the reddening of so many hands and the blackening of so, many
+souls since that innocent sin-breeder was first picked up in the land of
+Havilah. There came a sudden light into her eye, such as Bathsheba
+had never seen there before. It looked to her as if Myrtle were saying
+unconsciously to herself that she had the power of beauty, and would
+like to try its influence on the handsome young man whom she was soon to
+meet, even at the risk of unseating poor little Susan in his affections.
+This pained the gentle and humble-minded girl, who, without having
+tasted the world's pleasures, had meekly consecrated herself to the
+lowly duties which lay nearest to her. For Bathsheba's phrasing of life
+was in the monosyllables of a rigid faith. Her conceptions of the human
+soul were all simplicity and purity, but elementary. She could not
+conceive the vast license the creative energy allows itself in mingling
+the instincts which, after long conflict, may come into harmonious
+adjustment. The flash which Myrtle's eye had caught from the gleam of
+the golden bracelet filled Bathsheba with a sudden fear that she was
+like to be led away by the vanities of that world lying in wickedness of
+which the minister's daughter had heard so much and seen so little.
+
+Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself. She only
+felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often
+gives us,--such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a
+parent feel,--that impalpable something which in the slightest possible
+inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a
+sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true
+that what she saw meant a great deal. It meant the dawning in Myrtle
+Hazard of one of her as yet unlived secondary lives. Bathsheba's virgin
+perceptions had caught a faint early ray of its glimmering twilight.
+
+She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has made
+seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and that she
+did not know about Susan's sentiments. Only, as they had kept so long to
+each other, she supposed there must be love between them.
+
+Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its
+perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to look
+upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds
+of Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty
+fancies. She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her
+eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified ancestress, but
+on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the
+splendors of her full-blown womanhood.
+
+The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome,
+as the glance at him already given might have foreshadowed. But his
+features had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and
+the sober tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had given
+him a maturity beyond his years. The story was not an uncommon one. At
+sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream. At eighteen he had awoke, and
+found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to his so that its
+life was dependent on his own. Whether it would have perished if its
+filaments had been gently disentangled from the object to which they
+had attached themselves, experienced judges of such matters may perhaps
+question. To justify Clement in his estimate of the danger of such an
+experiment, we must remember that to young people in their teens a first
+passion is a portentous and unprecedented phenomenon. The young man may
+have been mistaken in thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and
+may have done more than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so,
+it was the mistake of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of
+another's feelings by his own. He measured the depth of his own rather
+by what he felt they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet
+sounded.
+
+Clement was called a “genius” by those who knew him, and was
+consequently in danger of being spoiled early. The risk is great enough
+anywhere, but greatest in a new country, where there is an almost
+universal want of fixed standards of excellence.
+
+He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a
+planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work of
+eye and hand. It would not have been strange if he thought he could do
+everything, having gifts which were capable of various application,--and
+being an American citizen. But though he was a good draughtsman, and had
+made some reliefs and modelled some figures, he called himself only an
+architect. He had given himself up to his art, not merely from a love
+of it and talent for it, but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he
+thought his country wanted a race of builders to clothe the new forms of
+religious, social, and national life afresh from the forest, the quarry,
+and the mine. Some thought he would succeed, others that he would be a
+brilliant failure.
+
+“Grand notions,--grand notions,” the master with whom he studied said.
+“Large ground plan of life,--splendid elevation. A little wild in some
+of his fancies, perhaps, but he's only a boy, and he's the kind of boy
+that sometimes grows to be a pretty big man. Wait and see,--wait and
+see. He works days, and we can let him dream nights. There's a good deal
+of him, anyhow.” His fellow-students were puzzled. Those who thought
+of their calling as a trade, and looked forward to the time when they
+should be embodying the ideals of municipal authorities in brick and
+stone, or making contracts with wealthy citizens, doubted whether
+Clement would have a sharp eye enough for business. “Too many whims, you
+know. All sorts of queer ideas in his head,--as if a boy like him were
+going to make things all over again!”.
+
+No doubt there was something of youthful extravagance in his plans and
+expectations. But it was the untamed enthusiasm which is the source of
+all great thoughts and deeds,--a beautiful delirium which age commonly
+tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath the world furnishes
+gratis proves a pretty certain cure.
+
+Creation is always preceded by chaos. The youthful architect's mind was
+confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in upon
+it, and which he had not yet had time or developed mature strength
+sufficient to reduce to order. The young American of any freshness of
+intellect is stimulated to dangerous excess by the conditions of life
+into which he is born. There is a double proportion of oxygen in the New
+World air. The chemists have not found it out yet, but human brains and
+breathing-organs have long since made the discovery.
+
+Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his possibilities
+of happiness in one direction, and he felt that there was a certain
+grandeur in the recompense of working out his defeated instincts through
+the ambitious medium of his noble art. Had not Pharaohs chosen it to
+proclaim their longings for immortality, Caesars their passion for pomp
+and luxury, and priests to symbolize their conceptions of the heavenly
+mansions? His dreams were on a grand scale; such, after all, are the
+best possessions of youth. Had he but been free, or mated with a
+nature akin to his own, he would have felt himself as truly the heir
+of creation as any young man that lived. But his lot was cast, and his
+youth had all the serious aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood.
+In the region of his art alone he hoped always to find freedom and a
+companionship which his home life could never give him.
+
+Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank,
+but was called unexpectedly back to the city. Happily Susan was not
+exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance
+between them to dare to question his actions. Perhaps she found a
+partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried his
+new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing them to
+her. “Would that you were with us at this delightful season,” she
+wrote in the autumn; “but no, your Susan must not repine. Yet, in the
+beautiful words of our native poet,
+
+     “Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
+     For absence makes thee doubly dear;
+     Ah! what is life while thou 'rt away?
+     'T is night without the orb of day!'”
+
+The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and
+promising friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself. The
+letter, it is unnecessary to state, was voluminous,--for a woman can
+tell her love, or other matter of interest, over and over again in as
+many forms as another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing
+the musical changes of “In Memoriam.”
+
+The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long. They
+convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could come
+to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work he had to
+keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any rate. But at
+last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was coming; yes, it
+was so nice, and, oh dear! should n't she be real happy to see him?
+
+To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for human
+nature's daily food. Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could have told
+herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have confessed to
+certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of late, cast a
+shadow on her seemingly bright future. With all the pleasure that the
+thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a little tremor, a certain
+degree of awe, in contemplating his visit. If she could have clothed her
+self-humiliation in the gold and purple of the “Portuguese Sonnets,”
+ it would have been another matter; but the trouble with the most common
+sources of disquiet is that they have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology
+to air themselves in; the inward burning goes on without the relief and
+gratifying display of the crater.
+
+“A friend of mine is coming to the village,” she said to Mr. Gifted
+Hopkins. “I want you to see him. He is a genius,--as some other young
+men are.” (This was obviously personal, and the youthful poet blushed
+with ingenuous delight.) “I have known him for ever so many years. He
+and I are very good friends.” The poet knew that this meant an exclusive
+relation between them; and though the fact was no surprise to him,
+his countenance fell a little. The truth was, that his admiration was
+divided between Myrtle, who seemed to him divine and adorable, but
+distant, and Susan, who listened to his frequent poems, whom he was in
+the habit of seeing in artless domestic costumes, and whose attractions
+had been gaining upon him of late in the enforced absence of his
+divinity.
+
+He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his
+desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the
+language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he
+began thus--
+
+               “ANOTHER'S!
+
+     “Another's!  Oh the pang, the smart!
+          Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge,
+     --The barbed fang has rent a heart
+          Which--which
+
+“judge--judge,--no, not judge. Budge, drudge, fudge--What a disgusting
+language English is! Nothing fit to couple with such a word as grudge!
+And the gush of an impassioned moment arrested in full flow, stopped
+short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme!
+
+“Judge,--budge,--drudge,--nudge, oh!--smudge,--misery!--fudge. In
+vain,--futile,--no use,--all up for to-night!”
+
+While the poet, headed off in this way by the poverty of his native
+tongue, sought inspiration by retiring into the world of dreams,--went
+to bed, in short, his more fortunate rival was just entering the
+village, where he was to make his brief residence at the house of Deacon
+Rumrill, who, having been a loser by the devouring element, was glad to
+receive a stray boarder when any such were looking about for quarters.
+
+For some reason or other he was restless that evening, and took out
+a volume he had brought with him to beguile the earlier hours of the
+night. It was too late when he arrived to disturb the quiet of Mrs.
+Hopkins's household, and whatever may have been Clement's impatience,
+he held it in check, and sat tranquilly until midnight over the pages of
+the book with which he had prudently provided himself.
+
+“Hope you slept well last night,” said the old Deacon, when Mr. Clement
+came down to breakfast the next morning.
+
+“Very well, thank you,--that is, after I got to bed. But I sat up pretty
+late reading my favorite Scott. I am apt to forget how the hours pass
+when I have one of his books in my hand.”
+
+The worthy Deacon looked at Mr. Clement with a sudden accession of
+interest.
+
+“You couldn't find better reading, young man. Scott is my favorite
+author. A great man. I have got his likeness in a gilt-frame hanging up
+in the other room. I have read him all through three times.”
+
+The young man's countenance brightened. He had not expected to find so
+much taste for elegant literature in an old village deacon.
+
+“What are your favorites among his writings, Deacon? I suppose you have
+your particular likings, as the rest of us have.”
+
+The Deacon was flattered by the question. “Well,” he answered, “I
+can hardly tell you. I like pretty much everything Scott ever wrote.
+Sometimes I think it is one thing, and sometimes another. Great on
+Paul's Epistles,--don't you think so?”
+
+The honest fact was, that Clement remembered very little about “Paul's
+Letters to his Kinsfolk,”--a book of Sir Walter's less famous than
+many of his others; but he signified his polite assent to the Deacon's
+statement, rather wondering at his choice of a favorite, and smiling at
+his queer way of talking about the Letters as Epistles.
+
+“I am afraid Scott is not so much read now-a-days as he once was, and as
+he ought to be,” said Mr. Clement: “Such character, such nature and so
+much grace.”
+
+“That's it,--that's it, young man,” the Deacon broke in,--“Natur' and
+Grace,--Natur' and Grace. Nobody ever knew better what those two words
+meant than Scott did, and I'm very glad to see--you've chosen such good
+wholesome reading. You can't set up too late, young man, to read Scott.
+If I had twenty children, they should all begin reading Scott as soon as
+they were old enough to spell sin,--and that's the first word my little
+ones learned, next to 'pa' and I 'ma.' Nothing like beginning the
+lessons of life in good season.”
+
+“What a grim old satirist!” Clement said to himself. “I wonder if the
+old man reads other novelists.--Do tell me, Deacon, if you have read
+Thackeray's last story?”
+
+“Thackeray's story? Published by the American Tract Society?”
+
+“Not exactly,” Clement answered, smiling, and quite delighted to find
+such an unexpected vein of grave pleasantry about the demure-looking
+church-dignitary; for the Deacon asked his question without moving a
+muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and
+smile. First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for the
+immovable solemnity of their features. Clement promised himself not a
+little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the venerable
+Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had cultivated a
+literary taste which would make him a more agreeable companion than the
+common ecclesiastics of his grade in country villages.
+
+After breakfast, Mr. Clement walked forth in the direction of Mrs.
+Hopkins's house, thinking as he went of the pleasant surprise his visit
+would bring to his longing and doubtless pensive Susan; for though she
+knew he was coming, she did not know that he was at that moment in Oxbow
+Village.
+
+As he drew near the house, the first thing he saw was Susan Posey,
+almost running against her just as he turned a corner. She looked
+wonderfully lively and rosy, for the weather was getting keen and the
+frosts had begun to bite. A young gentleman was walking at her side,
+and reading to her from a paper he held in his hand. Both looked deeply
+interested,--so much so that Clement felt half ashamed of himself for
+intruding upon them so abruptly.
+
+But lovers are lovers, and Clement could not help joining them.
+The first thing, of course, was the utterance of two simultaneous
+exclamations, “Why, Clement!” “Why, Susan!” What might have come next
+in the programme, but for the presence of a third party, is matter of
+conjecture; but what did come next was a mighty awkward look on the part
+of Susan Posey, and the following short speech: “Mr. Lindsay, let me
+introduce Mr. Hopkins, my friend, the poet I 've written to you about.
+He was just reading two of his poems to me. Some other time, Gifted--Mr.
+Hopkins.”
+
+“Oh no, Mr. Hopkins,--pray go on,” said Clement. “I 'm very fond of
+poetry.”
+
+The poet did not require much urging, and began at once reciting over
+again the stanzas which were afterwards so much admired in the “Banner
+and Oracle,”--the first verse being, as the readers of that paper will
+remember,
+
+    “She moves in splendor, like the ray
+     That flashes from unclouded skies,
+     And all the charms of night and day
+     Are mingled in her hair and eyes.”
+
+Clement, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone
+with his beloved, commanded his feelings admirably. He signified his
+approbation of the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the
+rhymes absolutely without blemish. The stanzas reminded him forcibly of
+one of the greatest poets of the century.
+
+Gifted flushed hot with pleasure. He had tasted the blood of his own
+rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the bag
+of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to drag his
+piece away from him.
+
+“Perhaps you will like these lines still better,” he said; “the style is
+more modern:--
+
+     “'O daughter of the spiced South,
+          Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine
+          That staineth with its hue divine
+       The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'”
+
+And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of two
+rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.
+
+Clement was cornered. It was necessary to say something for the poet's
+sake,--perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense responsible
+for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had spoken so often and
+so enthusiastically.
+
+“Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should
+think, until of late years. You modelled this piece on the style of a
+famous living English poet, did you not?”
+
+“Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,--I never imitate. Originality is, if I
+may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte. Why, the
+critics allow as much as that. See here, Mr. Lindsay.”
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom a
+cutting from a newspaper,--which dropped helplessly open of itself, as
+if tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or creases, by
+reason of having been often folded and unfolded read aloud as follows:
+
+“The bard of Oxbow Pillage--our valued correspondent who writes over
+the signature of G. H.--is, in our opinion, more remarkable for his
+originality than for any other of his numerous gifts.”
+
+Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated
+with a sense of triumph. Susan could not help sharing his feeling of
+satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without knowing
+it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a little bit--the
+merest infinitesimal atom--nearer to Gifted Hopkins, who was on one side
+of her, while Clement walked on the other. Women love the conquering
+party,--it is the way of their sex. And poets, as we have seen,
+are well-nigh irresistible when they exert their dangerous power of
+fascination upon the female heart. But Clement was above jealousy; and,
+if he perceived anything of this movement, took no notice of it.
+
+He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day. She was tender in her
+expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little something
+in her looks and language from time to time that Clement did not know
+exactly what to make of. She colored once or twice when the young poet's
+name was mentioned. She was not so full of her little plans for the
+future as she had sometimes been, “everything was so uncertain,” she
+said. Clement asked himself whether she felt quite as sure that her
+attachment would last as she once did. But there were no reproaches, not
+even any explanations, which are about as bad between lovers. There
+was nothing but an undefined feeling on his side that she did not cling
+quite so closely to him, perhaps, as he had once thought, and that, if
+he had happened to have been drowned that day when he went down with
+the beautiful young woman, it was just conceivable that Susan, who
+would have cried dreadfully, no doubt, would in time have listened to
+consolation from some other young man,--possibly from the young poet
+whose verses he had been admiring. Easy-crying widows take new husbands
+soonest; there is nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master
+Gridley used to say. Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as
+Clement well knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up
+like the rose which had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned
+by Cowper.
+
+As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this visit
+of Clement's than he had ever before known. He wandered about with
+a dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance. He showed a
+falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and disturbed
+his mother, for she had filled the house with fragrant suggestions of
+good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was to be her guest
+at tea. And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut called in the native
+dialect cymbal (Qu. Symbol? B. G.) which graced the board with its
+plastic forms, suggestive of the most pleasing objects,--the spiral
+ringlets pendent from the brow of beauty; the magic circlet, which is
+the pledge of plighted affection,--the indissoluble knot, which typifies
+the union of hearts, which organs were also largely represented; this
+exceptional delicacy would at any other time have claimed his special
+notice. But his mother remarked that he paid little attention to these,
+and his, “No, I thank you,” when it came to the preserved “damsels,” as
+some call them, carried a pang with it to the maternal bosom. The most
+touching evidence of his unhappiness--whether intentional or the result
+of accident was not evident was a broken heart, which he left upon his
+plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the language of
+flowers. His thoughts were gloomy during that day, running a good deal
+on the more picturesque and impressive methods of bidding a voluntary
+farewell to a world which had allured him with visions of beauty only to
+snatch them from his impassioned gaze. His mother saw something of this,
+and got from him a few disjointed words, which led her to lock up the
+clothes-line and hide her late husband's razors,--an affectionate, yet
+perhaps unnecessary precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from
+this point of view by those who have the natural outlet of verse
+to relieve them is rarely followed by a casualty. It may rather be
+considered as implying a more than average chance for longevity; as
+those who meditate an--imposing finish naturally save themselves for it,
+and are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and this
+is apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to write
+or a proof to be corrected.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. THE SECOND MEETING.
+
+Miss Eveleth requests the pleasure of Mr. Lindsay's company to meet a
+few friends on the evening of the Feast of St. Ambrose, December 7th,
+Wednesday.
+
+THE PARSONAGE, December 6th.
+
+It was the luckiest thing in the world. They always made a little
+festival of that evening at the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth's, in honor of his
+canonized namesake, and because they liked to have a good time. It
+came this year just at the right moment, for here was a distinguished
+stranger visiting in the place. Oxbow Village seemed to be running
+over with its one extra young man,--as may be seen sometimes in larger
+villages, and even in cities of moderate dimensions.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had called on Clement the day after his
+arrival. He had already met the Deacon in the street, and asked some
+questions about his transient boarder.
+
+A very interesting young man, the Deacon said, much given to the
+reading of pious books. Up late at night after he came, reading Scott's
+Commentary. Appeared to be as fond of serious works as other young folks
+were of their novels and romances and other immoral publications. He,
+the Deacon, thought of having a few religious friends to meet the young
+gentleman, if he felt so disposed; and should like to have him, Mr.
+Bradshaw, come in and take a part in the exercises.--Mr. Bradshaw was
+unfortunately engaged. He thought the young gentleman could hardly find
+time for such a meeting during his brief visit.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw expected naturally to see a youth of imperfect
+constitution, and cachectic or dyspeptic tendencies, who was in training
+to furnish one of those biographies beginning with the statement that,
+from his infancy, the subject of it showed no inclination for boyish
+amusements, and so on, until he dies out, for the simple reason that
+there was not enough of him to live. Very interesting, no doubt, Master
+Byles Gridley would have said, but had no more to do with good, hearty,
+sound life than the history of those very little people to be seen in
+museums preserved in jars of alcohol, like brandy peaches.
+
+When Mr. Clement Lindsay presented himself, Mr. Bradshaw was a good deal
+surprised to see a young fellow of such a mould. He pleased himself with
+the idea that he knew a man of mark at sight, and he set down Clement in
+that category at his first glance. The young man met his penetrating and
+questioning look with a frank, ingenuous, open aspect, before which
+he felt himself disarmed, as it were, and thrown upon other means of
+analysis. He would try him a little in talk.
+
+“I hope you like these people you are with. What sort of a man do you
+find my old friend the Deacon?”
+
+Clement laughed. “A very queer old character. Loves his joke as well,
+and is as sly in making it, as if he had studied Joe Miller instead of
+the Catechism.”
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked at the young man to know what he meant. Mr. Lindsay
+talked in a very easy way for a serious young person. He was puzzled.
+He did not see to the bottom of this description of the Deacon. With a
+lawyer's instinct, he kept his doubts to himself and tried his witness
+with a new question.
+
+“Did you talk about books at all with the old man?”
+
+“To be sure I did. Would you believe it,--that aged saint is a great
+novel-reader. So he tells me. What is more, he brings up his children to
+that sort of reading, from the time when they first begin to spell. If
+anybody else had told me such a story about an old country deacon, I
+wouldn't have believed it; but he said so himself, to me, at breakfast
+this morning.”
+
+Mr. Bradshaw felt as if either he or Mr. Lindsay must certainly be in
+the first stage of mild insanity, and he did not think that he himself
+could be out of his wits. He must try one more question. He had become
+so mystified that he forgot himself, and began putting his interrogation
+in legal form.
+
+“Will you state, if you please--I beg your pardon--may I ask who is your
+own favorite author?”
+
+“I think just now I like to read Scott better than almost anybody.”
+
+“Do you mean the Rev. Thomas Scott, author of the Commentary?”
+
+Clement stared at Mr. Bradshaw, and wondered whether he was trying to
+make a fool of him. The young lawyer hardly looked as if he could be a
+fool himself.
+
+“I mean Sir Walter Scott,” he said, dryly.
+
+“Oh!” said Mr. Bradshaw. He saw that there had been a slight
+misunderstanding between the young man and his worthy host, but it was
+none of his business, and there were other subjects of interest to talk
+about.
+
+“You know one of our charming young ladies very well, I believe, Mr.
+Lindsay. I think you are an old acquaintance of Miss Posey, whom we all
+consider so pretty.”
+
+Poor Clement! The question pierced to the very marrow of his soul, but
+it was put with the utmost suavity and courtesy, and honeyed with a
+compliment to the young lady, too, so that there was no avoiding a
+direct and pleasant answer to it.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “I have known the young lady you speak of for a long
+time, and very well,--in fact, as you must have heard, we are something
+more than friends. My visit here is principally on her account.”
+
+“You must give the rest of us a chance to see something of you during
+your visit, Mr. Lindsay. I hope you are invited to Miss Eveleth's
+to-morrow evening?”
+
+“Yes, I got a note this morning. Tell me, Mr. Bradshaw, who is there
+that I shall meet if I go? I have no doubt there are girls here in the
+village I should like to see, and perhaps some young fellows that I
+should like to talk with. You know all that's prettiest and pleasantest,
+of course.”
+
+“Oh, we're a little place, Mr. Lindsay. A few nice people, the
+rest comme Va, you know. High-bush blackberries and low-bush
+black-berries,--you understand,--just so everywhere,--high-bush here and
+there, low-bush plenty. You must see the two parsons' daughters,--Saint
+Ambrose's and Saint Joseph's,--and another girl I want particularly to
+introduce you to. You shall form your own opinion of her. I call her
+handsome and stylish, but you have got spoiled, you know. Our young
+poet, too, one we raised in this place, Mr. Lindsay, and a superior
+article of poet, as we think,--that is, some of us, for the rest of us
+are jealous of him, because the girls are all dying for him and want his
+autograph. And Cyp,--yes, you must talk to Cyp,--he has ideas. But don't
+forget to get hold of old Byles Master Gridley I mean--before you go.
+Big head. Brains enough for a cabinet minister, and fit out a college
+faculty with what was left over. Be sure you see old Byles. Set him
+talking about his book, 'Thoughts on the Universe.' Did n't sell much,
+but has got knowing things in it. I'll show you a copy, and then you
+can tell him you know it, and he will take to you. Come in and get your
+dinner with me to-morrow. We will dine late, as the city folks do, and
+after that we will go over to the Rector's. I should like to show you
+some of our village people.”
+
+Mr. Bradshaw liked the thought of showing the young man to some of his
+friends there. As Clement was already “done for,” or “bowled out,” as
+the young lawyer would have expressed the fact of his being pledged in
+the matrimonial direction, there was nothing to be apprehended on the
+score of rivalry. And although Clement was particularly good-looking,
+and would have been called a distinguishable youth anywhere, Mr.
+Bradshaw considered himself far more than his match, in all probability,
+in social accomplishments. He expected, therefore, a certain amount of
+reflex credit for bringing such a fine young fellow in his company, and
+a second instalment of reputation from outshining him in conversation.
+This was rather nice calculating, but Murray Bradshaw always calculated.
+With most men life is like backgammon, half skill, and half luck, but
+with him it was like chess. He never pushed a pawn without reckoning the
+cost, and when his mind was least busy it was sure to be half a dozen
+moves ahead of the game as it was standing.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw gave Clement a pretty dinner enough for such a place as
+Oxbow Village. He offered him some good wine, and would have made him
+talk so as to show his lining, to use one of his own expressions, but
+Clement had apparently been through that trifling experience, and could
+not be coaxed into saying more than he meant to say. Murray Bradshaw
+was very curious to find out how it was that he had become the victim
+of such a rudimentary miss as Susan Posey. Could she be an heiress in
+disguise? Why no, of course not; had not he made all proper inquiries
+about that when Susan came to town? A small inheritance from an aunt or
+uncle, or some such relative, enough to make her a desirable party in
+the eyes of certain villagers perhaps, but nothing to allure a man like
+this, whose face and figure as marketable possessions were worth say
+a hundred thousand in the girl's own right, as Mr. Bradshaw put it
+roughly, with another hundred thousand if his talent is what some say,
+and if his connection is a desirable one, a fancy price,--anything he
+would fetch. Of course not. Must have got caught when he was a child.
+Why the diavolo didn't he break it off, then?
+
+There was no fault to find with the modest entertainment at the
+Parsonage. A splendid banquet in a great house is an admirable thing,
+provided always its getting up did not cost the entertainer an inward
+conflict, nor its recollection a twinge of economical regret, nor its
+bills a cramp of anxiety. A simple evening party in the smallest village
+is just as admirable in its degree, when the parlor is cheerfully
+lighted, and the board prettily spread, and the guests are made to feel
+comfortable without being reminded that anybody is making a painful
+effort.
+
+We know several of the young people who were there, and need not trouble
+ourselves for the others. Myrtle Hazard had promised to come. She had
+her own way of late as never before; in fact, the women were afraid of
+her. Miss Silence felt that she could not be responsible for her any
+longer. She had hopes for a time that Myrtle would go through the
+customary spiritual paroxysm under the influence of the Rev. Mr.
+Stoker's assiduous exhortations; but since she had broken off with him,
+Miss Silence had looked upon her as little better than a backslider. And
+now that the girl was beginning to show the tendencies which seemed to
+come straight down to her from the belle of the last century, (whose
+rich physical developments seemed to the under-vitalized spinster as
+in themselves a kind of offence against propriety,) the forlorn woman
+folded her thin hands and looked on hopelessly, hardly venturing a
+remonstrance for fear of some new explosion. As for Cynthia, she was
+comparatively easy since she had, through Mr. Byles Gridley, upset the
+minister's questionable arrangement of religious intimacy. She had, in
+fact, in a quiet way, given Mr. Bradshaw to understand that he would
+probably meet Myrtle at the Parsonage if he dropped in at their small
+gathering. Clement walked over to Mrs. Hopkins's after his dinner with
+the young lawyer, and asked if Susan was ready to go with him. At
+the sound of his voice, Gifted Hopkins smote his forehead, and called
+himself, in subdued tones, a miserable being. His imagination wavered
+uncertain for a while between pictures of various modes of ridding
+himself of existence, and fearful deeds involving the life of others.
+He had no fell purpose of actually doing either, but there was a
+gloomy pleasure in contemplating them as possibilities, and in mentally
+sketching the “Lines written in Despair” which would be found in what
+was but an hour before the pocket of the youthful bard, G. H., victim of
+a hopeless passion. All this emotion was in the nature of a surprise to
+the young man. He had fully believed himself desperately in love with
+Myrtle Hazard; and it was not until Clement came into the family circle
+with the right of eminent domain over the realm of Susan's affections,
+that this unfortunate discovered that Susan's pretty ways and morning
+dress and love of poetry and liking for his company had been too much
+for him, and that he was henceforth to be wretched during the remainder
+of his natural life, except so far as he could unburden himself in song.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had asked the privilege of waiting upon
+Myrtle to the little party at the Eveleths. Myrtle was not insensible
+to the attractions of the young lawyer, though she had never thought
+of herself except as a child in her relations with any of these older
+persons. But she was not the same girl that she had been but a few
+months before. She had achieved her independence by her audacious and
+most dangerous enterprise. She had gone through strange nervous trials
+and spiritual experiences which had matured her more rapidly than years
+of common life would have done. She had got back her health, bringing
+with it a riper wealth of womanhood. She had found her destiny in the
+consciousness that she inherited the beauty belonging to her blood, and
+which, after sleeping for a generation or two as if to rest from the
+glare of the pageant that follows beauty through its long career of
+triumph, had come to the light again in her life, and was to repeat the
+legends of the olden time in her own history.
+
+Myrtle's wardrobe had very little of ornament, such as the modistes of
+the town would have thought essential to render a young girl like her
+presentable. There were a few heirlooms of old date, however, which she
+had kept as curiosities until now, and which she looked over until she
+found some lace and other convertible material, with which she enlivened
+her costume a little for the evening. As she clasped the antique
+bracelet around her wrist, she felt as if it were an amulet that
+gave her the power of charming which had been so long obsolete in her
+lineage. At the bottom of her heart she cherished a secret longing to
+try her fascinations on the young lawyer. Who could blame her? It was
+not an inwardly expressed intention,--it was the simple instinctive
+movement to subjugate the strongest of the other sex who had come in her
+way, which, as already said, is as natural to a woman as it is to a man
+to be captivated by the loveliest of those to whom he dares to aspire.
+
+Before William Murray Bradshaw and Myrtle Hazard had reached the
+Parsonage, the girl's cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes were
+flashing with a new excitement. The young man had not made love to her
+directly, but he had interested her in herself by a delicate and tender
+flattery of manner, and so set her fancies working that she was taken
+with him as never before, and wishing that the Parsonage had been a mile
+farther from The Poplars. It was impossible for a young girl like Myrtle
+to conceal the pleasure she received from listening to her seductive
+admirer, who was trying all his trained skill upon his artless
+companion. Murray Bradshaw felt sure that the game was in his hands if
+he played it with only common prudence. There was no need of hurrying
+this child,--it might startle her to make downright love abruptly; and
+now that he had an ally in her own household, and was to have access
+to her with a freedom he had never before enjoyed, there was a
+refined pleasure in playing his fish,--this gamest of golden-scaled
+creatures,--which had risen to his fly, and which he wished to hook, but
+not to land, until he was sure it would be worth his while.
+
+They entered the little parlor at the Parsonage looking so beaming,
+that Olive and Bathsheba exchanged glances which implied so much that it
+would take a full page to tell it with all the potentialities involved.
+
+“How magnificent Myrtle is this evening, Bathsheba!” said Cyprian
+Eveleth, pensively.
+
+“What a handsome pair they are, Cyprian!” said Bathsheba cheerfully.
+
+Cyprian sighed. “She always fascinates me whenever I look upon her.
+Is n't she the very picture of what a poet's love should be,--a poem
+herself,--a glorious lyric,--all light and music! See what a smile the
+creature has! And her voice! When did you ever hear such tones? And when
+was it ever so full of life before.”
+
+Bathsheba sighed. “I do not know any poets but Gifted Hopkins. Does not
+Myrtle look more in her place by the side of Murray Bradshaw than she
+would with Gifted hitched on her arm?”
+
+Just then the poet made his appearance. He looked depressed, as if it
+had cost him an effort to come. He was, however, charged with a message
+which he must deliver to the hostess of the evening.
+
+“They 're coming presently,” he said. “That young man and Susan. Wants
+you to introduce him, Mr. Bradshaw.”
+
+The bell rang presently, and Murray Bradshaw slipped out into the entry
+to meet the two lovers.
+
+“How are you, my fortunate friend?” he said, as he met them at the door.
+“Of course you're well and happy as mortal man can be in this vale of
+tears. Charming, ravishing, quite delicious, that way of dressing your
+hair, Miss Posey! Nice girls here this evening, Mr. Lindsay. Looked
+lovely when I came out of the parlor. Can't say how they will show
+after this young lady puts in an appearance.” In reply to which florid
+speeches Susan blushed, not knowing what else to do, and Clement smiled
+as naturally as if he had been sitting for his photograph.
+
+He felt, in a vague way, that he and Susan were being patronized, which
+is not a pleasant feeling to persons with a certain pride of character.
+There was no expression of contempt about Mr. Bradshaw's manner or
+language at which he could take offence. Only he had the air of a man
+who praises his neighbor without stint, with a calm consciousness that
+he himself is out of reach of comparison in the possessions or qualities
+which he is admiring in the other. Clement was right in his obscure
+perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while he was making his phrases.
+That gentleman was, in another moment, to have the tingling delight of
+showing the grand creature he had just begun to tame. He was going to
+extinguish the pallid light of Susan's prettiness in the brightness of
+Myrtle's beauty. He would bring this young man, neutralized and rendered
+entirely harmless by his irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face
+to face with a masterpiece of young womanhood, and say to him, not
+in words, but as plainly as speech could have told him, “Behold my
+captive!”
+
+It was a proud moment for Murray Bradshaw. He had seen, or thought
+that he had seen, the assured evidence of a speedy triumph over all the
+obstacles of Myrtle's youth and his own present seeming slight excess
+of maturity. Unless he were very greatly mistaken, he could now walk the
+course; the plate was his, no matter what might be the entries. And this
+youth, this handsome, spirited-looking, noble-aired young fellow, whose
+artist-eye could not miss a line of Myrtle's proud and almost defiant
+beauty, was to be the witness of his power, and to look in admiration
+upon his prize! He introduced him to the others, reserving her for the
+last. She was at that moment talking with the worthy Rector, and turned
+when Mr. Bradshaw spoke to her.
+
+“Miss Hazard, will you allow me to present to you my friend, Mr. Clement
+Lindsay?”
+
+They looked full upon each other, and spoke the common words of
+salutation. It was a strange meeting; but we who profess to tell the
+truth must tell strange things, or we shall be liars.
+
+In poor little Susan's letter there was some allusion to a bust of
+Innocence which the young artist had begun, but of which he had said
+nothing in his answer to her. He had roughed out a block of marble for
+that impersonation; sculpture was a delight to him, though secondary to
+his main pursuit. After his memorable adventure, the image of the girl
+he had rescued so haunted him that the pale ideal which was to work
+itself out in the bust faded away in its perpetual presence, and--alas,
+poor Susan! in obedience to the impulse that he could not control, he
+left Innocence sleeping in the marble, and began modelling a figure
+of proud and noble and imperious beauty, to which he gave the name of
+Liberty.
+
+The original which had inspired his conception was before him. These
+were the lips to which his own had clung when he brought her back from
+the land of shadows. The hyacinthine curl of her lengthening locks
+had added something to her beauty; but it was the same face which had
+haunted him. This was the form he had borne seemingly lifeless in his
+arms, and the bosom which heaved so visibly before him was that which
+his eyes they were the calm eyes of a sculptor, but of a sculptor hardly
+twenty years old.
+
+Yes,--her bosom was heaving. She had an unexplained feeling of
+suffocation, and drew great breaths,--she could not have said why,--but
+she could not help it; and presently she became giddy, and had a great
+noise in her ears, and rolled her eyes about, and was on the point of
+going into an hysteric spasm. They called Dr. Hurlbut, who was making
+himself agreeable to Olive just then, to come and see what was the
+matter with Myrtle.
+
+“A little nervous turn,--that is all,” he said.
+
+“Open the window. Loose the ribbon round her neck. Rub her hands.
+Sprinkle some water on her forehead.
+
+“A few drops of cologne. Room too warm for her,--that 's all, I think.”
+
+Myrtle came to herself after a time without anything like a regular
+paroxysm. But she was excitable, and whatever the cause of the
+disturbance may have been, it seemed prudent that she should go home
+early; and the excellent Rector insisted on caring for her, much to the
+discontent of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+“Demonish odd,” said this gentleman, “was n't it, Mr. Lindsay, that Miss
+Hazard should go off in that way. Did you ever see her before?”
+
+“I--I--have seen that young lady before,” Clement answered.
+
+“Where did you meet her?” Mr. Bradshaw asked, with eager interest.
+
+“I met her in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” Clement answered, very
+solemnly.--“I leave this place to-morrow morning. Have you any commands
+for the city?”
+
+“Knows how to shut a fellow up pretty well for a young one, doesn't he?”
+ Mr. Bradshaw thought to himself.
+
+“Thank you, no,” he answered, recovering himself. “Rather a melancholy
+place to make acquaintance in, I should think, that Valley you spoke of.
+I should like to know about it.”
+
+Mr. Clement had the power of looking steadily into another person's eyes
+in a way that was by no means encouraging to curiosity or favorable to
+the process of cross-examination. Mr. Bradshaw was not disposed to press
+his question in the face of the calm, repressive look the young man gave
+him.
+
+“If he was n't bagged, I shouldn't like the shape of things any too
+well,” he said to himself.
+
+The conversation between Mr. Clement Lindsay and Miss Susan Posey, as
+they walked home together, was not very brilliant. “I am going to-morrow
+morning,” he said, “and I must bid you good-by tonight.” Perhaps it is
+as well to leave two lovers to themselves, under these circumstances.
+
+Before he went he spoke to his worthy host, whose moderate demands he
+had to satisfy, and with whom he wished to exchange a few words.
+
+“And by the way, Deacon, I have no use for this book, and as it is in a
+good type, perhaps you would like it. Your favorite, Scott, and one of
+his greatest works. I have another edition of it at home, and don't care
+for this volume.”
+
+“Thank you, thank you, Mr. Lindsay, much obleeged. I shall read that
+copy for your sake, the best of books next to the Bible itself.”
+
+After Mr. Lindsay had gone, the Deacon looked at the back of the book.
+“Scott's Works, Vol. IX.” He opened it at hazard, and happened to fall
+on a well-known page, from which he began reading aloud, slowly,
+
+    “When Izrul, of the Lord beloved,
+     Out of the land of bondage came.”
+
+The whole hymn pleased the grave Deacon. He had never seen this work of
+the author of the Commentary. No matter; anything that such a good man
+wrote must be good reading, and he would save it up for Sunday. The
+consequence of this was, that, when the Rev. Mr. Stoker stopped in on
+his way to meeting on the “Sabbath,” he turned white with horror at the
+spectacle of the senior Deacon of his church sitting, open-mouthed and
+wide-eyed, absorbed in the pages of “Ivanhoe,” which he found enormously
+interesting; but, so far as he had yet read, not occupied with religious
+matters so much as he had expected.
+
+Myrtle had no explanation to give of her nervous attack. Mr. Bradshaw
+called the day after the party, but did not see her. He met her walking,
+and thought she seemed a little more distant than common. That would
+never do. He called again at The Poplars a few days afterwards, and was
+met in the entry by Miss Cynthia, with whom he had a long conversation
+on matters involving Myrtle's interests and their own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. MADNESS?
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay returned to the city and his usual labors in a state
+of strange mental agitation. He had received an impression for which he
+was unprepared. He had seen for the second time a young girl whom, for
+the peace of his own mind, and for the happiness of others, he should
+never again have looked upon until Time had taught their young hearts
+the lesson which all hearts must learn, sooner or later.
+
+What shall the unfortunate person do who has met with one of those
+disappointments, or been betrayed into one of those positions, which
+do violence to all the tenderest feelings, blighting the happiness of
+youth, and the prospects of after years?
+
+If the person is a young man, he has various resources. He can take to
+the philosophic meerschaum, and nicotine himself at brief intervals into
+a kind of buzzing and blurry insensibility, until he begins to “color”
+ at last like the bowl of his own pipe, and even his mind gets the
+tobacco flavor. Or he can have recourse to the more suggestive
+stimulants, which will dress his future up for him in shining
+possibilities that glitter like Masonic regalia, until the morning light
+and the waking headache reveal his illusion. Some kind of spiritual
+anaesthetic he must have, if he holds his grief fast tied to his
+heartstrings. But as grief must be fed with thought, or starve to death,
+it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in other ways that it has
+no time to attend to the wants of that ravening passion. To sit down and
+passively endure it, is apt to end in putting all the mental machinery
+into disorder.
+
+Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already fought,
+and that he had conquered. He believed that he had subdued himself
+completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow of
+disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had
+assigned him in his companion, and share with it all of his own larger
+being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of apprehending.
+
+He had deceived himself. The battle was not fought and won. There
+had been a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the
+enemy--intrenched in the very citadel of life--had rallied, and would
+make another desperate attempt to retrieve his defeat.
+
+The haste with which the young man had quitted the village was only a
+proof that he felt his danger. He believed that, if he came into the
+presence of Myrtle Hazard for the third time, he should be no longer
+master of his feelings. Some explanation must take place between them,
+and how was it possible that it should be without emotion? and in what
+do all emotions shared by a young man with such a young girl as this
+tend to find their last expression?
+
+Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work. He would give
+himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams of what might have been.
+His plans were never so carefully finished, and his studies were never
+so continuous as now. But the passion still wrought within him, and, if
+he drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep until he could
+endure it no longer, and must give it some manifestation. He had covered
+up the bust of Liberty so closely, that not an outline betrayed itself
+through the heavy folds of drapery in which it was wrapped. His thoughts
+recurred to his unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which
+he could find a silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was
+torture to keep imprisoned in his soul. The cold stone would tell them,
+but without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of
+himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered from
+a presence which, lovely as it was, stood between him and all that made
+him seem honorable and worthy to himself.
+
+He uncovered the bust which he had but half shaped, and struck the first
+flake from the glittering marble. The toil, once begun, fascinated him
+strangely, and after the day's work was done, and at every interval he
+could snatch from his duties, he wrought at his secret task.
+
+“Clement is graver than ever,” the young men said at the office. “What's
+the matter, do you suppose? Turned off by the girl they say he means
+to marry by and by? How pale he looks too! Must have something worrying
+him: he used to look as fresh as a clove pink.”
+
+The master with whom he studied saw that he was losing color, and
+looking very much worn; and determined to find out, if he could, whether
+he was not overworking himself. He soon discovered that his light was
+seen burning late into the night, that he was neglecting his natural
+rest, and always busy with some unknown task, not called for in his
+routine of duty or legitimate study.
+
+“Something is wearing on you, Clement,” he said. “You are killing
+yourself with undertaking too much. Will you let me know what keeps you
+so busy when you ought to be asleep, or taking your ease and comfort in
+some way or other?”
+
+Nobody but himself had ever seen his marble or its model. He had now
+almost finished it, laboring at it with such sleepless devotion, and he
+was willing to let his master have a sight of his first effort of the
+kind,--for he was not a sculptor, it must be remembered, though he had
+modelled in clay, not without some success, from time to time.
+
+“Come with me,” he said.
+
+The master climbed the stairs with him up to his modest chamber. A
+closely shrouded bust stood on its pedestal in the light of the solitary
+window.
+
+“That is my ideal personage,” Clement said. “Wait one moment, and you
+shall see how far I have caught the character of our uncrowned queen.”
+
+The master expected, very naturally, to see the conventional young woman
+with classical wreath or feather headdress, whom we have placed upon our
+smallest coin, so that our children may all grow up loving Liberty.
+
+As Clement withdrew the drapery that covered his work, the master stared
+at it in amazement. He looked at it long and earnestly, and at length
+turned his eyes, a little moistened by some feeling which thus betrayed
+itself, upon his scholar.
+
+“This is no ideal, Clement. It is the portrait of a very young but
+very beautiful woman. No common feeling could have guided your hand in
+shaping such a portrait from memory. This must be that friend of yours
+of whom I have often heard as an amiable young person. Pardon me, for
+you know that nobody cares more for you than I do,--I hope that you are
+happy in all your relations with this young friend of yours. How could
+one be otherwise?”
+
+It was hard to bear, very hard. He forced a smile. “You are partly
+right,” he said. “There is a resemblance, I trust, to a living person,
+for I had one in my mind.”
+
+“Did n't you tell me once, Clement, that you were attempting a bust of
+Innocence? I do not see any block in your room but this. Is that done?”
+
+“Done with!” Clement answered; and, as he said it, the thought stung
+through him that this was the very stone which was to have worn the
+pleasant blandness of pretty Susan's guileless countenance. How the new
+features had effaced the recollection of the others!
+
+In a few days more Clement had finished his bust. His hours were again
+vacant to his thick-coming fancies. While he had been busy with his
+marble, his hands had required his attention, and he must think closely
+of every detail upon which he was at work. But at length his task was
+done, and he could contemplate what he had made of it. It was a triumph
+for one so little exercised in sculpture. The master had told him so,
+and his own eye could not deceive him. He might never succeed in any
+repetition of his effort, but this once he most certainly had succeeded.
+He could not disguise from himself the source of this extraordinary good
+fortune in so doubtful and difficult an attempt. Nor could he resist the
+desire of contemplating the portrait bust, which--it was foolish to talk
+about ideals--was not Liberty, but Myrtle Hazard.
+
+It was too nearly like the story of the ancient sculptor; his own
+work was an over-match for its artist. Clement had made a mistake in
+supposing that by giving his dream a material form he should drive it
+from the possession of his mind. The image in which he had fixed his
+recollection of its original served only to keep her living presence
+before him. He thought of her as she clasped her arms around him, and
+they were swallowed up in the rushing waters, coming so near to passing
+into the unknown world together. He thought of her as he stretched her
+lifeless form upon the bank, and looked for one brief moment on her
+unsunned loveliness,--“a sight to dream of, not to tell.” He thought of
+her as his last fleeting glimpse had shown her, beautiful, not with the
+blossomy prettiness that passes away with the spring sunshine, but with
+a rich vitality of which noble outlines and winning expression were only
+the natural accidents. And that singular impression which the sight of
+him had produced upon her,--how strange! How could she but have listened
+to him,--to him, who was, as it were, a second creator to her, for
+he had bought her back from the gates of the unseen realm,--if he had
+recalled to her the dread moments they had passed in each other's arms,
+with death, not love, in all their thoughts. And if then he had told her
+how her image had remained with him, how it had colored all his visions,
+and mingled with all his conceptions, would not those dark eyes have
+melted as they were turned upon him? Nay, how could he keep the thought
+away, that she would not have been insensible to his passion, if he
+could have suffered its flame to kindle in his heart? Did it not seem
+as if Death had spared them for Love, and that Love should lead them
+together through life's long journey to the gates of Death?
+
+Never! never! never! Their fates were fixed. For him, poor insect as he
+was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his wingless
+mate! For her--he thought he saw her doom.
+
+Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless egotist,
+who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all
+around her? Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not perhaps
+have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for him, for
+it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe analytically what
+we know as soon as we see it; but he felt in his inner consciousness
+all that we must tell for him. Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing,
+capable of winning a woman infinitely above himself, incapable of
+understanding her,--oh, if he could but touch him with the angel's
+spear, and bid him take his true shape before her whom he was gradually
+enveloping in the silken meshes of his subtle web! He would make a place
+for her in the world,--oh yes, doubtless. He would be proud of her
+in company, would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best
+lights. But from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly
+established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly
+pattern. He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her in
+their place his table of market-values. He would teach her to submit her
+sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to the fashion of
+the moment, no matter which world or half-world it came from. “As the
+husband is, the wife is,”--he would subdue her to what he worked in.
+
+All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the wife
+of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he did,
+from the few times he had seen him. He would be rich by and by, very
+probably. He looked like one of those young men who are sharp, and hard
+enough to come to fortune. Then she would have to take her place in the
+great social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily opened that the
+animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and the
+sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable
+life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an
+existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the
+piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid!
+How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready
+to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony of
+dressing, dawdling, and driving!
+
+This could not go on so forever. Clement had placed a red curtain so
+as to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which
+his fancy turned to the semblance of life. He would sit and look at the
+features his own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed as if
+the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as if they
+were ready to speak to him. His companions began to whisper strange
+things of him in the studio,--that his eye was getting an unnatural
+light,--that he talked as if to imaginary listeners,--in short, that
+there was a look as if something were going wrong with his brain,
+which it might be feared would spoil his fine intelligence. It was
+the undecided battle, and the enemy, as in his noblest moments he had
+considered the growing passion, was getting the better of him.
+
+He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which had smiled and
+whispered away his peace, when the post-man brought him a letter. It was
+from the simple girl to whom he had given his promise. We know how she
+used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent feelings, and the
+trifling matters that were going on in her little village world. But now
+she wrote in sadness. Something, she did not too clearly explain what,
+had grieved her, and she gave free expression to her feelings. “I have
+no one that loves me but you,” she said; “and if you leave me I must
+droop and die. Are you true to me, dearest Clement,--true as when we
+promised each other that we would love while life lasted? Or have you
+forgotten one who will never cease to remember that she was once your
+own Susan?”
+
+Clement dropped the letter from his hand, and sat a long hour looking
+at the exquisitely wrought features of her who had come between him and
+honor and his plighted word.
+
+At length he arose, and, lifting the bust tenderly from its pedestal,
+laid it upon the cloth with which it had been covered. He wrapped it
+closely, fold upon fold, as the mother whom man condemns and God pities
+wraps the child she loves before she lifts her hand against its life.
+Then he took a heavy hammer and shattered his lovely idol into shapeless
+fragments. The strife was over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII. A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw was in pretty intimate relations with Miss
+Cynthia Badlam. It was well understood between them that it might be of
+very great advantage to both of them if he should in due time become
+the accepted lover of Myrtle Hazard. So long as he could be reasonably
+secure against interference, he did not wish to hurry her in making
+her decision. Two things he did wish to be sure of, if possible, before
+asking her the great question;--first, that she would answer it in the
+affirmative; and secondly, that certain contingencies, the turning
+of which was not as yet absolutely capable of being predicted, should
+happen as he expected. Cynthia had the power of furthering his wishes in
+many direct and indirect ways, and he felt sure of her cooperation. She
+had some reason to fear his enmity if she displeased him, and he had
+taken good care to make her understand that her interests would be
+greatly promoted by the success of the plan which he had formed, and
+which was confided to her alone.
+
+He kept the most careful eye on every possible source of disturbance to
+this quietly maturing plan. He had no objection to have Gifted Hopkins
+about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him. The youthful bard
+entertained her very innocently with his bursts of poetry, but she
+was in no danger from a young person so intimately associated with the
+yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-paper parcel. There was
+Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any very particular solicitude.
+Myrtle had evidently found out that she was handsome and stylish and all
+that, and it was not very likely she would take up with such a bashful,
+humble, country youth as this. He could expect nothing beyond a possible
+rectorate in the remote distance, with one of those little pony chapels
+to preach in, which, if it were set up on a stout pole, would pass for a
+good-sized martin-house. Cyprian might do to practise on, but there was
+no danger of her looking at him in a serious way. As for that youth,
+Clement Lindsay, if he had not taken himself off as he did, Murray
+Bradshaw confessed to himself that he should have felt uneasy. He was
+too good-looking, and too clever a young fellow to have knocking about
+among fragile susceptibilities. But on reflection he saw there could be
+no danger.
+
+“All up with him,--poor diavolo! Can't understand it--such a little
+sixpenny miss--pretty enough boiled parsnip blonde, if one likes that
+sort of thing--pleases some of the old boys, apparently. Look out, Mr.
+L. remember Susanna and the Elders. Good!
+
+“Safe enough if something new doesn't turn up. Youngish. Sixteen's
+a little early. Seventeen will do. Marry a girl while she's in the
+gristle, and you can shape her bones for her. Splendid creature without
+her trimmings. Wants training. Must learn to dance, and sing something
+besides psalm-tunes.”
+
+Mr. Bradshaw began humming the hymn, “When I can read my title clear,”
+ adding some variations of his own. “That 's the solo for my prima
+donna!”
+
+In the mean time Myrtle seemed to be showing some new developments. One
+would have said that the instincts of the coquette, or at least of the
+city belle, were coming uppermost in her nature. Her little nervous
+attack passed away, and she gained strength and beauty every day. She
+was becoming conscious of her gifts of fascination, and seemed to please
+herself with the homage of her rustic admirers. Why was it that no one
+of them had the look and bearing of that young man she had seen but a
+moment the other evening? To think that he should have taken up with
+such a weakling as Susan Posey! She sighed, and not so much thought as
+felt how kind it would have been in Heaven to have made her such a man.
+But the image of the delicate blonde stood between her and all serious
+thought of Clement Lindsay. She saw the wedding in the distance, and
+very foolishly thought to herself that she could not and would not go to
+it.
+
+But Clement Lindsay was gone, and she must content herself with such
+worshippers as the village afforded. Murray Bradshaw was surprised and
+confounded at the easy way in which she received his compliments, and
+played with his advances, after the fashion of the trained ball-room
+belles, who know how to be almost caressing in manner, and yet are
+really as far off from the deluded victim of their suavities as the
+topmost statue of the Milan cathedral from the peasant that kneels on
+its floor. He admired her all the more for this, and yet he saw that she
+would be a harder prize to win than he had once thought. If he made up
+his mind that he would have her, he must go armed with all implements,
+from the red hackle to the harpoon.
+
+The change which surprised Murray Bradshaw could not fail to be noticed
+by all those about her. Miss Silence had long ago come to pantomime,
+rolling up of eyes, clasping of hands, making of sad mouths, and the
+rest,--but left her to her own way, as already the property of that
+great firm of World & Co. which drives such sharp bargains for young
+souls with the better angels. Cynthia studied her for her own purposes,
+but had never gained her confidence. The Irish servant saw that some
+change had come over her, and thought of the great ladies she had
+sometimes looked upon in the old country. They all had a kind of
+superstitious feeling about Myrtle's bracelet, of which she had told
+them the story, but which Kitty half believed was put in the drawer by
+the fairies, who brought her ribbons and partridge feathers, and
+other slight adornments with which she contrived to set off her simple
+costume, so as to produce those effects which an eye for color and
+cunning fingers can bring out of almost nothing.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the two
+great attractions to which he was exposed. Myrtle looked so immensely
+handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to meeting, for
+she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton was going to be
+the preacher, that the young poet was on the point of going down on his
+knees to her, and telling her that his heart was hers and hers alone.
+But he suddenly remembered that he had on his best trousers, and the
+idea of carrying the marks of his devotion in the shape of two dusty
+impressions on his most valued article of apparel turned the scale
+against the demonstration. It happened the next morning, that Susan
+Posey wore the most becoming ribbon she had displayed for a long
+time, and Gifted was so taken with her pretty looks that he might very
+probably have made the same speech to her that he had been on the point
+of making to Myrtle the day before, but that he remembered her plighted
+affections, and thought what he should have to say for himself when
+Clement Lindsay, in a frenzy of rage and jealousy, stood before him,
+probably armed with as many deadly instruments as a lawyer mentions by
+name in an indictment for murder.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth looked very differently on the new manifestations Myrtle
+was making of her tastes and inclinations. He had always felt dazzled,
+as well as attracted, by her; but now there was something in her
+expression and manner which made him feel still more strongly that they
+were intended for different spheres of life. He could not but own that
+she was born for a brilliant destiny,--that no ball-room would throw a
+light from its chandeliers too strong for her,--that no circle would
+be too brilliant for her to illuminate by her presence. Love does not
+thrive without hope, and Cyprian was beginning to see that it was idle
+in him to think of folding these wide wings of Myrtle's so that they
+would be shut up in any cage he could ever offer her. He began to doubt
+whether, after all, he might not find a meeker and humbler nature better
+adapted to his own. And so it happened that one evening after the three
+girls, Olive, Myrtle, and Bathsheba, had been together at the Parsonage,
+and Cyprian, availing himself of a brother's privilege, had joined them,
+he found he had been talking most of the evening with the gentle girl
+whose voice had grown so soft and sweet, during her long ministry in
+the sick-chamber, that it seemed to him more like music than speech. It
+would not be fair to say that Myrtle was piqued to see that Cyprian was
+devoting himself to Bathsheba. Her ambition was already reaching beyond
+her little village circle, and she had an inward sense that Cyprian
+found a form of sympathy in the minister's simple-minded daughter which
+he could not ask from a young woman of her own aspirations.
+
+Such was the state of affairs when Master Byles Gridley was one morning
+surprised by an early call from Myrtle. He had a volume of Walton's
+Polyglot open before him, and was reading Job in the original, when she
+entered.
+
+“Why, bless me, is that my young friend Miss Myrtle Hazard?” he
+exclaimed. “I might call you Keren-Happuch, which is Hebrew for Child of
+Beauty, and not be very far out of the way, Job's youngest daughter,
+my dear. And what brings my young friend out in such good season this
+morning? Nothing going wrong up at our ancient mansion, The Poplars, I
+trust?”
+
+“I want to talk with you, dear Master Gridley,” she answered. She looked
+as if she did not know just how to begin.
+
+“Anything that interests you, Myrtle, interests me. I think you have
+some project in that young head of yours, my child. Let us have it, in
+all its dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness. I think I can guess,
+Myrtle, that we have a little plan of some kind or other. We don't visit
+Papa Job quite so early as this without some special cause,--do we, Miss
+Keren-Happuch?”
+
+“I want to go to the city--to school,” Myrtle said, with the directness
+which belonged to her nature.
+
+“That is precisely what I want you to do myself, Miss Myrtle Hazard. I
+don't like to lose you from the village, but I think we must spare you
+for a while.”
+
+“You're the best and dearest man that ever lived. What could have made
+you think of such a thing for me, Mr. Gridley?”
+
+“Because you are ignorant, my child,--partly I want to see you fitted to
+take a look at the world without feeling like a little country miss. Has
+your aunt Silence promised to bear your expenses while you are in the
+city? It will cost a good deal of money.”
+
+“I have not said a word to her about it. I am sure I don't know what she
+would say. But I have some money, Mr. Gridley.”
+
+She showed him a purse with gold, telling him how she came by it. “There
+is some silver besides. Will it be enough?”
+
+“No, no, my child, we must not meddle with that. Your aunt will let me
+put it in the bank for you, I think, where it will be safe. But that
+shall not make any difference. I have got a little money lying idle,
+which you may just as well have the use of as not. You can pay it back
+perhaps some time or other; if you did not, it would not make much
+difference. I am pretty much alone in the world, and except a book now
+and then--Aut liberos aut libros, as our valiant heretic has it,--you
+ought to know a little Latin, Myrtle, but never mind--I have not much
+occasion for money. You shall go to the best school that any of our
+cities can offer, Myrtle, and you shall stay there until we agree that
+you are fitted to come back to us an ornament to Oxbow Village, and to
+larger places than this if you are called there. We have had some talk
+about it, your aunt Silence and I, and it is all settled. Your aunt does
+not feel very rich just now, or perhaps she would do more for you. She
+has many pious and poor friends, and it keeps her funds low. Never mind,
+my child, we will have it all arranged for you, and you shall begin the
+year 1860 in Madam Delacoste's institution for young ladies. Too many
+rich girls and fashionable ones there, I fear, but you must see some of
+all kinds, and there are very good instructors in the school,--I know
+one,--he was a college boy with me,--and you will find pleasant and good
+companions there, so he tells me; only don't be in a hurry to choose
+your friends, for the least desirable young persons are very apt to
+cluster about a new-comer.”
+
+Myrtle was bewildered with the suddenness of the prospect thus held
+out to her. It is a wonder that she did not bestow an embrace upon the
+worthy old master. Perhaps she had too much tact. It is a pretty way
+enough of telling one that he belongs to a past generation, but it
+does tell him that not over-pleasing fact. Like the title of Emeritus
+Professor, it is a tribute to be accepted, hardly to be longed for.
+
+When the curtain rises again, it will show Miss Hazard in a new
+character, and surrounded by a new world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII. MYRTLE HAZARD AT THE CITY SCHOOL.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw was obliged to leave town for a week or two on business
+connected with the great land-claim. On his return, feeling in pretty
+good spirits, as the prospects looked favorable, he went to make a call
+at The Poplars. He asked first for Miss Hazard.
+
+“Bliss your soul, Mr. Bridshaw,” answered Mistress Kitty Fagan, “she's
+been gahn nigh a wake. It's to the city, to the big school, they've sint
+her.”
+
+This announcement seemed to make a deep impression on Murray Bradshaw,
+for his feelings found utterance in one of the most energetic forms of
+language to which ears polite or impolite are accustomed. He next asked
+for Miss Silence, who soon presented herself. Mr. Bradshaw asked, in a
+rather excited way, “Is it possible, Miss Withers, that your niece has
+quitted you to go to a city school?”
+
+Miss Silence answered, with her chief--mourner expression, and her
+death-chamber tone: “Yes, she has left us for a season. I trust it
+may not be her destruction. I had hoped in former years that she would
+become a missionary, but I have given up all expectation of that now.
+Two whole years, from the age of four to that of six, I had prevailed
+upon her to give up sugar,--the money so saved to go to a graduate
+of our institution--who was afterwards----he labored among the
+cannibal-islanders. I thought she seemed to take pleasure in this small
+act of self-denial, but I have since suspected that Kitty gave her
+secret lumps. It was by Mr. Gridley's advice that she went, and by his
+pecuniary assistance. What could I do? She was bent on going, and I was
+afraid she would have fits, or do something dreadful, if I did not let
+her have her way. I am afraid she will come back to us spoiled. She has
+seemed so fond of dress lately, and once she spoke of learning--yes,
+Mr. Bradshaw, of learning to--dance! I wept when I heard of it. Yes, I
+wept.”
+
+That was such a tremendous thing to think of, and especially to speak of
+in Mr. Bradshaw's presence, for the most pathetic image in the world to
+many women is that of themselves in tears,--that it brought a return of
+the same overflow, which served as a substitute for conversation until
+Miss Badlam entered the apartment.
+
+Miss Cynthia followed the same general course of remark. They could not
+help Myrtle's going if they tried. She had always maintained that, if
+they had only once broke her will when she was little, they would have
+kept the upper hand of her; but her will never was broke. They came
+pretty near it once, but the child would n't give in.
+
+Miss Cynthia went to the door with Mr. Bradshaw, and the conversation
+immediately became short and informal.
+
+“Demonish pretty business! All up for a year or more,--hey?”
+
+“Don't blame me,--I couldn't stop her.”
+
+“Give me her address,--I 'll write to her. Any young men teach in the
+school?”
+
+“Can't tell you. She'll write to Olive and Bathsheba, and I'll find out
+all about it.”
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place, containing many interesting remarks and
+inquiries, some of the latter relating to Madam Delacoste's institution
+for the education of young ladies.
+
+While this was going on at Oxbow Village, Myrtle was establishing
+herself at the rather fashionable school to which Mr. Gridley had
+recommended her. Mrs. or Madam Delacoste's boarding-school had a name
+which on the whole it deserved pretty well. She had some very good
+instructors for girls who wished to get up useful knowledge in case they
+might marry professors or ministers. They had a chance to learn music,
+dancing, drawing, and the way of behaving in company. There was a
+chance, too, to pick up available acquaintances, for many rich people
+sent their daughters to the school, and it was something to have been
+bred in their company.
+
+There was the usual division of the scholars into a first and second
+set, according to the social position, mainly depending upon the
+fortune, of the families to which they belonged. The wholesale dealer's
+daughter very naturally considered herself as belonging to a different
+order from the retail dealer's daughter. The keeper of a great hotel and
+the editor of a widely circulated newspaper were considered as ranking
+with the wholesale dealers, and their daughters belonged also to the
+untitled nobility which has the dollar for its armorial bearing. The
+second set had most of the good scholars, and some of the prettiest
+girls; but nobody knew anything about their families, who lived off the
+great streets and avenues, or vegetated in country towns.
+
+Myrtle Hazard's advent made something like a sensation. They did not
+know exactly what to make of her. Hazard? Hazard? No great firm of that
+name. No leading hotel kept by any Hazard, was there? No newspaper of
+note edited by anybody called Hazard, was there? Came from where? Oxbow
+Village. Oh, rural district. Yes.--Still they could not help owning
+that she was handsome, a concession which of course had to be made with
+reservations.
+
+“Don't you think she's vuiry good-lookin'?” said a Boston girl to a New
+York girl. “I think she's real pooty.”
+
+“I dew, indeed. I didn't think she was haaf so handsome the feeest time
+I saw her,” answered the New York girl.
+
+“What a pity she had n't been bawn in Bawston!”
+
+“Yes, and moved very young to Ne Yock!”
+
+“And married a sarsaparilla man, and lived in Fiff Avenoo, and moved in
+the fust society.”
+
+“Better dew that than be strong-mainded, and dew your own cook'n, and
+live in your own kitch'n.”
+
+“Don't forgit to send your card when you are Mrs. Old Dr. Jacob!”
+
+“Indeed I shaan't. What's the name of the alley, and which bell?” The
+New York girl took out a memorandum-book as if to put it down.
+
+“Had n't you better let me write it for you, dear?” said the Boston
+girl. “It is as well to have it legible, you know.”
+
+“Take it,” said the New York girl. “There 's tew York shill'ns in it
+when I hand it to you.”
+
+“Your whole quarter's allowance, I bullieve,--ain't it?” said the Boston
+girl.
+
+“Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will be
+strictly attended to in this institution. The most correct standards of
+pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example. It will be
+the special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils out of all
+provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-bred English
+scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity.”--Extract from
+the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste's Boarding-school.
+
+Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls. Striking, they all agreed,
+but then the criticisms began. Many of the girls chattered a little
+broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had been half
+educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which are to social
+operators what his cutting instruments are to the surgeon. Her face she
+allowed was handsome; but her style, according to this oracle, was
+a little bourgeoise, and her air not exactly comme il faut. More
+specifically, she was guilty of contours fortement prononces,--corsage
+de paysanne,--quelque chose de sauvage, etc., etc. This girl prided
+herself on her figure.
+
+Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demi-Parisian girl had
+christened her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of
+Myrtle's face, but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy
+girl's.
+
+The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and
+Trojans over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live
+freshman. She was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as
+they could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of
+a queen, and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or
+two would make her a belle of the first water. She had that air of
+indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is
+surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community. On the
+other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play; and the
+modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the
+cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some hundreds of people,
+considered her as rather in sympathy with them than with the daughters
+of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who were grappling and rolling
+over each other in the golden dust of the great city markets.
+
+She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets. She came
+with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to supply
+them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over the heads
+of the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists. She learned,
+therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced instructors. Her
+somewhat rude sketching soon began to show something of the artist's
+touch. Her voice, which had only been taught to warble the simplest
+melodies, after a little training began to show its force and sweetness
+and flexibility in the airs that enchant drawing-room audiences.
+She caught with great readiness the manner of the easiest girls,
+unconsciously, for she inherited old social instincts which became
+nature with the briefest exercise. Not much license of dress was allowed
+in the educational establishment of Madam Delacoste, but every girl
+had an opportunity to show her taste within the conventional limits
+prescribed. And Myrtle soon began to challenge remark by a certain air
+she contrived to give her dresses, and the skill with which she blended
+their colors.
+
+“Tell you what, girls,” said Miss Berengaria Topping, female
+representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous
+Planet Hotel, “she's got style, lots of it. I call her perfectly
+splendid, when she's got up in her swell clothes. That oriole's wing
+she wears in her bonnet makes her look gorgeous, she'll be a stunning
+Pocahontas for the next tableau.”
+
+Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only
+merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from,
+thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken in
+hand in good season. So it came about that, before many weeks had passed
+over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment, she might
+be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the whole bevy
+of them. The studious ones admired her for her facility of learning, and
+her extraordinary appetite for every form of instruction, and the showy
+girls, who were only enduring school as the purgatory that opened into
+the celestial world of society, recognized in her a very handsome young
+person, who would be like to make a sensation sooner or later.
+
+There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered
+themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who submitted
+her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.
+
+“How many horses does your papa keep?” asked Miss Florence Smythe. “We
+keep nine, and a pony for Edgar.”
+
+Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not keep
+any horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an
+acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-bonnet-maker)
+that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--they were letting
+in persons one knew nothing about.
+
+Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate used
+in the household from which Myrtle came. Her father had just bought a
+complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a good deal of
+china at her own home,--old china, which had been a hundred years in the
+family, some of it.
+
+“A hundred years old!” exclaimed Miss Clare Browne. “What queer-looking
+stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as new and
+bright! Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for us. Have you
+got any handsome pictures in your house?”
+
+“We have a good many portraits of members of the family,” she said,
+“some of them older than the china.”
+
+“How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?”
+
+“One was a great beauty in her time.”
+
+“How jolly!”
+
+“Another was a young woman who was put to death for her
+religion,--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time.”
+
+“How very very wicked! It was n't nice a bit, was it? Ain't you telling
+me stories? Was that a hundred years ago?--But you 've got some new
+pictures and things, have n't you? Who furnished your parlors?”
+
+“My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe.”
+
+“Stuff and nonsense. I don't believe it. What color are your
+carriage-horses?”
+
+“Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse but
+a cow.”
+
+“Not keep any horses! Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet.”
+
+Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a
+pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if
+she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess. After all, the questions
+amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne.
+Of that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of
+discoursing. Her “papaa” commonly said sir in talking with a gentleman,
+and her “mammaa” would once in a while forget, and go down the area
+steps instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived behind a
+brown stone front, which veneers everybody's antecedents with a facing
+of respectability.
+
+Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss
+Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful common, and they
+were letting in very queer folks.
+
+Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
+thousand would have been so unprepared to meet. She knew absolutely
+nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons
+were quite familiar.
+
+There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens
+and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally,
+perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let alone. One of
+the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.
+
+“Oh, is n't 'Pickwick' nice?” she asked.
+
+“I don't know,” Myrtle replied; “I never tasted any.”
+
+The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature. “Tasted any!
+Why, I mean the 'Pickwick Papers,' Dickens's story. Don't you think
+they're nice.”
+
+Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n't
+know anything about them.
+
+“What! did you never read any novels?” said the young lady.
+
+“Oh, to be sure I have,” said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of
+the great trunk and its contents. “I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and
+'Evelina,' and 'Tristram Shandy'” (naughty girl!), “and the 'Castle of
+Otranto,' and the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of Wakefield,'
+and 'Don Quixote'--”
+
+The young lady burst out laughing. “Stop! stop! for mercy's sake,” she
+cried. “You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and come back
+to life again. Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat! You ought to
+powder your hair and wear patches.”
+
+“We've got the oddest girl here,” this young lady wrote home. “She has
+n't read any book that is n't a thousand years old. One of the girls
+says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I
+believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago. Her name, she says, is
+Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle.”
+
+Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled
+to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few
+young gentlemen were admitted. One of these took place about a month
+after Myrtle had joined the school. The girls were all in their best,
+and by and by they were to have a tableau. Myrtle came out in all her
+force. She dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome
+woman of the past generation whom she resembled. The very spirit of the
+dead beauty seemed to animate every feature and every movement of the
+young girl whose position in the school was assured from that moment.
+She had a good solid foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or
+three of the leading girls of the style of pretensions illustrated by
+some of their talk which has been given. There is no possible success
+without some opposition as a fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and
+crowds something or other, if it does not hit or trample on it.
+
+The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston
+Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called the
+great “swell” among the privileged young gentlemen who were present at
+the gathering.
+
+“Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara? By
+Jove, she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being a
+first-class beauty. Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara. If a
+girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like that,
+I know a good many who had better begin their nap without waiting. If I
+were Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,--eh, Clara?”
+
+Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by the
+depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her own. A
+little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost precisely the
+same sensation, produced in a very economical way by Mr. Livingston
+Jenkins's repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments to her, only with
+a change in the arrangement of the proper names. The two young ladies
+were left feeling comparatively comfortable with regard to each other,
+each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston Jenkins's remark about her
+friend to such of her other friends as enjoyed clever sayings, but not
+at all comfortable with reference to Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently
+considered by the leading “swell” of their circle as the most noticeable
+personage of the assembly. The individual exception in each case did
+very well as a matter of politeness, but they knew well enough what he
+meant.
+
+It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet on
+her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth. It was as if it had
+just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red blood and
+tingling all over with swift nerve-currents. Life had never looked
+to her as it did that evening. It was the swan's first breasting the
+water,--bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river,
+and strange longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length
+afloat upon the sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first
+time found her destiny. It was to please, and so to command, to rule
+with gentle sway in virtue of the royal gift of beauty,--to enchant with
+the commonest exercise of speech, through the rare quality of a voice
+which could not help being always gracious and winning, of a manner
+which came to her as an inheritance of which she had just found the
+title. She read in the eyes of all that she was more than any other the
+centre of admiration. Blame her who may, the world was a very splendid
+vision as it opened before her eyes in its long vista of pleasures and
+of triumphs. How different the light of these bright saloons from the
+glimmer of the dim chamber at The Poplars! Silence Withers was at that
+very moment looking at the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith
+Pride. “The old picture seems to me to be fading faster than ever,” she
+was thinking. But when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to
+her that the picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile
+upon its lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered
+it. A reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the
+martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that the
+beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company with
+which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing herself
+with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her news from the
+Satanic province overhead, where she herself had so long indulged in the
+profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.
+
+The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux. The
+girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look “stunning” or “gorgeous”
+ or “jolly,” or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas, was not far
+out of the way, and it was so evident to the managing heads that she
+would make a fine appearance in that character, that the “Rescue of
+Captain John Smith” was specially got up to show her off.
+
+Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of Indian
+blood in her veins. It was one of those family legends which some of
+the members are a little proud of, and others are willing to leave
+uninvestigated. But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she felt
+perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals, and she
+had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague recollections which
+must have come from the old warriors and hunters and their dusky brides.
+The Indians who visited the neighborhood recognized something of their
+own race in her dark eyes, as the reader may remember they told the
+persons who were searching after her. It had almost frightened her
+sometimes to find how like a wild creature she felt when alone in the
+woods. Her senses had much of that delicacy for which the red people are
+noted, and she often thought she could follow the trail of an enemy, if
+she wished to track one through the forest, as unerringly as if she were
+a Pequot or a Mohegan.
+
+It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle, as they dressed her for
+the part she was to take. Had she never worn that painted robe before?
+Was it the first time that these strings of wampum had ever rattled upon
+her neck and arms? And could it be that the plume of eagle's feathers
+with which they crowned her dark, fast-lengthening locks had never
+shadowed her forehead until now? She felt herself carried back into the
+dim ages when the wilderness was yet untrodden save by the feet of its
+native lords. Think of her wild fancy as we may, she felt as if that
+dusky woman of her midnight vision on the river were breathing for one
+hour through her lips. If this belief had lasted, it is plain enough
+where it would have carried her. But it came into her imagination and
+vivifying consciousness with the putting on of her unwonted costume,
+and might well leave her when she put it off. It is not for us, who tell
+only what happened, to solve these mysteries of the seeming admission
+of unhoused souls into the fleshly tenements belonging to air-breathing
+personalities. A very little more, and from that evening forward the
+question would have been treated in full in all the works on medical
+jurisprudence published throughout the limits of Christendom. The story
+must be told or we should not be honest with the reader.
+
+TABLEAU 1. Captain John Smith (Miss Euphrosyne de Lacy) was to be
+represented prostrate and bound, ready for execution; Powhatan (Miss
+Florence Smythe) sitting upon a log; savages with clubs (Misses Clara
+Browne, A. Van Boodle, E. Van Boodle, Heister, Booster, etc., etc.)
+standing around; Pocahontas holding the knife in her hand, ready to cut
+the cords with which Captain John Smith is bound.--Curtain.
+
+TABLEAU 2. Captain John Smith released and kneeling before Pocahontas,
+whose hand is extended in the act of raising him and presenting him to
+her father. Savages in various attitudes of surprise. Clubs fallen from
+their hands. Strontian flame to be kindled.--Curtain.
+
+This was a portion of the programme for the evening, as arranged behind
+the scenes. The first part went off with wonderful eclat, and at its
+close there were loud cries for Pocahontas. She appeared for a moment.
+Bouquets were flung to her; and a wreath, which one of the young ladies
+had expected for herself in another part, was tossed upon the stage, and
+laid at her feet. The curtain fell.
+
+“Put the wreath on her for the next tableau,” some of them whispered,
+just as the curtain was going to rise, and one of the girls hastened to
+place it upon her head.
+
+The disappointed young lady could not endure it, and, in a spasm of
+jealous passion, sprang at Myrtle, snatched it from her head, and
+trampled it under her feet at the very instant the curtain was rising.
+With a cry which some said had the blood-chilling tone of an Indian's
+battle-shriek, Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her arm against
+the girl who had thus rudely assailed her. The girl sank to the ground,
+covering her eyes in her terror. Myrtle, with her arm still lifted, and
+the blade glistening in her hand, stood over her, rigid as if she had
+been suddenly changed to stone. Many of those looking on thought all
+this was a part of the show, and were thrilled with the wonderful
+acting. Before those immediately around her had had time to recover from
+the palsy of their fright Myrtle had flung the knife away from her, and
+was kneeling, her head bowed and her hands crossed upon her breast. The
+audience went into a rapture of applause as the curtain came suddenly
+down; but Myrtle had forgotten all but the dread peril she had just
+passed, and was thanking God that his angel--her own protecting spirit,
+as it seemed to her had stayed the arm which a passion such as her
+nature had never known, such as she believed was alien to her truest
+self, had lifted with deadliest purpose. She alone knew how extreme the
+danger had been. “She meant to scare her,--that 's all,” they said. But
+Myrtle tore the eagle's feathers from her hair, and stripped off her
+colored beads, and threw off her painted robe. The metempsychosis was
+far too real for her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from
+whom, as she believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of
+which her soul recoiled in horror.
+
+“Pocahontas has got a horrid headache,” the managing young ladies gave
+it out, “and can't come to time for the last tableau.” So this all
+passed over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with no
+small addition to her local fame,--for it must have been acting; “and
+was n't it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if she was
+going to stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?”
+
+As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with
+new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact
+with those who were least agreeable to meet. The low-bred youth who
+amuse themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls
+who try to show off their gentility to those whom they think less
+important than themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but they
+make themselves odiously prominent before the quiet and modest young
+people have had time to gain the new scholar's confidence. Myrtle found
+friends in due time, some of them daughters of rich people, some poor
+girls, who came with the same sincerity of purpose as herself. But
+not one was her match in the facility of acquiring knowledge. Not one
+promised to make such a mark in society, if she found an opening into
+its loftier circles. She was by no means ignorant of her natural gifts,
+and she cultivated them with the ambition which would not let her rest.
+
+During her stay at the great school, she made but one visit to
+Oxbow Village. She did not try to startle the good people with her
+accomplishments, but they were surprised at the change which had
+taken place in her. Her dress was hardly more showy, for she was but
+a school-girl, but it fitted her more gracefully. She had gained a
+softness of expression, and an ease in conversation, which produced
+their effect on all with whom she came in contact. Her aunt's voice
+lost something of its plaintiveness in talking with her. Miss Cynthia
+listened with involuntary interest to her stories of school and
+school-mates. Master Byles Gridley accepted her as the great success of
+his life, and determined to make her his chief heiress, if there was any
+occasion for so doing. Cyprian told Bathsheba that Myrtle must come to
+be a great lady. Gifted Hopkins confessed to Susan Posey that he was
+afraid of her, since she had been to the great city school. She knew too
+much and looked too much like a queen, for a village boy to talk with.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw tried all his fascinations upon her, but
+she parried compliments so well, and put off all his nearer advances
+so dexterously, that he could not advance beyond the region of florid
+courtesy, and never got a chance, if so disposed, to risk a question
+which he would not ask rashly, believing that, if Myrtle once said No,
+there would be little chance of her ever saying Yes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV. MUSTERING OF FORCES.
+
+Not long after the tableau performance had made Myrtle Hazard's name
+famous in the school and among the friends of the scholars, she received
+the very flattering attention of a call from Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24
+Carat Place. This was in consequence of a suggestion from Mr. Livingston
+Jenkins, a particular friend of the family.
+
+“They've got a demonish splendid school-girl over there,” he said to
+that lady, “made the stunningest looking Pocahontas at the show there
+the other day. Demonish plucky looking filly as ever you saw. Had a row
+with another girl,--gave the war-whoop, and went at her with a knife.
+Festive,--hey? Say she only meant to scare her,--looked as if she meant
+to stick her, anyhow. Splendid style. Why can't you go over to the shop
+and make 'em trot her out?”
+
+The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would, just
+as soon as she could find a moment's leisure,--which, as she had nothing
+in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon. Myrtle in the mean
+time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an extraordinary
+honor was awaiting her.
+
+That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a
+leisure morning, did at last occur. An elegant carriage, with a coachman
+in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and wearing
+a hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal of Madam
+Delacoste's establishment. A card was sent in bearing the open sesame
+of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place. Miss Myrtle
+Hazard was summoned as a matter of course, and the fashionable woman and
+the young girl sat half an hour together in lively conversation.
+
+Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner
+which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply
+unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion. Then it was so delightful
+to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,--one who was as artistically
+composed as a poem or an opera,--in whose costume a kind of various
+rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray that nodded on
+her bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her sandal. As for the lady,
+she was captivated with Myrtle. There is nothing that your fashionable
+woman, who has ground and polished her own spark of life into as many
+and as glittering social facets as it will bear, has a greater passion
+for than a large rough diamond, which knows nothing of the sea of
+light it imprisons, and which it will be her pride to have cut into a
+brilliant under her own eye, and to show the world for its admiration
+and her own reflected glory. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire
+inventory of Myrtle's natural endowments before the interview was over.
+She had no marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing
+bait Myrtle would be at one of her stylish parties.
+
+She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which
+explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,--all
+which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she had found out a good
+part of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.
+
+“I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school,” he wrote.
+“There is a young girl there I take an interest in. She is handsome
+and interesting; and--though it is a shame to mention such a thing has
+possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued. Why can't you
+make her acquaintance and be civil to her? A country girl, but fine old
+stock, and will make a figure some time or other, I tell you. Myrtle
+Hazard,--that's her name. A mere schoolgirl. Don't be malicious and
+badger me about her, but be polite to her. Some of these country girls
+have got 'blue blood' in them, let me tell you, and show it plain
+enough.”
+
+(“In huckleberry season!”) said Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, in a
+parenthesis,--and went on reading.
+
+“Don't think I'm one of your love-in-a-cottage sort, to have my head
+turned by a village beauty. I've got a career before me, Mrs. K., and
+I know it. But this is one of my pets, and I want you to keep an eye on
+her. Perhaps when she leaves school you wouldn't mind asking her to come
+and stay with you a little while. Possibly I may come and see how she is
+getting on if you do,--won't that tempt you, Mrs. C. K.?”
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum wrote back to her relative how she had already made
+the young lady's acquaintance.
+
+“Livingston Jerkins (you remember him) picked her out of the whole lot
+of girls as the 'prettiest filly in the stable.' That's his horrid way
+of talking. But your young milkmaid is really charming, and will come
+into form like a Derby three-year-old. There, now, I've caught that
+odious creature's horse-talk, myself. You're dead in love with this
+girl, Murray, you know you are.
+
+“After all, I don't know but you're right. You would make a good country
+lawyer enough, I don't doubt. I used to think you had your ambitions,
+but never mind. If you choose to risk yourself on 'possibilities,' it is
+not my affair, and she's a beauty, there's no mistake about that.
+
+“There are some desirable partis at the school with your dulcinea. There
+'s Rose Bugbee. That last name is a good one to be married from. Rose
+is a nice girl,--there are only two of them. The estate will cut up
+like one of the animals it was made out of, you know,--the
+sandwich-quadruped. Then there 's Berengaria. Old Topping owns the
+Planet Hotel among other things,--so big, they say, there's always a
+bell ringing from somebody's room day and night the year round. Only
+child--unit and six ciphers carries diamonds loose in her pocket--that's
+the story--good-looking--lively--a little slangy called Livingston
+Jerkins 'Living Jingo' to his face one day. I want you to see my lot
+before you do anything serious. You owe something to the family, Mr.
+William Murray Bradshaw! But you must suit yourself, after all: if you
+are contented with a humble position in life, it is nobody's business
+that I know of. Only I know what life is, Murray B. Getting married is
+jumping overboard, any way you look at it, and if you must save some
+woman from drowning an old maid, try to find one with a cork jacket, or
+she 'll carry you down with her.”
+
+Murray Bradshaw was calculating enough, but he shook his head over this
+letter. It was too demonish cold-blooded for him, he said to himself.
+(Men cannot pardon women for saying aloud what they do not hesitate
+to think in silence themselves.) Never mind,--he must have Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum's house and influence for his own purposes. Myrtle Hazard must
+become her guest, and then if circumstances were favorable, he was
+certain obtaining her aid in his project.
+
+The opportunity to invite Myrtle to the great mansion presented itself
+unexpectedly. Early in the spring of 1861 there were some cases of
+sickness in Madam Delacoste's establishment, which led to closing the
+school for a while. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum took advantage of the dispersion
+of the scholars to ask Myrtle to come and spend some weeks with her.
+There were reasons why this was more agreeable to the young girl than
+returning to Oxbow Village, and she very gladly accepted the invitation.
+
+It was very remarkable that a man living as Master Byles Gridley had
+lived for so long a time should all at once display such liberality as
+he showed to a young woman who had no claim upon him, except that he had
+rescued her from the consequences of her own imprudence and warned her
+against impending dangers. Perhaps he cared more for her than if the
+obligation had been the other way,--students of human nature say it is
+commonly so. At any rate, either he had ampler resources than it was
+commonly supposed, or he was imprudently giving way to his generous
+impulses, or he thought he was making advances which would in due time
+be returned to him. Whatever the reason was, he furnished her with
+means, not only for her necessary expenses, but sufficient to afford her
+many of the elegances which she would be like to want in the fashionable
+society with which she was for a short time to mingle.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was so well pleased with the young lady she was
+entertaining, that she thought it worth while to give a party while
+Myrtle was staying with her. She had her jealousies and rivalries, as
+women of the world will, sometimes, and these may have had their share
+in leading her to take the trouble a large party involved. She was tired
+of the airs of Mrs. Pinnikle, who was of the great Apex family, and
+her terribly accomplished daughter Rhadamartha, and wanted to crush the
+young lady, and jaundice her mother, with a girl twice as brilliant and
+ten times handsomer. She was very willing, also, to take the nonsense
+out of the Capsheaf girls, who thought themselves the most stylish
+personages of their city world, and would bite their lips well to see
+themselves distanced by a country miss.
+
+In the mean time circumstances were promising to bring into Myrtle's
+neighborhood several of her old friends and admirers. Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum had written to Murray Bradshaw that she had asked his pretty
+milkmaid to come and stay awhile with her, but he had been away on
+business, and only arrived in the city a day or two before the party.
+But other young fellows had found out the attractions of the girl
+who was “hanging out at the Clymer Ketchum concern,” and callers were
+plenty, reducing tete-a-tetes in a corresponding ratio. He did get one
+opportunity, however, and used it well. They had so many things to talk
+about in common, that she could not help finding him good company. She
+might well be pleased, for he was an adept in the curious art of being
+agreeable, as other people are in chess or billiards, and had made
+a special study of her tastes, as a physician studies a patient's
+constitution. What he wanted was to get her thoroughly interested in
+himself, and to maintain her in a receptive condition until such time as
+he should be ready for a final move. Any day might furnish the decisive
+motive; in the mean time he wished only to hold her as against all
+others.
+
+It was well for her, perhaps, that others had flattered her into a
+certain consciousness of her own value. She felt her veins full of the
+same rich blood as that which had flushed the cheeks of handsome Judith
+in the long summer of her triumph. Whether it was vanity, or pride, or
+only the instinctive sense of inherited force and attraction, it was
+the best of defences. The golden bracelet on her wrist seemed to have
+brought as much protection with it as if it had been a shield over her
+heart.
+
+But far away in Oxbow Village other events were in preparation. The
+“fugitive pieces” of Mr. Gifted Hopkins had now reached a number so
+considerable, that, if collected and printed in large type, with plenty
+of what the unpleasant printers call “fat,”--meaning thereby blank
+spaces,--upon a good, substantial, not to say thick paper, they might
+perhaps make a volume which would have substance enough to bear the
+title, printed lengthwise along the back, “Hopkins's Poems.” Such a
+volume that author had in contemplation. It was to be the literary event
+of the year 1861.
+
+He could not mature such a project, one which he had been for some time
+contemplating, without consulting Mr. Byles Gridley, who, though he had
+not unfrequently repressed the young poet's too ardent ambition, had yet
+always been kind and helpful.
+
+Mr. Gridley was seated in his large arm-chair, indulging himself in the
+perusal of a page or two of his own work before repeatedly referred to.
+His eye was glistening, for it had just rested on the following passage:
+
+“There is infinite pathos in unsuccessful authorship. The book that
+perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature. The great asylum of
+Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in leaky
+garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves.”
+
+He shut the book, for the page grew a little dim as he finished this
+elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt its
+truth than when it was written,--than on that memorable morning when he
+saw the advertisement in all the papers, “This day published, 'Thoughts
+on the Universe.' By Byles Gridley, A. M.”
+
+At that moment he heard a knock at his door. He closed his eyelids
+forcibly for ten seconds, opened them, and said cheerfully, “Come in!”
+
+Gifted Hopkins entered. He had a collection of manuscripts in his hands
+which it seemed to him would fill a vast number of pages. He did not
+know that manuscript is to type what fresh dandelions are to the dish
+of greens that comes to table, of which last Nurse Byloe, who considered
+them very wholesome spring grazing for her patients, used to say that
+they “biled down dreadful.”
+
+“I have brought the autographs of my poems, Master Gridley, to consult
+you about making arrangements for publication. They have been so well
+received by the public and the leading critics of this part of the
+State, that I think of having them printed in a volume. I am going to
+the city for that purpose. My mother has given her consent. I wish to
+ask you several business questions. Shall I part with the copyright
+for a downright sum of money, which I understand some prefer doing, or
+publish on shares, or take a percentage on the sales? These, I believe,
+are the different ways taken by authors.”
+
+Mr. Gridley was altogether too considerate to reply with the words which
+would most naturally have come to his lips. He waited as if he were
+gravely pondering the important questions just put to him, all the while
+looking at Gifted with a tenderness which no one who had not buried one
+of his soul's children could have felt for a young author trying to get
+clothing for his new-born intellectual offspring.
+
+“I think,” he said presently, “you had better talk with an intelligent
+and liberal publisher, and be guided by his advice. I can put you in
+correspondence with such a person, and you had better trust him than me
+a great deal. Why don't you send your manuscript by mail?”
+
+“What, Mr. Gridley? Trust my poems, some of which are unpublished, to
+the post-office? No, sir, I could never make up my mind to such a risk.
+I mean to go to the city myself, and read them to some of the leading
+publishers. I don't want to pledge myself to any one of them. I should
+like to set them bidding against each other for the copyright, if I sell
+it at all.”
+
+Mr. Gridley gazed upon the innocent youth with a sweet wonder in his
+eyes that made him look like an angel, a little damaged in the features
+by time, but full of celestial feelings.
+
+“It will cost you something to make this trip, Gifted. Have you the
+means to pay for your journey and your stay at a city hotel?”
+
+Gifted blushed. “My mother has laid by a small sum for me,” he said.
+“She knows some of my poems by heart, and she wants to see them all in
+print.”
+
+Master Gridley closed his eyes very firmly again, as if thinking, and
+opened them as soon as the foolish film had left them. He had read many
+a page of “Thoughts on the Universe” to his own old mother, long, long
+years ago, and she had often listened with tears of modest pride that
+Heaven had favored her with a son so full of genius.
+
+“I 'll tell you what, Gifted,” he said. “I have been thinking for a good
+while that I would make a visit to the city, and if you have made up
+your mind to try what you can do with the publishers, I will take you
+with me as a companion. It will be a saving to you and your good mother,
+for I shall bear the expenses of the expedition.”
+
+Gifted Hopkins came very near going down on his knees. He was so
+overcome with gratitude that it seemed as if his very coattails wagged
+with his emotion.
+
+“Take it quietly,” said Master Gridley. “Don't make a fool of yourself.
+Tell your mother to have some clean shirts and things ready for you, and
+we will be off day after to-morrow morning.”
+
+Gifted hastened to impart the joyful news to his mother, and to break
+the fact to Susan Posey that he was about to leave them for a while, and
+rush into the deliriums and dangers of the great city.
+
+Susan smiled. Gifted hardly knew whether to be pleased with her
+sympathy, or vexed that she did not take his leaving more to heart. The
+smile held out bravely for about a quarter of a minute. Then there came
+on a little twitching at the corners of the mouth. Then the blue eyes
+began to shine with a kind of veiled glimmer. Then the blood came up
+into her cheeks with a great rush, as if the heart had sent up a herald
+with a red flag from the citadel to know what was going on at
+the outworks. The message that went back was of discomfiture and
+capitulation. Poor Susan was overcome, and gave herself up to weeping
+and sobbing.
+
+The sight was too much for the young poet. In a wild burst of passion he
+seized her hand, and pressed it to his lips, exclaiming, “Would that
+you could be mine forever!” and Susan forgot all that she ought to have
+remembered, and, looking half reproachfully but half tenderly through
+her tears, said, in tones of infinite sweetness, “O Gifted!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV. THE POET AND THE PUBLISHER.
+
+It was settled that Master Byles Gridley and Mr. Gifted Hopkins should
+leave early in the morning of the day appointed, to take the nearest
+train to the city. Mrs. Hopkins labored hard to get them ready, so that
+they might make a genteel appearance among the great people whom they
+would meet in society. She brushed up Mr. Gridley's best black suit, and
+bound the cuffs of his dress-coat, which were getting a little worried.
+She held his honest-looking hat to the fire, and smoothed it while it
+was warm, until one would have thought it had just been ironed by
+the hatter himself. She had his boots and shoes brought into a more
+brilliant condition than they had ever known: if Gifted helped, it was
+to his credit as much as if he had shown his gratitude by polishing off
+a copy of verses in praise of his benefactor.
+
+When she had got Mr. Gridley's encumbrances in readiness for the
+journey, she devoted herself to fitting out her son Gifted. First, she
+had down from the garret a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but covered
+with leather, and adorned with brass-headed nails, by the cunning
+disposition of which, also, the paternal initials stood out on the
+rounded lid, in the most conspicuous manner. It was his father's trunk,
+and the first thing that went into it, as the widow lifted the cover,
+and the smothering shut-up smell struck an old chord of associations,
+was a single tear-drop. How well she remembered the time when she first
+unpacked it for her young husband, and the white shirt bosoms showed
+their snowy plaits! O dear, dear!
+
+But women decant their affection, sweet and sound, out of the old
+bottles into the new ones,--off from the lees of the past generation,
+clear and bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive it.
+Gifted Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder. She had not only
+the common attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring, but she
+felt that her race was to be rendered illustrious by his genius, and
+thought proudly of the time when some future biographer would mention
+her own humble name, to be held in lasting remembrance as that of the
+mother of Hopkins.
+
+So she took great pains to equip this brilliant but inexperienced young
+man with everything he could by any possibility need during his absence.
+The great trunk filled itself until it bulged with its contents like a
+boa-constrictor who has swallowed his blanket. Best clothes and common
+clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes, flannels and linens, socks and
+collars, with handkerchiefs enough to keep the pickpockets busy for a
+week, with a paper of gingerbread and some lozenges for gastralgia, and
+“hot drops,” and ruled paper to write letters on, and a little Bible,
+and a phial with hiera picra, and another with paregoric, and another
+with “camphire” for sprains and bruises.
+
+--Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the
+pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster. He carried
+also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large
+pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution,
+pinned into his breast-pocket. He talked about having a pistol, in case
+he were attacked by any of the ruffians who are so numerous in the city,
+but Mr. Gridley told him, No! he would certainly shoot himself, and he
+shouldn't think of letting him take a pistol.
+
+They went forth, Mentor and Telemachus, at the appointed time, to dare
+the perils of the railroad and the snares of the city. Mrs. Hopkins was
+firm up to near the last moment, when a little quiver in her voice set
+her eyes off, and her face broke up all at once, so that she had to hide
+it behind her handkerchief. Susan Posey showed the truthfulness of her
+character in her words to Gifted at parting. “Farewell,” she said,
+“and think of me sometimes while absent. My heart is another's, but my
+friendship, Gifted--my friendship--”
+
+Both were deeply affected. He took her hand and would have raised it
+to his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it,
+exclaiming, “O Gifted!” this time with a tone of tender reproach which
+made him feel like a profligate. He tore himself away, and when at a
+safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with a tearful smile.
+
+Master Byles Gridley must have had some good dividends from some of his
+property of late. There is no other way of accounting for the handsome
+style in which he did things on their arrival in the city. He went to a
+tailor's and ordered a new suit to be sent home as soon as possible, for
+he knew his wardrobe was a little rusty. He looked Gifted over from head
+to foot, and suggested such improvements as would recommend him to the
+fastidious eyes of the selecter sort of people, and put him in his own
+tailor's hands, at the same time saying that all bills were to be sent
+to him, B. Gridley, Esq., parlor No. 6, at the Planet Hotel. Thus it
+came to pass that in three days from their arrival they were both in
+an eminently presentable condition. In the mean time the prudent Mr.
+Gridley had been keeping the young man busy, and amusing himself by
+showing him such of the sights of the city and its suburbs as he thought
+would combine instruction with entertainment.
+
+When they were both properly equipped and ready for the best company,
+Mr. Gridley said to the young poet, who had found it very hard to
+contain his impatience, that they would now call together on the
+publisher to whom he wished to introduce him, and they set out
+accordingly.
+
+“My name is Gridley,” he said with modest gravity, as he entered the
+publisher's private room. “I have a note of introduction here from one
+of your authors, as I think he called himself, a very popular writer for
+whom you publish.”
+
+The publisher rose and came forward in the most cordial and respectful
+manner. “Mr. Gridley? Professor Byles Gridley,--author of 'Thoughts on
+the Universe'?”
+
+The brave-hearted old man colored as if he had been a young girl.
+His dead book rose before him like an apparition. He groped in modest
+confusion for an answer. “A child I buried long ago, my dear sir,”
+ he said. “Its title-page was its tombstone. I have brought this young
+friend with me,--this is Mr. Gifted Hopkins of Oxbow Village,--who
+wishes to converse with you about--”
+
+“I have come, sir--” the young poet began, interrupting him.
+
+“Let me look at your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Popkins,” said the
+publisher, interrupting in his turn.
+
+“Hopkins, if you please, sir,” Gifted suggested mildly, proceeding to
+extract the manuscript, which had got wedged into his pocket, and seemed
+to be holding on with all its might. He was wondering all the time over
+the extraordinary clairvoyance of the publisher, who had looked through
+so many thick folds, broadcloth, lining, brown paper, and seen his poems
+lying hidden in his breast-pocket. The idea that a young person coming
+on such an errand should have to explain his intentions would have
+seemed very odd to the publisher. He knew the look which belongs to this
+class of enthusiasts just as a horse-dealer knows the look of a green
+purchaser with the equine fever raging in his veins. If a young author
+had come to him with a scrap of manuscript hidden in his boots, like
+Major Andre's papers, the publisher would have taken one glance at him
+and said, “Out with it!”
+
+While he was battling for the refractory scroll with his pocket, which
+turned half wrong side out, and acted as things always do when people
+are nervous and in a hurry, the publisher directed his conversation
+again to Master Byles Gridley.
+
+“A remarkable book, that of yours, Mr. Gridley, would have a great run
+if it were well handled. Came out twenty years too soon,--that was the
+trouble. One of our leading scholars was speaking of it to me the other
+day. 'We must have a new edition,' he said; people are just ripe for
+that book.' Did you ever think of that? Change the form of it a little,
+and give it a new title, and it will be a popular book. Five thousand or
+more, very likely.”
+
+Mr. Gridley felt as if he had been rapidly struck on the forehead with a
+dozen distinct blows from a hammer not quite big enough to stun him.
+He sat still without saying a word. He had forgotten for the moment all
+about poor Gifted Hopkins, who had got out his manuscript at last, and
+was calming the disturbed corners of it. Coming to himself a little, he
+took a large and beautiful silk handkerchief, one of his new purchases,
+from his pocket, and applied it to his face, for the weather seemed to
+have grown very warm all at once. Then he remembered the errand on which
+he had come, and thought of this youth, who had got to receive his first
+hard lesson in life, and whom he had brought to this kind man that it
+should be gently administered.
+
+“You surprise me,” he said,--“you surprise me. Dead and buried. Dead and
+buried. I had sometimes thought that--at some future period, after I was
+gone, it might--but I hardly know what to say about your suggestions.
+But here is my young friend, Mr. Hopkins, who would like to talk with
+you, and I will leave him in your hands. I am at the Planet Hotel, if
+you should care to call upon me. Good morning. Mr. Hopkins will explain
+everything to you more at his ease, without me, I am confident.”
+
+Master Gridley could not quite make up his mind to stay through the
+interview between the young poet and the publisher. The flush of hope
+was bright in Gifted's eye and cheek, and the good man knew that
+young hearts are apt to be over-sanguine, and that one who enters a
+shower-bath often feels very differently from the same person when he
+has pulled the string.
+
+“I have brought you my Poems in the original autographs, sir,” said Mr.
+Gifted Hopkins.
+
+He laid the manuscript on the table, caressing the leaves still with one
+hand, as loath to let it go.
+
+“What disposition had you thought of making of them?” the publisher
+asked, in a pleasant tone. He was as kind a man as lived, though he
+worked the chief engine in a chamber of torture.
+
+“I wish to read you a few specimens of the poems,” he said, “with
+reference to their proposed publication in a volume.”
+
+“By all means,” said the kind publisher, who determined to be very
+patient with the protege of the hitherto little-known, but remarkable
+writer, Professor Gridley. At the same time he extended his foot in an
+accidental sort of way, and pressed it on the right hand knob of three
+which were arranged in a line beneath the table. A little bell in a
+distant apartment--the little bell marked C--gave one slight note; loud
+enough to start a small boy up, who looked at the clock, and knew that
+he was to go and call the publisher in just twenty-five minutes. “A,
+five minutes; B, ten minutes; C, twenty-five minutes “;--that was
+the youngster's working formula. Mr. Hopkins was treated to the full
+allowance of time, as being introduced by Professor Gridley.
+
+The young man laid open the manuscript so that the title-page,
+written out very handsomely in his own hand, should win the eye of the
+publisher.
+
+               BLOSSOMS OF THE SOUL.
+           A WREATH OF VERSE; Original.
+
+               BY GIFTED HOPKINS.
+
+    “a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.”--Gray.
+
+“Shall I read you some of the rhymed pieces first, or some of the
+blank-verse poems, sir?” Gifted asked.
+
+“Read what you think is best,--a specimen of your first-class style of
+composition.”
+
+“I will read you the very last poem I have written,” he said, and he
+began:
+
+              “THE TRIUMPH OF SONG.
+
+     “I met that gold-haired maiden, all too dear;
+     And I to her: Lo! thou art very fair,
+     Fairer than all the ladies in the world
+     That fan the sweetened air with scented fans,
+     And I am scorched with exceeding love,
+     Yea, crisped till my bones are dry as straw.
+     Look not away with that high-arched brow,
+     But turn its whiteness that I may behold,
+     And lift thy great eyes till they blaze on mine,
+     And lay thy finger on thy perfect mouth,
+     And let thy lucent ears of careen pearl
+     Drink in the murmured music of my soul,
+     As the lush grass drinks in the globed dew;
+     For I have many scrolls of sweetest rhyme
+     I will unroll and make thee glad to hear.
+
+     “Then she: O shaper of the marvellous phrase
+     That openeth woman's heart as Both a key,
+     I dare not hear thee--lest the bolt should slide
+     That locks another's heart within my own.
+     Go, leave me,--and she let her eyelids fall,
+     And the great tears rolled from her large blue eyes.
+
+     “Then I: If thou not hear me, I shall die,
+     Yea, in my desperate mood may lift my hand
+     And do myself a hurt no leach can mend;
+     For poets ever were of dark resolve,
+     And swift stern deed
+
+     “That maiden heard no more,
+     But spike: Alas! my heart is very weak,
+     And but for--Stay!  And if some dreadful morn,
+     After great search and shouting thorough the wold,
+     We found thee missing,--strangled,--drowned i' the mere,
+     Then should I go distraught and be clean mad!
+
+     “O poet, read! read all thy wondrous scrolls.
+     Yea, read the verse that maketh glad to hear!
+     Then I began and read two sweet, brief hours,
+     And she forgot all love save only mine!”
+
+“Is all this from real life?” asked the publisher.
+
+“It--no, sir--not exactly from real life--that is, the leading female
+person is not wholly fictitious--and the incident is one which might
+have happened. Shall I read you the poems referred to in the one you
+have just heard, sir?”
+
+“Allow me, one moment. Two hours' reading, I think, you said. I fear I
+shall hardly be able to spare quite time to hear them all. Let me ask
+what you intend doing with these productions, Mr.----rr Poplins.”
+
+“Hopkins, if you please, sir, not Poplins,” said Gifted, plaintively.
+He expressed his willingness to dispose of the copyright, to publish on
+shares, or perhaps to receive a certain percentage on the profits.
+
+“Suppose we take a glass of wine together, Mr.--Hopkins, before we talk
+business,” the publisher said, opening a little cupboard and taking
+therefrom a decanter and two glasses. He saw the young man was looking
+nervous. He waited a few minutes, until the wine had comforted his
+epigastrium, and diffused its gentle glow through his unspoiled and
+consequently susceptible organisation.
+
+“Come with me,” he said.
+
+Gifted followed him into a dingy apartment in the attic, where one sat
+at a great table heaped and piled with manuscripts. By him was a huge
+basket, ha'f full of manuscripts also. As they entered he dropped
+another manuscript into the basket and looked up.
+
+“Tell me,” said Gifted, “what are these papers, and who is he that looks
+upon them and drops them into the basket?”
+
+“These are the manuscript poems that we receive, and the one sitting at
+the table is commonly spoken of among us as 'The Butcher'. The poems he
+drops into the basket are those rejected as of no account.”
+
+“But does he not read the poems before he rejects them?”
+
+“He tastes them. Do you eat a cheese before you buy it?”
+
+“And what becomes of all those that he drops into the basket?”
+
+“If they are not claimed by their author in proper season, they go to
+the devil.”
+
+“What!” said Gifted, with his eyes stretched very round.
+
+“To the paper factory, where they have a horrid machine they call the
+devil, that tears everything to bits,--as the critics treat our authors,
+sometimes, sometimes, Mr. Hopkins.”
+
+Gifted devoted a moment to silent reflection.
+
+After this instructive sight they returned together to the publisher's
+private room. The wine had now warmed the youthful poet's praecordia,
+so that he began to feel a renewed confidence in his genius and his
+fortunes.
+
+“I should like to know what that critic of yours would say to my
+manuscript,” he said boldly.
+
+“You can try it if you want to,” the publisher replied, with an ominous
+dryness of manner which the sanguine youth did not perceive, or,
+perceiving, did not heed.
+
+“How can we manage to get an impartial judgment?”
+
+“Oh, I'll arrange that. He always goes to his luncheon about this time.
+Raw meat and vitriol punch,--that 's what the authors say. Wait till we
+hear him go, and then I will lay your manuscript so that he will come to
+it among the first after he gets back. You shall see with your own eyes
+what treatment it gets. I hope it may please him, but you shall see.”
+
+They went back to the publisher's private room and talked awhile.
+Then the little office-boy came up with some vague message about a
+gentleman--business--wants to see you, sir, etc., according to the
+established programme; all in a vacant, mechanical sort of way, as if he
+were a talking-machine just running down.
+
+The publisher told the boy that he was engaged, and the gentleman must
+wait. Very soon they heard The Butcher's heavy footstep as he went out
+to get his raw meat and vitriol punch.
+
+“Now, then,” said the publisher, and led forth the confiding literary
+lamb once more, to enter the fatal door of the critical shambles.
+
+“Hand me your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Hopkins. I will lay it so
+that it shall be the third of these that are coming to hand. Our friend
+here is a pretty good judge of verse, and knows a merchantable article
+about as quick as any man in his line of business. If he forms a
+favorable opinion of your poems, we will talk over your propositions.”
+
+Gifted was conscious of a very slight tremor as he saw his precious
+manuscript deposited on the table, under two others, and over a pile
+of similar productions. Still he could not help feeling that the critic
+would be struck by his title. The quotation from Gray must touch his
+feelings. The very first piece in the collection could not fail to
+arrest him. He looked a little excited, but he was in good spirits.
+
+“We will be looking about here when our friend comes back,” the
+publisher said. “He is a very methodical person, and will sit down and
+go right to work just as if we were not here. We can watch him, and if
+he should express any particular interest in your poems, I will, if you
+say so, carry you up to him and reveal the fact that you are the author
+of the works that please him.”
+
+They waited patiently until The Butcher returned, apparently refreshed
+by his ferocious refection, and sat down at his table. He looked
+comforted, and not in ill humor. The publisher and the poet talked
+in low tones, as if on business of their own, and watched him as he
+returned to his labor.
+
+The Butcher took the first manuscript that came to hand, read a
+stanza here and there, turned over the leaves, turned back and tried
+again,--shook his head--held it for an instant over the basket, as if
+doubtful,--and let it softly drop. He took up the second manuscript,
+opened it in several places, seemed rather pleased with what he read,
+and laid it aside for further examination.
+
+He took up the third. “Blossoms of the Soul,” etc. He glared at it in
+a dreadfully ogreish way. Both the looker-ons held their breath. Gifted
+Hopkins felt as if half a glass more of that warm sherry would not hurt
+him. There was a sinking at the pit of his stomach, as if he was in
+a swing, as high as he could go, close up to the swallows' nests and
+spiders' webs. The Butcher opened the manuscript at random, read ten
+seconds, and gave a short low grunt. He opened again, read ten seconds,
+and gave another grunt, this time a little longer and louder. He opened
+once more, read five seconds, and, with something that sounded like the
+snort of a dangerous animal, cast it impatiently into the basket, and
+took up the manuscript that came next in order.
+
+Gifted Hopkins stood as if paralyzed for a moment.
+
+“Safe, perfectly safe,” the publisher said to him in a whisper. “I'll
+get it for you presently. Come in and take another glass of wine,” he
+said, leading him back to his own office.
+
+“No, I thank you,” he said faintly, “I can bear it. But this is
+dreadful, sir. Is this the way that genius is welcomed to the world of
+letters?”
+
+The publisher explained to him, in the kindest manner, that there was an
+enormous over-production of verse, and that it took a great part of one
+man's time simply to overhaul the cart-loads of it that were trying to
+get themselves into print with the imprimatur of his famous house. “You
+are young, Mr. Hopkins. I advise you not to try to force your article
+of poetry on the market. The B----, our friend, there, that is, knows
+a thing that will sell as soon as he sees it. You are in independent
+circumstances, perhaps? If so, you can print--at your own
+expense--whatever you choose. May I take the liberty to ask
+your--profession?”
+
+Gifted explained that he was “clerk” in a “store,” where they sold dry
+goods and West India goods, and goods promiscuous.
+
+“Oh, well, then,” the publisher said, “you will understand me. Do you
+know a good article of brown sagas when you see it?”
+
+Gifted Hopkins rather thought he did. He knew at sight whether it was a
+fair, salable article or not.
+
+“Just so. Now our friend, there, knows verses that are salable and
+unsalable as well as you do brown sugar.--Keep quiet now, and I will go
+and get your manuscript for you.
+
+“There, Mr. Hopkins, take your poems,--they will give you a reputation
+in your village, I don't doubt, which, is pleasant, but it will cost you
+a good deal of money to print them in a volume. You are very young: you
+can afford to wait. Your genius is not ripe yet, I am confident, Mr.
+Hopkins. These verses are very well for a beginning, but a man of
+promise like you, Mr. Hopkins, must n't throw away his chance by
+premature publication! I should like to make you a present of a few
+of the books we publish. By and by, perhaps, we can work you into
+our series of poets; but the best pears ripen slowly, and so with
+genius.--Where shall I send the volumes?”
+
+Gifted answered, to parlor No. 6, Planet Hotel, where he soon presented
+himself to Master Gridley, who could guess pretty well what was coming.
+But he let him tell his story.
+
+“Shall I try the other publishers?” said the disconsolate youth.
+
+“I would n't, my young friend, I would n't. You have seen the best one
+of them--all. He is right about it, quite right: you are young, and had
+better wait. Look here, Gifted, here is something to please you. We are
+going to visit the gay world together. See what has been left here this
+forenoon.”
+
+He showed him two elegant notes of invitation requesting the pleasure
+of Professor Byles Gridley's and of Mr. Gifted Hopkins's company on
+Thursday evening, as the guests of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat
+Place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI. MRS. CLYMER KETCHUM'S PARTY.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had flowered out as beyond question the handsomest girl
+of the season, There were hints from different quarters that she might
+possibly be an heiress. Vague stories were about of some contingency
+which might possibly throw a fortune into her lap. The young men about
+town talked of her at the clubs in their free-and-easy way, but all
+agreed that she was the girl of the new crop,--“best filly this grass,”
+ as Livingston Jenkins put it. The general understanding seemed to be
+that the young lawyer who had followed her to the city was going to
+capture her. She seemed to favor him certainly as much as anybody. But
+Myrtle saw many young men now, and it was not so easy as it would once
+have been to make out who was an especial favorite.
+
+There had been times when Murray Bradshaw would have offered his heart
+and hand to Myrtle at once, if he had felt sure that she would accept
+him. But he preferred playing the safe game now, and only wanted to
+feel sure of her. He had done his best to be agreeable, and could
+hardly doubt that he had made an impression. He dressed well when in
+the city,--even elegantly,--he had many of the lesser social
+accomplishments, was a good dancer, and compared favorably in all such
+matters with the more dashing young fellows in society. He was a better
+talker than most of them, and he knew more about the girl he was dealing
+with than they could know. “You have only got to say the word, Murray,”
+ Mrs. Clymer Ketchum said to her relative, “and you can have her. But
+don't be rash. I believe you can get Berengaria if you try; and there 's
+something better there than possibilities.” Murray Bradshaw laughed,
+and told Mrs. Clymer Ketchum not to worry about him; he knew what he was
+doing.
+
+It so happened that Myrtle met Master Byles Gridley walking with Mr.
+Gifted Hopkins the day before the party. She longed to have a talk with
+her old friend, and was glad to have a chance of pleasing her poetical
+admirer. She therefore begged her hostess to invite them both to her
+party to please her, which she promised to do at once. Thus the two
+elegant notes were accounted for.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though her acquaintances were chiefly in the world
+of fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weakness for what she
+called clever people. She therefore always variegated her parties with a
+streak of young artists and writers, and a literary lady or two; and,
+if she could lay hands on a first-class celebrity, was as happy as an
+Amazon who had captured a Centaur.
+
+“There's a demonish clever young fellow by the name of Lindsay,” Mr.
+Livingston Jenkins said to her a little before the day of the party.
+“Better ask him. They say he 's the rising talent in his line,
+architecture mainly, but has done some remarkable things in the way
+of sculpture. There's some story about a bust he made that was quite
+wonderful. I'll find his address for you.” So Mr. Clement Lindsay got
+his invitation, and thus Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party promised to bring
+together a number of persons with whom we are acquainted, and who were
+acquainted with each other.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum knew how to give a party. Let her only have carte
+blanche for flowers, music, and champagne, she used to tell her lord,
+and she would see to the rest,--lighting the rooms, tables, and toilet.
+He needn't be afraid: all he had to do was to keep out of the way.
+
+Subdivision of labor is one of the triumphs of modern civilization.
+Labor was beautifully subdivided in this lady's household. It was old
+Ketchum's business to make money, and he understood it. It was Mrs. K.'s
+business to spend money, and she knew how to do it. The rooms blazed
+with light like a conflagration; the flowers burned like lamps
+of many-colored flame; the music throbbed into the hearts of the
+promenaders and tingled through all the muscles of the dancers.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was in her glory. Her point d'Alenyon must have
+spoiled ever so many French girls' eyes. Her bosom heaved beneath a kind
+of breastplate glittering with a heavy dew of diamonds. She glistened
+and sparkled with every movement, so that the admirer forgot to question
+too closely whether the eyes matched the brilliants, or the cheeks
+glowed like the roses. Not far from the great lady stood Myrtle Hazard.
+She was dressed as the fashion of the day demanded, but she had added
+certain audacious touches of her own, reminiscences of the time when the
+dead beauty had flourished, and which first provoked the question
+and then the admiration of the young people who had a natural eye for
+effect. Over the long white glove on her left arm was clasped a rich
+bracelet, of so quaint an antique pattern that nobody had seen anything
+like it, and as some one whispered that it was “the last thing out,” it
+was greatly admired by the fashion-plate multitude, as well as by the
+few who had a taste of their own. If the soul of Judith Pride, long
+divorced from its once beautifully moulded dust, ever lived in dim
+consciousness through any of those who inherited her blood, it was then
+and there that she breathed through the lips of Myrtle Hazard. The
+young girl almost trembled with the ecstasy of this new mode of being,
+soliciting every sense with light, with perfume, with melody,--all that
+could make her feel the wonderful complex music of a fresh life when all
+its chords first vibrate together in harmony. Miss Rhadamantha Pinnikle,
+whose mother was an Apex (of whose race it was said that they always
+made an obeisance when the family name was mentioned, and had all
+their portraits painted with halos round their heads), found herself
+extinguished in this new radiance. Miss Victoria Capsheaf stuck to the
+wall as if she had been a fresco on it. The fifty-year-old dynasties
+were dismayed and dismounted. Myrtle fossilized them as suddenly as if
+she had been a Gorgon instead of a beauty.
+
+The guests in whom we may have some interest were in the mean time
+making ready for the party, which was expected to be a brilliant
+one; for 24 Carat Place was well known for the handsome style of its
+entertainments.
+
+Clement Lindsay was a little surprised by his invitation. He had,
+however, been made a lion of several times of late, and was very willing
+to amuse himself once in a while with a peep into the great world.
+
+It was but an empty show to him at best, for his lot was cast, and he
+expected to lead a quiet domestic life after his student days were over.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had known what society was in his earlier time, and
+understood very well that all a gentleman of his age had to do was to
+dress himself in his usual plain way, only taking a little more care in
+his arrangements than was needed in the latitude of Oxbow Village. But
+Gifted must be looked after, that he should not provoke the unamiable
+comments of the city youth by any defect or extravagance of costume.
+The young gentleman had bought a light sky-blue neckerchief, and a very
+large breast-pin containing a gem which he was assured by the vender
+was a genuine stone. He considered that both these would be eminently
+effective articles of dress, and Mr. Gridley had some trouble to
+convince him that a white tie and plain shirt-buttons would be more
+fitted to the occasion.
+
+On the morning of the day of the great party Mr. William Murray Bradshaw
+received a brief telegram, which seemed to cause him great emotion, as
+he changed color, uttered a forcible exclamation, and began walking up
+and down his room in a very nervous kind of way. It was a foreshadowing
+of a certain event now pretty sure to happen. Whatever bearing this
+telegram may have had upon his plans, he made up his mind that he would
+contrive an opportunity somehow that very evening to propose himself as
+a suitor to Myrtle Hazard. He could not say that he felt as absolutely
+certain of getting the right answer as he had felt at some previous
+periods. Myrtle knew her price, he said to himself, a great deal better
+than when she was a simple country girl. The flatteries with which she
+had been surrounded, and the effect of all the new appliances of
+beauty, which had set her off so that she could not help seeing her
+own attractions, rendered her harder to please and to satisfy. A little
+experience in society teaches a young girl the arts and the phrases
+which all the Lotharios have in common. Murray Bradshaw was ready to
+land his fish now, but he was not quite sure that she was yet hooked,
+and he had a feeling that by this time she knew every fly in his
+book. However, as he had made up his mind not to wait another day,
+he addressed himself to the trial before him with a determination to
+succeed, if any means at his command would insure success. He arrayed
+himself with faultless elegance: nothing must be neglected on such an
+occasion. He went forth firm and grave as a general going into a battle
+where all is to be lost or won. He entered the blazing saloon with the
+unfailing smile upon his lips, to which he set them as he set his watch
+to a particular hour and minute.
+
+The rooms were pretty well filled when he arrived and made his bow
+before the blazing, rustling, glistening, waving, blushing appearance
+under which palpitated, with the pleasing excitement of the magic scene
+over which its owner presided, the heart of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum. He
+turned to Myrtle Hazard, and if he had ever doubted which way his
+inclinations led him, he could doubt no longer. How much dress and how
+much light can a woman bear? That is the way to measure her beauty. A
+plain girl in a simple dress, if she has only a pleasant voice, may
+seem almost a beauty in the rosy twilight. The nearer she comes to being
+handsome, the more ornament she will bear, and the more she may defy the
+sunshine or the chandelier.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was fairly dazzled with the brilliant effect of
+Myrtle in full dress. He did not know before what handsome arms she
+had,--Judith Pride's famous arms--which the high-colored young men in
+top-boots used to swear were the handsomest pair in New England--right
+over again. He did not know before with what defiant effect she would
+light up, standing as she did directly under a huge lustre, in full
+flower of flame, like a burning azalea. He was not a man who intended
+to let his sentiments carry him away from the serious interests of his
+future, yet, as he looked upon Myrtle Hazard, his heart gave one throb
+which made him feel in every pulse that this way a woman who in her own
+right, simply as a woman, could challenge the homage of the proudest
+young man of her time. He hardly knew till this moment how much of
+passion mingled with other and calmer motives of admiration. He could
+say I love you as truly as such a man could ever speak these words,
+meaning that he admired her, that he was attracted to her, that he
+should be proud of her as his wife, that he should value himself
+always as the proprietor of so rare a person, that no appendage to his
+existence would take so high a place in his thoughts. This implied also,
+what is of great consequence to a young woman's happiness in the
+married state, that she would be treated with uniform politeness, with
+satisfactory evidences of affection, and with a degree of confidence
+quite equal to what a reasonable woman should expect from a very
+superior man, her husband.
+
+If Myrtle could have looked through the window in the breast against
+which only authors are privileged to flatten their features, it is for
+the reader to judge how far the programme would have satisfied her.
+
+Less than this, a great deal less, does appear to satisfy many young
+women; and it may be that the interior just drawn, fairly judged,
+belongs to a model lover and husband. Whether it does or not, Myrtle did
+not see this picture. There was a beautifully embroidered shirt-bosom in
+front of that window through which we have just looked, that intercepted
+all sight of what was going on within. She only saw a man, young,
+handsome, courtly, with a winning tongue, with an ambitious spirit,
+whose every look and tone implied his admiration of herself, and who
+was associated with her past life in such a way that they alone appeared
+like old friends in the midst of that cold alien throng. It seemed as if
+he could not have chosen a more auspicious hour than this; for she never
+looked so captivating, and her presence must inspire his lips with the
+eloquence of love. And she--was not this delirious atmosphere of light
+and music just the influence to which he would wish to subject her
+before trying the last experiment of all which can stir the soul of a
+woman? He knew the mechanism of that impressionable state which served
+Coleridge so excellently well,--
+
+    “All impulses of soul and sense
+     Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve
+     The music, and the doleful tale,
+     The rich and balmy eve,”--
+
+though he hardly expected such startling results as happened in that
+case,--which might be taken as an awful warning not to sing moving
+ballads to young ladies of susceptible feelings, unless one is prepared
+for very serious consequences. Without expecting that Myrtle would rush
+into his arms, he did think that she could not help listening to him in
+the intervals of the delicious music, in some recess where the roses
+and jasmines and heliotropes made the air heavy with sweetness, and the
+crimson curtains drooped in heavy folds that half hid their forms from
+the curious eyes all round them. Her heart would swell like Genevieve's
+as he told her in simple phrase that she was his life, his love, his
+all,--for in some two or three words like these he meant to put his
+appeal, and not in fine poetical phrases: that would do for Gifted
+Hopkins and rhyming tom-tits of that feather.
+
+Full of his purpose, involving the plans of his whole life, implying, as
+he saw clearly, a brilliant future or a disastrous disappointment, with
+a great unexploded mine of consequences under his feet, and the spark
+ready to fall into it, he walked about the gilded saloon with a smile
+upon his lips so perfectly natural and pleasant, that one would
+have said he was as vacant of any aim, except a sort of superficial
+good-matured disposition to be amused, as the blankest-eyed simpleton
+who had tied himself up in a white cravat and come to bore and be bored.
+
+Yet under this pleasant smile his mind was so busy with its thoughts
+that he had forgotten all about the guests from Oxbow Village who, as
+Myrtle had told him, were to come this evening. His eye was all at once
+caught by a familiar figure, and he recognized Master Byles Gridley,
+accompanied by Mr. Gifted Hopkins, at the door of the saloon. He stepped
+forward at once to meet, and to present them.
+
+Mr. Gridley in evening costume made an eminently dignified and
+respectable appearance. There was an unusual look of benignity upon his
+firmly moulded features, and an air of ease which rather surprised Mr.
+Bradshaw, who did not know all the social experiences which had formed
+a part of the old Master's history. The greeting between them was
+courteous, but somewhat formal, as Mr. Bradshaw was acting as one of the
+masters of ceremony. He nodded to Gifted in an easy way, and led them
+both into the immediate Presence.
+
+“This is my friend Professor Gridley, Mrs. Ketchum, whom I have the
+honor of introducing to you,--a very distinguished scholar, as I have
+no doubt you are well aware. And this is my friend Mr. Gifted Hopkins,
+a young poet of distinction, whose fame will reach you by and by, if it
+has not come to your ears already.”
+
+The two gentlemen went through the usual forms, the poet a little
+crushed by the Presence, but doing his best. While the lady was making
+polite speeches to them, Myrtle Hazard came forward. She was greatly
+delighted to meet her old friend, and even looked upon the young poet
+with a degree of pleasure she would hardly have expected to receive
+from his company. They both brought with them so many reminiscences of
+familiar scenes and events, that it was like going back for the moment
+to Oxbow Village. But Myrtle did not belong to herself that evening, and
+had no opportunity to enter into conversation just then with either of
+them. There was to be dancing by and by, and the younger people were
+getting impatient that it should begin. At last the music sounded the
+well-known summons, and the floors began to ring to the tread of
+the dancers. As usual on such occasions there were a large number of
+noncombatants, who stood as spectators around those who were engaged
+in the campaign of the evening. Mr. Byles Gridley looked on gravely,
+thinking of the minuets and the gavots of his younger days. Mr. Gifted
+Hopkins, who had never acquired the desirable accomplishment of dancing,
+gazed with dazzled and admiring eyes at the wonderful evolutions of the
+graceful performers. The music stirred him a good deal; he had also been
+introduced to one or two young persons as Mr. Hopkins, the poet, and he
+began to feel a kind of excitement, such as was often the prelude of
+a lyric burst from his pen. Others might have wealth and beauty, he
+thought to himself, but what were these to the gift of genius? In fifty
+years the wealth of these people would have passed into other hands.
+In fifty years all these beauties would be dead, or wrinkled and
+double-wrinkled great-grandmothers. And when they were all gone and
+forgotten, the name of Hopkins would be still fresh in the world's
+memory. Inspiring thought! A smile of triumph rose to his lips; he felt
+that the village boy who could look forward to fame as his inheritance
+was richer than all the millionnaires, and that the words he should set
+in verse would have an enduring lustre to which the whiteness of pearls
+was cloudy, and the sparkle of diamonds dull.
+
+He raised his eyes, which had been cast down in reflection, to look upon
+these less favored children of Fortune, to whom she had given nothing
+but perishable inheritances. Two or three pairs of eyes, he
+observed, were fastened upon him. His mouth perhaps betrayed a little
+self-consciousness, but he tried to show his features in an aspect of
+dignified self-possession. There seemed to be remarks and questionings
+going on, which he supposed to be something like the following:--
+
+Which is it? Which is it?--Why, that one, there,--that young
+fellow,--don't you see?--What young fellow are you two looking at? Who
+is he? What is he?--Why, that is Hopkins, the poet.--Hopkins, the poet!
+Let me see him! Let me see him! Hopkins? What! Gifted Hopkins? etc.,
+etc.
+
+Gifted Hopkins did not hear these words except in fancy, but he did
+unquestionably find a considerable number of eyes concentrated upon him,
+which he very naturally interpreted as an evidence that he had already
+begun to enjoy a foretaste of the fame of which he should hereafter have
+his full allowance. Some seemed to be glancing furtively, some appeared
+as if they wished to speak, and all the time the number of those looking
+at him seemed to be increasing. A vision came through his fancy of
+himself as standing on a platform, and having persons who wished to look
+upon him and shake hands with him presented, as he had heard was the
+way with great people when going about the country. But this was only
+a suggestion, and by no means a serious thought, for that would have
+implied infatuation.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was quite right in believing that he attracted many eyes.
+At last those of Myrtle Hazard were called to him, and she perceived
+that an accident was making him unenviably conspicuous. The bow of his
+rather large white neck-tie had slid round and got beneath his left ear.
+A not very good-natured or well-bred young fellow had pointed out the
+subject of this slight misfortune to one or two others of not much
+better taste or breeding, and thus the unusual attention the youthful
+poet was receiving explained itself. Myrtle no sooner saw the little
+accident of which her rural friend was the victim than she left her
+place in the dance with a simple courage which did her credit.
+
+“I want to speak to you a minute,” she said. “Come into this alcove.”
+
+And the courageous young lady not only told Gifted what had happened to
+him, but found a pin somehow, as women always do on a pinch, and had him
+in presentable condition again almost before the bewildered young man
+knew what was the matter. On reflection it occurred to him, as it has
+to other provincial young persons going to great cities, that he
+might perhaps have been hasty in thinking himself an object of general
+curiosity as yet. There had hardly been time for his name to have become
+very widely known. Still, the feeling had been pleasant for the moment,
+and had given him an idea of what the rapture would be, when, wherever
+he went, the monster digit (to hint a classical phrase) of the
+collective admiring public would be lifted to point him out, and the
+whisper would pass from one to another, “That's him! That's Hopkins!”
+
+Mr. Murray Bradshaw had been watching the opportunity for carrying out
+his intentions, with his pleasant smile covering up all that was passing
+in his mind, and Master Byles Gridley, looking equally unconcerned, had
+been watching him. The young man's time came at last. Some were at the
+supper-table, some were promenading, some were talking, when he managed
+to get Myrtle a little apart from the rest, and led her towards one of
+the recesses in the apartment, where two chairs were invitingly placed.
+Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling,--the influences to
+which he had trusted had not been thrown away upon her. He had no idea
+of letting his purpose be seen until he was fully ready. It required all
+his self-mastery to avoid betraying himself by look or tone, but he was
+so natural that Myrtle was thrown wholly off her guard. He meant to
+make her pleased with herself at the outset, and that not by point-blank
+flattery, of which she had had more than enough of late, but rather by
+suggestion and inference, so that she should find herself feeling
+happy without knowing how. It would be easy to glide from that to the
+impression she had produced upon him, and get the two feelings more or
+less mingled in her mind. And so the simple confession he meant to
+make would at length evolve itself logically, and hold by a natural
+connection to the first agreeable train of thought which he had called
+up. Not the way, certainly, that most young men would arrange their
+great trial scene; but Murray Bradshaw was a lawyer in love as much as
+in business, and considered himself as pleading a cause before a jury of
+Myrtle Hazard's conflicting motives. What would any lawyer do in a jury
+case but begin by giving the twelve honest men and true to understand,
+in the first place, that their intelligence and virtue were conceded by
+all, and that he himself had perfect confidence in them, and leave them
+to shape their verdict in accordance with these propositions and his own
+side of the case?
+
+Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the honeyed
+accents of the young pleader. He flattered her with so much tact,
+that she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips of an
+admiration which he only shared with all around him. But in him he made
+it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very real. This it
+evidently was which had led him to trust her with his ambitions and his
+plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never keep them from
+her, and she was the one woman in the world to whom he thought he could
+safely give his confidence.
+
+The dread moment was close at hand. Myrtle was listening with an
+instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and
+grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it
+all in preceding generations until time reached backwards to the sturdy
+savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down the primeval
+great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his hole in the rock,
+or into the tree where he had made his nest. Why should not the coming
+question announce itself by stirring in the pulses and thrilling in the
+nerves of the descendant of all these grandmothers?
+
+She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere
+blind elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of
+Schehallion. Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster
+than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady
+nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and tremors
+tingling through them, as he came nearer and nearer the few simple words
+with which he was to make Myrtle Hazard the mistress of his destiny.
+His tones were becoming lower and more serious; there were slight breaks
+once or twice in the conversation; Myrtle had cast down her eyes.
+
+“There is but one word more to add,” he murmured softly, as he bent
+towards her--
+
+A grave voice interrupted him. “Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw,” said Master
+Bytes Gridley, “I wish to present a young gentleman to my friend here. I
+promised to show him the most charming young person I have the honor to
+be acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge. Miss Hazard, I have
+the pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance my distinguished young
+friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay.”
+
+Once mere, for the third time, these two young persons stood face to
+face. Myrtle was no longer liable to those nervous seizures which
+any sudden impression was liable to produce when she was in her
+half-hysteric state of mind and body. She turned to the new-comer, who
+found himself unexpectedly submitted to a test which he would never have
+risked of his own will. He must go through it, cruel as it was, with the
+easy self-command which belongs to a gentleman in the most trying social
+exigencies. He addressed her, therefore, in the usual terms of courtesy,
+and then turned and greeted Mr. Bradshaw, whom he had never met since
+their coming together at Oxbow Village. Myrtle was conscious, the
+instant she looked upon Clement Lindsay, of the existence of some
+peculiar relation between them; but what, she could not tell. Whatever
+it was, it broke the charm which had been weaving between her and Murray
+Bradshaw. He was not foolish enough to make a scene. What fault could he
+find with Clement Lindsay, who had only done as any gentleman would do
+with a lady to whom he had just been introduced, addressed a few
+polite words to her? After saying those words, Clement had turned very
+courteously to him, and they had spoken with each other. But Murray
+Bradshaw could not help seeing that Myrtle had transferred her
+attention, at least for the moment, from him to the new-comer. He folded
+his arms and waited,--but he waited in vain. The hidden attraction which
+drew Clement to the young girl with whom he had passed into the Valley
+of the Shadow of Death overmastered all other feelings, and he gave
+himself up to the fascination of her presence.
+
+The inward rage of Murray Bradshaw at being interrupted just at the
+moment when he was, as he thought, about to cry checkmate and finish the
+first great game he had ever played may well be imagined. But it could
+not be helped. Myrtle had exercised the customary privilege of young
+ladies at parties, and had turned from talking with one to talking with
+another,--that was all. Fortunately, for him the young man who had been
+introduced at such a most critical moment was not one from whom he need
+apprehend any serious interference. He felt grateful beyond measure to
+pretty Susan Posey, who, as he had good reason for believing, retained
+her hold upon her early lover, and was looking forward with bashful
+interest to the time when she should become Mrs. Lindsay. It was better
+to put up quietly with his disappointment; and, if he could get no
+favorable opportunity that evening to resume his conversation at the
+interesting point where he left it off, he would call the next day and
+bring matters to a conclusion.
+
+He called accordingly the next morning, but was disappointed in not
+seeing Myrtle. She had hardly slept that night, and was suffering from a
+bad headache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing company.
+
+He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had
+just left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village:
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII. MINE AND COUNTERMINE.
+
+What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect on
+the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody especially
+interested knew but himself. We may conjecture that it announced some
+fact, which had leaked out a little prematurely, relating to the issue
+of the great land-case in which the firm was interested. However that
+might be, Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard that Myrtle had suddenly left
+the city for Oxbow Village,--for what reason he puzzled himself to
+guess,--than he determined to follow her at once, and take up the
+conversation he had begun at the party where it left off. And as the
+young poet had received his quietus for the present at the publisher's,
+and as Master Gridley had nothing specially to detain him, they too
+returned at about the same time, and so our old acquaintances were
+once more together within the familiar precincts where we have been
+accustomed to see them.
+
+Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
+remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of the
+detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the habit of
+keeping an eye on mischievous students. If any underhand contrivance was
+at work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he was interested, he
+was a dangerous person for the plotters, for he had plenty of time to
+attend to them, and would be apt to take a kind of pleasure in matching
+his wits against another crafty person's,--such a one, for instance, as
+Mr. Macchiavelli Bradshaw.
+
+Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the
+party; at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner. When he
+found that the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he
+suspected something more than a coincidence. When he learned that he was
+assiduously visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close communication
+with Miss Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was pressing the siege
+of Myrtle's heart. But that there was some difficulty in the way was
+equally clear to him, for he ascertained, through channels which the
+attentive reader will soon have means of conjecturing, that Myrtle had
+seen him but once in the week following his return, and that in
+the presence of her dragons. She had various excuses when he
+called,--headaches, perhaps, among the rest, as these are staple
+articles on such occasions. But Master Gridley knew his man too well to
+think that slight obstacles would prevent his going forward to effect
+his purpose.
+
+“I think he will get her; if he holds on,” the old man said to himself,
+“and he won't let go in a hurry, if there were any real love about
+it--but surely he is incapable of such a human weakness as the tender
+passion. What does all this sudden concentration upon the girl mean? He
+knows something about her that we don't know,--that must be it. What did
+he hide that paper for, a year ago and more? Could that have anything to
+do with his pursuit of Myrtle Hazard today?”
+
+Master Gridley paused as he asked this question of himself, for a
+luminous idea had struck him. Consulting daily with Cynthia Badlam, was
+he? Could there be a conspiracy between these two persons to conceal
+some important fact, or to keep something back until it would be for
+their common interest to have it made known?
+
+Now Mistress Kitty Fagan was devoted, heart and soul, to Myrtle Hazard,
+and ever since she had received the young girl from Mr. Gridley's hands,
+when he brought her back safe and sound after her memorable adventure,
+had considered him as Myrtle's best friend and natural protector.
+These simple creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of
+educated people, with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are
+very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them. Mr.
+Gridley had met her, more or less accidentally, several times of late,
+and inquired very particularly about Myrtle, and how she got along
+at the house since her return, and whether she was getting over her
+headaches, and how they treated her in the family.
+
+“Bliss your heart, Mr. Gridley,” Kitty said to him on one of these
+occasions, “it's ahltogither changed intirely. Sure Miss Myrtle does
+jist iverythin' she likes, an' Miss Withers niver middles with her
+at ahl, excip' jist to roll up her eyes an' look as if she was the
+hid-moorner at a funeril whiniver Miss Myrtle says she wants to do this
+or that, or to go here or there. It's Miss Badlam that's ahlwiz after
+her, an' a-watchin' her,--she thinks she's cunnin'er than a cat, but
+there 's other folks that's got eyes an' ears as good as hers. It's that
+Mr. Bridshaw that's a puttin' his head together with Miss Badlam for
+somethin' or other, an' I don't believe there's no good in it, for what
+does the fox an' the cat be a whisperin' about, as if they was thaves
+an' incind'ries, if there ain't no mischief hatchin'?”
+
+“Why, Kitty,” he said, “what mischief do you think is going on, and who
+is to be harmed?”
+
+“O Mr. Gridley,” she answered, “if there ain't somebody to be chated
+somehow, then I don't know an honest man and woman from two rogues. An'
+have n't I heard Miss Myrtle's name whispered as if there was somethin'
+goin' on agin' her, an' they was afraid the tahk would go out through
+the doors, an' up through the chimbley? I don't want to tell no tales,
+Mr. Gridley, nor to hurt no honest body, for I'm a poor woman, Mr.
+Gridley, but I comes of dacent folks, an' I vallies my repitation an'
+character as much as if I was dressed in silks and satins instead of
+this mane old gown, savin' your presence, which is the best I 've got,
+an' niver a dollar to buy another. But if I iver I hears a word, Mr.
+Gridley, that manes any kind of a mischief to Miss Myrtle,--the Lard
+bliss her soul an' keep ahl the divils away from her!--I'll be runnin'
+straight down here to tell ye ahl about it,--be right sure o' that, Mr.
+Gridley.”
+
+“Nothing must happen to Myrtle,” he said, “that we can help. If you see
+anything more that looks wrong, you had better come down here at once
+and let me know, as you say you will. At once, you understand. And,
+Kitty, I am a little particular about the dress of people who come to
+see me, so that if you would just take the trouble to get you a tidy
+pattern of gingham or calico, or whatever you like of that sort for
+a gown, you would please me; and perhaps this little trifle will be a
+convenience to you when you come to pay for it.”
+
+Kitty thanked him with all the national accompaniments, and trotted off
+to the store, where Mr. Gifted Hopkins displayed the native amiability
+of his temper by fumbling down everything in the shape of ginghams and
+calicoes they had on the shelves, without a murmur at the taste of his
+customer, who found it hard to get a pattern sufficiently emphatic for
+her taste. She succeeded at last, and laid down a five-dollar bill as if
+she were as used to the pleasing figure on its face as to the sight of
+her own five digits.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had struck a spade deeper than he knew into his
+first countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples about
+the means of obtaining information which might have embarrassed a
+diplomatist of higher degree.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII. MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM
+
+“Is Miss Hazard in, Kitty?”
+
+“Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, but she won't see nobody.”
+
+“What's the meaning of that, Kitty? Here is the third time within three
+days you've told me I could n't see her. She saw Mr. Gridley yesterday,
+I know; why won't she see me to-day?”
+
+“Y' must ask Miss Myrtle what the rason is, it's none o' my business,
+Mr. Bridshaw. That's the order she give me.”
+
+“Is Miss Badlam in?”
+
+“Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, an' I 'll go cahl her.”
+
+“Bedad,” said Kitty Fagan to herself, “the cat an' the fox is goin' to
+have another o' thim big tahks togither, an' sure the old hole for the
+stove-pipe has niver been stopped up yet.”
+
+Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Cynthia went into the parlor together, and
+Mistress Kitty retired to her kitchen. There was a deep closet belonging
+to this apartment, separated by a partition from the parlor. There was a
+round hole high up in this partition through which a stove-pipe had
+once passed. Mistress Kitty placed a stool just under this opening, upon
+which, as on a pedestal, she posed herself with great precaution in the
+attitude of the goddess of other people's secrets, that is to say, with
+her head a little on one side, so as to bring her liveliest ear close
+to the opening. The conversation which took place in the hearing of the
+invisible third party began in a singularly free-and-easy manner on Mr.
+Bradshaw's part.
+
+“What the d---- is the reason I can't see Myrtle, Cynthia?”
+
+“That's more than I can tell you, Mr. Bradshaw. I can watch her goings
+on, but I can't account for her tantrums.”
+
+“You say she has had some of her old nervous whims,--has the doctor been
+to see her?”
+
+“No indeed. She has kept to herself a good deal, but I don't think
+there's anything in particular the matter with her. She looks well
+enough, only she seems a little queer,--as girls do that have taken a
+fancy into their heads that they're in love, you know,--absent-minded,
+does n't seem to be interested in things as you would expect after being
+away so long.”
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked as if this did not please him particularly. If he
+was the object of her thoughts she would not avoid him, surely.
+
+“Have you kept your eye on her steadily?”
+
+“I don't believe there is an hour we can't account for,--Kitty and I
+between us.”
+
+“Are you sure you can depend on Kitty?”
+
+[“Depind on Kitty, is it? Oh, an' to be sure ye can depind on Kitty to
+kape watch at the stove-pipe hole, an' to tell all y'r plottin's an'
+contrivin's to them that'll get the cheese out o' y'r mousetrap for ye
+before ye catch any poor cratur in it.” This was the inaudible comment
+of the unseen third party.]
+
+“Of course I can depend on her as far as I trust her. All she knows is
+that she must look out for the girl to see that she does not run away or
+do herself a mischief. The Biddies don't know much, but they know enough
+to keep a watch on the--”
+
+“Chickens.” Mr. Bradshaw playfully finished the sentence for Miss
+Cynthia.
+
+[“An' on the foxes, an' the cats, an' the wazels, an' the hen-hahks,
+an' ahl the other bastes,” added the invisible witness, in unheard
+soliloquy.]
+
+“I ain't sure whether she's quite as stupid as she looks,” said the
+suspicious young lawyer. “There's a little cunning twinkle in her eye
+sometimes that makes me think she might be up to a trick on occasion.
+Does she ever listen about to hear what people are saying?”
+
+“Don't trouble yourself about Kitty Fagan,' for pity's sake, Mr.
+Bradshaw. The Biddies are all alike, and they're all as stupid as owls,
+except when you tell 'em just what to do, and how to do it. A pack of
+priest-ridden fools!”
+
+The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap. The stout
+muscles gave an involuntary jerk. The substantial frame felt the thrill
+all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing creaked
+sharply under its burden.
+
+Murray Bradshaw started. He got up and opened softly all the doors
+leading from the room, one after another, and looked out.
+
+“I thought I heard a noise as if somebody was moving, Cynthia. It's just
+as well to keep our own matters to ourselves.”
+
+“If you wait till this old house keeps still, Mr. Bradshaw, you might as
+well wait till the river has run by. It's as full of rats and mice as
+an old cheese is of mites. There's a hundred old rats in this house, and
+that's what you hear.”
+
+[“An' one old cat; that's what I hear.” Third party.]
+
+“I told you, Cynthia, I must be off on this business to-morrow. I want
+to know that everything is safe before I go. And, besides, I have got
+something to say to you that's important, very important, mind you.”
+
+He got up once more and opened every door softly and looked out. He
+fixed his eye suspiciously on a large sofa at the other side of the
+room, and went, looking half ashamed of his extreme precaution, and
+peeped under it, to see if there was any one hidden thereto listen.
+Then he came back and drew his chair close up to the table at which Miss
+Badlam had seated herself. The conversation which followed was in a low
+tone, and a portion of it must be given in another place in the words
+of the third party. The beginning of it we are able to supply in this
+connection.
+
+“Look here, Cynthia; you know what I am going for. It's all right, I
+feel sure, for I have had private means of finding out. It's a sure
+thing; but I must go once more to see that the other fellows don't try
+any trick on us. You understand what is for my advantage is for yours,
+and, if I go wrong, you go overboard with me. Now I must leave the--you
+know--behind me. I can't leave it in the house or the office: they might
+burn up. I won't have it about me when I am travelling. Draw your chair
+a little more this way. Now listen.”
+
+[“Indade I will,” said the third party to herself. The reader will find
+out in due time whether she listened to any purpose or not.]
+
+In the mean time Myrtle, who for some reason was rather nervous and
+restless, had found a pair of half-finished slippers which she had left
+behind her. The color came into her cheeks when she remembered the state
+of mind she was in when she was working on them for the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+She recollected Master Gridley's mistake about their destination, and
+determined to follow the hint he had given. It would please him better
+if she sent them to good Father Pemberton, she felt sure, than if he
+should get them himself. So she enlarged them somewhat, (for the old
+man did not pinch his feet, as the younger clergyman was in the habit
+of doing, and was, besides, of portly dimensions, as the old orthodox
+three-deckers were apt to be,) and worked E. P. very handsomely into the
+pattern, and sent them to him with her love and respect, to his great
+delight; for old ministers do not have quite so many tokens of affection
+from fair hands as younger ones.
+
+What made Myrtle nervous and restless? Why had she quitted the city so
+abruptly, and fled to her old home, leaving all the gayeties behind her
+which had so attracted and dazzled her?
+
+She had not betrayed herself at the third meeting with the young man who
+stood in such an extraordinary relation to her,--who had actually given
+her life from his own breath,--as when she met him for the second time.
+Whether his introduction to her at the party, just at the instant when
+Murray Bradshaw was about to make a declaration, saved her from being
+in another moment the promised bride of that young gentleman, or not, we
+will not be so rash as to say. It looked, certainly, as if he was in a
+fair way to carry his point; but perhaps she would have hesitated, or
+shrunk back, when the great question came to stare her in the face.
+
+She was excited, at any rate, by the conversation, so that, when Clement
+was presented to her, her thoughts could not at once be all called away
+from her other admirer, and she was saved from all danger of that sudden
+disturbance which had followed their second meeting. Whatever impression
+he made upon her developed itself gradually,--still, she felt strangely
+drawn towards him. It was not simply in his good looks, in his good
+manners, in his conversation, that she found this attraction, but there
+was a singular fascination which she felt might be dangerous to her
+peace, without explaining it to herself in words. She could hardly be in
+love with this young artist; she knew that his affections were plighted
+to another, a fact which keeps most young women from indulging unruly
+fancies; yet her mind was possessed by his image to such an extent that
+it left little room for that of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had been just ready to enter on a career of worldly vanity
+and ambition. It is hard to blame her, for we know how she came by the
+tendency. She had every quality, too, which fitted her to shine in the
+gay world; and the general law is, that those who have the power have
+the instinct to use it. We do not suppose that the bracelet on her arm
+was an amulet, but it was a symbol. It reminded her of her descent; it
+kept alive the desire to live over the joys and excitements of a bygone
+generation. If she had accepted Murray Bradshaw, she would have pledged
+herself to a worldly life. If she had refused him, it would perhaps have
+given her a taste of power that might have turned her into a coquette.
+
+This new impression saved her for the time. She had come back to her
+nest in the village like a frightened bird; her heart was throbbing, her
+nerves were thrilling, her dreams were agitated; she wanted to be quiet,
+and could not listen to the flatteries or entreaties of her old lover.
+
+It was a strong will and a subtle intellect that had arrayed their force
+and skill against the ill-defended citadel of Myrtle's heart. Murray
+Bradshaw was perfectly determined, and not to be kept back by any
+trivial hindrances, such as her present unwillingness to accept him, or
+even her repugnance to him, if a freak of the moment had carried her so
+far. It was a settled thing: Myrtle Hazard must become Mrs. Bradshaw;
+and nobody could deny that, if he gave her his name, they had a chance,
+at least, for a brilliant future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX. MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY.
+
+“I 'd like to go down to the store this mornin', Miss Withers, plase.
+Sure I've niver a shoe to my fut, only jist these two that I've got on,
+an' one other pair, and thim is so full of holes that whin I 'm standin'
+in 'em I'm outside of 'em intirely.”
+
+“You can go, Kitty,” Miss Silence answered, funereally.
+
+Thereupon Kitty Fagan proceeded to array herself in her most tidy
+apparel, including a pair of shoes not exactly answering to her
+description, and set out straight for the house of the Widow Hopkins.
+Arrived at that respectable mansion, she inquired for Mr. Gridley, and
+was informed that he was at home. Had a message for him,--could she
+see him in his study? She could if she would wait a little while. Mr.
+Gridley was busy just at this minute. Sit down, Kitty, and warm yourself
+at the cooking-stove.
+
+Mistress Kitty accepted Mrs. Hopkins's hospitable offer, and presently
+began orienting herself, and getting ready to make herself agreeable.
+The kindhearted Mrs. Hopkins had gathered about her several other
+pensioners besides the twins. These two little people, it may be here
+mentioned, were just taking a morning airing in charge of Susan Posey,
+who strolled along in company with Gifted Hopkins on his way to the
+store.
+
+Mistress Kitty soon began the conversational blandishments so natural to
+her good-humored race. “It's a little blarney that'll jist suit th' old
+lady,” she said to herself, as she made her first conciliatory advance.
+
+“An' sure an' it's a beautiful kitten you've got there, Mrs. Hopkins.
+An' it's a splendid mouser she is, I'll be bound. Does n't she look as
+if she'd clans the house out o'them little bastes, bad luck to em.”
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked benignantly upon the more than middle-aged tabby,
+slumbering as if she had never known an enemy, and turned smiling to
+Mistress Kitty. “Why, bless your heart, Kitty, our old puss would n't
+know a mouse by sight, if you showed her one. If I was a mouse, I'd as
+lieves have a nest in one of that old cat's ears as anywhere else. You
+couldn't find a safer place for one.”
+
+“Indade, an' to be sure she's too big an' too handsome a pussy to be
+after wastin' her time on them little bastes. It's that little tarrier
+dog of yours, Mrs. Hopkins, that will be after worryin' the mice an' the
+rats, an' the thaves too, I 'll warrant. Is n't he a fust-rate-lookin'
+watch-dog, an' a rig'ler rat-hound?”
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked at the little short-legged and short-winded
+animal of miscellaneous extraction with an expression of contempt and
+affection, mingled about half and half. “Worry 'em! If they wanted to
+sleep, I rather guess he would worry 'em! If barkin' would do their job
+for 'em, nary a mouse nor rat would board free gratis in my house as
+they do now. Noisy little good-for-nothing tike,--ain't you, Fret?”
+
+Mistress Kitty was put back a little by two such signal failures. There
+was another chance, however, to make her point, which she presently
+availed herself of,--feeling pretty sure this time that she should
+effect a lodgement. Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing Kitty,
+first with one eye and then with the other, evidently preparing to make
+a remark, but awkward with a stranger. “That 's a beautiful part y 've
+got there,” Kitty said, buoyant with the certainty that she was on safe
+ground this time; “and tahks like a book, I 'll be bound. Poll! Poll!
+Poor Poll!”
+
+She put forth her hand to caress the intelligent and affable bird,
+which, instead of responding as expected, “squawked,” as our phonetic
+language has it, and, opening a beak imitated from a tooth-drawing
+instrument of the good old days, made a shrewd nip at Kitty's
+forefinger. She drew it back with a jerk.
+
+“An' is that the way your part tahks, Mrs. Hopkins?”
+
+“Talks, bless you, Kitty! why, that parrot hasn't said a word this ten
+year. He used to say Poor Poll! when we first had him, but he found it
+was easier to squawk, and that's all he ever does nowadays,--except bite
+once in a while.”
+
+“Well, an' to be sure,” Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her
+defeats, “if you'll kape a cat that does n't know a mouse when she
+sees it, an' a dog that only barks for his livin', and a part that only
+squawks an' bites an' niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-hearted
+woman that's alive, an' bliss ye, if ye was only a good Catholic, the
+Holy Father 'd make a saint of ye in less than no time!”
+
+So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite of
+her three successive discomfitures.
+
+“You may come up now, Kitty,” said Mr. Gridley over the stairs. He had
+just finished and sealed a letter.
+
+“Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars? And how does
+our young lady seem to be of late?”
+
+“Whisht! whisht! your honor.”
+
+Mr. Bradshaw's lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive
+listener. She opened every door in the room, “by your lave,” as
+she said. She looked all over the walls to see if there was any old
+stovepipe hole or other avenue to eye or ear. Then she went, in her
+excess of caution, to the window. She saw nothing noteworthy except
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins and the charge he convoyed, large and small, in
+the distance. The whole living fleet was stationary for the moment, he
+leaning on the fence with his cheek on his hand, in one of the attitudes
+of the late Lord Byron; she, very near him, listening, apparently,
+in the pose of Mignon aspirant au ciel, as rendered by Carlo Dolce
+Scheffer.
+
+Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr. Gridley,
+who told her to sit down, which she did, first making a catch at her
+apron to dust the chair with, and then remembering that she had left
+that part of her costume at home.--Automatic movements, curious.
+
+Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between Mr.
+Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for herself
+as the reporter of the occasion. She then repeated to him, in her own
+way, that part of the conversation which has been already laid before
+the reader. There is no need of going over the whole of this again in
+Kitty's version, but we may fit what followed into the joints of what
+has been already told.
+
+“He cahled her Cynthy, d' ye see, Mr. Gridley, an' tahked to her jist as
+asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he did. An'
+so, says he, I'm goin' away, says he, an' I'm goin' to be gahn siveral
+days, or perhaps longer, says he, an' you'd better kape it, says he.”
+
+“Keep what, Kitty? What was it he wanted her to keep?” said Mr. Gridley,
+who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot, and meant
+to follow it. He was getting impatient with the “says he's” with which
+Kitty double-leaded her discourse.
+
+“An' to be sure ain't I tellin' you, Mr. Gridley, jist as fast as my
+breath will let me? An' so, says he, you'd better kape it, says he,
+mixed up with your other paupers, says he,” (Mr. Gridley started,) “an'
+thin we can find it in the garret, says he, whinever we want it, says
+he. An' if it all goes right out there, says he, it won't be lahng
+before we shall want to find it, says he. And I can dipind on you,
+says he, for we're both in the same boat, says he, an' you knows what I
+knows, says he, an' I knows what you knows, says be. And thin he taks a
+stack o' paupers out of his pocket, an' he pulls out one of 'em, an' he
+says to her, says he, that's the pauper, says he, an' if you die, says
+be, niver lose sight of that day or night, says he, for it's life an'
+dith to both of us, says he. An' thin he asks her if she has n't got one
+o' them paupers--what is 't they cahls 'em?--divilops, or some sich kind
+of a name--that they wraps up their letters in; an' she says no, she has
+n't got none that's big enough to hold it. So he says, give me a shate
+o' pauper, says he. An' thin he takes the pauper that she give him, an'
+he folds it up like one o' them--divilops, if that's the name of 'em;
+and thin he pulls a stick o' salin'-wax out of his pocket, an' a stamp,
+an' he takes the pauper an' puts it into th' other pauper, along with
+the rest of the paupers, an' thin he folds th' other pauper over the
+paupers, and thin he lights a candle, an' he milts the salin'-wax, and
+he sales up the pauper that was outside th' other paupers, an' he writes
+on the back of the pauper, an' thin he hands it to Miss Badlam.”
+
+“Did you see the paper that he showed her before he fastened it up with
+the others, Kitty?”
+
+“I did see it, indade, Mr. Gridley, and it's the truth I'm tellin' ye.”
+
+“Did you happen to notice anything about it, Kitty?”
+
+“I did, indade, Mr. Gridley. It was a longish kind of a pauper, and
+there was some blotches of ink on the back of it,--an' they looked like
+a face without any mouth, for, says I, there's two spots for the eyes,
+says I, and there's a spot for the nose, says I, and there's niver a
+spot for the mouth, says I.”
+
+This was the substance of what Master Byles Gridley got out of Kitty
+Fagan. It was enough, yes, it was too much. There was some deep-laid
+plot between Murray Bradshaw and Cynthia Badlam, involving the interests
+of some of the persons connected with the late Malachi Withers; for that
+the paper described by Kitty was the same that he had seen the young man
+conceal in the Corpus Juris Civilis, it was impossible to doubt. If it
+had been a single spot an the back of it, or two, he might have doubted.
+But three large spots “blotches” she had called them, disposed thus *.*
+--would not have happened to be on two different papers, in all human
+probability.
+
+After grave consultation of all his mental faculties in committee of the
+whole, he arrived at the following conclusion,--that Miss Cynthia Badlam
+was the depositary of a secret involving interests which he felt it his
+business to defend, and of a document which was fraudulently withheld
+and meant to be used for some unfair purpose. And most assuredly, Master
+Gridley said to himself, he held a master-key, which, just so certainly
+as he could make up his mind to use it, would open any secret in the
+keeping of Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+
+He proceeded, therefore, without delay, to get ready for a visit to that
+lady at The Poplars. He meant to go thoroughly armed, for he was a very
+provident old gentleman. His weapons were not exactly of the kind which
+a housebreaker would provide himself with, but of a somewhat peculiar
+nature.
+
+Weapon number one was a slip of paper with a date and a few words
+written upon it. “I think this will fetch the document,” he said to
+himself, “if it comes to the worst. Not if I can help it,--not if I can
+help it. But if I cannot get at the heart of this thing otherwise, why,
+I must come to this. Poor woman!--Poor woman!”
+
+Weapon number two was a small phial containing spirits of hartshorn,
+sal volatile, very strong, that would stab through the nostrils, like a
+stiletto, deep into the gray kernels that lie in the core of the brain.
+Excellent in cases of sudden syncope or fainting, such as sometimes
+require the opening of windows, the dashing on of cold water, the
+cutting of stays, perhaps, with a scene of more or less tumultuous
+perturbation and afflux of clamorous womanhood.
+
+So armed, Byles Gridley, A. M., champion of unprotected innocence,
+grasped his ivory-handled cane and sallied forth on his way to The
+Poplars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX. MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM.
+
+MISS Cynthia Badlam was seated in a small parlor which she was
+accustomed to consider her own during her long residences at The
+Poplars. The entry stove warmed it but imperfectly, and she looked
+pinched and cold, for the evenings were still pretty sharp, and the old
+house let in the chill blasts, as old houses are in the habit of doing.
+She was sitting at her table, with a little trunk open before her. She
+had taken some papers from it, which she was looking over, when a knock
+at her door announced a visitor, and Master Byles Gridley entered the
+parlor.
+
+As he came into the room, she gathered the papers together and replaced
+them in the trunk, which she locked, throwing an unfinished piece
+of needle-work over it, putting the key in her pocket, and gathering
+herself up for company. Something of all this Master Gridley saw through
+his round spectacles, but seemed not to see, and took his seat like a
+visitor making a call of politeness.
+
+A visitor at such an hour, of the male sex, without special provocation,
+without social pretext, was an event in the life of the desolate
+spinster. Could it be--No, it could not--and yet--and yet! Miss Cynthia
+threw back the rather common-looking but comfortable shawl which covered
+her shoulders, and showed her quite presentable figure, arrayed with a
+still lingering thought of that remote contingency which might yet offer
+itself at some unexpected moment; she adjusted the carefully plaited
+cap, which was not yet of the lasciate ogni speranza pattern, and as
+she obeyed these instincts of her sex, she smiled a welcome to the
+respectable, learned, and independent bachelor. Mr. Gridley had a frosty
+but kindly age before him, with a score or so of years to run, which it
+was after all not strange to fancy might be rendered more cheerful by
+the companionship of a well-conserved and amiably disposed woman, if any
+such should happen to fall in his way.
+
+That smile came very near disconcerting the plot of Master Byles
+Gridley. He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as he
+thought, against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down all
+resistance. He had come armed with an instrument of torture worse than
+the thumb-screw, worse than the pulleys which attempt the miracle of
+adding a cubit to the stature, worse than the brazier of live coals
+brought close to the naked soles of the feet,--an instrument which,
+instead of trifling with the nerves, would clutch all the nerve-centres
+and the heart itself in its gripe, and hold them until it got its
+answer, if the white lips had life enough left to shape one. And here
+was this unfortunate maiden lady smiling at him, setting her limited
+attractions in their best light, pleading with him in that natural
+language which makes any contumacious bachelor feel as guilty as Cain
+before any single woman. If Mr. Gridley had been alone, he would have
+taken a good sniff at his own bottle of sal volatile; for his kind heart
+sunk within him as he thought of the errand upon which he had come. It
+would not do to leave the subject of his vivisection under any illusion
+as to the nature of his designs.
+
+“Good evening, Miss Badlam,” he said, “I have come to visit you on a
+matter of business.”
+
+What was the internal panorama which had unrolled itself at the instant
+of his entrance, and which rolled up as suddenly at the sound of
+his serious voice and the look of his grave features? It cannot be
+reproduced, though pages were given to it; for some of the pictures were
+near, and some were distant; some were clearly seen, and some were only
+hinted; some were not recognized in the intellect at all, and yet they
+were implied, as it were, behind the others. Many times we have all
+found ourselves glad or sorry, and yet we could not tell what thought it
+was that reflected the sunbeam or cast the shadow. Look into Cynthia's
+suddenly exalted consciousness and see the picture, actual and
+potential, unroll itself in all its details of the natural, the
+ridiculous, the selfish, the pitiful, the human. Glimpses, hints,
+echoes, suggestions, involving tender sentiments hitherto unknown, we
+may suppose, to that unclaimed sister's breast,--pleasant excitement
+of receiving congratulations from suddenly cordial friends; the fussy
+delights of buying furniture and shopping for new dresses,--(it seemed
+as if she could hear herself saying, “Heavy silks,--best goods, if you
+please,”)--with delectable thumping down of flat-sided pieces of calico,
+cambric, “rep,” and other stiffs, and rhythmic evolution of measured
+yards, followed by sharp snip of scissors, and that cry of rending
+tissues dearer to woman's ear than any earthly sound until she hears
+the voice of her own first-born, (much of this potentially,
+remember,)--thoughts of a comfortable settlement, an imposing social
+condition, a cheerful household, and by and by an Indian summer of
+serene widowhood,--all these, and infinite other involved possibilities
+had mapped themselves in one long swift flash before Cynthia's inward
+eye, and all vanished as the old man spoke those few words. The look on
+his face, and the tone of his cold speech, had instantly swept them all
+away, like a tea-set sliding in a single crash from a slippery tray.
+
+What could be the “business” on which he had come to her with that
+solemn face?--she asked herself, as she returned his greeting and
+offered him a chair. She was conscious of a slight tremor as she put
+this question to her own intelligence.
+
+“Are we like to be alone and undisturbed?” Mr. Gridley asked. It was
+a strange question,--men do act strangely sometimes. She hardly knew.
+whether to turn red or white.
+
+“Yes, there is nobody like to come in at present,” she answered. She did
+not know what to make of it. What was coming next,--a declaration, or an
+accusation of murder?
+
+“My business,” Mr. Gridley said, very gravely, “relates to this. I wish
+to inspect papers which I have reason to believe exist, and which have
+reference to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers. Can you help me
+to get sight of any of these papers not to be found at the Registry of
+Deeds or the Probate Office?”
+
+“Excuse me, Mr. Gridley, but may I ask you what particular concern you
+have with the affairs of my relative, Cousin Malachi Withers, that's
+been dead and buried these half-dozen years?”
+
+“Perhaps it would take some time to answer that question fully, Miss
+Badlam. Some of these affairs do concern those I am interested in, if
+not myself directly.”
+
+“May I ask who the person or persons may be on whose account you wish to
+look at papers belonging to my late relative, Malachi Withers?”
+
+“You can ask me almost anything, Miss Badlam, but I should really be
+very much obliged if you would answer my question first. Can you help me
+to get a sight of any papers relating to the estate of Malachi Withers,
+not to be found at the Registry of Deeds or the Probate Office,--any of
+which you may happen to have any private and particular knowledge?”
+
+“I beg your pardon, Mr. Gridley; but I don't understand why you come to
+me with such questions. Lawyer Penhallow is the proper person, I
+should think, to go to. He and his partner that was--Mr. Wibird, you
+know--settled the estate, and he has got the papers, I suppose, if there
+are any, that ain't to be found in the offices you mention.”
+
+Mr. Gridley moved his chair a little, so as to bring Miss Badlam's face
+a little more squarely in view.
+
+“Does Mr. William Murray Bradshaw know anything about any papers, such
+as I am referring to, that may have been sent to the office?”
+
+The lady felt a little moisture stealing through all her pores, and at
+the same time a certain dryness of the vocal organs, so that her
+answer came in a slightly altered tone which neither of them could help
+noticing.
+
+“You had better ask Mr. William Murray Bradshaw yourself about that,”
+ she answered. She felt the hook now, and her spines were rising, partly
+with apprehension, partly with irritation.
+
+“Has that young gentleman ever delivered into your hands any papers
+relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your safe
+keeping?”
+
+“What do you mean by asking me these questions, Mr. Gridley? I don't
+choose to be catechised about Murray Bradshaw's business. Go to him, if
+you please, if you want to find out about it.”
+
+“Excuse my persistence, Miss Badlam, but I must prevail upon you to
+answer my question. Has Mr. William Murray Bradshaw ever delivered
+into your hands any papers relating to the affairs of the late Malachi
+Withers, for your safe keeping?”
+
+“Do you suppose I am going to answer such questions as you are putting
+me because you repeat them over, Mr. Gridley? Indeed I sha'n't. Ask him,
+if you please, whatever you wish to know about his doings.”
+
+She drew herself up and looked savagely at him. She had talked herself
+into her courage. There was a color in her cheeks and a sparkle in her
+eye; she looked dangerous as a cobra.
+
+“Miss Cynthia Badlam,” Master Gridley said, very deliberately, “I am
+afraid we do not entirely understand each other. You must answer my
+question precisely, categorically, point-blank, and on the instant.
+Will you do this at once, or will you compel me to show you the absolute
+necessity of your doing it, at the expense of pain to both of us? Six
+words from me will make you answer all my questions.”
+
+“You can't say six words, nor sixty, Mr. Gridley, that will make me
+answer one question I do not choose to. I defy you!”
+
+“I will not say one, Miss Cynthia Badlam. There are some things one
+does not like to speak in words. But I will show you a scrap of paper,
+containing just six words and a date; not one word more nor one less.
+You shall read them. Then I will burn the paper in the flame of your
+lamp. As soon after that as you feel ready, I will ask the same question
+again.”
+
+Master Gridley took out from his pocket-book a scrap of paper, and
+handed it to Cynthia Badlam. Her hand shook as she received it, for she
+was frightened as well as enraged, and she saw that Mr. Gridley was in
+earnest and knew what he was doing.
+
+She read the six words, he looking at her steadily all the time, and
+watching her as if he had just given her a drop of prussic acid.
+
+No cry. No sound from her lips. She stared as if half stunned for one
+moment, then turned her head and glared at Mr. Gridley as if she would
+have murdered him if she dared. In another instant her face whitened,
+the scrap of paper fluttered to the floor, and she would have followed
+it but for the support of both Mr. Gridley's arms. He disengaged one of
+them presently, and felt in his pocket for the sal volatile. It served
+him excellently well, and stung her back again to her senses very
+quickly. All her defiant aspect had gone.
+
+“Look!” he said, as he lighted the scrap of paper in the flame. “You
+understand me, and you see that I must be answered the next time I ask
+my question.”
+
+She opened her lips as if to speak. It was as when a bell is rung in a
+vacuum,--no words came from them,--only a faint gasping sound, an effort
+at speech. She was caught tight in the heart-screw.
+
+“Don't hurry yourself, Miss Cynthia,” he said, with a certain relenting
+tenderness of manner. “Here, take another sniff of the smelling-salts.
+Be calm, be quiet,--I am well disposed towards you,--I don't like to
+give you trouble. There, now, I must have the answer to that question;
+but take your time, take your time.”
+
+“Give me some water,--some water!” she said, in a strange hoarse
+whisper. There was a pitcher of water and a tumbler on an old marble
+sideboard near by. He filled the tumbler, and Cynthia emptied it as
+if she had just been taken from the rack, and could have swallowed a
+bucketful.
+
+“What do you want to know?” she asked.
+
+“I wish to know all that you can tell me about a certain paper, or
+certain papers, which I have reason to believe Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw committed to your keeping.”
+
+“There is only one paper of any consequence. Do you want to make him
+kill me? or do you want to make me kill myself?”
+
+“Neither, Miss Cynthia, neither. I wish to see that paper, but not for
+any bad purpose. Don't you think, on the whole, you have pretty good
+reason to trust me? I am a very quiet man, Miss Cynthia. Don't be afraid
+of me; only do what I ask,--it will be a great deal better for you in
+the end.”
+
+She thrust her trembling hand into her pocket, and took out the key of
+the little trunk. She drew the trunk towards her, put the key in the
+lock, and opened it. It seemed like pressing a knife into her own bosom
+and turning the blade. That little trunk held all the records of her
+life the forlorn spinster most cherished;--a few letters that came
+nearer to love-letters than any others she had ever received; an album,
+with flowers of the summers of 1840 and 1841 fading between its leaves;
+two papers containing locks of hair, half of a broken ring, and other
+insignificant mementos which had their meaning, doubtless, to her,--such
+a collection as is often priceless to one human heart, and passed by
+as worthless in the auctioneer's inventory. She took the papers out
+mechanically, and laid them on the table. Among them was an oblong
+packet, sealed with what appeared to be the office seal of Messrs.
+Penhallow and Bradshaw.
+
+“Will you allow me to take that envelope containing papers, Miss
+Badlam?” Mr. Gridley asked, with a suavity and courtesy in his tone and
+manner that showed how he felt for her sex and her helpless position.
+
+She seemed to obey his will as if she had none of her own left. She
+passed the envelope to him, and stared at him vacantly while he examined
+it. He read on the back of the package: “Withers Estate--old papers--of
+no importance apparently. Examine hereafter.”
+
+“May I ask when, where, and of whom you obtained these papers, Miss
+Badlam?”
+
+“Have pity on me, Mr. Gridley,--have pity on me. I am a lost woman if
+you do not. Spare me! for God's sake, spare me! There will no wrong come
+of all this, if you will but wait a little while. The paper will come
+to light when it is wanted, and all will be right. But do not make me
+answer any more questions, and let me keep this paper. O Mr. Gridley! I
+am in the power of a dreadful man--”
+
+“You mean Mr. William Murray Bradshaw?”
+
+“I mean him.”
+
+“Has there not been some understanding between you that he should become
+the approved suitor of Miss Myrtle Hazard?”
+
+Cynthia wrung her hands and rocked herself backward and forward in
+her misery, but answered not a word. What could she answer, if she had
+plotted with this “dreadful man” against a young and innocent girl, to
+deliver her over into his hands, at the risk of all her earthly hopes
+and happiness?
+
+Master Gridley waited long and patiently for any answer she might have
+the force to make. As she made none, he took upon himself to settle the
+whole matter without further torture of his helpless victim.
+
+“This package must go into the hands of the parties who had the
+settlement of the estate of the late Malachi Withers. Mr. Penhallow is
+the survivor of the two gentlemen to whom that business was intrusted.
+How long is Mr. William Murray Bradshaw like to be away?”
+
+“Perhaps a few days,--perhaps weeks,--and then he will come back and
+kill me,--or--or--worse! Don't take that paper, Mr. Gridley,--he isn't
+like you! you would n't--but he would--he would send me to everlasting
+misery to gain his own end, or to save himself. And yet he is n't every
+way bad, and if he did marry Myrtle she'd think there never was such a
+man,--for he can talk her heart out of her, and the wicked in him lies
+very deep and won't ever come out, perhaps, if the world goes right with
+him.” The last part of this sentence showed how Cynthia talked with her
+own conscience; all her mental and moral machinery lay open before the
+calm eyes of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+His thoughts wandered a moment from the business before him; he had
+just got a new study of human nature, which in spite of himself would be
+shaping itself into an axiom for an imagined new edition of “Thoughts on
+the Universe,” something like this, “The greatest saint may be a sinner
+that never got down to 'hard pan.'” It was not the time to be framing
+axioms.
+
+“Poh! poh!” he said to himself; “what are you about making phrases, when
+you have got a piece of work like this in hand?” Then to Cynthia,
+with great gentleness and kindness of manner: “Have no fear about any
+consequences to yourself. Mr. Penhallow must see that paper--I mean
+those papers. You shall not be a loser nor a sufferer if you do your
+duty now in these premises.”
+
+Master Gridley, treating her, as far as circumstances permitted, like a
+gentleman, had shown no intention of taking the papers either stealthily
+or violently. It must be with her consent. He had laid the package down
+upon the table, waiting for her to give him leave to take it. But just
+as he spoke these last words, Cynthia, whose eye had been glancing
+furtively at it while he was thinking out his axiom, and taking her
+bearings to it pretty carefully, stretched her hand out, and, seizing
+the package, thrust it into the sanctuary of her bosom.
+
+“Mr. Penhallow must see those papers, Miss Cynthia Badlam,” Mr. Gridley
+repeated calmly. “If he says they or any of them can be returned to your
+keeping, well and good. But see them he must, for they have his office
+seal and belong in his custody, and, as you see by the writing on the
+back, they have not been examined. Now there may be something among them
+which is of immediate importance to the relatives of the late deceased
+Malachi Withers, and therefore they must be forthwith submitted to the
+inspection of the surviving partner of the firm of Wibird and Penhallow.
+This I propose to do, with your consent, this evening. It is now
+twenty-five minutes past eight by the true time, as my watch has it.
+At half past eight exactly I shall have the honor of bidding you good
+evening, Miss Cynthia Badlam, whether you give me those papers or not.
+I shall go to the office of Jacob Penhallow, Esquire, and there make
+one of two communications to him; to wit, these papers and the facts
+connected therewith, or another statement, the nature of which you may
+perhaps conjecture.”
+
+There is no need of our speculating as to what Mr. Byles Gridley, an
+honorable and humane man, would have done, or what would have been the
+nature of that communication which he offered as an alternative to the
+perplexed woman. He had not at any rate miscalculated the strength
+of his appeal, which Cynthia interpreted as he expected. She bore the
+heart-screw about two minutes. Then she took the package from her bosom,
+and gave it with averted face to Master Byles Gridley, who, on receiving
+it, made her a formal but not unkindly bow, and bade her good evening.
+
+“One would think it had been lying out in the dew,” he said, as he left
+the house and walked towards Mr. Penhallow's residence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI. MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CONSULTS WITH JACOB PENHALLOW, ESQUIRE
+
+Lawyer Penhallow was seated in his study, his day's work over, his
+feet in slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which Sir
+Walter Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old Reports.
+He was a knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but honest, and
+therefore less ready to suspect the honesty of others. He had a great
+belief in his young partner's ability, and, though he knew him to be
+astute, did not think him capable of roguery.
+
+It was at his request that Mr. Bradshaw had undertaken his journey,
+which, as he believed,--and as Mr. Bradshaw had still stronger evidence
+of a strictly confidential nature which led him to feel sure,--would
+end in the final settlement of the great land claim in favor of their
+client. The case had been dragging along from year to year, like an
+English chancery suit; and while courts and lawyers and witnesses had
+been sleeping, the property had been steadily growing. A railroad had
+passed close to one margin of the township, some mines had been opened
+in the county, in which a village calling itself a city had grown big
+enough to have a newspaper and Fourth of July orations. It was plain
+that the successful issue of the long process would make the heirs of
+the late Malachi Withers possessors of an ample fortune, and it was also
+plain that the firm of Penhallow and Bradshaw were like to receive, in
+such case, the largest fee that had gladdened the professional existence
+of its members.
+
+Mr. Penhallow had his book open before him, but his thoughts were
+wandering from the page. He was thinking of his absent partner, and the
+probable results of his expedition. What would be the consequence if
+all this property came into the possession of Silence Withers? Could she
+have any liberal intentions with reference to Myrtle Hazard, the young
+girl who had grown up with her, or was the common impression true, that
+she was bent on endowing an institution, and thus securing for herself
+a favorable consideration in the higher courts, where her beneficiaries
+would be, it might be supposed, influential advocates? He could not help
+thinking that Mr. Bradshaw believed that Myrtle Hazard would eventually
+come to a part at least of this inheritance. For the story was, that he
+was paying his court to the young lady whenever he got an opportunity,
+and that he was cultivating an intimacy with Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+“Bradshaw wouldn't make a move in that direction,” Mr. Penhallow said
+to himself, “until he felt pretty sure that it was going to be a paying
+business. If he was only a young minister now, there'd be no difficulty
+about it. Let any man, young or old, in a clerical white cravat, step
+up to Myrtle Hazard, and ask her to be miserable in his company through
+this wretched life, and aunt Silence would very likely give them her
+blessing, and add something to it that the man in the white cravat would
+think worth even more than that was. But I don't know what she'll say
+to Bradshaw. Perhaps he 'd better have a hint to go to meeting a little
+more regularly. However, I suppose he knows what he's about.”
+
+He was thinking all this over when a visitor was announced, and Mr.
+Byles Gridley entered the study.
+
+“Good evening, Mr. Penhallow,” Mr. Gridley said, wiping his forehead.
+“Quite warm, is n't it, this evening?”
+
+“Warm!” said Mr. Penhallow, “I should think it would freeze pretty
+thick to-night. I should have asked you to come up to the fire and warm
+yourself. But take off your coat, Mr. Gridley,--very glad to see you.
+You don't come to the house half as often as you come to the office. Sit
+down, sit down.”
+
+Mr. Gridley took off his outside coat and sat down. “He does look warm,
+does n't he?” Mr. Penhallow thought. “Wonder what has heated up the
+old gentleman so. Find out quick enough, for he always goes straight to
+business.”
+
+“Mr. Penhallow,” Mr. Gridley began at once, “I have come on a very grave
+matter, in which you are interested as well as myself, and I wish to lay
+the whole of it before you as explicitly as I can, so that we may settle
+this night before I go what is to be done. I am afraid the good standing
+of your partner, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, is concerned in the
+matter. Would it be a surprise to you, if he had carried his acuteness
+in some particular case like the one I am to mention beyond the
+prescribed limits?”
+
+The question was put so diplomatically that there was no chance for an
+indignant denial of the possibility of Mr. Bradshaw's being involved in
+any discreditable transaction.
+
+“It is possible,” he answered, “that Bradshaw's keen wits may have
+betrayed him into sharper practice than I should altogether approve in
+any business we carried on together. He is a very knowing young man, but
+I can't think he is foolish enough, to say nothing of his honesty, to
+make any false step of the kind you seem to hint. I think he might on
+occasion go pretty near the line, but I don't believe he would cross
+it.”
+
+“Permit me a few questions, Mr. Penhallow. You settled the estate of the
+late Malachi Withers, did you not?”
+
+“Mr. Wibird and myself settled it together.”
+
+“Have you received any papers from any of the family since the
+settlement of the estate?”
+
+“Let me see. Yes; a roll of old plans of the Withers Place, and so
+forth,--not of much use, but labelled and kept. An old trunk with
+letters and account-books, some of them in Dutch,--mere curiosities. A
+year ago or more, I remember that Silence sent me over some papers she
+had found in an odd corner,--the old man hid things like a magpie. I
+looked over most of them,--trumpery not worth keeping,--old leases and
+so forth.”
+
+“Do you recollect giving some of them to Mr. Bradshaw to look over?”
+
+“Now I come to think of it, I believe I did; but he reported to me, if I
+remember right, that they amounted to nothing.”
+
+“If any of those papers were of importance, should you think your junior
+partner ought to keep them from your knowledge?”
+
+“I need not answer that question, Mr. Gridley. Will you be so good as to
+come at once to the facts on which you found your suspicions, and which
+lead you to put these questions to me?”
+
+Thereupon Mr. Gridley proceeded to state succinctly the singular
+behavior of Murray Bradshaw in taking one paper from a number handed to
+him by Mr. Penhallow, and concealing it in a volume. He related how
+he was just on the point of taking out the volume which contained the
+paper, when Mr. Bradshaw entered and disconcerted him. He had, however,
+noticed three spots on the paper by which he should know it anywhere. He
+then repeated the substance of Kitty Fagan's story, accenting the fact
+that she too noticed three remarkable spots on the paper which Mr.
+Bradshaw had pointed out to Miss Badlam as the one so important to both
+of them. Here he rested the case for the moment.
+
+Mr. Penhallow looked thoughtful. There was something questionable in
+the aspect of this business. It did obviously suggest the idea of an
+underhand arrangement with Miss Cynthia, possibly involving some very
+grave consequences. It would have been most desirable, he said, to have
+ascertained what these papers, or rather this particular paper, to which
+so much importance was attached, amounted to. Without that knowledge
+there was nothing, after all, which it might not be possible to explain.
+He might have laid aside the spotted paper to examine for some object
+of mere curiosity. It was certainly odd that the one the Fagan woman had
+seen should present three spots so like those on the other paper, but
+people did sometimes throw treys at backgammon, and that which not
+rarely happened with two dice of six faces might happen if they had
+sixty or six hundred faces. On the whole, he did not see that there was
+any ground, so far, for anything more than a vague suspicion. He thought
+it not unlikely that Mr. Bradshaw was a little smitten with the young
+lady up at The Poplars, and that he had made some diplomatic overtures
+to the duenna, after the approved method of suitors. She was young for
+Bradshaw,--very young,--but he knew his own affairs. If he chose to make
+love to a child, it was natural enough that he should begin by courting
+her nurse.
+
+Master Byles Gridley lost himself for half a minute in a most
+discreditable inward discussion as to whether Laura Penhallow was
+probably one or two years older than Mr. Bradshaw. That was his way, he
+could not help it. He could not think of anything without these mental
+parentheses. But he came back to business at the end of his half-minute.
+
+“I can lay the package before you at this moment, Mr. Penhallow. I
+have induced that woman in whose charge it was left to intrust it to
+my keeping, with the express intention of showing it to you. But it is
+protected by a seal, as I have told you, which I should on no account
+presume to meddle with.”
+
+Mr. Gridley took out the package of papers.
+
+“How damp it is!” Mr. Penhallow said; “must have been lying in some very
+moist neighborhood.”
+
+“Very,” Mr. Gridley answered, with a peculiar expression which said,
+“Never mind about that.”
+
+“Did the party give you possession of these documents without making any
+effort to retain them?” the lawyer asked.
+
+“Not precisely. It cost some effort to induce Miss Badlam to let them go
+out of her hands. I hope you think I was justified in making the effort
+I did, not without a considerable strain upon my feelings, as well as
+her own, to get hold of the papers?”
+
+“That will depend something on what the papers prove to be, Mr. Gridley.
+A man takes a certain responsibility in doing just what you have done.
+If, for instance, it should prove that this envelope contained matters
+relating solely to private transactions between Mr. Bradshaw and Miss
+Badlam, concerning no one but themselves,--and if the words on the back
+of the envelope and the seal had been put there merely as a protection
+for a package containing private papers of a delicate but perfectly
+legitimate character--”
+
+The lawyer paused, as careful experts do, after bending the bow of an
+hypothesis, before letting the arrow go. Mr. Gridley felt very warm
+indeed, uncomfortably so, and applied his handkerchief to his face.
+Could n't be anything in such a violent supposition as that, and yet
+such a crafty fellow as that Bradshaw,--what trick was he not up to?
+Absurd! Cynthia was not acting,--Rachel would n't be equal to such a
+performance!--“why then, Mr. Gridley,” the lawyer continued, “I don't
+see but what my partner would have you at an advantage, and, if disposed
+to make you uncomfortable, could do so pretty effectively. But this, you
+understand, is only a supposed case, and not a very likely one. I don't
+think it would have been prudent in you to meddle with that seal. But
+it is a very different matter with regard to myself. It makes no
+difference, so far as I am concerned, where this package came from, or
+how it was obtained. It is just as absolutely within my control as any
+piece of property I call my own. I should not hesitate, if I saw fit,
+to break this seal at once, and proceed to the examination of any papers
+contained within the envelope. If I found any paper of the slightest
+importance relating to the estate, I should act as if it had never been
+out of my possession.
+
+“Suppose, however, I chose to know what was in the package, and, having
+ascertained, act my judgment about returning it to the party from whom
+you obtained it. In such case I might see fit to restore or cause it
+to be restored, to the party, without any marks of violence having been
+used being apparent. If everything is not right, probably no questions
+would be asked by the party having charge of the package. If there is
+no underhand work going on, and the papers are what they profess to be,
+nobody is compromised but yourself, so far as I can see, and you are
+compromised at any rate, Mr. Gridley, at least in the good graces of the
+party from whom you obtained the documents. Tell that party that I
+took the package without opening it, and shall return it, very likely,
+without breaking the seal. Will consider of the matter, say a couple of
+days. Then you shall hear from me, and she shall hear from you. So. So.
+Yes, that's it. A nice business. A thing to sleep on. You had better
+leave the whole matter of dealing with the package to me. If I see fit
+to send it back with the seal unbroken, that is my affair. But keep
+perfectly quiet, if you please, Mr. Gridley, about the whole matter. Mr.
+Bradshaw is off, as you know, and the business on which he is gone is
+important,--very important. He can be depended on for that; he has acted
+all along as if he had a personal interest in the success of our firm
+beyond his legal relation to it.”
+
+Mr. Penhallow's light burned very late in the office that night, and the
+following one. He looked troubled and absent-minded, and when Miss
+Laura ventured to ask him how long Mr. Bradshaw was like to be gone, he
+answered her in such a way that the girl who waited at table concluded
+that he did n't mean to have Miss Laury keep company with Mr. Bradshaw,
+or he'd never have spoke so dreadful hash to her when she asked about
+him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII. SUSAN POSEY'S TRIAL.
+
+A day or two after Myrtle Hazard returned to the village, Master Byles
+Gridley, accompanied by Gifted Hopkins, followed her, as has been
+already mentioned, to the same scene of the principal events of this
+narrative. The young man had been persuaded that it would be doing
+injustice to his talents to crowd their fruit prematurely upon the
+market. He carried his manuscript back with him, having relinquished the
+idea of publishing for the present. Master Byles Gridley, on the other
+hand, had in his pocket a very flattering proposal, from the same
+publisher to whom he had introduced the young poet, for a new and
+revised edition of his work, “Thoughts on the Universe,” which was to
+be remodelled in some respects, and to have a new title not quite so
+formidable to the average reader.
+
+It would be hardly fair to Susan Posey to describe with what delight and
+innocent enthusiasm she welcomed back Gifted Hopkins. She had been
+so lonely since he was away? She had read such of his poems as she
+possessed--duplicates of his printed ones, or autographs which he had
+kindly written out for her--over and over again, not without the sweet
+tribute of feminine sensibility, which is the most precious of all
+testimonials to a poet's power over the heart. True, her love belonged
+to another,--but then she was so used to Gifted! She did so love to hear
+him read his poems,--and Clement had never written that “little bit of
+a poem to Susie,” which she had asked him for so long ago! She received
+him therefore with open arms,--not literally, of course, which would
+have been a breach of duty and propriety, but in a figurative sense,
+which it is hoped no reader will interpret to her discredit.
+
+The young poet was in need of consolation. It is true that he had seen
+many remarkable sights during his visit to the city; that he had got
+“smarted up,” as his mother called it, a good deal; that he had been to
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party, where he had looked upon life in all its
+splendors; and that he brought back many interesting experiences, which
+would serve to enliven his conversation for a long time. But he had
+failed in the great enterprise he had undertaken. He was forced to
+confess to his revered parent, and his esteemed friend Susan Posey, that
+his genius, which was freely acknowledged, was not thought to be quite
+ripe as yet. He told the young lady some particulars of his visit to the
+publisher, how he had listened with great interest to one of his
+poems, “The Triumph of Song,”--how he had treated him with marked and
+flattering attention; but that he advised him not to risk anything
+prematurely, giving him the hope that by and by he would be admitted
+into that series of illustrious authors which it was the publisher's
+privilege to present to the reading public. In short, he was advised not
+to print. That was the net total of the matter, and it was a pang to the
+susceptible heart of the poet. He had hoped to have come home enriched
+by the sale of his copyright, and with the prospect of seeing his name
+before long on the back of a handsome volume.
+
+Gifted's mother did all in her power to console him in his
+disappointment. There was plenty of jealous people always that wanted
+to keep young folks from rising in the world. Never mind, she did n't
+believe but what Gifted could make jest as good verses as any of them
+that they kept such a talk about. She had a fear that he might pine
+away in consequence of the mental excitement he had gone through,
+and solicited his appetite with her choicest appliances,--of which he
+partook in a measure which showed that there was no immediate cause of
+alarm.
+
+But Susan Posey was more than a consoler,--she was an angel to him in
+this time of his disappointment. “Read me all the poems over again,”
+ she said,--“it is almost the only pleasure I have left, to hear you read
+your beautiful verses.” Clement Lindsay had not written to Susan quite
+so often of late as at some former periods of the history of their love.
+Perhaps it was that which had made her look paler than usual for some
+little time. Something was evidently preying on her. Her only delight
+seemed to be in listening to Gifted as he read, sometimes with fine
+declamatory emphasis, sometimes in low, tremulous tones, the various
+poems enshrined in his manuscript. At other times she was sad, and more
+than once Mrs. Hopkins had seen a tear steal down her innocent cheek,
+when there seemed to be no special cause for grief. She ventured to
+speak of it to Master Byles Gridley.
+
+“Our Susan's in trouble, Mr. Gridley, for some reason or other that's
+unbeknown to me, and I can't help wishing you could jest have a few
+words with her. You're a kind of a grandfather, you know, to all
+the young folks, and they'd tell you pretty much everything about
+themselves. I calc'late she is n't at ease in her mind about somethin'
+or other, and I kind o' think, Mr. Gridley, you could coax it out of
+her.”
+
+“Was there ever anything like it?” said Master Byles Gridley to himself.
+“I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take care of at
+this rate. Susan Posey in trouble, too! Well, well, well, it's easier to
+get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a big ship off the rocks.
+Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily enough; but Myrtle Hazard
+floats in deeper water. We must make Susan Posey tell her own story, or
+let her tell it, for it will all come out of itself.”
+
+“I am going to dust the books in the open shelves this morning. I wonder
+if Miss Susan Posey would n't like to help for half an hour or so,”
+ Master Gridley remarked at the breakfast-table.
+
+The amiable girl's very pleasant countenance lighted up at the thought
+of obliging the old man who had been so kind to her and so liberal to
+her friend, the poet. She would be delighted to help him; she would
+dust them all for him, if he wanted her to. No, Master Gridley said, he
+always wanted to have a hand in it; and, besides, such a little body
+as she was could not lift those great folios out of the lower shelves
+without overstraining herself; she might handle the musketry and the
+light artillery, but he must deal with the heavy guns himself. “As low
+down as the octavos, Susan Posey, you shall govern; below that, the
+Salic law.”
+
+Susan did not know much about the Salic law; but she knew he meant that
+he would dust the big books and she would attend to the little ones.
+
+A very young and a very pretty girl is sometimes quite charming in a
+costume which thinks of nothing less than of being attractive. Susan
+appeared after breakfast in the study, her head bound with a kerchief of
+bright pattern, a little jacket she had outgrown buttoned, in spite
+of opposition, close about her up to the throat, round which a white
+handkerchief was loosely tied, and a pair of old gauntlets protecting
+her hands, so that she suggested something between a gypsy, a jaunty
+soubrette, and the fille du regiment.
+
+Master Gridley took out a great volume from the lower shelf,--a folio in
+massive oaken covers with clasps Like prison hinges, bearing the stately
+colophon, white on a ground of vermilion, of Nicholas Jenson and his
+associates. He opened the volume,--paused over its blue, and scarlet
+initial letter,--he turned page after page, admiring its brilliant
+characters, its broad, white marginal rivers, and the narrower white
+creek that separated the black-typed twin-columns, he turned back to
+the beginning and read the commendatory paragraph, “Nam ipsorum omnia
+fidgent tum correctione dignissima, tum cura imprimendo splendida
+ac miranda,” and began reading, “Incipit proemium super apparatum
+decretalium....” when it suddenly occurred to him that this was not
+exactly doing what he had undertaken to do, and he began whisking an
+ancient bandanna about the ears of the venerable volume. All this time
+Miss Susan Posey was catching the little books by the small of their
+backs, pulling them out, opening them, and clapping them together,
+'p-'p-'p! 'p-'p-'p! and carefully caressing all their edges with a
+regular professional dusting-cloth, so persuasively that they yielded
+up every particle that a year had drifted upon them, and came forth
+refreshed and rejuvenated. This process went on for a while, until Susan
+had worked down among the octavos and Master Gridley had worked up among
+the quartos. He had got hold of Calmet's Dictionary, and was caught by
+the article Solomon, so that he forgot his occupation again. All at
+once it struck him that everything was very silent,--the 'p-'p-'p! of
+clapping the books had ceased, and the light rustle of Susan's dress was
+no longer heard. He looked up and saw her standing perfectly still, with
+a book in one hand and her duster in the other. She was lost in thought,
+and by the shadow on her face and the glistening of her blue eyes he
+knew it was her hidden sorrow that had just come back to her. Master
+Gridley shut up his book, leaving Solomon to his fate, like the worthy
+Benedictine he was reading, without discussing the question whether he
+was saved or not.
+
+“Susan Posey, child, what is your trouble?”
+
+Poor Susan was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least
+touch upsets, and fell to crying. It took her some time to get down
+the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them. At last it
+ventured out,--showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the billow,
+sinking into the hollow, and climbing again into notice.
+
+“O Mr. Grid-ley--I can't--I can't--tell you or--any-body--what 's the
+mat-mat-matter. My heart will br-br-break.”
+
+“No, no, no, child,” said Mr. Gridley, sympathetically stirred a little
+himself by the sight of Susan in tears and sobbing and catching her
+breath, “that mustn't be, Susan Posey. Come off the steps, Susan Posey,
+and stop dusting the books,--I can finish them,--and tell me all about
+your troubles. I will try to help you out of them, and I have begun
+to think I know how to help young people pretty well. I have had some
+experience at it.”
+
+But Susan cried and sobbed all the more uncontrollably and convulsively.
+Master Gridley thought he had better lead her at once to what he felt
+pretty sure was the source of her grief, and that, when she had had her
+cry out, she would probably make the hole in the ice he had broken big
+enough in a very few minutes.
+
+“I think something has gone wrong between you and your friend, the young
+gentleman with whom you are in intimate relations, my child, and I think
+you had better talk freely with me, for I can perhaps give you a little
+counsel that will be of service.”
+
+Susan cried herself quiet at last. “There's nobody in the world
+like you, Mr. Gridley,” she said, “and I've been wanting to tell you
+something ever so long. My friend--Mr. Clem--Clement Lindsay does n't
+care for me as he used to,--I know he does n't. He hasn't written to me
+for--I don't know but it's a month. And O Mr. Gridley! he's such a great
+man, and I am such a simple person,--I can't help thinking--he would be
+happier with somebody else than poor little Susan Posey!”
+
+This last touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do those
+who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly, as a
+horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before she
+recovered her conversational road-gait.
+
+“O Mr. Gridley,” she began again, at length, “if I only dared to tell
+him what I think,--that perhaps it would be happier for us both--if we
+could forget each other! Ought I not to tell him so? Don't you think he
+would find another to make him happy? Wouldn't he forgive me for telling
+him he was free? Were we not too young to know each other's hearts when
+we promised each other that we would love as long as we lived? Sha'n't I
+write him a letter this very day and tell him all? Do you think it would
+be wrong in me to do it? O Mr. Gridley, it makes me almost crazy to
+think about it. Clement must be free! I cannot, cannot hold him to a
+promise he does n't want to keep.”
+
+There were so many questions in this eloquent rhapsody of Susan's that
+they neutralized each other, as one might say, and Master Gridley had
+time for reflection. His thoughts went on something in this way:
+
+“Pretty clear case! Guess Mr. Clement can make up his mind to it. Put
+it well, did n't she? Not a word about our little Gifted! That's the
+trouble. Poets! how they do bewitch these schoolgirls! And having a
+chance every day, too, how could you expect her to stand it?” Then
+aloud: “Susan Posey, you are a good, honest little girl as ever was. I
+think you and Clement were too hasty in coming together for life before
+you knew what life meant. I think if you write Clement a letter, telling
+him that you cannot help fearing that you two are not perfectly adapted
+to each other, on account of certain differences for which neither of
+you is responsible, and that you propose that each should release the
+other from the pledge given so long ago,--in that case, I say, I believe
+he will think no worse of you for so doing, and may perhaps agree that
+it is best for both of you to seek your happiness elsewhere than in each
+other.”
+
+The book-dusting came to as abrupt a close as the reading of Lancelot.
+Susan went straight to her room, dried her tears so as to write in
+a fair hand, but had to stop every few lines and take a turn at
+the “dust-layers,” as Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's friend used to call
+the fountains of sensibility. It would seem like betraying Susan's
+confidence to reveal the contents of this letter, but the reader may be
+assured that it was simple and sincere and very sweetly written, without
+the slightest allusion to any other young man, whether of the poetical
+or cheaper human varieties.
+
+It was not long before Susan received a reply from Clement Lindsay.
+It was as kind and generous and noble as she could have asked. It was
+affectionate, as a very amiable brother's letter might be, and candidly
+appreciative of the reasons Susan had assigned for her proposal. He gave
+her back her freedom, not that he should cease to feel an interest in
+her, always. He accepted his own release, not that he would ever think
+she could be indifferent to his future fortunes. And within a very
+brief period of time after sending his answer to Susan Posey, whether he
+wished to see her in person, or whether he had some other motive, he
+had packed his trunk, and made his excuses for an absence of uncertain
+length at the studio, and was on his way to Oxbow Village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII. JUST AS YOU EXPECTED.
+
+The spring of 1861 had now arrived,--that eventful spring which was to
+lift the curtain and show the first scene of the first act in the mighty
+drama which fixed the eyes of mankind during four bloody years. The
+little schemes of little people were going on in all our cities and
+villages without thought of the fearful convulsion which was soon coming
+to shatter the hopes and cloud the prospects of millions. Our little
+Oxbow Village, which held itself by no means the least of human centres,
+was the scene of its own commotions, as intense and exciting to those
+concerned as if the destiny of the nation had been involved in them.
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay appeared suddenly in that important locality, and
+repaired to his accustomed quarters at the house of Deacon Rumrill. That
+worthy person received him with a certain gravity of manner, caused
+by his recollections of the involuntary transgression into which Mr.
+Lindsay had led him by his present of “Ivanhoe.”--He was, on the whole,
+glad to see him, for his finances were not yet wholly recovered from
+the injury inflicted on them by the devouring element. But he could not
+forget that his boarder had betrayed him into a breach of the fourth
+commandment, and that the strict eyes of his clergyman had detected him
+in the very commission of the offence. He had no sooner seen Mr. Clement
+comfortably installed, therefore, than he presented himself at the
+door of his chamber with the book, enveloped in strong paper and very
+securely tied round with a stout string.
+
+“Here is your vollum, Mr. Lindsay,” the Deacon said. “I understand it is
+not the work of that great and good mahn who I thought wrote it. I did
+not see anything immoral in it as fur as I read, but it belongs to what
+I consider a very dangerous class of publications. These novels and
+romances are awfully destructive to our youth. I should recommend you,
+as a young man of principle, to burn the vollum. At least I hope you
+will not leave it about anywhere unless it is carefully tied up. I have
+written upon the paper round it to warn off all the young persons of my
+household from meddling with it.”
+
+True enough, Mr. Clement saw in strong black letters on the back of the
+paper wrapping his unfortunate “Ivanhoe,”--
+
+      “DANGEROUS READING FOR CHRISTIAN YOUTH.
+
+      “TOUCH NOT THE UNCLEAN THING.”
+
+“I thought you said you had Scott's picture hung up in your parlor,
+Deacon Rumrill,” he said, a little amused with the worthy man's fear and
+precautions.
+
+“It is the great Scott's likeness that I have in my parlor,” he said; “I
+will show it to you if you will come with me.”
+
+Mr. Clement followed the Deacon into that sacred apartment.
+
+“That is the portrait of the great Scott,” he said, pointing to an
+engraving of a heavy-looking person whose phrenological developments
+were a somewhat striking contrast to those of the distinguished Sir
+Walter.
+
+“I will take good care that none of your young people see this volume,”
+ Mr. Clement said; “I trust you read it yourself, however, and found
+something to please you in it. I am sure you are safe from being harmed
+by any such book. Did n't you have to finish it, Deacon, after you had
+once begun?”
+
+“Well, I--I--perused a consid'able portion of the work,” the Deacon
+answered, in a way that led Mr. Clement to think he had not stopped much
+short of Finis. “Anything new in the city?”
+
+“Nothing except what you've all had,--Confederate States establishing
+an army and all that,--not very new either. What has been going on here
+lately, Deacon?”--
+
+“Well, Mr. Lindsay, not a great deal. My new barn is pretty nigh done.
+I've got as fine a litter of pigs as ever you see. I don't know whether
+you're a judge of pigs or no. The Hazard gal's come back, spilt, pooty
+much, I guess. Been to one o' them fashionable schools,--I 've heerd
+that she 's learnt to dance. I've heerd say that that Hopkins boy's
+round the Posey gal, come to think, she's the one you went with some
+when you was here,--I 'm gettin' kind o' forgetful. Old Doctor Hurlbut's
+pretty low,--ninety-four year old,--born in '67,--folks ain't ginerally
+very spry after they're ninety, but he held out wonderful.”
+
+“How's Mr. Bradshaw?”
+
+“Well, the young squire, he's off travellin' somewhere in the West, or
+to Washin'ton, or somewhere else,--I don't jestly know where. They say
+that he's follerin' up the courts in the business about old Malachi's
+estate. I don' know much about it.”
+
+The news got round Oxbow Village very speedily that Mr. Clement Lindsay,
+generally considered the accepted lover of Miss Susan Posey, had arrived
+in that place. Now it had come to be the common talk of the village that
+young Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were getting to be mighty thick
+with each other, and the prevailing idea was that Clement's visit had
+reference to that state of affairs. Some said that Susan had given her
+young man the mitten, meaning thereby that she had signified that his
+services as a suitor were dispensed with. Others thought there was only
+a wavering in her affection for her lover, and that he feared for her
+constancy, and had come to vindicate his rights.
+
+Some of the young fellows, who were doubtless envious of Gifted's
+popularity with the fair sex, attempted in the most unjustifiable manner
+to play upon his susceptible nature. One of them informed him that he
+had seen that Lindsay fellah raound taown with the darndest big stick y'
+ever did see. Looked kind o' savage and wild like. Another one told him
+that perhaps he'd better keep a little shady; that are chap that had
+got the mittin was praowlin' abaout--with a pistil,--one o' them
+Darringers,--abaout as long as your thumb, an' fire a bullet as big as a
+p'tatah-ball,--'a fellah carries one in his breeches-pocket, an' shoots
+y' right threugh his own pahnts, withaout ever takin' on it aout of his
+pocket. The stable-keeper, who, it may be remembered, once exchanged
+a few playful words with Mr. Gridley, got a hint from some of these
+unfeeling young men, and offered the resources of his stable to the
+youth supposed to be in peril.
+
+“I 've got a faast colt, Mr. Hopkins, that 'll put twenty mild betwixt
+you an' this here village, as quick as any four huffs 'll dew it in this
+here caounty, if you should want to get away suddin. I've heern tell
+there was some lookin' raound here that wouldn't be wholesome to
+meet,--jest say the word, Mr. Hopkins, an' I 'll have ye on that are
+colt's back in less than no time, an' start ye off full jump. There's a
+good many that's kind o' worried for fear something might happen to ye,
+Mr. Hopkins,--y' see fellahs don't like to have other chaps cuttin' on
+'em aout with their gals.”
+
+Gifted Hopkins had become excessively nervous by this time. It is true
+that everything in his intimacy with Susan Posey, so far, might
+come under the general head of friendship; but he was conscious
+that something more was in both their thoughts. Susan had given him
+mysterious hints that her relations with Clement had undergone a change,
+but had never had quite courage enough, perhaps had too much delicacy,
+to reveal the whole truth.
+
+Gifted was walking home, deeply immersed in thoughts excited by
+the hints which hail been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his
+imagination, when all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement
+Lindsay coming straight towards him. Gifted was unarmed, except with a
+pair of blunt scissors, which he carried habitually in his pocket. What
+should he do? Should he fly? But he was never a good runner, being apt
+to find himself scant o' breath, like Hamlet, after violent exercise.
+His demeanor on the occasion did credit to his sense of his own virtuous
+conduct and his self-possession. He put his hand out, while yet at a
+considerable distance, and marched up towards Clement, smiling with all
+the native amiability which belonged to him.
+
+To his infinite relief, Clement put out his hand to grasp the one
+offered him, and greeted the young poet in the most frank and cordial
+manner.
+
+“And how is Miss Susan Posey, Mr. Hopkins?” asked Clement, in the most
+cheerful tone. “It is a long while since I have seen her, and you must
+tell her that I hope I shall not leave the village without finding time
+to call upon her. She and I are good friends always, Mr. Hopkins, though
+perhaps I shall not be quite so often at your mother's as I was during
+my last visit to Oxbow Village.”
+
+Gifted felt somewhat as the subject of one of those old-fashioned forms
+of argument, formerly much employed to convince men of error in matters
+of religion, must have felt when the official who superintended the
+stretching-machine said, “Slack up!”
+
+He told Mr. Clement all about Susan, and was on the point of saying that
+if he, Mr. Clement, did not claim any engrossing interest in her, he,
+Gifted, was ready to offer her the devotion of a poet's heart. Mr.
+Clement, however, had so many other questions to ask him about everybody
+in the village, more particularly concerning certain young persons in
+whom he seemed to be specially interested, that there was no chance to
+work in his own revelations of sentiment.
+
+Clement Lindsay had come to Oxbow Village with a single purpose. He
+could now venture to trust himself in the presence of Myrtle Hazard. He
+was free, and he knew nothing to show that she had lost the liberty
+of disposing of her heart. But after an experience such as he had gone
+through, he was naturally distrustful of himself, and inclined to be
+cautious and reserved in yielding to a new passion. Should he tell her
+the true relations in which they stood to each other,--that she owed her
+life to him, and that he had very nearly sacrificed his own in saving
+hers? Why not? He had a claim on her gratitude for what he had done in
+her behalf, and out of this gratitude there might naturally spring a
+warmer feeling.
+
+No, he could not try to win her affections by showing that he had paid
+for them beforehand. She seemed to be utterly unconscious of the fact
+that it was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters. If the
+thought came to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it would be time
+enough to tell her the story. If not, the moment might arrive when
+he could reveal to her the truth that he was her deliverer, without
+accusing himself of bribing her woman's heart to reward him for his
+services. He would wait for that moment.
+
+It was the most natural thing in the world that Mr. Lindsay, a young
+gentleman from the city, should call to see Miss Hazard, a young lady
+whom he had met recently at a party. To that pleasing duty he addressed
+himself the evening after his arrival.
+
+“The young gentleman's goin' a courtin', I calc'late,” was the remark of
+the Deacon's wife when she saw what a comely figure Mr. Clement showed
+at the tea-table.
+
+“A very hahnsome young mahn,” the Deacon replied, “and looks as if he
+might know consid'able. An architect, you know,--a sort of a builder.
+Wonder if he has n't got any good plans for a hahnsome pigsty. I suppose
+he 'd charge somethin' for one, but it couldn't be much, an' he could
+take it out in board.”
+
+“Better ask him,” his wife--said; “he looks mighty pleasant; there's
+nothin' lost by askin', an' a good deal got sometimes, grandma used to
+say.”
+
+The Deacon followed her advice. Mr. Clement was perfectly good-natured
+about it, asked the Deacon the number of snouts in his menagerie, got an
+idea of the accommodations required, and sketched the plaza of a
+neat, and appropriate edifice for the Porcellarium, as Master Gridley
+afterwards pleasantly christened it, which was carried out by
+the carpenter, and stands to this day a monument of his obliging
+disposition, and a proof that there is nothing so humble that taste
+cannot be shown in it.
+
+“What'll be your charge for the plan of the pigsty, Mr. Lindsay?” the
+Deacon inquired with an air of interest,--he might have become involved
+more deeply than he had intended. “How much should you call about right
+for the picter an' figgerin'?”
+
+“Oh, you're quite welcome to my sketch of a plan, Deacon. I've seen much
+showier buildings tenanted by animals not very different from those your
+edifice is meant for.”
+
+Mr. Clement found the three ladies sitting together in the chill, dim
+parlor at The Poplars. They had one of the city papers spread out on
+the table, and Myrtle was reading aloud the last news from Charleston
+Harbor. She rose as Mr. Clement entered, and stepped forward to meet
+him. It was a strange impression this young man produced upon her,--not
+through the common channels of the intelligence, not exactly that
+“magnetic” influence of which she had had experience at a former time.
+It did not over come her as at the moment of their second meeting. But
+it was something she must struggle against, and she had force and pride
+and training enough now to maintain her usual tranquillity, in spite of
+a certain inward commotion which seemed to reach her breathing and her
+pulse by some strange, inexplicable mechanism.
+
+Myrtle, it must be remembered, was no longer the simple country girl who
+had run away at fifteen, but a young lady of seventeen, who had learned
+all that more than a year's diligence at a great school could teach her,
+who had been much with girls of taste and of culture, and was familiar
+with the style and manners of those who came from what considered
+itself the supreme order in the social hierarchy. Her natural love for
+picturesque adornment was qualified by a knowledge of the prevailing
+modes not usual in so small a place as Oxbow Village. All this had not
+failed to produce its impression on those about her. Persons who, like
+Miss Silence Withers, believe, not in education, inasmuch as there is no
+healthy nature to be educated, but in transformation, worry about
+their charges up to a certain period of their lives. Then, if the
+transformation does not come, they seem to think their cares and duties
+are at an end, and, considering their theories of human destiny, usually
+accept the situation with wonderful complacency. This was the stage
+which Miss Silence Withers had reached with reference to Myrtle. It made
+her infinitely more agreeable, or less disagreeable, as the reader may
+choose one or the other statement, than when she was always fretting
+about her “responsibility.” She even began to take an interest in some
+of Myrtle's worldly experiences, and something like a smile would now
+and then disarrange the chief-mourner stillness of her features, as
+Myrtle would tell some lively story she had brought away from the gay
+society she had frequented.
+
+Cynthia Badlam kept her keen eyes on her like a hawk. Murray Bradshaw
+was away, and here was this handsome and agreeable youth coming in to
+poach on the preserve of which she considered herself the gamekeeper.
+What did it mean? She had heard the story about Susan's being off with
+her old love and on with a new one. Ah ha! this is the game, is it?
+
+Clement Lindsay passed not so much a pleasant evening, as one of
+strange, perplexed, and mingled delight and inward conflict. He had
+found his marble once more turned to flesh and blood, and breathing
+before him. This was the woman he was born for; her form was fit to
+model his proudest ideal from, her eyes melted him when they rested for
+an instant on his face,--her voice reached the hidden sensibilities of
+his inmost nature; those which never betray their existence until the
+outward chord to which they vibrate in response sends its message
+to stir them. But was she not already pledged to that other,--that
+cold-blooded, contriving, venal, cynical, selfish, polished, fascinating
+man of the world, whose artful strategy would pass with nine women out
+of ten for the most romantic devotion?
+
+If he had known the impression he made, he would have felt less anxiety
+with reference to this particular possibility. Miss Silence expressed
+herself gratified with his appearance, and thought he looked like a good
+young man,--he reminded her of a young friend of hers who--[It was the
+same who had gone to one of the cannibal islands as a missionary,--and
+stayed there.] Myrtle was very quiet. She had nothing to say about
+Clement, except that she had met him at a party in the city, and found
+him agreeable. Miss Cynthia wrote a letter to Murray Bradshaw that very
+evening, telling him that he had better come back to Oxbow Village as
+quickly as he could, unless he wished to find his place occupied by an
+intruder.
+
+In the mean time, the country was watching the garrison in Charleston
+Harbor. All at once the first gun of the four years' cannonade hurled
+its ball against the walls of Fort Sumter. There was no hamlet in the
+land which the reverberations of that cannon-roar did not reach. There
+was no valley so darkened by overshadowing hills that it did not see the
+American flag hauled down on the 13th of April. There was no loyal
+heart in the North that did not answer to the call of the country to
+its defenders which went forth two days later. The great tide of feeling
+reached the locality where the lesser events of our narrative were
+occurring. A meeting of the citizens was instantly called. The venerable
+Father Pemberton opened it with a prayer that filled every soul with
+courage and high resolve. The young farmers and mechanics of that whole
+region joined the companies to which they belonged, or organized in
+squads and marched at once, or got ready to march, to the scene of
+conflict.
+
+The contagion of warlike patriotism reached the most peacefully inclined
+young persons.
+
+“My country calls me,” Gifted Hopkins said to Susan Posey, “and I am
+preparing to obey her summons. If I can pass the medical examination,
+which it is possible I may, though I fear my constitution _may_ be thought
+too weak, and if no obstacle impedes me, I think of marching in the
+ranks of the Oxbow Invincibles. If I go, Susan, and I fall, will you not
+remember me... as one who... cherished the tenderest... sentiments...
+towards you... and who had looked forward to the time when... when....”
+
+His eyes told the rest. He loved!
+
+Susan forgot all the rules of reserve to which she had been trained.
+What were cold conventionalities at such a moment? “Never! never!” she
+said, throwing her arms about his neck and mingling her tears with his,
+which were flowing freely. “Your country does not need your sword... but
+it does need... your pen. Your poems will inspire... our soldiers....
+The Oxbow Invincibles will march to victory, singing your songs.... If
+you go... and if you... fall... O Gifted!... I... I... yes, I shall die
+too!”
+
+His love was returned. He was blest!
+
+“Susan,” he said, “my own Susan, I yield to your wishes at every
+sacrifice. Henceforth they will be my law. Yes, I will stay and
+encourage my brave countrymen to go forward to the bloody field. My
+voice shall urge them on to the battle-ground. I will give my dearest
+breath to stimulate their ardor.
+
+“O Susan! My own, own Susan!”
+
+While these interesting events had been going on beneath the modest roof
+of the Widow Hopkins, affairs had been rapidly hastening to a similar
+conclusion under the statelier shadow of The Poplars. Clement Lindsay
+was so well received at his first visit that he ventured to repeat it
+several times, with so short intervals that it implied something more
+than a common interest in one of the members of the household. There was
+no room for doubt who this could be, and Myrtle Hazard could not help
+seeing that she was the object of his undisguised admiration. The belief
+was now general in the village that Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey
+were either engaged or on the point of being so; and it was equally
+understood that, whatever might be the explanation, she and her former
+lover had parted company in an amicable manner.
+
+Love works very strange transformations in young women. Sometimes it
+leads them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,--their
+whole thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so
+as to keep out all other images. Poor darlings! We smile at their little
+vanities, as if they were very trivial things compared with the last
+Congressman's speech or the great Election Sermon; but Nature knows well
+what she is about. The maiden's ribbon or ruffle means a great deal more
+for her than the judge's wig or the priest's surplice.
+
+It was not in this way that the gentle emotion awaking in the breast
+of Myrtle Hazard betrayed itself. As the thought dawned in her
+consciousness that she was loved, a change came over her such as the
+spirit that protected her, according to the harmless fancy she had
+inherited, might have wept for joy to behold, if tears could flow from
+angelic eyes. She forgot herself and her ambitions,--the thought of
+shining in the great world died out in the presence of new visions of a
+future in which she was not to be her own,--of feelings in the depth of
+which the shallow vanities which had drawn her young eyes to them for a
+while seemed less than nothing. Myrtle had not hitherto said to herself
+that Clement was her lover, yet her whole nature was expanding and
+deepening in the light of that friendship which any other eye could have
+known at a glance for the great passion.
+
+Cynthia Badlam wrote a pressing letter to Murray Bradshaw. “There is no
+time to be lost; she is bewitched, and will be gone beyond hope if this
+business is not put a stop to.”
+
+Love moves in an accelerating ratio; and there comes a time when the
+progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings
+two young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer
+together, into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an infinity
+between the moment when all is told and that which went just before.
+
+They were sitting together by themselves in the dimly lighted parlor.
+They had told each other many experiences of their past lives, very
+freely, as two intimate friends of different sex might do. Clement had
+happened to allude to Susan, speaking very kindly and tenderly of her.
+He hoped this youth to whom she was attached would make her life happy.
+“You know how simple-hearted and good she is; her image will always be a
+pleasant one in my memory,--second to but one other.”
+
+Myrtle ought, according to the common rules of conversation, to have
+asked, What other? but she did not. She may have looked as if she wanted
+to ask,--she may have blushed or turned pale, perhaps she could not
+trust her voice; but whatever the reason was, she sat still, with
+downcast eyes. Clement waited a reasonable time, but, finding it was of
+no use, began again.
+
+“Your image is the one other,--the only one, let me say, for all else
+fades in its presence,--your image fills all my thought. Will you trust
+your life and happiness with one who can offer you so little beside his
+love? You know my whole heart is yours.”
+
+Whether Myrtle said anything in reply or not, whether she acted like
+Coleridge's Genevieve,--that is, “fled to him and wept,” or suffered her
+feelings to betray themselves in some less startling confession, we will
+leave untold. Her answer, spoken or silent, could not have been a cruel
+one, for in another moment Clement was pressing his lips to hers, after
+the manner of accepted lovers.
+
+“Our lips have met to-day for the second time,” he said, presently.
+
+She looked at him in wonder. What did he mean? The second time! How
+assuredly he spoke! She looked him calmly in the face, and awaited his
+explanation.
+
+“I have a singular story to tell you. On the morning of the 16th of
+June, now nearly two years ago, I was sitting in my room at Alderbank,
+some twenty miles down the river, when I heard a cry for help coming
+from the river. I ran down to the bank, and there I saw a boy in an old
+boat--”
+
+When it came to the “boy” in the old boat, Myrtle's cheeks flamed so
+that she could not bear it, and she covered her face with both her
+hands. But Clement told his story calmly through to the end, sliding
+gently over its later incidents, for Myrtle's heart was throbbing
+violently, and her breath a little catching and sighing, as when she had
+first lived with the new life his breath had given her.
+
+“Why did you ask me for myself, when you could have claimed me?” she
+said.
+
+“I wanted a free gift, Myrtle,” Clement answered, “and I have it.”
+
+They sat in silence, lost in the sense of that new life which had
+suddenly risen on their souls.
+
+The door-bell rang sharply. Kitty Fagan answered its summons, and
+presently entered the parlor and announced that Mr. Bradshaw was in the
+library, and wished to see the ladies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV. MURRAY BRADSHAW PLAYS HIS LAST CARD.
+
+“How can I see that man this evening, Mr. Lindsay?”
+
+“May I not be Clement, dearest? I would not see him at all, Myrtle.
+I don't believe you will find much pleasure in listening to his fine
+speeches.”
+
+“I cannot endure it.--Kitty, tell him I am engaged, and cannot see him
+this evening. No, no! don't say engaged, say very much occupied.”
+
+Kitty departed, communing with herself in this wise:--“Ockipied, is it?
+An' that's what ye cahl it when ye 're kapin' company with one young
+gintleman an' don't want another young gintleman to come in an' help the
+two of ye? Ye won't get y'r pigs to market to-day, Mr. Bridshaw, no, nor
+to-morrow, nayther, Mr. Bridshaw. It's Mrs. Lindsay that Miss Myrtle
+is goin' to be,--an' a big cake there'll be at the weddin' frosted all
+over,--won't ye be plased with a slice o' that, Mr. Bridshaw?”
+
+With these reflections in her mind, Mistress Kitty delivered her
+message, not without a gleam of malicious intelligence in her look that
+stung Mr. Bradshaw sharply. He had noticed a hat in the entry, and a
+little stick by it which he remembered well as one he had seen carried
+by Clement Lindsay. But he was used to concealing his emotions, and
+he greeted the two older ladies who presently came into the library so
+pleasantly, that no one who had not studied his face long and carefully
+would have suspected the bitterness of heart that lay hidden far down
+beneath his deceptive smile. He told Miss Silence, with much apparent
+interest, the story of his journey. He gave her an account of the
+progress of the case in which the estate of which she inherited the
+principal portion was interested. He did not tell her that a final
+decision which would settle the right to the great claim might be
+expected at any moment, and he did not tell her that there was very
+little doubt that it would be in favor of the heirs of Malachi Withers.
+He was very sorry he could not see Miss Hazard that evening,--hoped he
+should be more fortunate to-morrow forenoon, when he intended to call
+again,--had a message for her from one of her former school friends,
+which he was anxious to give her. He exchanged certain looks and hints
+with Miss Cynthia, which led her to withdraw and bring down the papers
+he had entrusted to her. At the close of his visit, she followed him
+into the entry with a lamp, as was her common custom.
+
+“What's the meaning of all this, Cynthia? Is that fellow making love to
+Myrtle?”
+
+“I'm afraid so, Mr. Bradshaw. He's been here several times, and they
+seem to be getting intimate. I couldn't do anything to stop it.”
+
+“Give me the papers,--quick!”
+
+Cynthia pulled the package from her pocket. Murray Bradshaw looked
+sharply at it. A little crumpled,--crowded into her pocket. Seal
+unbroken. All safe.
+
+“I shall come again to-morrow forenoon. Another day and it will be all
+up. The decision of the court will be known. It won't be my fault if
+one visit is not enough.--You don't suppose Myrtle is in love with this
+fellow?”
+
+“She acts as--if she might be. You know he's broke with Susan Posey, and
+there's nothing to hinder. If you ask my opinion, I think it's your last
+chance: she is n't a girl to half do things, and if she has taken to
+this man it will be hard to make her change her mind. But she's young,
+and she has had a liking for you, and if you manage it well there's no
+telling.”
+
+Two notes passed between Myrtle Hazard and Master Byles Gridley that
+evening. Mistress Kitty Fagan, who had kept her ears pretty wide open,
+carried them.
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home in a very desperate state of feeling. He had
+laid his plans, as he thought, with perfect skill, and the certainty of
+their securing their end. These papers were to have been taken from the
+envelope, and found in the garret just at the right moment, either by
+Cynthia herself or one of the other members of the family, who was to be
+led on, as it were accidentally, to the discovery. The right moment must
+be close at hand. He was to offer his hand--and heart, of course--to
+Myrtle, and it was to be accepted. As soon as the decision of the land
+case was made known, or not long afterwards, there was to be a search
+in the garret for papers, and these were to be discovered in a certain
+dusty recess, where, of course, they would have been placed by Miss
+Cynthia.
+
+And now the one condition which gave any value to these arrangements
+seemed like to fail. This obscure youth--this poor fool, who had been
+on the point of marrying a simpleton to whom he had made a boyish
+promise--was coming between him and the object of his long pursuit,--the
+woman who had every attraction to draw him to herself. It had been a
+matter of pride with Murray Bradshaw that he never lost his temper so as
+to interfere with the precise course of action which his cool judgment
+approved; but now he was almost beside himself with passion. His labors,
+as he believed, had secured the favorable issue of the great case so
+long pending. He had followed Myrtle through her whole career, if not as
+her avowed lover, at least as one whose friendship promised to flower
+in love in due season. The moment had come when the scene and the
+characters in this village drama were to undergo a change as sudden
+and as brilliant as is seen in those fairy spectacles where the dark
+background changes to a golden palace and the sober dresses are replaced
+by robes of regal splendor. The change was fast approaching; but he,
+the enchanter, as he had thought himself, found his wand broken, and his
+power given to another.
+
+He could not sleep during that night. He paced his room, a prey to
+jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him from
+feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour. He thought of
+all that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own intolerable
+anguish. Of revenge. If Myrtle rejected his suit, should he take her
+life on the spot, that she might never be another's,--that neither
+man nor woman should ever triumph over him,--the proud ambitious man,
+defeated, humbled, scorned? No! that was a meanness of egotism which
+only the most vulgar souls could be capable of. Should he challenge her
+lover? It was not the way of the people and time, and ended in absurd
+complications, if anybody was foolish enough to try it. Shoot him? The
+idea floated through his mind, for he thought of everything; but he
+was a lawyer, and not a fool, and had no idea of figuring in court as
+a criminal. Besides, he was not a murderer,--cunning was his natural
+weapon, not violence. He had a certain admiration of desperate crime in
+others, as showing nerve and force, but he did not feel it to be his own
+style of doing business.
+
+During the night he made every arrangement for leaving the village the
+next day, in case he failed to make any impression on Myrtle Hazard
+and found that his chance was gone. He wrote a letter to his partner,
+telling him that he had left to join one of the regiments forming in the
+city. He adjusted all his business matters so that his partner should
+find as little trouble as possible. A little before dawn he threw
+himself on the bed, but he could not sleep; and he rose at sunrise, and
+finished his preparations for his departure to the city.
+
+The morning dragged along slowly. He could not go to the office, not
+wishing to meet his partner again. After breakfast he dressed himself
+with great care, for he meant to show himself in the best possible
+aspect. Just before he left the house to go to The Poplars, he took the
+sealed package from his trunk, broke open the envelope, took from it a
+single paper,--it had some spots on it which distinguished it from
+all the rest,--put it separately in his pocket, and then the envelope
+containing the other papers. The calm smile he wore on his features as
+he set forth cost him a greater effort than he had ever made before to
+put it on. He was moulding his face to the look with which he meant to
+present himself; and the muscles had been sternly fixed so long that it
+was a task to bring them to their habitual expression in company,--that
+of ingenuous good-nature.
+
+He was shown into the parlor at The Poplars; and Kitty told Myrtle that
+he had called and inquired for her and was waiting down stairs.
+
+“Tell him I will be down presently,” she said. “And, Kitty, now mind
+just what I tell you. Leave your kitchen door open, so that you can
+hear anything fall in the parlor. If you hear a book fall,--it will be a
+heavy one, and will make some noise,--run straight up here to my little
+chamber, and hang this red scarf out of the window. The left-hand
+side-sash, mind, so that anybody can see it from the road. If Mr.
+Gridley calls, show him into the parlor, no matter who is there.”
+
+Kitty Fagan looked amazingly intelligent, and promised that she would
+do exactly as she was told. Myrtle followed her down stairs almost
+immediately, and went into the parlor, where Mr. Bradshaw was waiting.
+
+Never in his calmest moments had he worn a more insinuating smile on
+his features than that with which he now greeted Myrtle. So gentle, so
+gracious, so full of trust, such a completely natural expression of a
+kind, genial character did it seem, that to any but an expert it would
+have appeared impossible that such an effect could be produced by the
+skilful balancing of half a dozen pairs of little muscles that manage
+the lips and the corners of the mouth. The tones of his voice were
+subdued into accord with the look of his features; his whole manner was
+fascinating, as far as any conscious effort could make it so. It was
+just one of those artificially pleasing effects that so often pass with
+such as have little experience of life for the genuine expression of
+character and feeling. But Myrtle had learned the look that shapes
+itself on the features of one who loves with a love that seeketh not its
+own, and she knew the difference between acting and reality. She met his
+insinuating approach with a courtesy so carefully ordered that it was of
+itself a sentence without appeal. Artful persons often interpret sincere
+ones by their own standard. Murray Bradshaw thought little of this
+somewhat formal address,--a few minutes would break this thin film
+to pieces. He was not only a suitor with a prize to gain, he was a
+colloquial artist about to employ all the resources of his specialty.
+
+He introduced the conversation in the most natural and easy way,
+by giving her the message from a former school-mate to which he had
+referred, coloring it so delicately, as he delivered it, that it became
+an innocent-looking flattery. Myrtle found herself in a rose-colored
+atmosphere, not from Murray Bradshaw's admiration, as it seemed, but
+only reflected by his mind from another source. That was one of his
+arts, always, if possible, to associate himself incidentally, as it
+appeared, and unavoidably, with an agreeable impression.
+
+So Myrtle was betrayed into smiling and being pleased before he had said
+a word about himself or his affairs. Then he told her of the adventures
+and labors of his late expedition; of certain evidence which at the
+very last moment he had unearthed, and which was very probably the
+turning-point in the case. He could not help feeling that she must
+eventually reap some benefit from the good fortune with which his
+efforts had been attended. The thought that it might yet be so had been
+a great source of encouragement to him,--it would always be a great
+happiness to him to remember that he had done anything to make her
+happy.
+
+Myrtle was very glad that he had been so far successful,--she did not
+know that it made much difference to her, but she was obliged to him for
+the desire of serving her that he had expressed.
+
+“My services are always yours, Miss Hazard. There is no sacrifice I
+would not willingly make for your benefit. I have never had but one
+feeling toward you. You cannot be ignorant of what that feeling is.”
+
+“I know, Mr. Bradshaw, it has been one of kindness. I have to thank
+you for many friendly attentions, for which I hope I have never been
+ungrateful.”
+
+“Kindness is not all that I feel towards you, Miss Hazard. If that
+were all, my lips would not tremble as they do now in telling you my
+feelings.--I love you.”
+
+He sprang the great confession on Myrtle a little sooner than he had
+meant. It was so hard to go on making phrases! Myrtle changed color a
+little, for she was startled.
+
+The seemingly involuntary movement she made brought her arm against a
+large dictionary, which lay very near the edge of the table on which it
+was resting. The book fell with a loud noise to the floor.
+
+There it lay. The young man awaited her answer; he did not think of
+polite forms at such a moment.
+
+“It cannot be, Mr. Bradshaw,--it must not be. I have known you long,
+and I am not ignorant of all your brilliant qualities, but you must not
+speak to me of love. Your regard,--your friendly interest, tell me that
+I shall always have these, but do not distress me with offering more
+than these.”
+
+“I do not ask you to give me your love in return; I only ask you not
+to bid me despair. Let me believe that the time may come' when you will
+listen to me,--no matter how distant. You are young,--you have a
+tender heart,--you would not doom one who only lives for you to
+wretchedness,--so long that we have known each other. It cannot be that
+any other has come between us--”
+
+Myrtle blushed so deeply that there was no need of his finishing his
+question.
+
+“Do you mean, Myrtle Hazard, that you have cast me aside for
+another?--for this stranger--this artist--who was with you yesterday
+when I came, bringing with me the story of all I had done for you, yes,
+for you,--and was ignominiously refused the privilege of seeing you?”
+ Rage and jealousy had got the better of him this time. He rose as he
+spoke, and looked upon her with such passion kindling in his eyes that
+he seemed ready for any desperate act.
+
+“I have thanked you for any services you may have rendered me, Mr.
+Bradshaw,” Myrtle answered, very calmly, “and I hope you will add one
+more to them by sparing me this rude questioning. I wished to treat you
+as a friend; I hope you will not render that impossible.”
+
+He had recovered himself for one more last effort. “I was impatient:
+overlook it, I beg you. I was thinking of all the happiness I have
+labored to secure for you, and of the ruin to us both it would be if you
+scornfully rejected the love I offer you,--if you refuse to leave me any
+hope for the future,--if you insist on throwing yourself away on this
+man, so lately pledged to another. I hold the key of all your earthly
+fortunes in my hand. My love for you inspired me in all that I have
+done, and, now that I come to lay the result of my labors at your feet,
+you turn from me, and offer my reward to a stranger. I do not ask you
+to say this day that you will be mine,--I would not force your
+inclinations,--but I do ask you that you will hold yourself free of all
+others, and listen to me as one who may yet be more than a friend. Say
+so much as this, Myrtle, and you shall have such a future as you never
+dreamed of. Fortune, position, all that this world can give, shall be
+yours.”
+
+“Never! never! If you could offer me the whole world, or take away from
+me all that the world can give, it would make no difference to me. I
+cannot tell what power you hold over me, whether of life and death, or
+of wealth and poverty; but after talking to me of love, I should not
+have thought you would have wronged me by suggesting any meaner motive.
+It is only because we have been on friendly terms so long that I have
+listened to you as I have done. You have said more than enough, and I
+beg you will allow me to put an end to this interview.”
+
+She rose to leave the room. But Murray Bradshaw had gone too far to
+control himself,--he listened only to the rage which blinded him.
+
+“Not yet!” he said. “Stay one moment, and you shall know what your pride
+and self-will have cost you!”
+
+Myrtle stood, arrested, whether by fear, or curiosity, or the passive
+subjection of her muscles to his imperious will, it would be hard to
+say.
+
+Murray Bradshaw took out the spotted paper from his breast-pocket, and
+held it up before her. “Look here!” he exclaimed. “This would have made
+you rich,--it would have crowned you a queen in society,--it would have
+given you all, and more than all, that you ever dreamed of luxury, of
+splendor, of enjoyment; and I, who won it for you, would have taught you
+how to make life yield every bliss it had in store to your wishes. You
+reject my offer unconditionally?”
+
+Myrtle expressed her negative only by a slight contemptuous movement.
+
+Murray Bradshaw walked deliberately to the fireplace, and laid the
+spotted paper upon the burning coals. It writhed and curled, blackened,
+flamed, and in a moment was a cinder dropping into ashes. He folded his
+arms, and stood looking at the wreck of Myrtle's future, the work of his
+cruel hand. Strangely enough, Myrtle herself was fascinated, as it were,
+by the apparent solemnity of this mysterious sacrifice. She had kept her
+eyes steadily on him all the time, and was still gazing at the altar on
+which her happiness had been in some way offered up, when the door was
+opened by Kitty Fagan, and Master Byles Gridley was ushered into the
+parlor.
+
+“Too late, old man!” Murray Bradshaw exclaimed, in a hoarse and savage
+voice, as he passed out of the room, and strode through the entry and
+down the avenue. It was the last time the old gate of The Poplars was
+to open or close for him. The same day he left the village; and the next
+time his name was mentioned it was as an officer in one of the regiments
+just raised and about marching to the seat of war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV. THE SPOTTED PAPER.
+
+What Master Gridley may have said to Myrtle Hazard that served to
+calm her after this exciting scene cannot now be recalled. That Murray
+Bradshaw thought he was inflicting a deadly injury on her was plain
+enough. That Master Gridley did succeed in convincing her that no great
+harm had probably been done her is equally certain.
+
+Like all bachelors who have lived a lonely life, Master Byles Gridley
+had his habits, which nothing short of some terrestrial convulsion--or
+perhaps, in his case, some instinct that drove him forth to help
+somebody in trouble--could possibly derange. After his breakfast, he
+always sat and read awhile,--the paper, if a new one came to hand,
+or some pleasant old author,--if a little neglected by the world of
+readers, he felt more at ease with him, and loved him all the better.
+
+But on the morning after his interview with Myrtle Hazard, he had
+received a letter which made him forget newspapers, old authors, almost
+everything, for the moment. It was from the publisher with whom he had
+had a conversation, it may be remembered, when he visited the city, and
+was to this effect: That Our Firm propose to print and stereotype the
+work originally published under the title of “Thoughts on the Universe”;
+said work to be remodelled according to the plan suggested by the
+Author, with the corrections, alterations, omissions, and additions
+proposed by him; said work to be published under the following title,
+to wit: ________ ________: said work to be printed in 12mo, on paper
+of good quality, from new types, etc., etc., and for every copy thereof
+printed the author to receive, etc., etc.
+
+Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over,
+to know if it could be really so. So it really was. His book had
+disappeared from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet the
+ground and never germinate disappear. At last it had got a certain value
+as a curiosity for book-hunters. Some one of them, keener-eyed than the
+rest, had seen that there was a meaning and virtue in this unsuccessful
+book, for which there was a new audience educated since it had tried to
+breathe before its time. Out of this had grown at last the publisher's
+proposal. It was too much: his heart swelled with joy, and his eyes
+filled with tears.
+
+How could he resist the temptation? He took down his own particular
+copy of the book, which was yet to do him honor as its parent, and
+began reading. As his eye fell on one paragraph after another, he
+nodded approval of this sentiment or opinion, he shook his head as if
+questioning whether this other were not to be modified or left out,
+he condemned a third as being no longer true for him as when it was
+written, and he sanctioned a fourth with his hearty approval. The reader
+may like a few specimens from this early edition, now a rarity. He shall
+have them, with Master Gridley's verbal comments. The book, as its
+name implied, contained “Thoughts” rather than consecutive trains of
+reasoning or continuous disquisitions. What he read and remarked
+upon were a few of the more pointed statements which stood out in the
+chapters he was turning over. The worth of the book must not be judged
+by these almost random specimens.
+
+“THE BEST THOUGHT, LIKE THE MOST PERFECT DIGESTION, IS DONE
+UNCONSCIOUSLY.--Develop that.--Ideas at compound interest in the
+mind.--Be aye sticking in an idea,--while you're sleeping it'll be
+growing. Seed of a thought to-day,--flower to-morrow--next week--ten
+years from now, etc.--Article by and by for the....
+
+“CAN THE INFINITE BE SUPPOSED TO SHIFT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE
+ULTIMATE DESTINY OF ANY CREATED THING TO THE FINITE? OUR THEOLOGIANS
+PRETEND THAT IT CAN. I DOUBT.--Heretical. Stet.
+
+“PROTESTANTISM MEANS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. BUT IT IS AFRAID OF ITS OWN
+LOGIC.--Stet. No logical resting-place short of None of your business.
+
+“THE SUPREME SELF-INDULGENCE IS TO SURRENDER THE WILL TO A SPIRITUAL
+DIRECTOR.--Protestantism gave up a great luxury.--Did it though?
+
+“ASIATIC MODES OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH DO NOT EXPRESS THE 'RELATIONS IN
+WHICH THE AMERICAN FEELS HIM SELF TO STAND TO HIS SUPERIORS IN THIS OR
+ANY OTHER SPHERE OF BEING. REPUBLICANISM MUST HAVE ITS OWN RELIGIOUS
+PHRASEOLOGY, WHICH IS NOT THAT BORROWED FROM ORIENTAL DESPOTISMS.
+
+“IDOLS AND DOGMAS IN PLACE OF CHARACTER; PILLS AND THEORIES IN PLACE
+OF WHOLESOME LIVING. SEE THE HISTORIES OF THEOLOGY AND MEDICINE
+PASSIM.--Hits 'em.
+
+“'OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.' DO YOU MEAN TO SAY JEAN CHAUVIN,
+THAT          'HEAVEN LIES ABOUT US IN OUR INFANCY'?
+
+“WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN OF YOUR ORGANIZATION? YOUR SOUL WAS IN A HURRY, AND
+MADE A RUSH FOR A BODY. THERE ARE PATIENT SPIRITS THAT HAVE WAITED FROM
+ETERNITY, AND NEVER FOUND PARENTS FIT TO BE BORN OF.--How do you know
+anything about all that? Dele.
+
+“WHAT SWEET, SMOOTH VOICES THE NEGROES HAVE! A HUNDRED GENERATIONS FED
+ON BANANAS.--COMPARE THEM WITH OUR APPLE-EATING WHITE FOLKS!--It won't
+do. Bananas came from the West Indies.
+
+“TO TELL A MAN'S TEMPERAMENT BY HIS HANDWRITING. SEE IF THE DOTS OF HIS
+I'S RUN AHEAD OR NOT, AND IF THEY DO, HOW FAR.--I have tried that--on
+myself.
+
+“MARRYING INTO SOME FAMILIES IS THE NEXT THING TO BEING CANONIZED.--Not
+so true now as twenty or thirty years ago. As many bladders, but more
+pins.
+
+“FISH AND DANDIES ONLY KEEP ON ICE.--Who will take? Explain in note how
+all warmth approaching blood heat spoils fops and flounders.
+
+“FLYING IS A LOST ART AMONG MEN AND REPTILES. BATS FLY, AND MEN
+OUGHT TO. TRY A LIGHT TURBINE. RISE A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE
+SLANTING,--RISE HALF A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE SLANTING, AND SO
+ON. OR SLANT UP AND SLANT DOWN.--Poh! You ain't such a fool as to think
+that is new,--are you?
+
+“Put in my telegraph project. Central station. Cables with insulated
+wires running to it from different quarters of the city. These form
+the centripetal system. From central station, wires to all the livery
+stables, messenger stands, provision shops, etc., etc. These form the
+centrifugal system. Any house may have a wire in the nearest cable at
+small cost.
+
+“DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED AFTER THE CONTINENTS HAVE GONE UNDER, AND
+COME UP AGAIN, AND DRIED, AND BRED NEW RACES? HAVE YOUR NAME STAMPED ON
+ALL YOUR PLATES AND CUPS AND SAUCERS. NOTHING OF YOU OR YOURS WILL LAST
+LIKE THOSE. I NEVER SIT DOWN AT MY TABLE WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE CHINA
+SERVICE, AND SAYING, 'HERE ARE MY MONUMENTS. THAT BUTTER-DISH IS MY
+URN. THIS SOUP-PLATE IS MY MEMORIAL TABLET.' NO NEED OF A SKELETON AT MY
+BANQUETS! I FEED FROM MY TOMBSTONE AND READ MY EPITAPH AT THE BOTTOM OF
+EVERY TEACUP.--Good.”
+
+He fell into a revery as he finished reading this last sentence. He
+thought of the dim and dread future,--all the changes that it would
+bring to him, to all the living, to the face of the globe, to the order
+of earthly things. He saw men of a new race, alien to all that had
+ever lived, excavating with strange, vast engines the old ocean-bed now
+become habitable land. And as the great scoops turned out the earth they
+had fetched up from the unexplored depths, a relic of a former simple
+civilization revealed the fact that here a tribe of human beings had
+lived and perished.--Only the coffee-cup he had in his hand half an hour
+ago.--Where would he be then? and Mrs. Hopkins, and Gifted, and Susan,
+and everybody? and President Buchanan? and the Boston State-House?
+and Broadway?--O Lord, Lord, Lord! And the sun perceptibly smaller,
+according to the astronomers, and the earth cooled down a number of
+degrees, and inconceivable arts practised by men of a type yet undreamed
+of, and all the fighting creeds merged in one great universal--
+
+A knock at his door interrupted his revery. Miss Susan Posey informed
+him that a gentleman was waiting below who wished to see him.
+
+“Show him up to my study, Susan Posey, if you please,” said Master
+Gridley.
+
+Mr. Penhallow presented himself at Mr. Gridley's door with a countenance
+expressive of a very high state of excitement.
+
+“You have heard the news, Mr. Gridley, I suppose?”
+
+“What news, Mr. Penhallow?”
+
+“First, that my partner has left very unexpectedly to enlist in a
+regiment just forming. Second, that the great land case is decided in
+favor of the heirs of the late Malachi Withers.”
+
+“Your partner must have known about it yesterday?”
+
+“He did, even before I knew it. He thought himself possessed of a very
+important document, as you know, of which he has made, or means to
+make, some use. You are aware of the artifice I employed to prevent any
+possible evil consequences from any action of his. I have the genuine
+document, of course. I wish you to go over with me to The Poplars, and I
+should be glad to have good old Father Pemberton go with us; for it is
+a serious matter, and will be a great surprise to more than one of the
+family.”
+
+They walked together to the old house, where the old clergyman had lived
+for more than half a century. He was used to being neglected by the
+people who ran after his younger colleague; and the attention paid him
+in asking him to be present on an important occasion, as he understood
+this to be, pleased him greatly. He smoothed his long white locks,
+and called a grand-daughter to help make him look fitly for such an
+occasion, and, being at last got into his grandest Sunday aspect, took
+his faithful staff, and set out with the two gentlemen for The Poplars.
+On the way, Mr. Penhallow explained to him the occasion of their visit,
+and the general character of the facts he had to announce. He wished
+the venerable minister to prepare Miss Silence Withers for a revelation
+which would materially change her future prospects. He thought it might
+be well, also, if he would say a few words to Myrtle Hazard, for whom
+a new life, with new and untried temptations, was about to open. His
+business was, as a lawyer, to make known to these parties the facts just
+come to his own knowledge affecting their interests. He had asked Mr.
+Gridley to go with him, as having intimate relations with one of the
+parties referred to, and as having been the principal agent in securing
+to that party the advantages which were to accrue to her from the new
+turn of events. “You are a second parent to her, Mr. Gridley,” he said.
+“Your vigilance, your shrewdness, and your-spectacles have saved her. I
+hope she knows the full extent of her obligations to you, and that she
+will always look to you for counsel in all her needs. She will want a
+wise friend, for she is to begin the world anew.”
+
+What had happened, when she saw the three grave gentlemen at the door
+early in the forenoon, Mistress Kitty Fagan could not guess. Something
+relating to Miss Myrtle, no doubt: she wasn't goin' to be married right
+off to Mr. Clement,--was she,--and no church, nor cake, nor anything?
+The gentlemen were shown into the parlor. “Ask Miss Withers to go into
+the library, Kitty,” said Master Gridley. “Dr. Pemberton wishes to speak
+with her.” The good old man was prepared for a scene with Miss Silence.
+He announced to her, in a kind and delicate way, that she must make up
+her mind to the disappointment of certain expectations which she had
+long entertained, and which, as her lawyer, Mr. Penhallow, had come to
+inform her and others, were to be finally relinquished from this hour.
+
+To his great surprise, Miss Silence received this communication almost
+cheerfully. It seemed more like a relief to her than anything else. Her
+one dread in this world was her “responsibility “; and the thought that
+she might have to account for ten talents hereafter, instead of one,
+had often of late been a positive distress to her. There was also in her
+mind a secret disgust at the thought of the hungry creatures who would
+swarm round her if she should ever be in a position to bestow patronage.
+This had grown upon her as the habits of lonely life gave her more and
+more of that fastidious dislike to males in general, as such, which
+is not rare in maidens who have seen the roses of more summers than
+politeness cares to mention.
+
+Father Pemberton then asked if he could see Miss Myrtle Hazard a few
+moments in the library before they went into the parlor, where they were
+to meet Mr. Penhallow and Mr. Gridley, for the purpose of receiving the
+lawyer's communication.
+
+What change was this which Myrtle had undergone since love had touched
+her heart, and her visions of worldly enjoyment had faded before the
+thought of sharing and ennobling the life of one who was worthy of her
+best affections,--of living for another, and of finding her own noblest
+self in that divine office of woman? She had laid aside the bracelet
+which she had so long worn as a kind of charm as well as an ornament.
+One would have said her features had lost something of that look of
+imperious beauty which had added to her resemblance to the dead woman
+whose glowing portrait hung upon her wall. And if it could be that,
+after so many generations, the blood of her who had died for her faith
+could show in her descendants veins, and the soul of that elect lady
+of her race look out from her far-removed offspring's dark eyes, such a
+transfusion of the martyr's life and spiritual being might well seem to
+manifest itself in Myrtle Hazard.
+
+The large-hearted old man forgot his scholastic theory of human nature
+as he looked upon her face. He thought he saw in her the dawning of
+that grace which some are born with; which some, like Myrtle, only reach
+through many trials and dangers; which some seem to show for a while
+and then lose; which too many never reach while they wear the robes of
+earth, but which speaks of the kingdom of heaven already begun in
+the heart of a child of earth. He told her simply the story of the
+occurrences which had brought them together in the old house, with the
+message the lawyer was to deliver to its inmates. He wished to prepare
+her for what might have been too sudden a surprise.
+
+But Myrtle was not wholly unprepared for some such revelation. There was
+little danger that any such announcement would throw her mind from its
+balance after the inward conflict through which she had been passing.
+For her lover had left her almost as soon as he had told her the story
+of his passion, and the relation in which he stood to her. He, too, had
+gone to answer his country's call to her children, not driven away by
+crime and shame and despair, but quitting all--his new-born happiness,
+the art in which he was an enthusiast, his prospects of success and
+honor--to obey the higher command of duty. War was to him, as to so many
+of the noble youth who went forth, only organized barbarism, hateful but
+for the sacred cause which alone redeemed it from the curse that blasted
+the first murderer. God only knew the sacrifice such young men as he
+made.
+
+How brief Myrtle's dream had been! She almost doubted, at some moments,
+whether she would not awake from it, as from her other visions, and find
+it all unreal. There was no need of fearing any undue excitement of her
+mind after the alternations of feeling she had just experienced. Nothing
+seemed of much moment to her which could come from without,--her real
+world was within, and the light of its day and the breath of its life
+came from her love, made holy by the self-forgetfulness on both sides
+which was born with it.
+
+Only one member of the household was in danger of finding the excitement
+more than she could bear. Miss Cynthia knew that all Murray Bradshaw's
+plans, in which he had taken care that she should have a personal
+interest, had utterly failed. What he had done with the means of revenge
+in his power,--if, indeed, they were still in his power,--she did not
+know. She only knew that there had been a terrible scene, and that he
+had gone, leaving it uncertain whether he would ever return. It was with
+fear and trembling that she heard the summons which went forth, that the
+whole family should meet in the parlor to listen to a statement from Mr.
+Penhallow. They all gathered as requested, and sat round the room, with
+the exception of Mistress Kitty Fagan, who knew her place too well to
+be sittin' down with the likes o' them, and stood with attentive ears in
+the doorway.
+
+Mr. Penhallow then read from a printed paper the decision of the Supreme
+Court in the land case so long pending, where the estate of the late
+Malachi Withers was the claimant, against certain parties pretending to
+hold under an ancient grant. The decision was in favor of the estate.
+
+“This gives a great property to the heirs,” Mr. Penhallow remarked, “and
+the question as to who these heirs are has to be opened. For the will
+under which Silence Withers, sister of the deceased, has inherited is
+dated some years previous to the decease, and it was not very strange
+that a will of later date should be discovered. Such a will has been
+discovered. It is the instrument I have here.”
+
+Myrtle Hazard opened her eyes very widely, for the paper Mr. Penlallow
+held looked exactly like that which Murray Bradshaw had burned, and,
+what was curious, had some spots on it just like some she had noticed on
+that.
+
+“This will,” Mr. Penhallow said, “signed by witnesses dead or absent
+from this place, makes a disposition of the testator's property in some
+respects similar to that of the previous one, but with a single change,
+which proves to be of very great importance.”
+
+Mr. Penhallow proceeded to read the will. The important change in the
+disposition of the property was this: in case the land claim was decided
+in favor of the estate, then, in addition to the small provision made
+for Myrtle Hazard, the property so coming to the estate should all go
+to her. There was no question about the genuineness and the legal
+sufficiency of this instrument. Its date was not very long after the
+preceding one, at a period when, as was well known, he had almost given
+up the hope of gaining his case, and when the property was of little
+value compared to that which it had at present.
+
+A long silence followed this reading. Then, to the surprise of all, Miss
+Silence Withers rose, and went to Myrtle Hazard, and wished her joy
+with every appearance of sincerity. She was relieved of a great
+responsibility. Myrtle was young and could bear it better. She
+hoped that her young relative would live long to enjoy the blessings
+Providence had bestowed upon her, and to use them for the good of the
+community, and especially the promotion of the education of deserving
+youth. If some fitting person could be found to advise Myrtle, whose
+affairs would require much care, it would be a great relief to her.
+
+They all went up to Myrtle and congratulated her on her change of
+fortune. Even Cynthia Badlam got out a phrase or two which passed muster
+in the midst of the general excitement. As for Kitty Fagan, she could
+not say a word, but caught Myrtle's hand and kissed it as if it belonged
+to her own saint; and then, suddenly applying her apron to her eyes,
+retreated from a scene which was too much for her, in a state of
+complete mental beatitude and total bodily discomfiture.
+
+Then Silence asked the old minister to make a prayer, and he stretched
+his hands up to Heaven, and called down all the blessings of Providence
+upon all the household, and especially upon this young handmaiden, who
+was to be tried with prosperity, and would need all aid from above to
+keep her from its dangers.
+
+Then Mr. Penhallow asked Myrtle if she had any choice as to the friend
+who should have charge of her affairs. Myrtle turned to Master Byles
+Gridley, and said, “You have been my friend and protector so far, will
+you continue to be so hereafter?”
+
+Master Gridley tried very hard to begin a few words of thanks to her
+for her preference, but finding his voice a little uncertain, contented
+himself with pressing her hand and saying, “Most willingly, my dear
+daughter!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI. CONCLUSION.
+
+The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune came
+out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in marriage to
+Mr. Clement Lindsay. But her friends hardly knew how to congratulate her
+on this last event. Her lover was gone, to risk his life, not improbably
+to lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by wounds, or worn out
+with disease.
+
+Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of trial.
+They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's determination
+had nerved her for womanly endurance. They had not learned that a great
+cause makes great souls, or reveals them to themselves,--a lesson taught
+by so many noble examples in the times that followed. Myrtle's only
+desire seemed to be to labor in some way to help the soldiers and their
+families. She appeared to have forgotten everything for this duty; she
+had no time for regrets, if she were disposed to indulge them, and she
+hardly asked a question as to the extent of the fortune which had fallen
+to her.
+
+The next number of the “Banner and Oracle” contained two announcements
+which she read with some interest when her attention was called to them.
+They were as follows:
+
+“A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late
+decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property estimated
+at a million of dollars or more. It consists of a large tract of land
+purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers, now become of
+immense value by the growth of a city in its neighborhood, the opening
+of mines, etc., etc. It is rumored that the lovely and highly educated
+heiress has formed a connection looking towards matrimony with a certain
+distinguished artist.”
+
+“Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has
+been among the first to respond to the call of the country for champions
+to defend her from traitors. We understand that he has obtained a
+captaincy in the __th regiment, about to march to the threatened seat of
+war. May victory perch on his banners!”
+
+The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the very
+hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for the
+common cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the camp
+and the field, the other in the not less needful work which the good
+women carried on at home, or wherever their services were needed.
+Clement--now Captain Lindsay--returned at the end of his first campaign
+charged with a special office. Some months later, after one of the great
+battles, he was sent home wounded. He wore the leaf on his shoulder
+which entitled him to be called Major Lindsay. He recovered from his
+wound only too rapidly, for Myrtle had visited him daily in the military
+hospital where he had resided for treatment; and it was bitter parting.
+The telegraph wires were thrilling almost hourly with messages of death,
+and the long pine boxes came by almost every train,--no need of asking
+what they held.
+
+Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the
+eagle on his shoulder,--he was Colonel Lindsay. The lovers could not
+part again of their own free will. Some adventurous women had followed
+their husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she could play the
+part of the Maid of Saragossa on occasion. So Clement asked her if she
+would return with him as his wife; and Myrtle answered, with as
+much willingness to submit as a maiden might fairly show under such
+circumstances, that she would do his bidding. Thereupon, with the
+shortest possible legal notice, Father Pemberton was sent for, and the
+ceremony was performed in the presence of a few witnesses in the large
+parlor at The Poplars, which was adorned with flowers, and hung round
+with all the portraits of the dead members of the family, summoned
+as witnesses to the celebration. One witness looked on with unmoved
+features, yet Myrtle thought there was a more heavenly smile on her
+faded lips than she had ever seen before beaming from the canvas,--it
+was Ann Holyoake, the martyr to her faith, the guardian spirit of
+Myrtle's visions, who seemed to breathe a holier benediction than
+any words--even those of the good old Father Pemberton himself--could
+convey.
+
+They went back together to the camp. From that period until the end of
+the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and that of
+the hospital. In the offices of mercy which she performed for the sick
+and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature seemed to be
+burned away. The conflict of mingled lives in her blood had ceased.
+No lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene resolve which had
+grown strong by every exercise of its high prerogative. If she had
+been called now to die for any worthy cause, her race would have been
+ennobled by a second martyr, true to the blood of her who died under the
+cruel Queen.
+
+Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some
+months at intervals,--one never to be forgotten. An officer was
+brought into the ward where she was in attendance. “Shot through the
+lungs,--pretty nearly gone.”
+
+She went softly to his bedside. He was breathing with great difficulty;
+his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she recognized him in
+a moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,--Captain Bradshaw, as she knew by the
+bars on his coat flung upon the bed where he had just been laid.
+
+She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother;
+she saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would
+ever hear.
+
+He turned his glazing eyes upon her. “Who are you?” he said in a feeble
+voice.
+
+“An old friend,” she answered; “you knew me as Myrtle Hazard.”
+
+He started. “You by my bedside! You caring for me!--for me, that burned
+the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes! You can't forgive
+that,--I won't believe it! Don't you hate me, dying as I am?”
+
+Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and
+countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down. “I have nothing
+to forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw. You may have meant to do me wrong, but
+Providence raised up a protector for me. The paper you burned was not
+the original,--it was a copy substituted for it--”
+
+“And did the old man outwit me after all?” he cried out, rising suddenly
+in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a few more
+gasps of breath. “I knew he was cunning, but I thought I was his match.
+It must have been Byles Gridley,--nobody else. And so the old man beat
+me after all, and saved you from ruin! Thank God that it came out so!
+Thank God! I can die now. Give me your hand, Myrtle.”
+
+She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and he
+ceased to breathe. Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of trust
+and love in it than of systematized articles of belief. She cherished
+the fond hope that these last words of one who had erred so miserably
+were a token of some blessed change which the influences of the better
+world might carry onward until he should have outgrown the sins and the
+weaknesses of his earthly career.
+
+Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp. From time to time
+they received stray copies of the “Banner and Oracle,” which, to Myrtle
+especially, were full of interest, even to the last advertisement. A
+few paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate to persons who have
+figured in this narrative.
+
+                    “TEMPLE OF HYMEN.
+
+“Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only
+daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth. The editor of this paper returns
+his acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-cake. May their
+shadows never be less!”
+
+Not many weeks after this appeared the following:
+
+“Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel Hurlbut,
+M. D., at the great age of XCVI years.
+
+“'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'”
+
+Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the
+tribute of a sigh to his memory,--there was nothing in a death like his
+to call for any aching regret.
+
+The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the village
+paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and shocked by
+receiving a number containing the following paragraph:
+
+                    CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT
+
+“It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house
+was struck by lightning about a month ago. The frame of the building was
+a good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended from the
+injury it had received. On Sunday last the congregation came together
+as usual. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit, the Rev. Doctor
+Pemberton having been detained by slight indisposition. The sermon was
+from the text, 'The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard
+shall lie down with the kid.' (Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the
+millennium as--the reign of love and peace, in eloquent and impressive
+language. He was in the midst of the prayer which follows the sermon,
+and had jest put up a petition that the spirit of affection and faith
+and trust might grow up and prevail among the flock of which he was the
+shepherd, more especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his
+arm, and carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had
+hung safely for nearly a century,--loosened, no doubt by the bolt which
+had fallen on the church,--broke from its fastenings, and fell with
+a loud crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its
+ruins. The scene that followed beggars description. Cries and shrieks
+resounded through the horse. Two or three young women fainted entirely
+away. Mr. Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted Hopkins, Esq., and others,
+came forward immediately, and after much effort succeeded in removing
+the wreck of the sounding-board, and extricating their unfortunate
+pastor. He was not fatally injured, it is hoped; but, sad to relate, he
+received such a violent blow upon the spine of the back, that palsy of
+the lower extremities is like to ensue. He is at present lying entirely
+helpless. Every attention is paid to him by his affectionately devoted
+family.”
+
+Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this
+unfortunate occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the
+following pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent
+number of the village paper:
+
+                    IMPOSING CEREMONY.
+
+“The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of baptism
+upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman, Gifted Hopkins,
+Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P. Hopkins, his amiable
+and respected lady. The babe conducted himself with singular propriety
+on this occasion. He received the Christian name of Byron Tennyson
+Browning. May he prove worthy of his name and his parentage!”
+
+The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its
+unharmed survivors. He returned with Myrtle to her native village, and
+they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence Withers,
+in the old family mansion. Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle made a generous
+allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles distant, where she
+had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at The Poplars. This was a
+convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe was invited to stay with them
+for a month or two; and one nurse and two single women under the same
+roof keep each other in a stew all the time, as the old dame somewhat
+sharply remarked.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector, and,
+with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property she
+inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that, when
+Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt that at
+least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give himself
+to sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing by him to
+pinch the features of all his ideals, and give them something of her own
+likeness.
+
+Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her
+responsibility. She embellished her spare person a little more than
+in former years. These young people looked so happy! Love was not so
+unendurable, perhaps, after all. No woman need despair,--especially if
+she has a house over her, and a snug little property. A worthy man, a
+former missionary, of the best principles, but of a slightly jocose and
+good-humored habit, thought that he could piece his widowed years with
+the not insignificant, fraction of life left to Miss Silence, to their
+mutual advantage. He came to the village, therefore, where Father
+Pemberton was very glad to have him supply the pulpit in the place of
+his unfortunate disabled colleague. The courtship soon began, and was
+brisk enough; for the good man knew there was no time to lose at his
+period of life,--or hers either, for that matter. It was a rather odd
+specimen of love-making; for he was constantly trying to subdue his
+features to a gravity which they were not used to, and she was as
+constantly endeavoring to be as lively as possible, with the innocent
+desire of pleasing her light-hearted suitor.
+
+“Vieille fille fait jeune mariee.” Silence was ten years younger as a
+bride than she had seemed as a lone woman. One would have said she had
+got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some half
+a dozen behind it,--where there is often good and reasonably cheerful
+conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the probable
+amount of his property, or the little slips he may have committed, and
+where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense sets the four
+waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-hour ago in
+the house of mourning. But Miss Silence, that was, thought that two
+families, with all the possible complications which time might bring,
+would be better in separate establishments. She therefore proposed
+selling The Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and removing to a house
+in the village, which would be large enough for them, at least for the
+present. So the young folks bought the old house, and paid a mighty good
+price for it; and enlarged it, and beautified and glorified it, and one
+fine morning went together down to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence
+seemed in danger of being a little crowded,--for Gifted lived there with
+his Susan,--and what had happened might happen again,--and gave Master
+Byles Gridley a formal and most persuasively worded invitation to come
+up and make his home with them at The Poplars.
+
+Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised
+weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are looking
+upon him almost for the last time before they part from him, and see his
+face no more. Let us not inquire too curiously, then, how he received
+this kind proposition. It is enough, that, when he found that a new
+study had been built on purpose for him, and a sleeping-room attached to
+it so that he could live there without disturbing anybody if he
+chose, he consented to remove there for a while, and that he was there
+established amidst great rejoicing.
+
+Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health. She found at last
+that she was going; and as she had a little property of her own,--as
+almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of it,--she
+was much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements to be made
+respecting its disposition. The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was one day surprised
+by a message, that she wished to have an interview with him. He rode
+over to the town in which she was residing, and there had a long
+conversation with her upon this matter. When this was settled, her mind
+seemed too be more at ease. She died with a comfortable assurance that
+she was going to a better world, and with a bitter conviction that it
+would be hard to find one that would offer her a worse lot than being a
+poor relation in this.
+
+Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob
+Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes as
+they should elect, educational or other. Father Pemberton preached an
+admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her virtues, known to this
+people among whom she had long lived, and especially that crowning act
+by which she devoted all she had to purposes of charity-and benevolence.
+
+The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the misfortune
+of his colleague had incapacitated him from labor. He generally preached
+in the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance of the people,--for the
+truth was that the honest minister who had married Miss Silence was
+not young enough or good-looking enough to be an object of personal
+attentions like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, and the old minister
+appeared to great advantage contrasted with him in the pulpit. Poor Mr.
+Stoker was now helpless, faithfully and tenderly waited upon by his own
+wife, who had regained her health and strength,--in no small measure,
+perhaps, from the great need of sympathy and active aid which her
+unfortunate husband now experienced. It was an astonishment to herself
+when she found that she who had so long been served was able to serve
+another. Some who knew his errors thought his accident was a judgment;
+but others believed that it was only a mercy in disguise,--it snatched
+him roughly from his sin, but it opened his heart to gratitude towards
+her whom his neglect could not alienate, and through gratitude to
+repentance and better thoughts. Bathsheba had long ago promised herself
+to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was about to become the rector of a
+parish in the next town, the marriage was soon to take place.
+
+How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing! Clement
+loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength and fine
+humanity blended in them. He was so fascinated by their noble expression
+that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and looked at him more
+like an artist taking his portrait than like an admiring friend. He
+maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump of benevolence and as
+large a one of cautiousness as the two people most famous for the size
+of these organs on the phrenological chart he showed him, and proved it,
+or nearly proved it, by careful measurements of his head. Master Gridley
+laughed, and read him a passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.
+
+The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the
+village. Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the foundations of
+a public library. Others thought it should be applied for the relief of
+the families of soldiers who had fallen in the war. Still another set
+would take it to build a monument to the memory of those heroes. The
+trustees listened with the greatest candor to all these gratuitous
+hints. It was, however, suggested, in a well-written anonymous article
+which appeared in the village paper, that it was desirable to follow the
+general lead of the testator's apparent preference. The trustees were
+at liberty to do as they saw fit; but, other things being equal, same
+educational object should be selected.
+
+If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be
+very proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them. The
+trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion. Why not apply it
+to the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and promising
+children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs. Hopkins had cared
+for so long without any recompense, and at a cost which would soon
+become beyond her means? The good people of the neighborhood accepted
+this as the best solution of the difficulty. It was agreed upon at
+length by the trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam Fund for Educational
+Purposes should be applied for the benefit of the two foundlings, known
+as Isosceles and Helminthia Hopkins.
+
+Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two “preposterous
+names,” as he called them, which in a moment of eccentric impulse he had
+given to these children of nature. He ventured to hint as much to Mrs.
+Hopkins. The good dame was vastly surprised. She thought they was about
+as pooty names as anybody had had given 'em in the village. And they was
+so handy, spoke short, Sossy and Minthy,--she never should know how to
+call 'em anything else.
+
+“But my dear Mrs. Hopkins,” Master Gridley urged, “if you knew the
+meaning they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did very
+wrong to apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures, and that
+I am bound to rectify my error. More than that, my dear madam, I mean
+to consult you as to the new names; and if we can fix upon proper and
+pleasing ones, it is my intention to leave a pretty legacy in my will to
+these interesting children.”
+
+“Mr. Gridley,” said Mrs. Hopkins, “you're the best man I ever see, or
+ever shall see, ... except my poor dear Ammi.... I 'll do jest as you say
+about that, or about anything else in all this livin' world.”
+
+“Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?”
+
+“Byles Gridley Hopkins!” she answered instantly.
+
+“Good Lord!” said Mr. Gridley, “think a minute, my dear madam. I will
+not say one word,--only think a minute, and mention some name that will
+not suggest quite so many winks and whispers.”
+
+She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud,
+“Abraham Lincoln Hopkins.”
+
+“Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past year,
+on a moderate computation.”
+
+“Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything
+that you like. To think of those dear babes having a fund--if that's the
+right name--on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope they
+won't get that till they're a hundred year old!”
+
+“What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins? That means the
+gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather than a
+burden.”
+
+Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes. She was weeping.
+“Theodore!” she said, “Theodore! My little brother's name, that I buried
+when I was only eleven year old. Drownded. The dearest little child that
+ever you see. I have got his little mug with Theodore on it now. Kep' o'
+purpose. Our little Sossy shall have it. Theodore P. Hopkins,--sha'n't
+it be, Mr. Gridley?”
+
+“Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins? Theodore Parker, is
+it?”
+
+“Doesn't P. stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best man
+in the world--next to you, Mr. Gridley?”
+
+“Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am. Now
+about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to call
+her,--surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in naming one of
+the objects of her charity.”
+
+“Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins,” said the good woman triumphantly,--“is
+that what you mean?”
+
+“Suppose we leave out one of the names,--four are too many. I think the
+general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of her
+two benefactresses,--Cynthia Badlam Hopkins.”
+
+“Why, law! Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?--Minthy and Cynthy,--there
+ain't but one letter of difference! Poor Cynthy would be pleased if she
+could know that one of our babes was to be called after her. She was
+dreadful fond of children.”
+
+On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely, the
+Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pemberton was summoned to officiate at three most
+interesting ceremonies,--a wedding and two christenings, one of the
+latter a double one.
+
+The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between
+the Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named
+clergyman. He could not be present on account of his great infirmity,
+but the door of his chamber was left open that he might hear the
+marriage service performed. The old, white-haired minister, assisted,
+as the papers said, by the bridegroom's father, conducted the ceremony
+according to the Episcopal form. When he came to those solemn words in
+which the husband promises fidelity to the wife so long as they both
+shall live, the nurse, who was watching, near the poor father, saw him
+bury his face in his pillow, and heard him murmur the words, “God be
+merciful to me a sinner!”
+
+The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the old
+meeting-house. Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came in, and
+stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms. A slip of
+paper was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words were
+written:--“The name is Charles Hazard.”
+
+The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe
+disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of its
+consecration.
+
+Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the broad
+aisle--marshalled by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted Hopkins
+bringing up the rear--the two children hitherto known as Isosceles and
+Helminthia. They had been well schooled, and, as the mysterious and to
+them incomprehensible ceremony was enacted, maintained the most stoical
+aspect of tranquillity. In Mrs. Hopkins's words, “They looked like
+picters, and behaved like angels.”
+
+That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of
+some few friends at The Poplars. It was such a great occasion that
+the Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,--which was,
+strictly speaking, secular time,--were relaxed. Father Pemberton
+was there, and Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose
+Eveleth, with his son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her
+mother, now in comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband, Doctor
+Hurlbut and his wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob Penhallow, Esq.,
+Mrs. Hopkins, her son and his wife (Susan Posey that was), the
+senior deacon of the old church (the admirer of the great Scott), the
+Editor-in-chief of the “Banner and Oracle,” and in the background Nurse
+Byloe and the privileged servant, Mistress Kitty Fagan, with a few
+others whose names we need not mention.
+
+The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of two
+long services repaired by such simple refections as would not turn the
+holy day into a day of labor. A large paper copy of the new edition of
+Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table. He never looked
+so happy,--could anything fill his cup fuller? In the course of the
+evening Clement spoke of the many trials through which they had passed
+in common with vast numbers of their countrymen, and some of those
+peculiar dangers which Myrtle had had to encounter in the course of a
+life more eventful, and attended with more risks, perhaps, than most of
+them imagined. But Myrtle, he said, had always been specially cared for.
+He wished them to look upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who
+had been faithful to her in her gravest hours of trial and danger. If
+they would follow him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they
+would have an opportunity to do so.
+
+Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest. They all ascended
+to the little projecting chamber, through the window of which her
+scarlet jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about on the
+river in those early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the name of the
+Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+
+The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from
+which looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose continued
+presence with her descendants was the old family legend. But underneath
+it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some closely covered
+object upon it. It was a mysterious arrangement, made without any
+knowledge on her part.
+
+“Now, then, Kitty!” Mr. Lindsay said.
+
+Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward,
+and removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object. It was a
+lifelike marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+“And this is what you have been working at so long,--is it, Clement?”
+ Myrtle said.
+
+“Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?”, he answered, smiling.
+
+Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble
+forehead, saying, “This is the face of my Guardian Angel.”
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+(The Physician and Poet, not the Jurist, O. W. Holmes, Jr.)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+ with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Guardian Angel
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
+
+Release Date: August 16, 2006 [EBook #2697]
+Last Updated: February 18, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GUARDIAN ANGEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <h1>
+      THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Oliver Wendell Holmes
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> TO MY READERS. </a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. </a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0003"> <b>THE GUARDIAN ANGEL</b> </a><br /><br /> <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. </a>AN ADVERTISEMENT. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>GREAT EXCITEMENT <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>ANTECEDENTS. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>THE TWINS. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>THE USE OF SPECTACLES. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>MYRTLE'S LETTER&mdash;THE YOUNG
+        MEN'S PURSUIT. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>DOWN
+        THE RIVER. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>MR.
+        CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND BEGINS HIS ANSWER. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X. </a>MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS
+        LETTER&mdash;WHAT CAME OF IT. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER
+        XI. </a>VEXED WITH A DEVIL. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER
+        XII. </a>SKIRMISHING. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII.
+        </a>BATTLE. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV. </a>FLANK
+        MOVEMENT. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV. </a>ARRIVAL OF
+        REINFORCEMENTS. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI. </a>VICTORY.
+        <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII. </a>SAINT AND SINNER
+        <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII. </a>VILLAGE POET.
+        <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX. </a>SUSAN'S YOUNG MAN.
+        <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX. </a>THE SECOND MEETING.
+        <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI. </a>MADNESS? <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII. </a>A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII. </a>MYRTLE HAZARD AT THE CITY
+        SCHOOL. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV. </a>MUSTERING
+        OF FORCES. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV. </a>THE POET
+        AND THE PUBLISHER. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0026"> CHAPTER XXVI. </a>MRS.
+        CLYMER KETCHUM'S PARTY. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0027"> CHAPTER
+        XXVII. </a>MINE AND COUNTERMINE. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0028">
+        CHAPTER XXVIII. </a>MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0029"> CHAPTER XXIX. </a>MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON
+        MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0030"> CHAPTER XXX.
+        </a>MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0031"> CHAPTER XXXI. </a>MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CONSULTS
+        WITH JACOB PENHALLOW, ESQUIRE <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0032"> CHAPTER
+        XXXII. </a>SUSAN POSEY'S TRIAL. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0033">
+        CHAPTER XXXIII. &nbsp;&nbsp;</a>JUST AS YOU EXPECTED. <br /><br /><a
+        href="#link2HCH0034"> CHAPTER XXXIV. </a>MURRAY BRADSHAW PLAYS HIS LAST
+        CARD. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0035"> CHAPTER XXXV. </a>THE SPOTTED
+        PAPER. <br /><br /><a href="#link2HCH0036"> CHAPTER XXXVI. </a>CONCLUSION.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TO MY READERS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A new Preface&rdquo; is, I find, promised with my story. If there are any among
+      my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the Moral
+      appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and learn what I
+      have to say here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
+      remember, entitled &ldquo;Elsie Venner.&rdquo; Like that,&mdash;it is intended for two
+      classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers of the
+      &ldquo;Morals&rdquo; in Aesop and of this Preface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which some
+      thought cruel, even on paper. It imagined an alien element introduced into
+      the blood of a human being before that being saw the light. It showed a
+      human nature developing itself in conflict with the ophidian
+      characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during the pre-natal
+      period. Whether anything like this ever happened, or was possible,
+      mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest the limitations of
+      human responsibility in a simple and effective way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
+      experience. The successive development of inherited bodily aspects and
+      habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see families
+      grow up under their own eyes. The same thing happens, but less obviously
+      to common observation, in the mental and moral nature. There is something
+      frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but
+      particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to
+      generation. Jonathan Edwards the younger tells the story of a brutal
+      wretch in New Haven who was abusing his father, when the old man cried
+      out, &ldquo;Don't drag me any further, for I did n't drag my father beyond this
+      tree.&rdquo; [The original version of this often-repeated story may be found in
+      Aristotle's Ethics, Book 7th, Chapter 7th.] I have attempted to show the
+      successive evolution of some inherited qualities in the character of
+      Myrtle Hazard, not so obtrusively as to disturb the narrative, but plainly
+      enough to be kept in sight by the small class of preface-readers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its higher
+      sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the learned
+      ladies. If I should proclaim that they were protests against the
+      scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all human action
+      from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the jealousy of the
+      cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums. By saying nothing about it, the
+      large majority of those whom my book reaches, not being preface-readers,
+      will never suspect anything to harm them beyond the simple facts of the
+      narrative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
+      limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
+      self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
+      intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in our new
+      country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown of
+      scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of nature into
+      the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as much as in the
+      bodily functions, without being accused of laying &ldquo;all that we are evil in
+      to a divine thrusting on,&rdquo; we had better return at once to our old
+      demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower House in his
+      time-honored prerogatives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may be needed
+      here to make some of my characters and statements appear probable. The
+      long-pending question involving a property which had become in the mean
+      time of immense value finds its parallel in the great De Haro land-case,
+      decided in the Supreme Court while this story was in progress (May 14th,
+      1867). The experiment of breaking the child's will by imprisonment and
+      fasting is borrowed from a famous incident, happening long before the case
+      lately before one of the courts of a neighboring Commonwealth, where a
+      little girl was beaten to death because she would not say her prayers. The
+      mental state involving utter confusion of different generations in a
+      person yet capable of forming a correct judgment on other matters, is
+      almost a direct transcript from nature. I should not have ventured to
+      repeat the questions of the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle Hazard
+      about her family conditions, and their comments, had not a lady of fortune
+      and position mentioned to me a similar circumstance in the school history
+      of one of her own children. Perhaps I should have hesitated in reproducing
+      Myrtle Hazard's &ldquo;Vision,&rdquo; but for a singular experience of his own related
+      to me by the late Mr. Forceythe Willson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins (under various alliasis) has been a frequent correspondent
+      of mine. I have also received a good many communications, signed with
+      various names, which must have been from near female relatives of that
+      young gentleman. I once sent a kind of encyclical letter to the whole
+      family connection; but as the delusion under which they labor is still
+      common, and often leads to the wasting of time, the contempt of honest
+      study or humble labor, and the misapplication of intelligence not so far
+      below mediocrity as to be incapable of affording a respectable return when
+      employed in the proper direction, I thought this picture from life might
+      also be of service. When I say that no genuine young poet will apply it to
+      himself, I think I have so far removed the sting that few or none will
+      complain of being wounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is lamentable to be forced to add that the Reverend Joseph Bellamy
+      Stoker is only a softened copy of too many originals to whom, as a regular
+      attendant upon divine worship from my childhood to the present time, I
+      have respectfully listened, while they dealt with me and mine and the bulk
+      of their fellow-creatures after the manner of their sect. If, in the
+      interval between his first showing himself in my story and its publication
+      in a separate volume, anything had occurred to make me question the
+      justice or expediency of drawing and exhibiting such a portrait, I should
+      have reconsidered it, with the view of retouching its sharper features.
+      But its essential truthfulness has been illustrated every month or two,
+      since my story has been in the course of publication, by a fresh example
+      from real life, stamped in darker colors than any with which I should have
+      thought of staining my pages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are a great many good clergymen to one bad one, but a writer finds
+      it hard to keep to the true proportion of good and bad persons in telling
+      a story. The three or four good ministers I have introduced in this
+      narrative must stand for many whom I have known and loved, and some of
+      whom I count to-day among my most valued friends. I hope the best and
+      wisest of them will like this story and approve it. If they cannot all do
+      this, I know they will recognize it as having been written with a right
+      and honest purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOSTON, 1867. <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is a quarter of a century since the foregoing Preface was written, and
+      that is long enough to allow a story to be forgotten by the public, and
+      very possibly by the writer of it also. I will not pretend that I have
+      forgotten all about &ldquo;The Guardian Angel,&rdquo; but it is long since I have read
+      it, and many of its characters and incidents are far from being distinct
+      in my memory. There are, however, a few points which hold their place
+      among my recollections. The revolt of Myrtle Hazard from the tyranny of
+      that dogmatic dynasty now breaking up in all directions has found new
+      illustrations since this tale was written. I need only refer to two
+      instances of many. The first is from real life. Mr. Robert C. Adams's
+      work, &ldquo;Travels in Faith from Tradition to Reason,&rdquo; is the outcome of the
+      teachings of one of the most intransigeant of our New England Calvinists,
+      the late Reverend Nehemiah Adams. For an example in fiction,&mdash;fiction
+      which bears all the marks of being copied from real life,&mdash;I will
+      refer to &ldquo;The Story of an African Farm.&rdquo; The boy's honest, but terrible
+      outburst, &ldquo;I hate God,&rdquo; was, I doubt not, more acceptable in the view of
+      his Maker than the lying praise of many a hypocrite who, having enthroned
+      a demon as Lord of the Universe, thinks to conciliate his favor by using
+      the phrases which the slaves of Eastern despots are in the habit of
+      addressing to their masters. I have had many private letters showing the
+      same revolt of reasoning natures against doctrines which shock the more
+      highly civilized part of mankind in this nineteenth century and are
+      leading to those dissensions which have long shown as cracks, and are fast
+      becoming lines of cleavage in some of the largest communions of
+      Protestantism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The principle of heredity has been largely studied since this story was
+      written. This tale, like &ldquo;Elsie Venner,&rdquo; depends for its deeper
+      significance on the ante-natal history of its subject. But the story was
+      meant to be readable for those who did not care for its underlying
+      philosophy. If it fails to interest the reader who ventures upon it, it
+      may find a place on an unfrequented bookshelf in common with other
+      &ldquo;medicated novels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps I have been too hard with Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of
+      rhymesters to which he belongs. I ought not to forget that I too
+      introduced myself to the reading world in a thin volume of verses; many of
+      which had better not have been written, and would not be reprinted now,
+      but for the fact that they have established a right to a place among my
+      poems in virtue of long occupancy. Besides, although the writing of verses
+      is often a mark of mental weakness, I cannot forget that Joseph Story and
+      George Bancroft each published his little book, of rhymes, and that John
+      Quincy Adams has left many poems on record, the writing of which did not
+      interfere with the vast and important labors of his illustrious career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 7, 1891. O. W. H.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I. AN ADVERTISEMENT.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On Saturday, the 18th day of June, 1859, the &ldquo;State Banner and Delphian
+      Oracle,&rdquo; published weekly at Oxbow Village, one of the principal centres
+      in a thriving river-town of New England, contained an advertisement which
+      involved the story of a young life, and stained the emotions of a small
+      community. Such faces of dismay, such shaking of heads, such gatherings at
+      corners, such halts of complaining, rheumatic wagons, and dried-up,
+      chirruping chaises, for colloquy of their still-faced tenants, had not
+      been known since the rainy November Friday, when old Malachi Withers was
+      found hanging in his garret up there at the lonely house behind the
+      poplars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The number of the &ldquo;Banner and Oracle&rdquo; which contained this advertisement
+      was a fair specimen enough of the kind of newspaper to which it belonged.
+      Some extracts from a stray copy of the issue of the date referred to will
+      show the reader what kind of entertainment the paper was accustomed to
+      furnish its patrons, and also serve some incidental purposes of the writer
+      in bringing into notice a few personages who are to figure in this
+      narrative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The copy in question was addressed to one of its regular subscribers,&mdash;&ldquo;B.
+      Gridley, Esq.&rdquo; The sarcastic annotations at various points, enclosed in
+      brackets and italicised that they may be distinguished from any other
+      comments, were taken from the pencilled remarks of that gentleman,
+      intended for the improvement of a member of the family in which he
+      resided, and are by no means to be attributed to the harmless pen which
+      reproduces them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons acquainted
+      with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a schoolmaster, a
+      college tutor, and afterwards for many years professor,&mdash;a man of
+      learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such as are hardly to be
+      found, except in old, unmarried students,&mdash;the double flowers of
+      college culture, their stamina all turned to petals, their stock in the
+      life of the race all funded in the individual. Being a man of letters,
+      Byles Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary acquirements of
+      the good people of the rural district where he resided, and, having known
+      much of college and something of city life, was apt to smile at the
+      importance they attached to their little local concerns. He was, of
+      course, quite as much an object of rough satire to the natural observers
+      and humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,&mdash;perhaps
+      not in any village where a score or two of families are brought together,&mdash;enough
+      of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary characters of a real-life
+      stock company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
+      worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire, whose
+      handsome monument&mdash;in a finished and carefully colored lithograph,
+      representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely groomed willow&mdash;hung
+      in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were, monumental parlor. Her
+      household consisted of herself, her son, nineteen years of age, of whom
+      more hereafter, and of two small children, twins, left upon her doorstep
+      when little more than mere marsupial possibilities, taken in for the
+      night, kept for a week, and always thereafter cherished by the good soul
+      as her own; also of Miss Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the
+      &ldquo;Academy&rdquo; in another part of the same town, a distant relative, boarding
+      with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to guess,
+      unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly to hear the
+      preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of the old minister
+      of the village parish; namely, because he did not believe a word of his
+      favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as to growl to himself
+      through the sermon, and go home scolding all the way about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The leading article of the &ldquo;Banner and Oracle&rdquo; for June 18th must have
+      been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked, several of the
+      &ldquo;metropolitan&rdquo; journals of the date of June 15th and thereabout had
+      evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some of his ideas before
+      he gave them to the public. The Foreign News by the Europa at Halifax,
+      15th, was spread out in the amplest dimensions the type of the office
+      could supply. More battles! The Allies victorious! The King and General
+      Cialdini beat the Austrians at Palestro! 400 Austrians drowned in a canal!
+      Anti-French feeling in Germany! Allgermine Zeiturg talks of conquest of
+      Allsatia and Loraine and the occupation of Paris! [Vicious digs with a
+      pencil through the above proper names.] Race for the Derby won by Sir
+      Joseph Hawley's Musjid! [That's what England cares for! Hooray for the
+      Darby! Italy be deedeed!] Visit of Prince Alfred to the Holy Land. Letter
+      from our own Correspondent. [Oh! Oh! A West Minkville?] Cotton advanced.
+      Breadstuffs declining.&mdash;Deacon Rumrill's barn burned down on Saturday
+      night. A pig missing; supposed to have &ldquo;fallen a prey to the devouring
+      element.&rdquo; [Got roasted.] A yellow mineral had been discovered on the
+      Doolittle farm, which, by the report of those who had seen it, bore a
+      strong resemblance to California gold ore. Much excitement in the
+      neighborhood in consequence [Idiots! Iron pyrites!] A hen at Four Corners
+      had just laid an egg measuring 7 by 8 inches. Fetch on your biddies!
+      [Editorial wit!] A man had shot an eagle measuring six feet and a half
+      from tip to tip of his wings.&mdash;Crops suffering for want of rain
+      [Always just so. &ldquo;Dry times, Father Noah!&rdquo;] The editors had received a
+      liberal portion of cake from the happy couple whose matrimonial union was
+      recorded in the column dedicated to Hymen. Also a superior article of
+      [article of! bah!] steel pen from the enterprising merchant [shopkeeper]
+      whose advertisement was to be found on the third page of this paper.&mdash;An
+      interesting Surprise Party [cheap theatricals] had transpired [bah!] on
+      Thursday evening last at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker. The
+      parishioners had donated [donated! GIVE is a good word enough for the
+      Lord's Prayer. DONATE our daily bread!] a bag of meal, a bushel of beans,
+      a keg of pickles, and a quintal of salt-fish. The worthy pastor was much
+      affected, etc., etc. [Of course. Call'em. SENSATION parties and done with
+      it!] The Rev. Dr. Pemberton and the venerable Dr. Hurlbut honored the
+      occasion with their presence.&mdash;We learn that the Rev. Ambrose
+      Eveleth, rector of St. Bartholomew's Chapel, has returned from his
+      journey, and will officiate to-morrow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came strings of advertisements, with a luxuriant vegetation of
+      capitals and notes of admiration. More of those PRIME GOODS! Full
+      Assortments of every Article in our line! [Except the one thing you want!]
+      Auction Sale. Old furniture, feather-beds, bed-spreads [spreads! ugh!],
+      setts [setts!] crockery-ware, odd vols., ullage bbls. of this and that,
+      with other household goods, etc., etc., etc.,&mdash;the etceteras meaning
+      all sorts of insane movables, such as come out of their bedlam-holes when
+      an antiquated domestic establishment disintegrates itself at a country
+      &ldquo;vandoo.&rdquo;&mdash;Several announcements of &ldquo;Feed,&rdquo; whatever that may be,&mdash;not
+      restaurant dinners, anyhow,&mdash;also of &ldquo;Shorts,&rdquo;&mdash;terms mysterious
+      to city ears as jute and cudbear and gunnybags to such as drive oxen in
+      the remote interior districts.&mdash;Then the marriage column above
+      alluded to, by the fortunate recipients of the cake. Right opposite, as if
+      for matrimonial ground-bait, a Notice that Whereas my wife, Lucretia Babb,
+      has left my bed and board, I will not be responsible, etc., etc., from
+      this date.&mdash;Jacob Penhallow (of the late firm Wibird and Penhallow)
+      had taken Mr. William Murray Bradshaw into partnership, and the business
+      of the office would be carried on as usual under the title Penhallow and
+      Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law. Then came the standing professional card of
+      Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut, the medical patriarch of the
+      town and his son. Following this, hideous quack advertisements, some of
+      them with the certificates of Honorables, Esquires, and Clergymen.&mdash;Then
+      a cow, strayed or stolen from the subscriber.&mdash;Then the advertisement
+      referred to in our first paragraph:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MYRTLE HAZARD has been missing from her home in this place since Thursday
+      morning, June 16th. She is fifteen years old, tall and womanly for her
+      age, has dark hair and eyes, fresh complexion, regular features, pleasant
+      smile and voice, but shy with strangers. Her common dress was a black and
+      white gingham check, straw hat, trimmed with green ribbon. It is feared
+      she may have come to harm in some way, or be wandering at large in a state
+      of temporary mental alienation. Any information relating to the missing
+      child will be gratefully received and properly rewarded by her afflicted
+      aunt,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MISS SILENCE WITHERS, Residing at the Withers Homestead, otherwise known
+      as &ldquo;The Poplars,&rdquo; in this village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II. GREAT EXCITEMENT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The publication of the advertisement in the paper brought the village
+      fever of the last two days to its height. Myrtle Hazard's disappearance
+      had been pretty well talked round through the immediate neighborhood, but
+      now that forty-eight hours of search and inquiry had not found her, and
+      the alarm was so great that the young girl's friends were willing to
+      advertise her in a public journal, it was clear that the gravest
+      apprehensions were felt and justified. The paper carried the tidings to
+      many who had not heard it. Some of the farmers who had been busy all the
+      week with their fields came into the village in their wagons on Saturday,
+      and there first learned the news, and saw the paper, and the placards
+      which were posted up, and listened, open-mouthed, to the whole story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and some
+      stir in the neighboring settlements. Of course there was a great variety
+      of comment, its character depending very much on the sense, knowledge, and
+      disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young people who talked over the
+      painful and mysterious occurrence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest. Nurse
+      Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl when she
+      was a little bright-eyed child, handed over &ldquo;the baby&rdquo; she was holding to
+      another attendant, and got on her things to go straight up to The Poplars.
+      She had been holding &ldquo;the baby&rdquo; these forty years and more, but somehow it
+      never got to be more than a month or six weeks old. She reached The
+      Poplars after much toil and travail. Mistress Fagan, Irish, house-servant,
+      opened the door, at which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as she was in the
+      habit of doing at the doors of those who sent for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?&rdquo; asked Nurse Byloe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Niver a blissed word,&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;Miss Withers is upstairs with Miss
+      Bathsheby, a cryin' and a lamentin'. Miss Badlam's in the parlor. The men
+      has been draggin' the pond. They have n't found not one thing, but only
+      jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the gray cat,&mdash;it's them
+      nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied round her neck and then
+      drownded her.&rdquo; [P. Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had a snarl of similar string in
+      his pocket.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor. A woman was sitting
+      there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself with the
+      blackest of black fans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nuss Byloe, is that you? Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you, though we
+      're all in trouble. Set right down, Nuss, do. Oh, it's dreadful times!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was here
+      called on for its function.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of those
+      soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so fearfully like
+      a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they flatten under
+      the subsiding person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin of
+      Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion at
+      intervals for some years. She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more
+      or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course
+      she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with women.
+      She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent headaches had thinned her locks
+      somewhat of late years. Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a
+      quick and restless glance, which rather avoided being met, gave the
+      impression that she was a wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very
+      possibly, crafty person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could n't help comin',&rdquo; said Nurse Byloe, &ldquo;we do so love our babies,&mdash;how
+      can we help it, Miss Badlam?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the possessive
+      pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never tended children as you have, Nuss,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But I 've known
+      Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she should
+      have come to such an end,&mdash;'The heart is deceitful above all things
+      and desperately wicked,'&rdquo;&mdash;and she wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?&rdquo; said Nurse Byloe. &ldquo;Y' don't think
+      anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Child!&rdquo; said Cynthia Badlam,&mdash;&ldquo;child enough to wear this very gown I
+      have got on and not find it too big for her neither.&rdquo; [It would have
+      pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange of
+      intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty.
+      Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the
+      conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead to
+      it as to the music of the spheres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together, through
+      whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb growths of thought
+      ripened in both their souls into articulate speech, consentingly, as the
+      movement comes after the long stillness of a Quaker meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their lips opened at the same moment. &ldquo;You don't mean&rdquo;&mdash;began Nurse
+      Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They need n't drag the pond,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;They need n't go beating the
+      woods as if they were hunting a patridge,&mdash;though for that matter
+      Myrtle Hazard was always more like a patridge than she was like a pullet.
+      Nothing ever took hold of that girl,&mdash;not catechising, nor advising,
+      nor punishing. It's that dreadful will of hers never was broke. I've
+      always been afraid that she would turn out a child of wrath. Did y' ever
+      watch her at meetin' playing with posies and looking round all the time of
+      the long prayer? That's what I've seen her do many and many a time. I'm
+      afraid&mdash;Oh dear! Miss Byloe, I'm afraid to say&mdash;what I'm afraid
+      of. Men are so wicked, and young girls are full of deceit and so ready to
+      listen to all sorts of artful creturs that take advantage of their
+      ignorance and tender years.&rdquo; She wept once more, this time with sobs that
+      seemed irrepressible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear suz!&rdquo; said the nurse, &ldquo;I won't believe no sech thing as wickedness
+      about Myrtle Hazard. You mean she's gone an' run off with some
+      good-for-nothin' man or other? If that ain't what y' mean, what do y'
+      mean? It can't be so, Miss Badlam: she's one o' my babies. At any rate, I
+      handled her when she fust come to this village,&mdash;and none o' my
+      babies never did sech a thing. Fifteen year old, and be bringin' a whole
+      family into disgrace! If she was thirty year old, or five-an'-thirty or
+      more, and never'd had a chance to be married, and if one o' them artful
+      creturs you was talkin' of got hold of her, then, to be sure,&mdash;why,
+      dear me!&mdash;law! I never thought, Miss Badlam!&mdash;but then of course
+      you could have had your pickin' and choosin' in the time of it; and I
+      don't mean to say it's too late now if you felt called that way, for
+      you're better lookin' now than some that's younger, and there's no
+      accountin' for tastes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A sort of hysteric twitching that went through the frame of Cynthia Badlam
+      dimly suggested to the old nurse that she was not making her slightly
+      indiscreet personality much better by her explanations. She stopped short,
+      and surveyed the not uncomely person of the maiden lady sitting before her
+      with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes, and one hand clenching the arm
+      of the reeking-chair, as if some spasm had clamped it there. The nurse
+      looked at her with a certain growing interest she had never felt before.
+      It was the first time for some years that she had had such a chance,
+      partly because Miss Cynthia had often been away for long periods,&mdash;partly
+      because she herself had been busy professionally. There was no occasion
+      for her services, of course, in the family at The Poplars; and she was
+      always following round from place to place after that everlasting
+      migratory six-weeks or less old baby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was not a more knowing pair of eyes, in their way, in a circle of
+      fifty miles, than those kindly tranquil orbs that Nurse Byloe fixed on
+      Cynthia Badlam. The silver threads in the side fold of hair, the delicate
+      lines at the corner of the eye, the slight drawing down at the angle of
+      the mouth,&mdash;almost imperceptible, but the nurse dwelt upon it,&mdash;a
+      certain moulding of the features as of an artist's clay model worked by
+      delicate touches with the fingers, showing that time or pain or grief had
+      had a hand in shaping them, the contours, the adjustment of every fold of
+      the dress, the attitude, the very way of breathing, were all passed
+      through the searching inspection of the ancient expert, trained to know
+      all the changes wrought by time and circumstance. It took not so long as
+      it takes to describe it, but it was an analysis of imponderables, equal to
+      any of Bunsen's with the spectroscope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Badlam removed her handkerchief and looked in a furtive, questioning
+      way, in her turn, upon the nurse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's dreadful close here,&mdash;I'm 'most smothered,&rdquo; Nurse Byloe said;
+      and, putting her hand to her throat, unclasped the catch of the necklace
+      of gold beads she had worn since she was a baby,&mdash;a bead having been
+      added from time to time as she thickened. It lay in a deep groove of her
+      large neck, and had not troubled her in breathing before, since the day
+      when her husband was run over by an ox-team.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment Miss Silence Withers entered, followed by Bathsheba Stoker,
+      daughter of Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was the friend of Myrtle, and had come to comfort Miss Silence, and
+      consult with her as to what further search they should institute. The two,
+      Myrtle's aunt and her friend, were as unlike as they could well be.
+      Silence Withers was something more than forty years old, a shadowy,
+      pinched, sallow, dispirited, bloodless woman, with the habitual look of
+      the people in the funeral carriage which follows next to the hearse, and
+      the tone in speaking that may be noticed in a household where one of its
+      members is lying white and still in a cool, darkened chamber overhead.
+      Bathsheba Stoker was not called handsome; but she had her mother's
+      youthful smile, which was so fresh and full of sweetness that she seemed
+      like a beauty while she was speaking or listening; and she could never be
+      plain so long as any expression gave life to her features. In perfect
+      repose, her face, a little prematurely touched by sad experiences,&mdash;for
+      she was but seventeen years old,&mdash;had the character and decision
+      stamped in its outlines which any young man who wanted a companion to
+      warn, to comfort, and command him, might have depended on as warranting
+      the courage, the sympathy, and the sense demanded for such a
+      responsibility. She had been trying her powers of consolation on Miss
+      Silence. It was a sudden freak of Myrtle's. She had gone off on some
+      foolish but innocent excursion. Besides, she was a girl that would take
+      care of herself; for she was afraid of nothing, and nimbler than any boy
+      of her age, and almost as strong as any. As for thinking any bad thoughts
+      about her, that was a shame; she cared for none of the young fellows that
+      were round her. Cyprian Eveleth was the one she thought most of; but
+      Cyprian was as true as his sister Olive, and who else was there?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To all this Miss Silence answered only by sighing and moaning, For two
+      whole days she had been kept in constant fear and worry, afraid every
+      minute of some tragical message, perplexed by the conflicting advice of
+      all manner of officious friends, sleepless of course through the two
+      nights, and now utterly broken down and collapsed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bathsheba had said all she could in the way of consolation, and hastened
+      back to her mother's bedside, which she hardly left, except for the
+      briefest of visits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a great trial, Miss Withers, that's laid on you,&rdquo; said Nurse Byloe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I only knew that she was dead, and had died in the Lord,&rdquo; Miss Silence
+      answered,&mdash;&ldquo;if I only knew that but if she is living in sin, or dead
+      in wrong&mdash;doing, what is to become of me?&mdash;Oh, what is to become
+      of me when 'He maketh inquisition far blood'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cousin Silence,&rdquo; said Miss Cynthia, &ldquo;it is n't your fault, if that young
+      girl has taken to evil ways. If going to meeting three times every Sabbath
+      day, and knowing the catechism by heart, and reading of good books, and
+      the best of daily advice, and all needful discipline, could have corrected
+      her sinful nature, she would never have run away from a home where she
+      enjoyed all these privileges. It's that Indian blood, Cousin Silence. It's
+      a great mercy you and I have n't got any of it in our veins! What can you
+      expect of children that come from heathens and savages? You can't lay it
+      to yourself, Cousin Silence, if Myrtle Hazard goes wrong&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Lord will lay it to me,&mdash;the Lord will lay it to me,&rdquo; she
+      moaned. &ldquo;Did n't he say to Cain, 'Where is Abel, thy brother?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nurse Byloe was getting very red in the face. She had had about enough of
+      this talk between the two women. &ldquo;I hope the Lard 'll take care of Myrtle
+      Hazard fust, if she's in trouble, 'n' wants help,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;'n' then
+      look out for them that comes next. Y' 're too suspicious, Miss Badlam; y'
+      're too easy to believe stories. Myrtle Hazard was as pretty a child and
+      as good a child as ever I see, if you did n't rile her; 'n' d' d y' ever
+      see one o' them hearty lively children, that had n't a sperrit of its own?
+      For my part, I'd rather handle one of 'em than a dozen o' them little
+      waxy, weak-eyed, slim-necked creturs that always do what they tell 'em to,
+      and die afore they're a dozen year old; and never was the time when I've
+      seen Myrtle Hazard, sence she was my baby, but what it's always been,
+      'Good mornin', Miss Byloe,' and 'How do you do, Miss Byloe? I'm so glad to
+      see you.' The handsomest young woman, too, as all the old folks will agree
+      in tellin' you, s'ence the time o' Judith Pride that was,&mdash;the Pride
+      of the County they used to call her, for her beauty. Her great-grandma, y'
+      know, Miss Cynthy, married old King David Withers. What I want to know is,
+      whether anything has been heerd, and jest what's been done about findin'
+      the poor thing. How d' ye know she has n't fell into the river? Have they
+      fired cannon? They say that busts the gall of drownded folks, and makes
+      the corpse rise. Have they looked in the woods everywhere? Don't believe
+      no wrong of nobody, not till y' must,&mdash;least of all of them that come
+      o' the same folks, partly, and has lived with yo all their days. I tell
+      y', Myrtle Hazard's jest as innocent of all what y' 've been thinkin'
+      about,&mdash;bless the poor child; she's got a soul that's as clean and
+      sweet-well, as a pond-lily when it fust opens of a mornin', without a
+      speck on it no more than on the fust pond-lily God Almighty ever made!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That gave a turn to the two women's thoughts, and their handkerchiefs went
+      up to their faces. Nurse Byloe turned her eyes quickly on Cynthia Badlam,
+      and repeated her close inspection of every outline and every light and
+      shadow in her figure. She did not announce any opinion as to the age or
+      good looks or general aspect or special points of Miss Cynthia; but she
+      made a sound which the books write humph! but which real folks make with
+      closed lips, thus: m'!&mdash;a sort of half-suppressed labio-palato-nasal
+      utterance, implying that there is a good deal which might be said, and all
+      the vocal organs want to have a chance at it, if there is to be any
+      talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person that
+      came was the old minister, of whom, and of his colleague, the Rev. Joseph
+      Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers called
+      him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country people&mdash;would
+      have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the village had not been
+      so much older. A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly
+      neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young
+      folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he
+      can come near their camp. Dr. Hurlbut, at ninety-two, made Priest
+      Pemberton seem comparatively little advanced; but the college catalogue
+      showed that he must be seventy-five years old, if, as we may suppose, he
+      was twenty at the time of his graduation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of his
+      flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging his serene
+      and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the measured dignity
+      of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff, he was an imposing
+      personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the occasion demanded it.
+      His creed was of the sternest: he was looked up to as a bulwark against
+      all the laxities which threatened New England theology. But it was a creed
+      rather of the study and of the pulpit than of every-day application among
+      his neighbors. He dealt too much in the lofty abstractions which had
+      always such fascinations for the higher class of New England divines, to
+      busy himself as much as he might have done with the spiritual condition of
+      individuals. He had also a good deal in him of what he used to call the
+      Old Man, which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in putting off,&mdash;meaning
+      thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as much as the natural
+      gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and tending to make a man
+      beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish,
+      monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all that
+      made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house bell. But
+      Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of novelty than its
+      forefathers. It wants change, and it loves young blood. Polyandry is
+      getting to be the normal condition of the Church; and about the time a man
+      is becoming a little overripe for the livelier human sentiments, he may be
+      pretty sure the women are looking round to find him a colleague. In this
+      way it was that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the colleague of the
+      Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces&mdash;the
+      charity, the sweetness of disposition, the humility&mdash;of Father
+      Pemberton, he would have found a small remnant of the &ldquo;Old Man,&rdquo; as the
+      good clergyman would have called it, which was never in harmony with the
+      Rev. Mr. Stoker. The younger divine felt his importance, and made his
+      venerable colleague feel that he felt it. Father Pemberton had a fair
+      chance at rainy Sundays and hot summer-afternoon services; but the junior
+      pushed him aside without ceremony whenever he thought there was like to be
+      a good show in the pews. As for those courtesies which the old need, to
+      soften the sense of declining faculties and failing attractions, the
+      younger pastor bestowed them in public, but was negligent of them, to say
+      the least, when not on exhibition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good old Father Pemberton could not love this man, but he would not hate
+      him, and he never complained to him or of him. It would have been of no
+      use if he had: the women of the parish had taken up the Rev. Mr. Stoker;
+      and when the women run after a minister or a doctor, what do the men
+      signify?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why the women ran after him, some thought it was not hard to guess. He was
+      not ill-looking, according to the village standard, parted his hair
+      smoothly, tied his white cravat carefully, was fluent, plausible, had a
+      gift in prayer, was considered eloquent, was fond of listening to their
+      spiritual experiences, and had a sickly wife. This is what Byles Gridley
+      said; but he was apt to be caustic at times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Pemberton visited his people but rarely. Like Jonathan Edwards,
+      like David Osgood, he felt his call to be to study-work, and was impatient
+      of the egotisms and spiritual megrims, in listening to which, especially
+      from the younger females of his flock, his colleague had won the hearts of
+      so many of his parishioners. His presence had a wonderful effect in
+      restoring the despondent Miss Silence to her equanimity; for not all the
+      hard divinity he had preached for half a century had spoiled his kindly
+      nature; and not the gentle Melanchthon himself, ready to welcome death as
+      a refuge from the rage and bitterness of theologians, was more in contrast
+      with the disputants with whom he mingled, than the old minister, in the
+      hour of trial, with the stern dogmatist in his study, forging thunderbolts
+      to smite down sinners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was well that there were no tithing-men about on that next day, Sunday;
+      for it shone no Sabbath day for the young men within half a dozen miles of
+      the village. They were out on Bear Hill the whole day, beating up the
+      bushes as if for game, scaring old crows out of their ragged nests, and in
+      one dark glen startling a fierce-eyed, growling, bobtailed catamount, who
+      sat spitting and looking all ready to spring at them, on the tall tree
+      where he clung with his claws unsheathed, until a young fellow came up
+      with a gun and shot him dead. They went through and through the swamp at
+      Musquash Hollow; but found nothing better than a wicked old
+      snapping-turtle, evil to behold, with his snaky head and alligator tail,
+      but worse to meddle with, if his horny jaws were near enough to spring
+      their man-trap on the curious experimenter. At Wood-End there were some
+      Indians, ill-conditioned savages in a dirty tent, making baskets, the
+      miracle of which was that they were so clean. They had seen a young lady
+      answering the description, about a week ago. She had bought a basket.
+      Asked them if they had a canoe they wanted to sell.&mdash;Eyes like hers
+      (pointing to a squaw with a man's hat on).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Pocasset the young men explored all the thick woods,&mdash;some who
+      ought to have known better taking their guns, which made a talk, as one
+      might well suppose it would. Hunting on a Sabbath day! They did n't mean
+      to shoot Myrtle Hazard, did they? it was keenly asked. A good many said it
+      was all nonsense, and a mere excuse to get away from meeting and have a
+      sort of frolic on pretence that it was a work of necessity and mercy, one
+      or both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While they were scattering themselves about in this way, some in earnest,
+      some rejoicing in the unwonted license, lifting off for a little while
+      that enormous Sabbath-day pressure which weighs like forty atmospheres on
+      every true-born Puritan, two young men had been since Friday in search of
+      the lost girl, each following a clue of his own, and determined to find
+      her if she was among the living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyprian Eveleth made for the village of Mapleton, where his sister Olive
+      was staying, trusting that, with her aid, he might get a clue to the
+      mystery of Myrtle's disappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      William Murray Bradshaw struck for a railroad train going to the great
+      seaport, at a station where it stops for wood and water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time, a third young man, Gifted Hopkins by name, son of the
+      good woman already mentioned, sat down, with tears in his eyes, and wrote
+      those touching stanzas, &ldquo;The Lost Myrtle,&rdquo; which were printed in the next
+      &ldquo;Banner and Oracle,&rdquo; and much admired by many who read them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III. ANTECEDENTS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town. It was built on the
+      east bank of the river, a little above the curve which gave the name to
+      Oxbow Village. It stood on an elevation, its west gable close to the
+      river's edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the foot of the slope
+      behind it, woods at the east, open to the south, with a great row of
+      Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the house. The Hon. Selah
+      Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the first colonists, built it for
+      his own residence, in the early part of the last century. Deeply impressed
+      with his importance in the order of things, he had chosen to place it a
+      little removed from the cluster of smaller dwellings about the Oxbow; and
+      with some vague fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook the Rhine
+      and the Danube, he had selected this eminence on which to place his
+      substantial gambrel roofed dwelling-house. Long afterwards a bay-window,
+      almost a little room of itself, had been thrown out of the second story on
+      the west side, so that it looked directly down on the river running
+      beneath it. The chamber, thus half suspended in the air, had been for
+      years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard; and as the boys paddling
+      about on the river would often catch glimpses, through the window, of the
+      little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket she fancied in those days, one
+      of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it a name which became current among
+      the young people, and indeed furnished to Gifted Hopkins the subject of
+      one of his earliest poems, to wit, &ldquo;The Fire-hang-bird's Nest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If we would know anything about the persons now living at the Withers
+      Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late years,
+      we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital antecedents. It is
+      by no means certain that our individual personality is the single
+      inhabitant of these our corporeal frames. Nay, there is recorded an
+      experience of one of the living persons mentioned in this narrative,&mdash;to
+      be given in full in its proper place, which, so far as it is received in
+      evidence, tends to show that some, at least, who have long been dead, may
+      enjoy a kind of secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in these
+      bodily tenements which we are in the habit of considering exclusively our
+      own. There are many circumstances, familiar to common observers, which
+      favor this belief to a certain extent. Thus, at one moment we detect the
+      look, at another the tone of voice, at another some characteristic
+      movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or others. There are
+      times when our friends do not act like themselves, but apparently in
+      obedience to some other law than that of their own proper nature. We all
+      do things both awake and asleep which surprise us. Perhaps we have
+      cotenants in this house we live in. No less than eight distinct
+      personalities are said to have coexisted in a single female mentioned by
+      an ancient physician of unimpeachable authority. In this light we may
+      perhaps see the meaning of a sentence, from a work which will be
+      repeatedly referred to in this narrative, viz.: &ldquo;This body in which we
+      journey across the isthmus between the two oceans is not a private
+      carriage, but an omnibus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr to their faith
+      before they were known as Puritans. The record was obscure in some points;
+      but the portrait, marked &ldquo;Ann Holyoake, burned by ye bloudy Papists, ano
+      15..&rdquo; (figures illegible), was still hanging against the panel over the
+      fireplace in the west parlor at The Poplars. The following words were yet
+      legible on the canvas: &ldquo;Thou hast made a covenant O Lord with mee and my
+      Children forever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a prayer
+      she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled. There had
+      always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of her descendants
+      could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this solemn &ldquo;covenant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been also a legend in the family, that the martyred woman's
+      spirit exercised a kind of supervision over her descendants; that she
+      either manifested herself to them, or in some way impressed them, from
+      time to time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast his lot
+      with the emigrants,&mdash;of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant in the third
+      generation, when the Indians were about to attack the settlement where she
+      lived,&mdash;and of another, just before he was killed at Quebec.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a remarkable resemblance between the features of Ann Holyoake,
+      as shown in the portrait, and the miniature likeness of Myrtle's mother.
+      Myrtle adopted the nearly obsolete superstition more readily on this
+      account, and loved to cherish the fancy that the guardian spirit which had
+      watched over her ancestors was often near her, and would be with her in
+      her time of need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of that
+      delusion. A careless expression in one of her letters, that &ldquo;ye Parson was
+      as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em,&rdquo; had got abroad,
+      and given great offence to godly people. There was no doubt that some odd
+      &ldquo;manifestations,&rdquo; as they would be called nowadays, had taken place in the
+      household when she was a girl, and that she presented many of the
+      conditions belonging to what are at the present day called mediums.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty,
+      loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings, and to
+      hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic sentiments
+      at town-meetings and in the General Court. He loved to wear a crimson sash
+      and a military cap with a large red feather, in which the village folk
+      used to say he looked as &ldquo;hahnsome as a piny,&rdquo;&mdash;meaning a favorite
+      flower of his, which is better spelt peony, and to which it was not
+      unnatural that his admirers should compare him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough have
+      sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who would have
+      dropped into their places like posts into their holes, asking no questions
+      of life, contented, like so many other honest folks, with the part of
+      supernumeraries in the drama of being, their wardrobe of flesh and bones
+      being furnished them gratis, and nothing to do but to walk across the
+      stage wearing it. But Major Gideon Withers, for some reason or other,
+      married a slender, sensitive, nervous, romantic woman, which accounted for
+      the fact that his son David, &ldquo;King David,&rdquo; as he was called in his time,
+      had a very different set of tastes from his father, showing a turn for
+      literature and sentiment in his youth, reading Young's &ldquo;Night Thoughts,&rdquo;
+       and Thomson's &ldquo;Seasons,&rdquo; and sometimes in those early days writing verses
+      himself to Celia or to Chloe, which sounded just as fine to him as Effie
+      and Minnie sound to young people now, as Musidora, as Saccharissa, as
+      Lesbia, as Helena, as Adah and Zillah, have all sounded to young people in
+      their time,&mdash;ashes of roses as they are to us now, and as our
+      endearing Scotch diminutives will be to others by and by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly because he was rich,
+      and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew too old to
+      write love-poems, married the famous beauty before mentioned, Miss Judith
+      Pride, and the race came up again in vigor. Their son, Jeremy, took for
+      his first wife a delicate, melancholic girl, who matured into a sad-eyed
+      woman, and bore him two children, Malachi and Silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she died, he mourned for her bitterly almost a year, and then put on
+      a ruffled shirt and went across the river to tell his grief to Miss
+      Virginia Wild, there residing. This lady was said to have a few drops of
+      genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain that her cheek
+      had a little of the russet tinge which a Seckel pear shows on its warmest
+      cheek when it blushes.&mdash;Love shuts itself up in sympathy like a
+      knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily. All the rest followed in
+      due order according to Nature's kindly programme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell desperately in love
+      with the daughter of this second wife, married her, and carried her to
+      India, where their first and only child was born, and received the name of
+      Myrtle, as fitting her cradle in the tropics. So her earliest impressions,&mdash;it
+      would not be exact to call them recollections,&mdash;besides the smiles of
+      her father and mother, were of dusky faces, of loose white raiment, of
+      waving fans, of breezes perfumed with the sweet exhalations of
+      sandal-wood, of gorgeous flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas, of
+      gliding palanquins, and all the languid luxury of the South. The
+      pestilence which has its natural home in India, but has journeyed so far
+      from its birth place in these later years, took her father and mother
+      away, suddenly, in the very freshness of their early maturity. A relation
+      of Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was returning to America on a
+      visit, and the child was sent back, under her care, while still a mere
+      infant, to her relatives at the old homestead. During the long voyage, the
+      strange mystery of the ocean was wrought into her consciousness so deeply,
+      that it seemed to have become a part of her being. The waves rocked her,
+      as if the sea had been her mother; and, looking over the vessel's side
+      from the arms that held her with tender care, she used to watch the play
+      of the waters, until the rhythm of their movement became a part of her,
+      almost as much as her own pulse and breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral traits which
+      predominated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this child in embryo,
+      waiting to come to maturity. It was as when several grafts, bearing fruit
+      that ripens at different times, are growing upon the same stock. Her
+      earlier impulses may have been derived directly from her father and
+      mother, but all the ancestors who have been mentioned, and more or less
+      obscurely many others, came uppermost in their time, before the absolute
+      and total result of their several forces had found its equilibrium in the
+      character by which she was to be known as an individual. These inherited
+      impulses were therefore many, conflicting, some of them dangerous. The
+      World, the Flesh, and the Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed
+      was put in her hands; but sweet and gracious influences were also born
+      with her; and the battle of life was to be fought between them, God
+      helping her in her need, and her own free choice siding with one or the
+      other. The formal statement of this succession of ripening characteristics
+      need not be repeated, but the fact must be borne in mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the child who was delivered into the hands of Miss Silence
+      Withers, her mother's half&mdash;sister, keeping house with her brother
+      Malachi, a bachelor, already called Old Malachi, though hardly entitled by
+      his years to such a venerable prefix. Both these persons had inherited the
+      predominant traits of their sad-eyed mother. Malachi, the chief heir of
+      the family property, was rich, but felt very poor. He owned this fine old
+      estate of some hundreds of acres. He had moneys in the bank, shares in
+      various companies, wood-lots in the town; and a large tract of Western
+      land, the subject of a lawsuit which seemed as if it would never be
+      settled, and kept him always uneasy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some said he hoarded gold somewhere about the old house, but nobody knew
+      this for a certainty. In spite of his abundant means, he talked much of
+      poverty, and kept the household on the narrowest footing of economy. One
+      Irishwoman, with a little aid from her husband now and then, did all their
+      work; and the only company they saw was Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as a
+      relative, claimed a home with them whenever she was so disposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;little Indian,&rdquo; as Malachi called her, was an awkward accession to
+      the family. Silence Withers knew no more about children and their ways and
+      wants than if she had been a female ostrich. Thus it was that she found it
+      necessary to send for a woman well known in the place as the first friend
+      whose acquaintance many of the little people of the town had made in this
+      vale of tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thirty years of practice had taught Nurse Byloe the art of handling the
+      young of her species with the soft firmness which one may notice in cats
+      with their kittens,&mdash;more grandly in a tawny lioness mouthing her
+      cubs. Myrtle did not know she was held; she only felt she was lifted, and
+      borne up, as a cherub may feel upon a white-woolly cloud, and smiled
+      accordingly at the nurse, as if quite at home in her arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As fine a child as ever breathed the breath of life. But where did them
+      black eyes come from? Born in Injy,&mdash;that 's it, ain't it? No, it's
+      her poor mother's eyes to be sure. Does n't it seem as if there was a kind
+      of Injin look to 'em? She'll be a lively one to manage, if I know anything
+      about childun. See her clinchin' them little fists!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was when Miss Silence came near her and brought her rather severe
+      countenance close to the child for inspection of its features. The
+      ungracious aspect of the woman and the defiant attitude of the child
+      prefigured in one brief instant the history of many long coming years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a great while before the two parties in that wearing conflict
+      of alien lives, which is often called education, began to measure their
+      strength against each other. The child was bright, observing, of restless
+      activity, inquisitively curious, very hard to frighten, and with a will
+      which seemed made for mastery, not submission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stern spinster to whose care this vigorous life was committed was
+      disposed to discharge her duty to the girl faithfully and conscientiously;
+      but there were two points in her character and belief which had a most
+      important bearing on the manner in which she carried out her laudable
+      intentions. First, she was one of that class of human beings whose one
+      single engrossing thought is their own welfare,&mdash;in the next world,
+      it is true, but still their own personal welfare. The Roman Church
+      recognizes this class, and provides every form of specific to meet their
+      spiritual condition. But in so far as Protestantism has thrown out works
+      as a means of insuring future safety, these unfortunates are as badly off
+      as nervous patients who have no drops, pills, potions, no doctors' rules,
+      to follow. Only tell a poor creature what to do, and he or she will do it,
+      and be made easy, were it a pilgrimage of a thousand miles, with shoes
+      full of split peas instead of boiled ones; but if once assured that doing
+      does no good, the drooping Little-faiths are left at leisure to worry
+      about their souls, as the other class of weaklings worry about their
+      bodies. The effect on character does not seem to be very different in the
+      two classes. Metaphysicians may discuss the nature of selfishness at their
+      leisure; if to have all her thoughts centring on the one point of her own
+      well-being by and by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely
+      selfish; and if we are offended with that form of egotism, it is no more
+      than ten of the twelve Apostles were, as the reader may see by turning to
+      the Gospel of St. Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the twenty-fourth
+      verse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to carry out a
+      theory which, whatever might be its success in other cases, did not work
+      kindly in the case of Myrtle Hazard, but, on the contrary, developed a
+      mighty spirit of antagonism in her nature, which threatened to end in
+      utter lawlessness. Miss Silence started from the approved doctrine, that
+      all children are radically and utterly wrong in all their motives,
+      feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as they remain subject to their
+      natural instincts. It was by the eradication, and not the education, of
+      these instincts, that the character of the human being she was moulding
+      was to be determined. The first great preliminary process, so soon as the
+      child manifested any evidence of intelligent and persistent
+      self-determination, was to break her will.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion from the teaching
+      of Priest Pemberton, but it required a colder and harder nature than his
+      own to carry out many of his dogmas to their practical application. He
+      wrought in the pure mathematics, so to speak, of theology, and left the
+      working rules to the good sense and good feeling of his people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Silence had been waiting for her opportunity to apply the great
+      doctrine, and it came at last in a very trivial way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Myrtle does n't want brown bread. Myrtle won't have brown bread. Myrtle
+      will have white bread.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Myrtle is a wicked child. She will have what Aunt Silence says she shall
+      have. She won't have anything but brown bread.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon the bright red lip protruded, the hot blood mounted to her face,
+      the child untied her little &ldquo;tire,&rdquo; got down from the table, took up her
+      one forlorn, featureless doll, and went to bed without her supper. The
+      next morning the worthy woman thought that hunger and reflection would
+      have subdued the rebellious spirit. So there stood yesterday's untouched
+      supper waiting for her breakfast. She would not taste it, and it became
+      necessary to enforce that extreme penalty of the law which had been
+      threatened, but never yet put in execution. Miss Silence, in obedience to
+      what she felt to be a painful duty, without any passion, but filled with
+      high, inexorable purpose, carried the child up to the garret, and,
+      fastening her so that she could not wander about and hurt herself, left
+      her to her repentant thoughts, awaiting the moment when a plaintive
+      entreaty for liberty and food should announce that the evil nature had
+      yielded and the obdurate will was broken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The garret was an awful place. All the skeleton-like ribs of the roof
+      showed in the dim light, naked overhead, and the only floor to be trusted
+      consisted of the few boards which bridged the lath and plaster. A great,
+      mysterious brick tower climbed up through it,&mdash;it was the chimney,
+      but it looked like a horrible cell to put criminals into. The whole place
+      was festooned with cobwebs,&mdash;not light films, such as the housewife's
+      broom sweeps away before they have become a permanent residence, but vast
+      gray draperies, loaded with dust, sprinkled with yellow powder from the
+      beams where the worms were gnawing day and night, the home of old, hairy
+      spiders who had, lived there since they were eggs and would leave it for
+      unborn spiders who would grow old and huge like themselves in it, long
+      after the human tenants had left the mansion for a narrower home. Here
+      this little criminal was imprisoned, six, twelve,&mdash;tell it not to
+      mothers,&mdash;eighteen dreadful hours, hungry until she was ready to gnaw
+      her hands, a prey to all childish imaginations; and here at her stern
+      guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled, almost fainting, but
+      sullen and unsubdued. The Irishwoman, poor stupid Kitty Fagan, who had no
+      theory of human nature, saw her over the lean shoulders of the spinster,
+      and, forgetting all differences of condition and questions of authority,
+      rushed to her with a cry of maternal tenderness, and, with a tempest of
+      passionate tears and kisses, bore her off to her own humble realm, where
+      the little victorious martyr was fed from the best stores of the house,
+      until there was as much danger from repletion as there had been from
+      famine. How the experiment might have ended but for this empirical and
+      most unphilosophical interference, there is no saying; but it settled the
+      point that the rebellious nature was not to be subjugated in a brief
+      conflict.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities as she
+      grew older. At the age of four years she was detected in making a
+      cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time, and, on being reprimanded for
+      so doing, laughed out loud, so as to be heard by Father Pemberton, who
+      thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows upon the child, and, to his
+      shame be it spoken, had such a sudden uprising of weak, foolish,
+      grandfatherly feelings, that a mist came over his eyes, and he left out
+      his &ldquo;ninthly&rdquo; altogether, thereby spoiling the logical sequence of
+      propositions which had kept his large forehead knotty for a week.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored picture of Major
+      Gideon Withers in the crimson sash and the red feather of his exalted
+      military office. It was then for the first time that her aunt Silence
+      remarked a shade of resemblance between the child and the portrait. She
+      had always, up to this time, been dressed in sad colors, as was fitting,
+      doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but happening one day to see a small
+      negro girl peacocking round in a flaming scarlet petticoat, she struck for
+      bright colors in her own apparel, and carried her point at last. It was as
+      if a ground-sparrow had changed her gray feathers for the burning plumage
+      of some tropical wanderer; and it was natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth
+      should have called her the fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the
+      fire-hang-bird's nest,&mdash;using the country boy's synonyme for the
+      Baltimore oriole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At ten years old she had one of those great experiences which give new
+      meaning to the life of a child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking for her at one time,
+      but of late years his delusions had gained upon him, and under their
+      influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an extravagance.
+      He was growing more and more solitary in his habits, more and more
+      negligent of his appearance. He was up late at night, wandering about the
+      house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his light being seen
+      flitting from window to window, the story got about that the old house was
+      haunted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the house.
+      Her uncle had been gone since the day before. The two women were both away
+      at the village. At such times the child took a strange delight in
+      exploring all the hiding-places of the old mansion. She had the mysterious
+      dwelling-place of so many of the dead and the living all to herself. What
+      a fearful kind of pleasure in its silence and loneliness! The old clock
+      that Marmaduke Storr made in London more than a hundred years ago was
+      clicking the steady pulse-beats of its second century. The featured moon
+      on its dial had lifted one eye, as if to watch the child, as it had
+      watched so many generations of children, while the swinging pendulum
+      ticked them along into youth, maturity, gray hairs, deathbeds,&mdash;ticking
+      through the prayer at the funeral, ticking without grief through all the
+      still or noisy woe of mourning,&mdash;ticking without joy when the smiles
+      and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again. She looked at herself
+      in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber. She pulled aside the
+      curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads of the house had slept
+      until they died and were stretched out upon it, and the sheet shaped
+      itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline, like a block of
+      monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by the chisel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
+      punishment. A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little higher
+      than a man's head. Something was hanging from it,&mdash;an old garment,
+      was it? She went bravely up and touched&mdash;a cold hand. She did what
+      most children of that age would do,&mdash;uttered a cry and ran downstairs
+      with all her might. She rushed out of the door and called to the man
+      Patrick, who was doing some work about the place. What could be done was
+      done, but it was too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Uncle Malachi had made away with himself. That was plain on the face of
+      thing. In due time the coroner's verdict settled it. It was not so strange
+      as it seemed; but it made a great talk in the village and all the country
+      round about. Everybody knew he had money enough, and yet he had hanged
+      himself for fear of starving to death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some years before,
+      leaving his property to his sister Silence, with the exception of a
+      certain moderate legacy to be paid in money to Myrtle Hazard when she
+      should arrive at the age of twenty years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The household seemed more chilly than ever after this tragical event. Its
+      depressing influence followed the child to school, where she learned the
+      common branches of knowledge. It followed her to the Sabbath-day
+      catechisings, where she repeated the answers about the federal headship of
+      Adam, and her consequent personal responsibilities, and other
+      technicalities which are hardly milk for babes, perhaps as well as other
+      children, but without any very profound remorse for what she could not
+      help, so far as she understood the matter, any more than her sex or
+      stature, and with no very clear comprehension of the phrases which the New
+      England followers of the Westminster divines made a part of the elementary
+      instruction of young people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly enough to attract the
+      eyes of the youth and older boys, several of whom made advances towards
+      her acquaintance. But the dreary discipline of the household had sunk into
+      her soul, and she had been shaping an internal life for herself, which it
+      was hard for friendship to penetrate. Bathsheba Stoker was chained to the
+      bedside of an invalid mother. Olive Eveleth, a kind, true-hearted girl,
+      belonged to another religious communion; and this tended to render their
+      meetings less frequent, though Olive was still her nearest friend. Cyprian
+      was himself a little shy, and rather held to Myrtle through his sister
+      than by any true intimacy directly with herself. Of the other young men of
+      the village Gifted Hopkins was perhaps the most fervent of her admirers,
+      as he had repeatedly shown by effusions in verse, of which, under the
+      thinnest of disguises, she was the object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      William Murray Bradshaw, ten years older than herself, a young man of
+      striking aspect and claims to exceptional ability, had kept his eye on her
+      of late; but it was generally supposed that he would find a wife in the
+      city, where he was in the habit of going to visit a fashionable relative,
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place. She, at any rate, understood very
+      well that he meant, to use his own phrase, &ldquo;to go in for a corner lot,&rdquo;&mdash;understanding
+      thereby a young lady with possessions and without encumbrances. If the old
+      man had only given his money to Myrtle, William Murray Bradshaw would have
+      made sure of her; but she was not likely ever to get much of it. Miss
+      Silence Withers, it was understood, would probably leave her money as the
+      Rev. Mr. Stoker, her spiritual director, should indicate, and it seemed
+      likely that most of it would go to a rising educational institution where
+      certain given doctrines were to be taught through all time, whether
+      disproved or not, and whether those who taught them believed them or not,
+      provided only they would say they believed them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody had promised to say masses for her soul if she made this
+      disposition of her property, or pledged the word of the Church that she
+      should have plenary absolution. But she felt that she would be making
+      friends in Influential Quarters by thus laying up her treasure, and that
+      she would be safe if she had the good-will of the ministers of her sect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard had nearly reached the age of fourteen, and, though not like
+      to inherit much of the family property, was fast growing into a large
+      dower of hereditary beauty. Always handsome, her features shaped
+      themselves in a finer symmetry, her color grew richer, her figure promised
+      a perfect womanly development, and her movements had the grace which
+      high-breeding gives the daughter of a queen, and which Nature now and then
+      teaches the humblest of village maidens. She could not long escape the
+      notice of the lovers and flatterers of beauty, and the time of danger was
+      drawing near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this period of her life she made two discoveries which changed the
+      whole course of her thoughts, and opened for her a new world of ideas and
+      possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ever since the dreadful event of November, 1854, the garret had been a
+      fearful place to think of, and still more to visit. The stories that the
+      house was haunted gained in frequency of repetition and detail of
+      circumstance. But Myrtle was bold and inquisitive, and explored its
+      recesses at such times as she could creep among them undisturbed. Hid away
+      close under the eaves she found an old trunk covered with dust and
+      cobwebs. The mice had gnawed through its leather hinges, and, as it had
+      been hastily stuffed full, the cover had risen, and two or three volumes
+      had fallen to the floor. This trunk held the papers and books which her
+      great-grandmother, the famous beauty, had left behind her, records of the
+      romantic days when she was the belle of the county,&mdash;storybooks,
+      memoirs, novels, and poems, and not a few love-letters,&mdash;a strange
+      collection, which, as so often happens with such deposits in old families,
+      nobody had cared to meddle with, and nobody had been willing to destroy,
+      until at last they had passed out of mind, and waited for a new generation
+      to bring them into light again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin. Under one of the boards
+      which formed the imperfect flooring of the garret was hidden an old
+      leather mitten. Instead of a hand, it had a fat fist of silver dollars,
+      and a thumb of gold half-eagles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple and secluded
+      maiden. The books were hers to read as much as any other's; the gold and
+      silver were only a part of that small provision which would be hers by and
+      by, and if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself. The tree of the
+      knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into her lap, and, without
+      any serpent to tempt her, she took thereof and did eat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV. BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his outside presentment as
+      one will find among five hundred college alumni as they file in
+      procession. His strong, squared features, his formidable scowl, his
+      solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his positive and as it were
+      categorical stride, his slow, precise way of putting a statement, the
+      strange union of trampling radicalism in some directions and high-stepping
+      conservatism in others, which made it impossible to calculate on his
+      unexpressed opinions, his testy ways and his generous impulses, his hard
+      judgments and kindly actions, were characteristics that gave him a very
+      decided individuality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had all the aspects of a man of books. His study, which was the best
+      room in Mrs. Hopkins's house, was filled with a miscellaneous-looking
+      collection of volumes, which his curious literary taste had got together
+      from the shelves of all the libraries that had been broken up during his
+      long life as a scholar. Classics, theology, especially of the
+      controversial sort, statistics, politics, law, medicine, science, occult
+      and overt, general literature,&mdash;almost every branch of knowledge was
+      represented. His learning was very various, and of course mixed up, useful
+      and useless, new and ancient, dogmatic and rational,&mdash;like his
+      library, in short; for a library gathered like his is a looking-glass in
+      which the owner's mind is reflected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The common people about the village did not know what to make of such a
+      phenomenon. He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the
+      ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry cases
+      into court for quarrelsome neighbors. What was he good for? Not a great
+      deal, some of the wiseacres thought,&mdash;had &ldquo;all sorts of sense but
+      common sense,&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;smart mahn, but not prahctical.&rdquo; There were others
+      who read him more shrewdly. He knowed more, they said, than all the
+      ministers put together, and if he'd stan' for Ripresentative they 'd like
+      to vote for him,&mdash;they hed n't hed a smart mahn in the Gineral Court
+      sence Squire Wibird was thar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with that of
+      all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real scholar in his
+      special line of study,&mdash;as all D. D.'s are supposed to be, or they
+      would not have been honored with that distinguished title. But Mr. Byles
+      Gridley not only had more learning than the deep-sea line of the bucolic
+      intelligence could fathom; he had more wisdom also than they gave him
+      credit for, even those among them who thought most of his abilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against those of
+      the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a reputation as
+      &ldquo;Master&rdquo; Gridley, that he kept that title even after he had become a
+      college tutor and professor. As a tutor he had to deal with many of these
+      same boys, and others like them, in the still more vivacious period of
+      their early college life. He got rid of his police duties when he became a
+      professor, but he still studied the pupils as carefully as he used once to
+      watch them, and learned to read character with a skill which might have
+      fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents. But he loved quiet
+      and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the market-place, whose stock
+      in trade is a voice and a vocabulary. So it was that he had passed his
+      life in the patient mechanical labor of instruction, leaving too many of
+      his instincts and faculties in abeyance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to worldly
+      wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed, than it does
+      in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as their blood grows
+      cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with anything more practical than
+      a gerund or a cosine. Master Gridley not only knew a good deal of human
+      nature, but he knew how to keep his knowledge to himself upon occasion. He
+      understood singularly well the ways and tendencies of young people. He was
+      shrewd in the detection of trickery, and very confident in those who had
+      once passed the ordeal of his well-schooled observing powers. He had no
+      particular tendency to meddle with the personal relations of those about
+      him; but if they were forced upon him in any way, he was like to see into
+      them at least as quickly as any of his neighbors who thought themselves
+      most endowed with practical skill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said a
+      little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out to
+      pasture. He felt that he had separated himself from human interests, and
+      was henceforth to live in his books with the dead, until he should be
+      numbered with them himself. He had chosen this quiet village as a place
+      where he might pass his days undisturbed, and find a peaceful
+      resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel was dry, and the sun lay
+      warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would spread their many-colored
+      counterpane over the bed where he would be taking his rest. It sometimes
+      came over him painfully that he was never more to be of any importance to
+      his fellow-creatures. There was nobody living to whom he was connected by
+      any very near ties. He felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose house
+      he lived; he sometimes gave a few words of counsel to her son; he was not
+      unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed with great consideration to
+      the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with no small interest the
+      physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose sermons he
+      listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a nostril dilating with
+      ominous intensity of meaning. But he said sadly to himself, that his life
+      had been a failure,&mdash;that he had nothing to show for it, and his one
+      talent was ready in its napkin to give back to his Lord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many would
+      hold of small significance. Though he had mourned for no lost love, at
+      least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the pang of
+      parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those joys and griefs
+      which come with the ties of family, he too had his private urn filled with
+      the ashes of extinguished hopes. He was the father of a dead book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.,&rdquo; had not met with
+      an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating public, it
+      would take us too long to inquire in detail. Indeed; he himself was never
+      able to account satisfactorily for the state of things which his
+      bookseller's account made evident to him. He had read and re-read his
+      work; and the more familiar he became with it, the less was he able to
+      understand the singular want of popular appreciation of what he could not
+      help recognizing as its excellences. He had a special copy of his work,
+      printed on large paper and sumptuously bound. He loved to read in this, as
+      people read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and it
+      might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the ludicrous,
+      if his comments on his own production could have been heard. &ldquo;That's a
+      thought, now, for you!&mdash;See Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay's Essay
+      printed six years after thus book.&rdquo; &ldquo;A felicitous image! and so everybody
+      would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle had hit upon it.&rdquo; &ldquo;If this is
+      not genuine pathos, where will you find it, I should like to know? And
+      nobody to open the book where it stands written but one poor old man&mdash;in
+      this generation, at least&mdash;in this generation!&rdquo; It may be doubted
+      whether he would ever have loved his book with such jealous fondness if it
+      had gone through a dozen editions, and everybody was quoting it to his
+      face. But now it lived only for him; and to him it was wife and child,
+      parent, friend, all in one, as Hector was all in all to his spouse. He
+      never tired of it, and in his more sanguine moods he looked forward to the
+      time when the world would acknowledge its merits, and his genius would
+      find full recognition. Perhaps he was right: more than one book which
+      seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers has had a resurrection
+      when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only in the tombstone memory
+      of antiquaries. Comfort for some of us, dear fellow-writer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It followed from the way in which he lived that he must have some means of
+      support upon which he could depend. He was economical, if not over frugal
+      in some of his habits; but he bought books, and took newspapers and
+      reviews, and had money when money was needed; the fact being, though it
+      was not generally known, that a distant relative had not long before died,
+      leaving him a very comfortable property.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings with the late
+      legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow, which had naturally passed into the
+      hands of the new partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw. He had entire
+      confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the young man who had
+      been recently associated in the business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, commonly called by his last two names, was
+      the son of a lawyer of some note for his acuteness, who marked out his
+      calling for him in having him named after the great Lord Mansfield. Murray
+      Bradshaw was about twenty-five years old, by common consent good-looking,
+      with a finely formed head, a searching eye, and a sharp-cut mouth, which
+      smiled at his bidding without the slightest reference to the real
+      condition of his feeling at the moment. This was a great convenience; for
+      it gave him an appearance of good-nature at the small expense of a slight
+      muscular movement which was as easy as winking, and deceived everybody but
+      those who had studied him long and carefully enough to find that this play
+      of his features was what a watch maker would call a detached movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had been a good scholar in college, not so much by hard study as by
+      skilful veneering, and had taken great pains to stand well with the
+      Faculty, at least one of whom, Byles Gridley, A. M., had watched him with
+      no little interest as a man with a promising future, provided he were not
+      so astute as to outwit and overreach himself in his excess of contrivance.
+      His classmates could not help liking him; as to loving him, none of them
+      would have thought of that. He was so shrewd, so keen, so full of
+      practical sense, and so good-humored as long as things went on to his
+      liking, that few could resist his fascination. He had a way of talking
+      with people about what they were interested in, as if it were the one
+      matter in the world nearest to his heart. But he was commonly trying to
+      find out something, or to produce some impression, as a juggler is working
+      at his miracle while he keeps people's attention by his voluble discourse
+      and make-believe movements. In his lightest talk he was almost always
+      edging towards a practical object, and it was an interesting and
+      instructive amusement to watch for the moment at which he would ship the
+      belt of his colloquial machinery on to the tight pulley. It was done so
+      easily and naturally that there was hardly a sign of it. Master Gridley
+      could usually detect the shifting action, but the young man's features and
+      voice never betrayed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a favorite with the other sex, who love poetry and romance, as he
+      well knew, for which reason he often used the phrases of both, and in such
+      a way as to answer his purpose with most of those whom he wished to
+      please. He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of life: he was not
+      handicapped with any burdensome ideals. He took everything at its marked
+      value. He accepted the standard of the street as a final fact for to-day,
+      like the broker's list of prices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His whole plan of life was laid out. He knew that law was the best
+      introduction to political life, and he meant to use it for this end. He
+      chose to begin his career in the country, so as to feel his way more
+      surely and gradually to its ultimate aim; but he had no intention of
+      burning his shining talents in a grazing district, however tall its grass
+      might grow. His business was not with these stiff-jointed, slow-witted
+      graziers, but with the supple, dangerous, far-seeing men who sit scheming
+      by the gas-light in the great cities, after all the lamps and candles are
+      out from the Merrimac to the Housatonic. Every strong and every weak point
+      of those who might probably be his rivals were laid down on his charts, as
+      winds and currents and rocks are marked on those of a navigator. All the
+      young girls in the country, and not a few in the city, with which, as
+      mentioned, he had frequent relations, were on his list of possible
+      availabilities in the matrimonial line of speculation, provided always
+      that their position and prospects were such as would make them proper
+      matches for so considerable a person as the future Hon. William Murray
+      Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley had made a careful study of his old pupil since they had
+      resided in the same village. The old professor could not help admiring
+      him, notwithstanding certain suspicious elements in his character; for
+      after muddy village talk, a clear stream of intelligent conversation was a
+      great luxury to the hard-headed scholar. The more he saw of him, the more
+      he learned to watch his movements, and to be on his guard in talking with
+      him. The old man could be crafty, with all his simplicity, and he had
+      found out that under his good-natured manner there often lurked some
+      design more or less worth noting, and which might involve other interests
+      deserving protection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some reason or other the old Master of Arts had of late experienced a
+      certain degree of relenting with regard to himself, probably brought about
+      by the expressions of gratitude from worthy Mrs. Hopkins for acts of
+      kindness to which he himself attached no great value. He had been kind to
+      her son Gifted; he had been fatherly with Susan Posey, her relative and
+      boarder; and he had shown himself singularly and unexpectedly amiable with
+      the little twins who had been adopted by the good woman into her
+      household. In fact, ever since these little creatures had begun to toddle
+      about and explode their first consonants, he had looked through his great
+      round spectacles upon them with a decided interest; and from that time it
+      seemed as if some of the human and social sentiments which had never
+      leafed or flowered in him, for want of their natural sunshine, had begun
+      growing up from roots which had never lost their life. His liking for the
+      twins may have been an illustration of that singular law which old Dr.
+      Hurlbut used to lay down, namely, that at a certain period of life, say
+      from fifty to sixty and upward, the grand-paternal instinct awakens in
+      bachelors, the rhythms of Nature reaching them in spite of her defeated
+      intentions; so that when men marry late they love their autumn child with
+      a twofold affection,&mdash;father's and grandfather's both in one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However this may be, there is no doubt that Mr. Byles Gridley was
+      beginning to take a part in his neighbors' welfare and misfortunes, such
+      as could hardly have been expected of a man so long lost in his books and
+      his scholastic duties. And among others, Myrtle Hazard had come in for a
+      share of his interest. He had met her now and then in her walks to and
+      from school and meeting, and had been taken with her beauty and her
+      apparent unconsciousness of it, which he attributed to the forlorn kind of
+      household in which she had grown up. He had got so far as to talk with her
+      now and then, and found himself puzzled, as well he might be, in talking
+      with a girl who had been growing into her early maturity in antagonism
+      with every influence that surrounded her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Love will reach her by and by,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;in spite of the dragons up at
+      the den yonder.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;'Centum fronte oculos, centum cervice gerebat
+     Argus, et hos unus saepe fefellit amor.'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      But there was something about Myrtle,&mdash;he hardly knew whether to call
+      it dignity, or pride, or reserve, or the mere habit of holding back
+      brought about by the system of repression under which she had been
+      educated,&mdash;which kept even the old Master of Arts at his distance.
+      Yet he was strongly drawn to her, and had a sort of presentiment that he
+      might be able to help her some day, and that very probably she would want
+      his help; for she was alone in the world, except for the dragons, and sure
+      to be assailed by foes from without and from within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He noticed that her name was apt to come up in his conversations with
+      Murray Bradshaw; and, as he himself never introduced it, of course the
+      young man must have forced it, as conjurers force a card, and with some
+      special object. This set him thinking hard; and, as a result of it, he
+      determined the next time Mr. Bradshaw brought her name up to set him
+      talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he talked, not suspecting how carefully the old man listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a demonish hard case,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that old Malachi had left his
+      money as he did. Myrtle Hazard was going to be the handsomest girl about,
+      when she came to her beauty, and she was coming to it mighty fast. If they
+      could only break that will, but it was no use trying. The doctors said he
+      was of sound mind for at least two years after making it. If Silence
+      Withers got the land claim, there'd be a pile, sure enough. Myrtle Hazard
+      ought to have it. If the girl had only inherited that property&mdash;whew?
+      She'd have been a match for any fellow. That old Silence Withers would do
+      just as her minister told her,&mdash;even chance whether she gives it to
+      the Parson-factory, or marries Bellamy Stoker, and gives it to him after
+      his wife's dead. He'd take it if he had to take her with it. Earn his
+      money, hey, Master Gridley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, you don't seem to think very well of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+      Stoker?&rdquo; said Mr. Gridley, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think well of him? Too fond of using the Devil's pitchfork for my fancy!
+      Forks over pretty much all the world but himself and his lot into&mdash;the
+      bad place, you know; and toasts his own cheese with it with very much the
+      same kind of comfort that other folks seem to take in that business.
+      Besides, he has a weakness for pretty saints&mdash;and sinners. That's an
+      odd name he has. More belle amie than Joseph about him, I rather guess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old professor smiled again. &ldquo;So you don't think he believes all the
+      mediaeval doctrines he is in the habit of preaching, Mr. Bradshaw?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir; I think he belongs to the class I have seen described somewhere.
+      'There are those who hold the opinion that truth is only safe when
+      diluted,&mdash;about one fifth to four fifths lies,&mdash;as the oxygen of
+      the air is with its nitrogen. Else it would burn us all up.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byles Gridley colored and started a little. This was one of his own
+      sayings in &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe.&rdquo; But the young man quoted it without
+      seeming to suspect its authorship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't remember. Some paper, I rather think. It's one of those good
+      things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em. Sounds like
+      Coleridge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's what I call a compliment worth having,&rdquo; said Byles Gridley to
+      himself, when he got home. &ldquo;Let me look at that passage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took down &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe,&rdquo; and got so much interested,
+      reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell, and
+      Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down to tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V. THE TWINS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that tea was
+      waiting. He rather liked Susan Posey. She was a pretty creature, slight,
+      blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the second or third grade,
+      effective at picnics and by moonlight,&mdash;the kind of girl that very
+      young men are apt to remember as their first love. She had a taste for
+      poetry, and an admiration of poets; but, what was better, she was modest
+      and simple, and a perfect sister and mother and grandmother to the two
+      little forlorn twins who had been stranded on the Widow Hopkins's
+      doorstep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three years
+      old. A few words will make us acquainted with them. Nothing had ever been
+      known of their origin. The sharp eyes of all the spinsters had been
+      through every household in the village and neighborhood, and not a
+      suspicion fixed itself on any one. It was a dark night when they were
+      left; and it was probable that they had been brought from another town, as
+      the sound of wheels had been heard close to the door where they were
+      found, had stopped for a moment, then been heard again, and lost in the
+      distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How the good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been
+      briefly mentioned. At first nobody thought they would live a day, such
+      little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem. But the young doctor
+      came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in cotton-wool,
+      and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-teaspoonfuls of milk
+      given them, and after being kept alive in this way, like the young of
+      opossums and kangaroos, they came to a conclusion about which they did not
+      seem to have made up their thinking-pulps for some weeks, namely, to go on
+      trying to cross the sea of life by tugging at the four-and-twenty oars
+      which must be pulled day and night until the unknown shore is reached, and
+      the oars lie at rest under the folded hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it was not very likely that the parents who left their offspring round
+      on doorsteps were of saintly life, they were not presented for baptism
+      like the children of church-members. Still, they must have names to be
+      known by, and Mrs. Hopkins was much exercised in the matter. Like many New
+      England parents, she had a decided taste for names that were significant
+      and sonorous. That which she had chosen for her oldest child, the young
+      poet, was either a remarkable prophecy, or it had brought with it the
+      endowments it promised. She had lost, or, in her own more pictorial
+      language, she had buried, a daughter to whom she had given the names, at
+      once of cheerful omen and melodious effect, Wealthy Amadora.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for them poor little creturs, she said, she believed they was rained
+      down out o' the skies, jest as they say toads and tadpoles come. She meant
+      to be a mother to 'em for all that, and give 'em jest as good names as if
+      they was the governor's children, or the minister's. If Mr. Gridley would
+      be so good as to find her some kind of a real handsome Chris'n name for
+      'em, she'd provide 'em with the other one. Hopkinses they shall be bred
+      and taught, and Hopkinses they shall be called. Ef their father and mother
+      was ashamed to own 'em, she was n't. Couldn't Mr. Gridley pick out some
+      pooty sounding names from some of them great books of his. It's jest as
+      well to have 'em pooty as long as they don't cost any more than if they
+      was Tom and Sally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A grim smile passed over the rugged features of Byles Gridley. &ldquo;Nothing is
+      easier than that, Mrs. Hopkins,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I will give you two very pretty
+      names that I think will please you and other folks. They're new names,
+      too. If they shouldn't like to keep them, they can change them before
+      they're christened, if they ever are. Isosceles will be just the name for
+      the boy, and I'm sure you won't find a prettier name for the girl in a
+      hurry than Helminthia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hopkins was delighted with the dignity and novelty of these two
+      names, which were forthwith adopted. As they were rather long for common
+      use in the family, they were shortened into the easier forms of Sossy and
+      Minthy, under which designation the babes began very soon to thrive
+      mightily, turning bread and milk into the substance of little sinners at a
+      great rate, and growing as if they were put out at compound interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles
+      Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by Miss
+      Susan Posey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am coming, my dear,&rdquo; he said,&mdash;which expression quite touched Miss
+      Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from the
+      delicious page he was reading. It was not the living child that was
+      kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a trivial
+      use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his eye
+      was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of papers.
+      Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him. Could that be a
+      copy of &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe&rdquo;? He watched his opportunity, and got a
+      hurried sight of the volume. His own treatise, sure enough! Leaves Uncut.
+      Opened of itself to the one hundred and twentieth page. The axiom Murray
+      Bradshaw had quoted&mdash;he did not remember from what,&mdash;&ldquo;sounded
+      like Coleridge&rdquo;&mdash;was staring him in the face from that very page.
+      When he remembered how he had pleased himself with that compliment the
+      other day, he blushed like a school-girl; and then, thinking out the whole
+      trick,&mdash;to hunt up his forgotten book, pick out a phrase or two from
+      it, and play on his weakness with it, to win his good opinion,&mdash;for
+      what purpose he did not know, but doubtless to use him in some way,&mdash;he
+      grinned with a contempt about equally divided between himself and the
+      young schemer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah ha!&rdquo; he muttered scornfully. &ldquo;Sounds like Coleridge, hey? Niccolo
+      Macchiavelli Bradshaw!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with even
+      more suspicion than before. Yet he would not forego his company and
+      conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and this
+      trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way of
+      flattering his brother plenipotentiary. Who could say? Some time or other
+      he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty with just such a
+      trick. Shallower men than he had gone out as ministers of the great
+      Republic. At any rate, the fellow was worth watching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI. THE USE OF SPECTACLES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he lived
+      for knowing everything that was going on. He rather enjoyed it; and
+      sometimes amused himself with surprising his simple-hearted landlady and
+      her boarders with the unaccountable results of his sagacity. One thing was
+      quite beyond her comprehension. She was perfectly sure that Mr. Gridley
+      could see out of the back of his head, just as other people see with their
+      natural organs. Time and again he had told her what she was doing when his
+      back was turned to her, just as if he had been sitting squarely in front
+      of her. Some laughed at this foolish notion; but others, who knew more of
+      the nebulous sciences, told her it was like's not jes' so. Folks had read
+      letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their stomachs, 'n' why should n't they
+      see out o' the backs o' their heads?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now there was a certain fact at the bottom of this belief of Mrs. Hopkins;
+      and as it world be a very small thing to make a mystery of so simple a
+      matter, the reader shall have the whole benefit of knowing all there is in
+      it,&mdash;not quite yet, however, of knowing all that came of it. It was
+      not the mirror trick, of course, which Mrs. Felix Lorraine and other
+      dangerous historical personages have so long made use of. It was nothing
+      but this: Mr. Byles Gridley wore a pair of formidable spectacles with
+      large round glasses. He had often noticed the reflection of objects behind
+      him when they caught their images at certain angles, and had got the habit
+      of very often looking at the reflecting surface of one or the other of the
+      glasses, when he seemed to be looking through them. It put a singular
+      power into his possession, which might possibly hereafter lead to
+      something more significant than the mystification of the Widow Hopkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A short time before Myrtle Hazard's disappearance, Mr. Byles Gridley had
+      occasion to call again at the office of Penhallow and Bradshaw on some
+      small matter of business of his own. There were papers to look over, and
+      he put on his great round-glassed spectacles. He and Mr. Penhallow sat
+      down at the table, and Mr. Bradshaw was at a desk behind them. After
+      sitting for a while, Mr. Penhallow seemed to remember something he had
+      meant to attend to, for he said all at once: &ldquo;Excuse me, Mr. Gridley. Mr.
+      Bradshaw, if you are not busy, I wish you would look over this bundle of
+      papers. They look like old receipted bills and memoranda of no particular
+      use; but they came from the garret of the Withers place, and might
+      possibly have something that would be of value. Look them over, will you,
+      and see whether there is anything there worth saving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man took the papers, and Mr. Penhallow sat down again at the
+      table with Mr. Byles Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This last-named gentleman felt just then a strong impulse to observe the
+      operations of Murray Bradshaw. He could not have given any very good
+      reason for it, any more than any of us can for half of what we do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to examine that conveyance we were speaking of once more,&rdquo;
+       said he. &ldquo;Please to look at this one in the mean time, will you, Mr.
+      Penhallow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley held the document up before him. He did not seem to find it
+      quite legible, and adjusted his spectacles carefully, until they were just
+      as he wanted them. When he had got them to suit himself, sitting there
+      with his back to Murray Bradshaw, he could see him and all his movements,
+      the desk at which he was standing, and the books in the shelves before
+      him,&mdash;all this time appearing as if he were intent upon his own
+      reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man began in a rather indifferent way to look over the papers.
+      He loosened the band round them, and took them up one by one, gave a
+      careless glance at them, and laid them together to tie up again when he
+      had gone through them. Master Gridley saw all this process, thinking what
+      a fool he was all the time to be watching such a simple proceeding.
+      Presently he noticed a more sudden movement: the young man had found
+      something which arrested his attention, and turned his head to see if he
+      was observed. The senior partner and his client were both apparently deep
+      in their own affairs. In his hand Mr. Bradshaw held a paper folded like
+      the others, the back of which he read, holding it in such a way that
+      Master Gridley saw very distinctly three large spots of ink upon it, and
+      noticed their position. Murray Bradshaw took another hurried glance at the
+      two gentlemen, and then quickly opened the paper. He ran it over with a
+      flash of his eye, folded it again, and laid it by itself. With another
+      quick turn of his head, as if to see whether he were observed or like to
+      be, he reached his hand out and took a volume down from the shelves. In
+      this volume he shut the document, whatever it was, which he had just taken
+      out of the bundle, and placed the book in a very silent and as it were
+      stealthy way back in its place. He then gave a look at each of the other
+      papers, and said to his partner: &ldquo;Old bills, old leases, and insurance
+      policies that have run out. Malachi seems to have kept every scrap of
+      paper that had a signature to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That 's the way with the old misers, always,&rdquo; said Mr. Penhallow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Byles Gridley had got through reading the document he held,&mdash;or
+      pretending to read it. He took off his spectacles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We all grow timid and cautious as we get old, Mr. Penhallow.&rdquo; Then
+      turning round to the young man, he slowly repeated the lines,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;'Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
+     Quaerit et inventis miser abstinet, ac timet uti;
+     Vel quod res omnes timide, gelideque ministrat'
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You remember the passage, Mr. Bradshaw?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was reciting these words from Horace, which he spoke slowly as if
+      he relished every syllable, he kept his eyes on the young man steadily,
+      but with out betraying any suspicion. His old habits as a teacher made
+      that easy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw's face was calm as usual, but there was a flush on his
+      cheek, and Master Gridley saw the slight but unequivocal signs of
+      excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something is going on inside there,&rdquo; the old man said to himself. He
+      waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw got up
+      and left the office. As soon as he and the senior partner were alone,
+      Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in his library. There
+      stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus Juris Civilis,&mdash;the
+      fine Elzevir edition of 1664. It was bound in parchment, and thus readily
+      distinguishable at a glance from all the books round it. Now Mr. Penhallow
+      was not much of a Latin scholar, and knew and cared very little about the
+      civil law. He had fallen in with this book at an auction, and bought it to
+      place in his shelves with the other &ldquo;properties&rdquo; of the office, because it
+      would look respectable. Anything shut up in one of those two octavos might
+      stay there a lifetime without Mr. Penhallow's disturbing it; that Master
+      Gridley knew, and of course the young man knew it too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in the
+      lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the knight's
+      zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to ourselves we
+      are not after the thing coveted. Put a lump of sugar in a canary-bird's
+      cage, and the small creature will illustrate the instinct for the benefit
+      of inquirers or sceptics. Byles Gridley went to the other side of the room
+      and took a volume of Reports from the shelves. He put it back and took a
+      copy of &ldquo;Fearne on Contingent Remainders,&rdquo; and looked at that for a moment
+      in an idling way, as if from a sense of having nothing to do. Then he drew
+      the back of his forefinger along the books on the shelf, as if nothing
+      interested him in them, and strolled to the shelf in front of the desk at
+      which Murray Bradshaw had stood. He took down the second volume of the
+      Corpus Juris Civilis, turned the leaves over mechanically, as if in search
+      of some title, and replaced it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked round for a moment. Mr. Penhallow was writing hard at his table,
+      not thinking of him, it was plain enough. He laid his hand on the FIRST
+      volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis. There was a document shut up in it.
+      His hand was on the book, whether taking it out or putting it back was not
+      evident, when the door opened and Mr. William Murray Bradshaw entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you are not studying the civil law, are you?&rdquo;
+       He strode towards him as he spoke, his face white, his eyes fixed fiercely
+      on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It always interests me, Mr. Bradshaw,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;and this is a fine
+      edition of it. One may find a great many valuable things in the Corpus
+      Juris Civilis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked impenetrable, and whether or not he had seen more than Mr.
+      Bradshaw wished him to see, that gentleman could not tell. But there stood
+      the two books in their place, and when, after Master Gridley had gone, he
+      looked in the first volume, there was the document he had shut up in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII. MYRTLE'S LETTER&mdash;THE YOUNG MEN'S PURSUIT.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know all about it, Olive?&rdquo; Cyprian Eveleth said to his sister, after
+      a brief word of greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Know of what, Cyprian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, sister, don't you know that Myrtle Hazard is missing,&mdash;gone!&mdash;gone
+      nobody knows where, and that we are looking in all directions to find
+      her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olive turned very pale and was silent for a moment. At the end of that
+      moment the story seemed almost old to her. It was a natural ending of the
+      prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her earliest years. When she
+      got large and strong enough, she broke out of jail,&mdash;that was all.
+      The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or later, whether it is a wooden
+      or an iron one. Olive felt as if she had dimly foreseen just such a
+      finishing to the tragedy of the poor girl's home bringing-up. Why could
+      not she have done something to prevent it? Well,&mdash;what shall we do
+      now, and as it is?&mdash;that is the question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has she left no letter,&mdash;no explanation of her leaving in this way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a word, so far as anybody in the village knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come over to the post-office with me; perhaps we may find a letter. I
+      think we shall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Olive's sagacity and knowledge of her friend's character had not misled
+      her. She found a letter from Myrtle to herself, which she opened and read
+      as here follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY DEAREST OLIVE:&mdash;Think no evil of me for what I have done. The
+      fire-hang-bird's nest, as Cyprian called it, is empty, and the poor bird
+      is flown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can live as I have lived no longer. This place is chilling all the life
+      out of me, and I must find another home. It is far, far away, and you will
+      not hear from me again until I am there. Then I will write to you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know where I was born,&mdash;under a hot sun and in the midst of
+      strange, lovely scenes that I seem still to remember. I must visit them
+      again: my heart always yearns for them. And I must cross the sea to get
+      there,&mdash;the beautiful great sea that I have always longed for and
+      that my river has been whispering about to me ever so many years. My life
+      is pinched and starved here. I feel as old as aunt Silence, and I am only
+      fifteen,&mdash;a child she has called me within a few days. If this is to
+      be a child, what is it to be a woman?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I love you dearly,&mdash;and your brother is almost to me as if he were
+      mine. I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,&mdash;yes, and the old man that
+      has spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to give you
+      pain,&mdash;to leave you all,&mdash;but my way of life is killing me, and
+      I am too young to die. I cannot take the comfort with you, my dear
+      friends, that I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of ice in my
+      heart, and all the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive. Do you remember
+      how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to flee into
+      Egypt? I have had a dream like that, Olive. There is an old belief in our
+      family that the spirit of one who died many generations ago watches over
+      some of her descendants. They say it led our first ancestor to come over
+      here when it was a wilderness. I believe it has appeared to others of the
+      family in times of trouble. I have had a strange dream at any rate, and
+      the one I saw, or thought I saw, told me to leave this place. Perhaps I
+      should have stayed if it had not been for that, but it seemed like an
+      angel's warning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody will know how I have gone, or which way I have taken. On Monday,
+      you may show this letter to my friends, not before. I do not think they
+      will be in danger of breaking their hearts for me at our house. Aunt
+      Silence cares for nothing but her own soul, and the other woman hates me,
+      I always thought. Kitty Fagan will cry hard. Tell her perhaps I shall come
+      back by and by. There is a little box in my room, with some keepsakes
+      marked,&mdash;one is for poor Kitty. You can give them to the right ones.
+      Yours is with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good-by, dearest. Keep my secret, as I told you, till Monday. And if you
+      never see me again, remember how much I loved you. Never think hardly of
+      me, for you have grown up in a happy home, and do not know how much misery
+      can be crowded into fifteen years of a young girl's life. God be with you!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MYRTLE HAZARD.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Olive could not restrain her tears, as she handed the letter to Cyprian.
+      &ldquo;Her secret is as safe with you as with me,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But this is
+      madness, Cyprian, and we must keep her from doing herself a wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What she means to do, is to get to Boston, in some way or other, and sail
+      for India. It is strange that they have not tracked her. There is no time
+      to be lost. She shall not go out into the world in this way, child that
+      she is. No; she shall come back, and make her home with us, if she cannot
+      be happy with these people. Ours is a happy and a cheerful home, and she
+      shall be to me as a younger sister, and your sister too, Cyprian. But you
+      must see her; you must leave this very hour; and you may find her. Go to
+      your cousin Edward, in Boston, at once; tell him your errand, and get him
+      to help you find our poor dear sister. Then give her the note I will
+      write, and say I know your heart, Cyprian, and I can trust that to tell
+      you what to say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a very short time Cyprian Eveleth was on his way to Boston. But
+      another, keener even in pursuit than he, was there before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ever since the day when Master Gridley had made that over-curious
+      observation of the young lawyer's proceedings at the office, Murray
+      Bradshaw had shown a far livelier interest than before in the conditions
+      and feelings of Myrtle Hazard. He had called frequently at The Poplars to
+      talk over business matters, which seemed of late to require a deal of
+      talking. He had been very deferential to Miss Silence, and had wound
+      himself into the confidence of Miss Badlam. He found it harder to
+      establish any very near relations with Myrtle, who had never seemed to
+      care much for any young man but Cyprian Eveleth, and to care for him quite
+      as much as Olive's brother as for any personal reason. But he carefully
+      studied Myrtle's tastes and ways of thinking and of life, so that, by and
+      by, when she should look upon herself as a young woman, and not as a girl,
+      he would have a great advantage in making her more intimate acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother's in India. She talked
+      at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes which might
+      well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions. She made herself a rude
+      hammock,&mdash;such as are often used in hot climates,&mdash;and swung it
+      between two elms. Here she would lie in the hot summer days, and fan
+      herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India had sent her,&mdash;the
+      perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw her into day-dreams,
+      which were almost like trances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
+      presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned for
+      himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue and cry,
+      and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away if he could
+      help it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first fact was this. He found among the copies of the city newspaper
+      they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a square had been cut
+      out. He procured another copy of this paper of the same date, and found
+      that the piece cut out was an advertisement to the effect that the A 1
+      Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to sail from Boston for Calcutta, on
+      the 20th of June.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second fact was the following. On the window-sill of her little
+      hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found some
+      threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the wood. They
+      were Myrtle's of course. A simpleton might have constructed a tragedy out
+      of this trivial circumstance,&mdash;how she had cast herself from the
+      window into the waters beneath it,&mdash;how she had been thrust out after
+      a struggle, of which this shred from her tresses was the dreadful witness,&mdash;and
+      so on. Murray Bradshaw did not stop to guess and wonder. He said nothing
+      about it, but wound the shining threads on his finger, and, as soon as he
+      got home, examined them with a magnifier. They had been cut off smoothly,
+      as with a pair of scissors. This was part of a mass of hair, then, which
+      had been shorn and thrown from the window. Nobody would do that but she
+      herself. What would she do it for? To disguise her sex, of course. The
+      other inferences were plain enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, and concluded
+      that he would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river, and scour the
+      woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport town from which she
+      would without doubt sail if she had formed the project he thought on the
+      whole most probable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to catch the
+      train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of the missing
+      girl nearer home. In the cars he made the most suggestive inquiries he
+      could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly conductor's memory. Had any young
+      fellow been on the train within a day or two, who had attracted his
+      notice? Smooth, handsome face, black eyes, short black hair, new clothes,
+      not fitting very well, looked away when he paid his fare, had a soft voice
+      like a woman's,&mdash;had he seen anybody answering to some such
+      description as this? The gentlemanly conductor had not noticed,&mdash;was
+      always taking up and setting down way-passengers,&mdash;might have had
+      such a young man aboard,&mdash;there was two or three students one day in
+      the car singing college songs,&mdash;he did n't care how folks looked if
+      they had their tickets ready,&mdash;and minded their own business,&mdash;and,
+      so saying, he poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was
+      reclining with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
+      provoke in lovely woman,&mdash;&ldquo;Fare!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel, where
+      they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby, with
+      nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and anything but
+      clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable and mean, and to
+      undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in the office, who, while
+      he shoves the book round to you for your name, is making a hasty
+      calculation as to how high up he can venture to doom you. But Murray
+      Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more than made up for by the
+      air and tone which imply the habit of being attended to. The clerk saw
+      that in a glance, and, as he looked at the name and address in the book,
+      spoke sharply in the explosive dialect of his tribe,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he appeared in
+      his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable countenance and
+      gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two stories higher, where he
+      found himself in a room not much better than a garret, feeling lonely
+      enough, for he did not know he had an acquaintance in the same house. The
+      two young men were in and out so irregularly that it was not very strange
+      that they did not happen to meet each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in the
+      city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward. He was not
+      only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and its ways,
+      and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian's motives, his own were of
+      such intensity that he thought of nothing else by day, and dreamed of
+      nothing else by night. He went to work, therefore, in the most systematic
+      manner. He first visited the ship Swordfish, lying at her wharf, saw her
+      captain, and satisfied himself that as yet nobody at all corresponding to
+      the description of Myrtle Hazard had been seen by any person on board. He
+      visited all the wharves, inquiring on every vessel where it seemed
+      possible she might have been looking about. Hotels, thoroughfares, every
+      place where he might hear of her or meet her, were all searched. He took
+      some of the police into his confidence, and had half a dozen pairs of eyes
+      besides his own opened pretty widely, to discover the lost girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Sunday, the 19th, he got the first hint which encouraged him to think
+      he was on the trail of his fugitive. He had gone down again to the wharf
+      where the Swordfish, advertised to sail the next day, was lying. The
+      captain was not on board, but one of the mates was there, and he addressed
+      his questions to him, not with any great hope of hearing anything
+      important, but determined to lose no chance, however small. He was
+      startled with a piece of information which gave him such an exquisite pang
+      of delight that he could hardly keep the usual quiet of his demeanor. A
+      youth corresponding to his description of Myrtle Hazard in her probable
+      disguise had been that morning on board the Swordfish, making many
+      inquires as to the hour at which she was to sail, and who were to be the
+      passengers, and remained some time on board, going all over the vessel,
+      examining her cabin accommodations, and saying he should return to-morrow
+      before she sailed,&mdash;doubtless intending to take passage in her, as
+      there was plenty of room on board. There could be little question, from
+      the description, who this young person was. It was a rather delicate&mdash;looking,
+      dark&mdash;haired youth, smooth-faced, somewhat shy and bashful in his
+      ways, and evidently excited and nervous. He had apparently been to look
+      about him, and would come back at the last moment, just as the vessel was
+      ready to sail, and in an hour or two be beyond the reach of inquiry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw returned to his hotel, and, going to his chamber, summoned
+      all his faculties in state council to determine what course he should
+      follow, now that he had the object of his search certainly within reaching
+      distance. There was no danger now of her eluding him; but the grave
+      question arose, what was he to do when he stood face to face with her. She
+      must not go,&mdash;that was fixed. If she once got off in that ship, she
+      might be safe enough; but what would become of certain projects in which
+      he was interested,&mdash;that was the question. But again, she was no
+      child, to be turned away from her adventure by cajolery, or by any such
+      threats as common truants would find sufficient to scare them back to
+      their duty. He could tell the facts of her disguise and the manner of her
+      leaving home to the captain of the vessel, and induce him to send her
+      ashore as a stray girl, to be returned to her relatives. But this would
+      only make her furious with him; and he must not alienate her from himself,
+      at any rate. He might plead with her in the name of duty, for the sake of
+      her friends, for the good name of the family. She had thought all these
+      things over before she ran away. What if he should address her as a lover,
+      throw himself at her feet, implore her to pity him and give up her rash
+      scheme, and, if things came to the very worst, offer to follow her
+      wherever she went, if she would accept him in the only relation that would
+      render it possible. Fifteen years old,&mdash;he nearly ten years older,&mdash;but
+      such things had happened before, and this was no time to stand on trifles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He worked out the hypothesis of the matrimonial offer as he would have
+      reasoned out the probabilities in a law case he was undertaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      1. He would rather risk that than lose all hold upon her. The girl was
+      handsome enough for his ambitious future, wherever it might carry him. She
+      came of an honorable family, and had the great advantage of being free
+      from a tribe of disagreeable relatives, which is such a drawback on many
+      otherwise eligible parties. To these considerations were to be joined
+      other circumstances which we need not here mention, of a nature to add
+      greatly to their force, and which would go far of themselves to determine
+      his action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2. How was it likely she would look on such an extraordinary proposition?
+      At first, no doubt, as Lady Anne looked upon the advances of Richard. She
+      would be startled, perhaps shocked. What then? She could not help feeling
+      flattered at such an offer from him,&mdash;him, William Murray Bradshaw,
+      the rising young man of his county, at her feet, his eyes melting with the
+      love he would throw into them, his tones subdued to their most sympathetic
+      quality, and all those phrases on his lips which every day beguile women
+      older and more discreet than this romantic, long-imprisoned girl, whose
+      rash and adventurous enterprise was an assertion of her womanhood and her
+      right to dispose of herself as she chose. He had not lived to be
+      twenty-five years old without knowing his power with women. He believed in
+      himself so thoroughly, that his very confidence was a strong promise of
+      success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3. In case all his entreaties, arguments, and offers made no impression,
+      should he make use of that supreme resource, not to be employed save in
+      extreme need, but which was of a nature, in his opinion, to shake a
+      resolution stronger than this young girl was like to oppose to it? That
+      would be like Christian's coming to his weapon called All-prayer, he said
+      to himself, with a smile that his early readings of Bunyan should have
+      furnished him an image for so different an occasion. The question was one
+      he could not settle till the time came,&mdash;he must leave it to the
+      instinct of the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning found him early waking after a night of feverish dreams.
+      He dressed himself with more than usual care, and walked down to the wharf
+      where the Swordfish was moored. The ship had left the wharf, and was lying
+      out in the stream: A small boat had just reached her, and a slender youth,
+      as he appeared at that distance, climbed, not over-adroitly, up the
+      vessel's side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw called to a boatman near by and ordered the man to row him
+      over as fast as he could to the vessel lying in the stream. He had no
+      sooner reached the deck of the Swordfish than he asked for the young
+      person who had just been put on board.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is in the cabin, sir, just gone down with the captain,&rdquo; was the reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His heart beat, in spite of his cool temperament, as he went down the
+      steps leading to the cabin. The young person was talking earnestly with
+      the captain, and, on his turning round, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had
+      the pleasure of recognizing his young friend, Mr. Cyprian Eveleth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII. DOWN THE RIVER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Look at the flower of a morning-glory the evening before the dawn which is
+      to see it unfold. The delicate petals are twisted into a spiral, which at
+      the appointed hour, when the sunlight touches the hidden springs of its
+      life, will uncoil itself and let the day into the chamber of its virgin
+      heart. But the spiral must unwind by its own law, and the hand that shall
+      try to hasten the process will only spoil the blossom which would have
+      expanded in symmetrical beauty under the rosy fingers of morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may take a hint from Nature's handling of the flower in dealing with
+      young souls, and especially with the souls of young girls, which, from
+      their organization and conditions, require more careful treatment than
+      those of their tougher-fibred brothers. Many parents reproach themselves
+      for not having enforced their own convictions on their children in the
+      face of every inborn antagonism they encountered. Let them not be too
+      severe in their self-condemnation. A want of judgment in this matter has
+      sent many a young person to Bedlam, whose nature would have opened kindly
+      enough if it had only been trusted to the sweet influences of morning
+      sunshine. In such cases it may be that the state we call insanity is not
+      always an unalloyed evil. It may take the place of something worse, the
+      wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the perpetual
+      interferences of another mind governed by laws alien and hostile to its
+      own. Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left to Nature in this
+      extremity. But before she comes to that, she has many expedients. The mind
+      does not know what diet it can feed on until it has been brought to the
+      starvation point. Its experience is like that of those who have been long
+      drifting about on rafts or in long-boats. There is nothing out of which it
+      will not contrive to get some sustenance. A person of note, long held
+      captive for a political offence, is said to have owed the preservation of
+      his reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to get exercise and
+      excitement by throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor of his
+      dungeon, and then hunting for it in a series of systematic explorations
+      until he had found it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would have
+      been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if Providence, which
+      in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected agencies, had not made a
+      special provision for her mental welfare. She was in that arid household
+      as the prophet in the land where there was no dew nor rain for these long
+      years. But as he had the brook Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the
+      morning and the bread and flesh in the evening which the ravens brought
+      him, so she had the river and her secret store of books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The river was light and life and music and companionship to her. She
+      learned to row herself about upon it, to swim boldly in it, for it had
+      sheltered nooks but a little way above The Poplars. But there was more
+      than that in it,&mdash;it was infinitely sympathetic. A river is strangely
+      like a human soul. It has its dark and bright days, its troubles from
+      within, and its disturbances from without. It often runs over ragged rocks
+      with a smooth surface, and is vexed with ripples as it slides over sands
+      that are level as a floor. It betrays its various moods by aspects which
+      are the commonplaces of poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles and
+      frowns. Its face is full of winking eyes, when the scattering rain-drops
+      first fall upon it, and it scowls back at the storm-cloud, as with knitted
+      brows, when the winds are let loose. It talks, too, in its own simple
+      dialect, murmuring, as it were, with busy lips all the way to the ocean,
+      as children seeking the mother's breast and impatient of delay. Prisoners
+      who know what a flower or an insect has been to them in their solitary
+      cell, invalids who have employed their vacant minds in studying the
+      patterns of paper-hangings on the walls of their sick-chambers, can tell
+      what the river was to the lonely, imaginative creature who used to sit
+      looking into its depths, hour after hour, from the airy height of the
+      Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of late a thought had mingled with her fancies which had given to the
+      river the aspect of something more than a friend and a companion. It
+      appeared all at once as a Deliverer. Did not its waters lead, after long
+      wanderings, to the great highway of the world, and open to her the gates
+      of those cities from which she could take her departure unchallenged
+      towards the lands of the morning or of the sunset? Often, after a freshet,
+      she had seen a child's miniature boat floating down on its side past her
+      window, and traced it in imagination back to some crystal brook flowing by
+      the door of a cottage far up a blue mountain in the distance. So she now
+      began to follow down the stream the airy shallop that held her bright
+      fancies. These dreams of hers were colored by the rainbows of an enchanted
+      fountain,&mdash;the books of adventure, the romances, the stories which
+      fortune had placed in her hands,&mdash;the same over which the heart of
+      the Pride of the County had throbbed in the last century, and on the pages
+      of some of which the traces of her tears might still be seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The literature which was furnished for Myrtle's improvement was chiefly of
+      a religious character, and, however interesting and valuable to those to
+      whom it was adapted, had not been chosen with any wise regard to its
+      fitness for her special conditions. Of what use was it to offer books like
+      the &ldquo;Saint's Rest&rdquo; to a child whose idea of happiness was in perpetual
+      activity? She read &ldquo;Pilgrim's Progress,&rdquo; it is true, with great delight.
+      She liked the idea of travelling with a pack on one's back, the odd shows
+      at the House of the interpreter, the fighting, the adventures, the
+      pleasing young ladies at the palace the name of which was Beautiful, and
+      their very interesting museum of curiosities. As for the allegorical
+      meaning, it went through her consciousness like a peck of wheat through a
+      bushel measure with the bottom out, without touching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the very first book she got hold of out of the hidden treasury threw
+      the &ldquo;Pilgrim's Progress&rdquo; quite into the shade. It was the story of a youth
+      who ran away and lived on an island,&mdash;one Crusoe,&mdash;a homely
+      narrative, but evidently true, though full of remarkable adventures. There
+      too was the history, coming much nearer home, of Deborah Sampson, the
+      young woman who served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, with a
+      portrait of her in man's attire, looking intrepid rather than lovely. A
+      virtuous young female she was, and married well, as she deserved to, and
+      raised a family with as good a name as wife and mother as the best of
+      them. But perhaps not one of these books and stories took such hold of her
+      imagination as the tale of Rasselas, which most young persons find less
+      entertaining than the &ldquo;Vicar of Wakefield,&rdquo; with which it is nowadays so
+      commonly bound up. It was the prince's discontent in the Happy Valley, the
+      iron gate opening to the sound of music, and closing forever on those it
+      admitted, the rocky boundaries of the imprisoning valley, the visions of
+      the world beyond, the projects of escape, and the long toil which ended in
+      their accomplishment, which haunted her sleeping and waking. She too was a
+      prisoner, but it was not in the Happy Valley. Of the romances and the
+      love-letters we must take it for granted that she selected wisely, and
+      read discreetly; at least we know nothing to the contrary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were mysterious reminiscences and hints of her past coming over her
+      constantly. It was in the course of the long, weary spring before her
+      disappearance, that a dangerous chord was struck which added to her
+      growing restlessness. In an old closet were some seashells and coral-fans,
+      and dried star-fishes and sea, horses, and a natural mummy of a
+      rough-skinned dogfish. She had not thought of them for years, but now she
+      felt impelled to look after them. The dim sea odors which still clung to
+      them penetrated to the very inmost haunts of memory, and called up that
+      longing for the ocean breeze which those who have once breathed and salted
+      their blood with it never get over, and which makes the sweetest inland
+      airs seem to them at last tame and tasteless. She held a tigershell to her
+      ear, and listened to that low, sleepy murmur, whether in the sense or in
+      the soul we hardly know, like that which had so often been her lullaby,&mdash;a
+      memory of the sea, as Landor and Wordsworth have sung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are getting to look like your father,&rdquo; Aunt Silence said one day; &ldquo;I
+      never saw it before. I always thought you took after old Major Gideon
+      Withers. Well, I hope you won't come to an early grave like poor Charles,&mdash;or
+      at any rate, that you may be prepared.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It did not seem very likely that the girl was going out of the world at
+      present, but she looked Miss Silence in the face very seriously, and said,
+      &ldquo;Why not an early grave, Aunt, if this world is such a bad place as you
+      say it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid you are not fit for a better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wondered if Silence Withers and Cynthia Badlam were just ripe for
+      heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some months Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as was said, had been an
+      habitual visitor at The Poplars, had lived there as a permanent resident.
+      Between her and Silence Withers, Myrtle Hazard found no rest for her soul.
+      Each of them was for untwisting the morning-glory without waiting for the
+      sunshine to do it. Each had her own wrenches and pincers to use for that
+      purpose. All this promised little for the nurture and admonition of the
+      young girl, who, if her will could not be broken by imprisonment and
+      starvation at three years old, was not likely to be over-tractable to any
+      but gentle and reasonable treatment at fifteen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Aunt Silence's engine was responsibility,&mdash;her own responsibility,
+      and the dreadful consequences which would follow to her, Silence, if
+      Myrtle should in any way go wrong. Ever since her failure in that moral
+      coup d'etat by which the sinful dynasty of the natural self-determining
+      power was to be dethroned, her attempts in the way of education had been a
+      series of feeble efforts followed by plaintive wails over their utter want
+      of success. The face she turned upon the young girl in her solemn
+      expostulations looked as if it were inscribed with the epitaphs of hope
+      and virtue. Her utterances were pitched in such a forlorn tone, that the
+      little bird in his cage, who always began twittering at the sound of
+      Myrtle's voice, would stop in his song, and cock his head with a look of
+      inquiry full of pathos, as if he wanted to know what was the matter, and
+      whether he could do anything to help.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The specialty of Cynthia Badlam was to point out all the dangerous and
+      unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and this
+      young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up examples of
+      those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil end, to present
+      the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the lively girl's
+      apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion that a bright
+      example of excellence stood before her in the irreproachable relative who
+      addressed her. Especially with regard to the allurements which the world
+      offers to the young and inexperienced female, Miss Cynthia Badlam was
+      severe and eloquent. Sometimes poor Myrtle would stare, not seeing the
+      meaning of her wise caution, sometimes look at Miss Cynthia with a feeling
+      that there was something about her that was false and forced, that she had
+      nothing in common with young people, that she had no pity for them, only
+      hatred of their sins, whatever these might be,&mdash;a hatred which seemed
+      to extend to those sources of frequent temptation, youth and beauty, as if
+      they were in themselves objectionable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both the lone women at The Poplars were gifted with a thin vein of music.
+      They gave it expression in psalmody, of course, in which Myrtle, who was a
+      natural singer, was expected to bear her part. This would have been
+      pleasantry if the airs most frequently selected had been cheerful or
+      soothing, and if the favorite hymns had been of a sort to inspire a love
+      for what was lovely in this life, and to give some faint foretaste of the
+      harmonies of a better world to come. But there is a fondness for minor
+      keys and wailing cadences common to the monotonous chants of cannibals and
+      savages generally, to such war-songs as the wild, implacable
+      &ldquo;Marseillaise,&rdquo; and to the favorite tunes of low&mdash;spirited Christian
+      pessimists. That mournful &ldquo;China,&rdquo; which one of our most agreeable
+      story-tellers has justly singled out as the cry of despair itself, was
+      often sung at The Poplars, sending such a sense of utter misery through
+      the house, that poor Kitty Fagan would cross herself, and wring her hands,
+      and think of funerals, and wonder who was going to die,&mdash;for she
+      fancied she heard the Banshee's warning in those most dismal ululations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the first Saturday of June, a fortnight before her disappearance,
+      Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and came
+      home with her hands full of leaves and blossoms. Silence Withers looked at
+      them as if they were a kind of melancholy manifestation of frivolity on
+      the part of the wicked old earth. Not that she did not inhale their faint
+      fragrance with a certain pleasure, and feel their beauty as none whose
+      souls are not wholly shriveled and hardened can help doing, but the world
+      was, in her estimate, a vale of tears, and it was only by a momentary
+      forgetfulness that she could be moved to smile at anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Cynthia, a sharper-edged woman, had formed the habit of crushing
+      everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost
+      odious, as flower-de-luces do when handled roughly. &ldquo;There's a worm in
+      that leaf, Myrtle. He has rolled it all round him, and hidden himself from
+      sight; but there is a horrid worm in it, for all it is so young and fresh.
+      There is a worm in every young soul, Myrtle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But there is not a worm in every leaf, Miss Cynthia. Look,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;all these are open, and you can see all over and under them, and there is
+      nothing there. Are there never any worms in the leaves after they get old
+      and yellow, Miss Cynthia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a pretty fair hit for a simple creature of fifteen, but perhaps
+      she was not so absolutely simple as one might have thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on the evening of this same day that they were sitting together.
+      The sweet season was opening, and it seemed as if the whispering of the
+      leaves, the voices of the birds, the softness of the air, the young life
+      stirring in everything, called on all creatures to join the universal
+      chorus of praise that was going up around them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What shall we sing this evening?&rdquo; said Miss Silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me one of the books, if you please, Cousin Silence,&rdquo; said Miss
+      Cynthia. &ldquo;It is Saturday evening. Holy time has begun. Let us prepare our
+      minds for the solemnities of the Sabbath.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took the book, one well known to the schools and churches of this
+      nineteenth century.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Book Second. Hymn 44. Long metre. I guess 'Putney' will be as good a tune
+      as any to sing it to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The trio began,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         &ldquo;With holy fear, and humble song,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and got through the first verse together pretty well. Then came the second
+      verse:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         &ldquo;Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+          The land of horror and despair,
+          Justice has built a dismal hell,
+          And laid her stores of vengeance there.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle's voice trembled a little in singing this verse, and she hardly
+      kept up her part with proper spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sing out, Myrtle,&rdquo; said Miss Cynthia, and she struck up the third verse:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+         &ldquo;Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+          Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+          And darts t' inflict immortal pains,
+          Dyed in the blood of damned souls.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      This last verse was a duet, and not a trio. Myrtle closed her lips while
+      it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a look of
+      anger and disgust. The hunted soul was at bay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I won't sing such words,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I won't stay here to hear them
+      sung. The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and I am not
+      going to sing them. You can't scare me into being good with your cruel
+      hymn-book!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not swear: she was not a boy. She would not cry: she felt proud,
+      obdurate, scornful, outraged. All these images, borrowed from the holy
+      Inquisition, were meant to frighten her&mdash;and had simply irritated
+      her. The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but not penetrating,
+      only enrages. It was a moment of fearful danger to her character, to her
+      life itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to her
+      hanging chamber. She threw open the window and looked down into the
+      stream. For one moment her head swam with the sudden, overwhelming, almost
+      maddening thought that came over her,&mdash;the impulse to fling herself
+      headlong into those running waters and dare the worst these dreadful women
+      had threatened her with. Something she often thought afterwards it was an
+      invisible hand held her back during that brief moment, and the paroxysm&mdash;just
+      such a paroxysm as throws many a young girl into the Thames or the Seine&mdash;passed
+      away. She remained looking, in a misty dream, into the water far below.
+      Its murmur recalled the whisper of the ocean waves. And through the depths
+      it seemed as if she saw into that strange, half&mdash;remembered world of
+      palm-trees and white robes and dusky faces, and amidst them, looking upon
+      her with ineffable love and tenderness, until all else faded from her
+      sight, the face of a fair woman,&mdash;was it hers, so long, long dead, or
+      that dear young mother's who was to her less a recollection than a dream?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could it have been this vision that soothed her, so that she unclasped her
+      hands and lifted her bowed head as if she had heard a voice whispering to
+      her from that unknown world where she felt there was a spirit watching
+      over her? At any rate, her face was never more serene than when she went
+      to meeting with the two maiden ladies on the following day, Sunday, and
+      heard the Rev. Mr. Stoker preach a sermon from Luke vii. 48, which made
+      both the women shed tears, but especially so excited Miss Cynthia that she
+      was in a kind of half-hysteric condition all the rest of the day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that Myrtle was quieter and more docile than ever before. Could it
+      be, Miss Silence thought, that the Rev. Mr. Stoker's sermon had touched
+      her hard heart? However that was, she did not once wear the stormy look
+      with which she had often met the complaining remonstrances Miss Silence
+      constantly directed against all the spontaneous movements of the youthful
+      and naturally vivacious subject of her discipline.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      June is an uncertain month, as everybody knows, and there were frosts in
+      many parts of New England in the June of 1859. But there were also
+      beautiful days and nights, and the sun was warm enough to be fast ripening
+      the strawberries,&mdash;also certain plans which had been in flower some
+      little time. Some preparations had been going on in a quiet way, so that
+      at the right moment a decisive movement could be made. Myrtle knew how to
+      use her needle, and always had a dexterous way of shaping any article of
+      dress or ornament,&mdash;a natural gift not very rare, but sometimes very
+      needful, as it was now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morning of the 15th of June she was wandering by the shores of the
+      river, some distance above The Poplars, when a boat came drifting along by
+      her, evidently broken loose from its fastenings farther up the stream. It
+      was common for such waifs to show themselves after heavy rains had swollen
+      the river. They might have run the gauntlet of nobody could tell how many
+      farms, and perhaps passed by half a dozen towns and villages in the night,
+      so that, if of common, cheap make, they were retained without scruple, by
+      any who might find them, until the owner called for them, if he cared to
+      take the trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle took a knife from her pocket, cut down a long, slender sapling, and
+      coaxed the boat to the side of the bank. A pair of old oars lay in the
+      bottom of the boat; she took one of these and paddled it into a little
+      cove, where it could lie hid among the thick alders. Then she went home
+      and busied herself about various little matters more interesting to her
+      than to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was never more amiable and gracious than on this day. But she looked
+      often at the clock, as they remembered afterwards, and studied over a copy
+      of the Farmer's Almanac which was lying in the kitchen, with a somewhat
+      singular interest. The days were nearly at their longest, the weather was
+      mild, the night promised to be clear and bright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The household was, to all appearance, asleep at the usual early hour. When
+      all seemed quiet, Myrtle lighted her lamp, stood before her mirror, and
+      untied the string that bound her long and beautiful dark hair, which fell
+      in its abundance over her shoulders and below her girdle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted its heavy masses with one hand, and severed it with a strong
+      pair of scissors, with remorseless exaction of every wandering curl, until
+      she stood so changed by the loss of that outward glory of her womanhood,
+      that she felt as if she had lost herself and found a brother she had never
+      seen before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-by, Myrtle!&rdquo; she said, and, opening her window very gently, she
+      flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them for a
+      few moments as they floated down the stream. Then she dressed herself in
+      the character of her imaginary brother, took up the carpet-bag in which
+      she had placed what she chose to carry with her, stole softly down-stairs,
+      and let herself out of a window on the lower floor, shutting it very
+      carefully so as to be sure that nobody should be disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She glided along, looking all about her, fearing she might be seen by some
+      curious wanderer, and reached the cove where the boat she had concealed
+      was lying. She got into it, and, taking the rude oars, pulled herself into
+      the middle of the swollen stream. Her heart beat so that it seemed to her
+      as if she could hear it between the strokes of the oar. The lights were
+      not all out in the village, and she trembled lest she should see the
+      figure of some watcher looking from the windows in sight of which she
+      would have to pass, and that a glimpse of this boat stealing along at so
+      late an hour might give the clue to the secret of her disappearance, with
+      which the whole region was to be busied in the course of the next day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she came abreast of The Poplars. The house lay so still, so
+      peaceful,&mdash;it would wake to such dismay! The boat slid along beneath
+      her own overhanging chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No song to-morrow from the Fire-hang-bird's Nest!&rdquo; she said. So she
+      floated by the slumbering village, the flow of the river carrying her
+      steadily on, and the careful strokes of the oars adding swiftness to her
+      flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last she came to the &ldquo;Broad Meadows,&rdquo; and knew that she was alone, and
+      felt confident that she had got away unseen. There was nothing, absolutely
+      nothing, to point out which way she had gone. Her boat came from nobody
+      knew where, her disguise had been got together at different times in such
+      a manner as to lead to no suspicion, and not a human being ever had the
+      slightest hint that she had planned and meant to carry out the enterprise
+      which she had now so fortunately begun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not till the last straggling house had been long past, not till the
+      meadows were stretched out behind her as well as before her, spreading far
+      off into the distance on each side, did she give way to the sense of wild
+      exultation which was coming fast over her. But then, at last, she drew a
+      long, long breath, and, standing up in the boat, looked all around her.
+      The stars were shining over her head and deep down beneath her. The cool
+      wind came fresh upon her cheek over the long grassy reaches. No living
+      thing moved in all the wide level circle which lay about her. She had
+      passed the Red Sea, and was alone in the Desert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She threw down her oars, lifted her hands like a priestess, and her
+      strong, sweet voice burst into song,&mdash;the song of the Jewish maiden
+      when she went out before the chorus of, women and sang that grand solo,
+      which we all remember in its ancient words, and in their modern
+      paraphrase,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea!
+     Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The poor child's repertory was limited to songs of the religious sort
+      mainly, but there was a choice among these. Her aunt's favorites, beside
+      &ldquo;China,&rdquo; already mentioned, were &ldquo;Bangor,&rdquo; which the worthy old New
+      England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-east city
+      called after it, and &ldquo;Windsor,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Funeral Hymn.&rdquo; But Myrtle was in no
+      mood for these. She let off her ecstasy in &ldquo;Balerma,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Arlington,&rdquo; and
+      &ldquo;Silver Street,&rdquo; and at last in that most riotous of devotional hymns,
+      which sounds as if it had been composed by a saint who had a cellar under
+      his chapel,&mdash;&ldquo;Jordan.&rdquo; So she let her wild spirits run loose; and
+      then a tenderer feeling stole over her, and she sang herself into a more
+      tranquil mood with the gentle music of &ldquo;Dundee.&rdquo; And again she pulled
+      quietly and steadily at her oars, until she reached the wooded region
+      through which the river winds after leaving the &ldquo;Broad Meadows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tumult in her blood was calmed, yet every sense and faculty was awake
+      to the manifold delicious, mysterious impressions of that wonderful June
+      night, The stars were shining between the tall trees, as if all the jewels
+      of heaven had been set in one belt of midnight sky. The voices of the
+      wind, as they sighed through the pines, seemed like the breath of a
+      sleeping child, and then, as they lisped from the soft, tender leaves of
+      beeches and maples, like the half-articulate whisper of the mother hushing
+      all the intrusive sounds that might awaken it. Then came the pulsating
+      monotone of the frogs from a far-off pool, the harsh cry of an owl from an
+      old tree that overhung it, the splash of a mink or musquash, and nearer
+      by, the light step of a woodchuck, as he cantered off in his quiet way to
+      his hole in the nearest bank. The laurels were just coming into bloom,&mdash;the
+      yellow lilies, earlier than their fairer sisters, pushing their golden
+      cups through the water, not content, like those, to float on the surface
+      of the stream that fed them, emblems of showy wealth, and, like that,
+      drawing all manner of insects to feed upon them. The miniature forests of
+      ferns came down to the edge of the stream, their tall, bending plumes
+      swaying in the night breeze. Sweet odors from oozing pines, from dewy
+      flowers, from spicy leaves, stole out of the tangled thickets, and made
+      the whole scene more dream-like with their faint, mingled suggestions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By and by the banks of the river grew lower and marshy, and in place of
+      the larger forest-trees which had covered them stood slender tamaracks,
+      sickly, mossy, looking as if they had been moon-struck and were out of
+      their wits, their tufts of leaves staring off every way from their
+      spindling branches. The winds came cool and damp out of the hiding-places
+      among their dark recesses. The country people about here called this
+      region the &ldquo;Witches' Hollow,&rdquo; and had many stories about the strange
+      things that happened there. The Indians used to hold their &ldquo;powwows,&rdquo; or
+      magical incantations, upon a broad mound which rose out of the common
+      level, and where some old hemlocks and beeches formed a dark grove, which
+      served them as a temple for their demon-worship. There were many legends
+      of more recent date connected with this spot, some of them hard to account
+      for, and no superstitious or highly imaginative person would have cared to
+      pass through it alone in the dead of the night, as this young girl was
+      doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew nothing of all these fables and fancies. Her own singular
+      experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by
+      anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious by
+      those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to them. We
+      are at liberty to report many things without attempting to explain them,
+      or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact that so they were told
+      us. The reader will find Myrtle's &ldquo;Vision,&rdquo; as written out at a later
+      period from her recollections, at the end of this chapter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night was passing, and she meant to be as far away as possible from
+      the village she had left, before morning. But the boat, like all craft on
+      country rivers, was leaky, and she had to work until tired, bailing it
+      out, before she was ready for another long effort. The old tin measure,
+      which was all she had to bail with, leaked as badly as the boat, and her
+      task was a tedious one. At last she got it in good trim, and sat down to
+      her oars with the determination to pull steadily as long as her strength
+      would hold out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hour after hour she kept at her work, sweeping round the long bends where
+      the river was hollowing out one bank and building new shore on the
+      opposite one, so as gradually to shift its channel; by clipper-shaped
+      islands, sharp at the bows looking up stream, sharp too at the stern,
+      looking down,&mdash;their shape solving the navigator's problem of least
+      resistance, as a certain young artist had pointed out; by slumbering
+      villages; by outlying farm-houses; between cornfields where the young
+      plants were springing up in little thready fountains; in the midst of
+      stumps where the forest had just been felled; through patches, where the
+      fire of the last great autumnal drought had turned all the green beauty of
+      the woods into brown desolation; and again amidst broad expanses of open
+      meadow stretching as far as the eye could reach in the uncertain light. A
+      faint yellow tinge was beginning to stain the eastern horizon. Her boat
+      was floating quietly along, for she had at last taken in her oars, and she
+      was now almost tired out with toil and excitement. She rested her head
+      upon her hands, and felt her eyelids closing in spite of herself. And now
+      there stole upon her ear a low, gentle, distant murmur, so soft that it
+      seemed almost to mingle with the sound of her own breathing, but so
+      steady, so uniform, that it soothed her to sleep, as if it were the old
+      cradle-song the ocean used to sing to her, or the lullaby of her fair
+      young mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she glided along, slowly, slowly, down the course of the winding river,
+      and the flushing dawn kindled around her as she slumbered, and the low,
+      gentle murmur grew louder and louder, but still she slept, dreaming of the
+      murmuring ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_APPE" id="link2H_APPE">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII. MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of June
+      15, 1859. Written out at the request of a friend from my recollections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told since,
+      Witches' Hollow. I had never been there before, and did not know that it
+      was called so, or anything about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of hill
+      or mound that rose out of the low meadows. I saw a burning cross lying on
+      the slope of that mound. It burned with a pale greenish light, and did not
+      waste, though I watched it for a long time, as the boat I was in moved
+      slowly with the current and I had stopped rowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking at
+      this cross. I think my eyes were open when I saw these other appearances,
+      but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures
+      moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were
+      outside of myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement, as if
+      without any effort. They made many gestures, and seemed to speak, but I
+      cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its meaning in some
+      other way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I knew the faces of some of these figures. They were the same I have seen
+      in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house where I was
+      brought up, called The Poplars. I saw my father and my mother as they look
+      in the two small pictures; also my grandmother, and her father and mother
+      and grandfather, and one other person, who lived a great while ago. All of
+      these have been long dead, and the longer they had been dead the less like
+      substance they looked and the more like shadows, so that the oldest was
+      like one's breath of a frosty morning, but shaped like the living figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be moving
+      as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath! I thought they wanted to
+      breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which I seemed to see as
+      it were empty of myself and of these other selves, like a sponge that has
+      water pressed out of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
+      others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost in my
+      own life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than any of
+      the rest. Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have become a part of
+      me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over the life they had led,
+      on the sea and in strange countries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a very
+      strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard sometimes,
+      though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I used to read in
+      the graveyard. It seemed to me that there was something about his life
+      that I did not want to make a part of mine, but that there was some right
+      he had in me through my being of his blood, and so his health and his
+      strength went all through me, and I was always to have what was left of
+      his life in that shadow-like shape, forming a portion of mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that
+      famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to be
+      called the Pride of the County.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait marked
+      on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors, and was
+      before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the witchcraft trials.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-dress of
+      feathers. She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw something of my own
+      features in her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our blood
+      who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me, and was in
+      some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence with me since,
+      as if she lived again in me; but not always,&mdash;only at times,&mdash;and
+      then I feel borne up as if I could do anything in the world. I had a
+      feeling as if she were my guardian and protector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not mentioned, do really
+      live over some part of their past lives in my life. I do not understand it
+      all, and perhaps it can be accounted for in some way I have not thought
+      of. I write it down as nearly as I can give it from memory, by request,
+      and if it is printed at this time had rather have all the real names
+      withheld.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MYRTLE HAZARD.&rdquo; NOTE BY THE FRIEND.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This statement must be accounted for in some way, or pass into the
+      category of the supernatural. Probably it was one of those intuitions,
+      with objective projection, which sometimes come to imaginative young
+      persons, especially girls, in certain exalted nervous conditions. The
+      study of the portraits, with the knowledge of some parts of the history of
+      the persons they represented, and the consciousness of instincts inherited
+      in all probability from these same ancestors, formed the basis of Myrtle's
+      'Vision.' The lives of our progenitors are, as we know, reproduced in
+      different proportions in ourselves. Whether they as individuals have any
+      consciousness of it, is another matter. It is possible that they do get a
+      second as it were fractional life in us. It might seem that many of those
+      whose blood flows in our veins struggle for the mastery, and by and by one
+      or more get the predominance, so that we grow to be like father, or
+      mother, or remoter ancestor, or two or more are blended in us, not to the
+      exclusion, however, it must be understood, of a special personality of our
+      own, about which these others are grouped. Independently of any possible
+      scientific value, this 'Vision' serves to illustrate the above-mentioned
+      fact of common experience, which is not sufficiently weighed by most
+      moralists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How much it may be granted to certain young persons to see, not in virtue
+      of their intellectual gifts, but through those direct channels which
+      worldly wisdom may possibly close to the luminous influx, each reader must
+      determine for himself by his own standards of faith and evidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One statement of the narrative admits of a simple natural explanation,
+      which does not allow the lovers of the marvellous to class it with the
+      quasi-miraculous appearance seen by Colonel Gardiner, and given in full by
+      Dr. Doddridge in his Life of that remarkable Christian soldier. Decaying
+      wood is often phosphorescent, as many readers must have seen for
+      themselves. The country people are familiar with the sight of it in wild
+      timber-land, and have given it the name of 'Fox-fire.' Two trunks of trees
+      in this state, lying across each other, will account for the fact
+      observed, and vindicate the truth of the young girl's story without
+      requiring us to suppose any exceptional occurrence outside of natural
+      laws.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX. MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND BEGINS HIS ANSWER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was already morning when a young man living in the town of Alderbank,
+      after lying awake for an hour thinking the unutterable thoughts that
+      nineteen years of life bring to the sleeping and waking dreams of young
+      people, rose from his bed, and, half dressing himself, sat down at his
+      desk, from which he took a letter, which he opened and read. It was
+      written in a delicate, though hardly formed female hand, and crossed like
+      a checker-board, as is usual with these redundant manuscripts. The letter
+      was as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      OXBOW VILLAGE, June 13, 1859.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY DEAREST CLEMENT,&mdash;You was so good to write me such a sweet little
+      bit of a letter,&mdash;only, dear, you never seem to be in quite so good
+      spirits as you used to be. I wish your Susie was with you to cheer you up;
+      but no, she must be patient, and you must be patient too, for you are so
+      ambitious! I have heard you say so many times that nobody could be a great
+      artist without passing years and years at work, and growing pale and lean
+      with thinking so hard. You won't grow pale and lean, I hope; for I do so
+      love to see that pretty color in your cheeks you have always had ever
+      since I have known you; and besides, I do not believe you will have to
+      work so very hard to do something great,&mdash;you have so much genius,
+      and people of genius do such beautiful things with so little trouble. You
+      remember those beautiful lines out of our newspaper I sent you? Well, Mr.
+      Hopkins told me he wrote those lines in one evening without stopping! I
+      wish you could see Mr. Hopkins,&mdash;he is a very talented person. I cut
+      out this little piece about him from the paper on purpose to show you,&mdash;for
+      genius loves genius,&mdash;and you would like to hear him read his own
+      poetry,&mdash;he reads it beautifully. Please send this piece from the
+      paper back, as I want to put it in my scrapbook, under his autograph:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our young townsman, Mr. Gifted Hopkins, has proved himself worthy of the
+      name he bears. His poetical effusions are equally creditable to his head
+      and his heart, displaying the highest order of genius and powers of
+      imagination and fancy hardly second to any writer of the age. He is
+      destined to make a great sensation in the world of letters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hopkins is the same good soul she always was. She is very proud of
+      her son, as is natural, and keeps a copy of everything he writes. I
+      believe she cries over them every time she reads them. You don't know how
+      I take to little Sossy and Minthy, those two twins I have written to you
+      about before. Poor little creatures,&mdash;what a cruel thing it was in
+      their father and mother not to take care of them! What do you think? Old
+      bachelor Gridley lets them come up into his room, and builds forts and
+      castles for them with his big books! &ldquo;The world's coming to an end,&rdquo; Mrs.
+      Hopkins said the first time he did so. He looks so savage with that scowl
+      of his, and talks so gruff when he is scolding at things in general, that
+      nobody would have believed he would have let such little things come
+      anywhere near him. But he seems to be growing kind to all of us and
+      everybody. I saw him talking to the Fire-hang-bird the other day. You know
+      who the Fire-hang-bird is, don't you? Myrtle Hazard her name is. I wish
+      you could see her. I don't know as I do, though. You would want to make a
+      statue of her, or a painting, I know. She is so handsome that all the
+      young men stand round to see her come out of meeting. Some say that Lawyer
+      Bradshaw is after her; but my! he is ten years older than she is. She is
+      nothing but a girl, though she looks as if she was eighteen. She lives up
+      at a place called The Poplars, with an old woman that is her aunt or
+      something, and nobody seems to be much acquainted with her except Olive
+      Eveleth, who is the minister's daughter at Saint Bartholomew's Church. She
+      never has beauxs round her, as some young girls do&mdash;they say that she
+      is not happy with her aunt and another woman that stays with her, and that
+      is the reason she keeps so much to herself. The minister came to see me
+      the other day,&mdash;Mr. Stoker his name is. I was all alone, and it
+      frightened me, for he looks, oh, so solemn on Sundays! But he called me
+      &ldquo;My dear,&rdquo; and did n't say anything horrid, you know, about my being such
+      a dreadful, dreadful sinner, as I have heard of his saying to some people,&mdash;but
+      he looked very kindly at me, and took my hand, and laid his hand on my
+      shoulder like a brother, and hoped I would come and see him in his study.
+      I suppose I must go, but I don't want to. I don't seem to like him
+      exactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hope you love me as well as ever you did. I can't help feeling sometimes
+      as if you was growing away from me,&mdash;you know what I mean,&mdash;getting
+      to be too great a person for such a small person as I am.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know I can't always understand you when you talk about art, and that you
+      know a great deal too much for such a simple girl as I am. Oh, if I
+      thought I could never make you happy!... There, now! I am almost ashamed
+      to send this paper so spotted. Gifted Hopkins wrote some beautiful verses
+      one day on &ldquo;A Maiden Weeping.&rdquo; He compared the tears falling from her eyes
+      to the drops of dew which one often sees upon the flowers in the morning.
+      Is n't it a pretty thought?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wish I loved art as well as I do poetry; but I am afraid I have not so
+      much taste as some girls have. You remember how I liked that picture in
+      the illustrated magazine, and you said it was horrid. I have been afraid
+      since to like almost anything, for fear you should tell me some time or
+      other it was horrid. Don't you think I shall ever learn to know what is
+      nice from what is n't?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Oh, dear Clement, I wish you would do one thing to please me. Don't say
+      no, for you can do everything you try to,&mdash;I am sure you can. I want
+      you to write me some poetry,&mdash;just three or four little verses TO
+      SUZIE. Oh, I should feel so proud to have some lines written all on
+      purpose for me. Mr. Hopkins wrote some the other day, and printed them in
+      the paper, &ldquo;To M&mdash;&mdash;e.&rdquo; I believe he meant them for Myrtle,&mdash;the
+      first and last letter of her name, you see, &ldquo;M&rdquo; and &ldquo;e.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Your letter was a dear one, only so short! I wish you would tell me all
+      about what you are doing at Alderbank. Have you made that model of
+      Innocence that is to have my forehead, and hair parted like mine! Make it
+      pretty, do, that is a darling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now don't make a face at my letter. It is n't a very good one, I know; but
+      your poor little Susie does the best she can, and she loves you so much!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now do be nice and write me one little bit of a mite of a poem,&mdash;it
+      will make me just as happy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am very well, and as happy as I can be when you are away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Your affectionate SUSIE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Directed to Mr. Clement Lindsay, Alderbank.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The envelope of this letter was unbroken, as was before said, when the
+      young man took it from his desk. He did not tear it with the hot
+      impatience of some lovers, but cut it open neatly, slowly, one would say
+      sadly. He read it with an air of singular effort, and yet with a certain
+      tenderness. When he had finished it, the drops were thick on his forehead;
+      he groaned and put his hands to his face, which was burning red.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was what the impulse of boyhood, years ago, had brought him to! He
+      was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of fastidious
+      taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue eyes, his
+      commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every change of
+      thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not improbably claim
+      that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter had spoken,&mdash;the
+      strange, divine, dread gift of genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This poor, simple, innocent, trusting creature, so utterly incapable of
+      coming into any true relation with his aspiring mind, his large and strong
+      emotions,&mdash;this mere child, all simplicity and goodness, but trivial
+      and shallow as the little babbling brooklet that ran by his window to the
+      river, to lose its insignificant being in the swift torrent he heard
+      rushing over the rocks,&mdash;this pretty idol for a weak and kindly and
+      easily satisfied worshipper, was to be enthroned as the queen of his
+      affections, to be adopted as the companion of his labors! The boy, led by
+      the commonest instinct, the mere attraction of biped to its female, which
+      accident had favored, had thrown away the dearest possession of manhood,&mdash;liberty,&mdash;and
+      this bauble was to be his lifelong reward! And yet not a bauble either,
+      for a pleasing person and a gentle and sweet nature, which had once made
+      her seem to him the very paragon of loveliness, were still hers. Alas! her
+      simple words were true,&mdash;he had grown away from her. Her only fault
+      was that she had not grown with him, and surely he could not reproach her
+      with that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;I will never leave her so long as her heart
+      clings to me. I have been rash, but she shall not pay the forfeit. And if
+      I may think of myself, my life need not be wretched because she cannot
+      share all my being with me. The common human qualities are more than all
+      exceptional gifts. She has a woman's heart; and what talent of mine is to
+      be named by the love a true woman can offer in exchange for these divided
+      and cold affections? If it had pleased God to mate me with one more equal
+      in other ways, who could share my thoughts, who could kindle my
+      inspiration, who had wings to rise into the air with me as well as feet to
+      creep by my side upon the earth,&mdash;what cannot such a woman do for a
+      man!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! cast away the flower I took in the bud because it does not show as
+      I hoped it would when it opened? I will stand by my word; I will be all as
+      a man that I promised as a boy. Thank God, she is true and pure and sweet.
+      My nest will be a peaceful one; but I must take wing alone,&mdash;alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew one long sigh, and the cloud passed from his countenance. He must
+      answer that letter now, at once. There were reasons, he thought, which
+      made it important. And so, with the cheerfulness which it was kind and
+      becoming to show, so far as possible, and yet with a little excitement on
+      one particular point, which was the cause of his writing so promptly, he
+      began his answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      ALDERBANK, Thursday morning, June 16, 1859.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY DEAR SUSIE,&mdash;I have just been reading your pleasant letter; and if
+      I do not send you the poem you ask for so eloquently, I will give you a
+      little bit of advice, which will do just as well,&mdash;won't it, my dear?
+      I was interested in your account of various things going on at Oxbow
+      Village. I am very glad you find young Mr. Hopkins so agreeable a friend.
+      His poetry is better than some which I see printed in the village papers,
+      and seems generally unexceptionable in its subjects and tone. I do not
+      believe he is a dangerous companion, though the habit of writing verse
+      does not always improve the character. I think I have seen it make more
+      than one of my acquaintances idle, conceited, sentimental, and frivolous,&mdash;perhaps
+      it found them so already. Don't make too much of his talent, and
+      particularly don't let him think that because he can write verses he has
+      nothing else to do in this world. That is for his benefit, dear, and you
+      must skilfully apply it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now about yourself. My dear Susie, there was something in your letter that
+      did not please me. You speak of a visit from the Rev. Mr. Stoker, and of
+      his kind, brotherly treatment, his cordiality of behavior, and his asking
+      you to visit him in his study. I am very glad to hear you say that you
+      &ldquo;don't seem to like him.&rdquo; He is very familiar, it seems to me, for so new
+      an acquaintance. What business had he to be laying his hand on your
+      shoulder? I should like to see him try these free-and-easy ways in my
+      presence! He would not have taken that liberty, my dear! No, he was alone
+      with you, and thought it safe to be disrespectfully familiar. I want you
+      to maintain your dignity always with such persons, and I beg you not to go
+      to the study of this clergyman, unless some older friend goes with you on
+      every occasion, and sits through the visit. I must speak plainly to you,
+      my dear, as I have a right to. If the minister has anything of importance
+      to say, let it come through the lips of some mature person. It may lose
+      something of the fervor with which it would have been delivered at first
+      hand, but the great rules of Christian life are not so dependent on the
+      particular individual who speaks them, that you must go to this or that
+      young man to find out what they are. If to any man, I should prefer the
+      old gentleman whom you have mentioned in your letters, Father Pemberton.
+      You understand me, my dear girl, and the subject is not grateful. You know
+      how truly I am interested in all that relates to you,&mdash;that I regard
+      you with an affection which&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     HELP!  HELP!  HELP!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      A cry as of a young person's voice was heard faintly, coming from the
+      direction of the river. Something in the tone of it struck to his heart,
+      and he sprang as if he had been stabbed. He flung open his chamber window
+      and leaped from it to the ground. He ran straight to the bank of the river
+      by the side of which the village of Alderbank was built, a little farther
+      down the stream than the house in which he was living.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody that travels in that region knows the beautiful falls which
+      break the course of the river just above the village; narrow and swift,
+      and surrounded by rocks of such picturesque forms that they are sought and
+      admired by tourists. The stream was now swollen, and rushed in a deep and
+      rapid current over the ledges, through the rocky straits, plunging at last
+      in tumult and foam, with loud, continuous roar, into the depths below the
+      cliff from which it tumbled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A short distance above the fall there projected from the water a rock
+      which had, by parsimonious saving during a long course of years, hoarded a
+      little soil, out of which a small tuft of bushes struggled to support a
+      decent vegetable existence. The high waters had nearly submerged it, but a
+      few slender twigs were seen above their surface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A skiff was lying close to this rock, between it and the brink of the
+      fall, which was but a few rods farther down. In the skiff was a youth of
+      fourteen or fifteen years, holding by the slender twigs, the boat dragging
+      at them all the time, and threatening to tear them away and go over the
+      fall. It was not likely that the boy would come to shore alive if it did.
+      There were stories, it is true, that the Indians used to shoot the fall in
+      their canoes with safety; but everybody knew that at least three persons
+      had been lost by going over it since the town was settled; and more than
+      one dead body had been found floating far down the river, with bruises and
+      fractured bones, as if it had taken the same fatal plunge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no time to lose. Clement ran a little way up the river-bank,
+      flung off his shoes, and sprang from the bank as far as he could leap into
+      the water. The current swept him toward the fall, but he worked nearer and
+      nearer the middle of the stream. He was making for the rock, thinking he
+      could plant his feet upon it and at the worst hold the boat until he could
+      summon other help by shouting. He had barely got his feet upon the rock,
+      when the twigs by which the boy was holding gave way. He seized the boat,
+      but it dragged him from his uncertain footing, and with a desperate effort
+      he clambered over its side and found himself its second doomed passenger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was but an instant for thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sit still,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and, just as we go over, put your arms round me
+      under mine, and don't let go for your life!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught up the single oar, and with a few sharp paddle-strokes brought
+      the skiff into the blackest centre of the current, where it was deepest,
+      and would plunge them into the deepest pool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hold your breath! God save us! Now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They rose, as if with one will, and stood for an instant, the arms of the
+      younger closely embracing the other as he had directed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sliding away from beneath them of the floor on which they stood, as the
+      drop fails under the feet of a felon. A great rush of air, and a mighty,
+      awful, stunning roar,&mdash;an involuntary gasp, a choking flood of water
+      that came bellowing after them, and hammered them down into the black
+      depths so far that the young man, though used to diving and swimming long
+      distances underwater, had well-nigh yielded to the fearful need of air,
+      and sucked in his death in so doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boat came up to the surface, broken in twain, splintered, a load of
+      firewood for those who raked the river lower down. It had turned
+      crosswise, and struck the rocks. A cap rose to the surface, such a one as
+      boys wear,&mdash;the same that boy had on. And then&mdash;after how many
+      seconds by the watch cannot be known, but after a time long enough, as the
+      young man remembered it, to live his whole life over in memory&mdash;Clement
+      Lindsay felt the blessed air against his face, and, taking a great breath,
+      came to his full consciousness. The arms of the boy were still locked
+      around him as in the embrace of death. A few strokes brought him to the
+      shore, dragging his senseless burden with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He unclasped the arms that held him so closely encircled, and laid the
+      slender form of the youth he had almost died to save gently upon the
+      grass. It was as if dead. He loosed the ribbon that was round the neck, he
+      tore open the checked shirt&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of Myrtle Hazard's sex was told; but she was deaf to his cry of
+      surprise, and no blush came to her cold cheek. Not too late, perhaps, to
+      save her,&mdash;not too late to try to save her, at least!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He placed his lips to hers, and filled her breast with the air from his
+      own panting chest. Again and again he renewed these efforts, hoping,
+      doubting, despairing,&mdash;once more hoping, and at last, when he had
+      almost ceased to hope, she gasped, she breathed, she moaned, and rolled
+      her eyes wildly round her, she was born again into this mortal life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught her up in his arms, bore her to the house, laid her on a sofa,
+      and, having spent his strength in this last effort, reeled and fell, and
+      lay as one over whom have just been whispered the words,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X. MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS LETTER&mdash;WHAT CAME OF IT.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The first thing Clement Lindsay did, when he was fairly himself again, was
+      to finish his letter to Susan Posey. He took it up where it left off,
+      &ldquo;with an affection which&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; and drew a long dash, as above. It
+      was with great effort he wrote the lines which follow, for he had got an
+      ugly blow on the forehead, and his eyes were &ldquo;in mourning,&rdquo; as the
+      gentlemen of the ring say, with unbecoming levity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An adventure! Just as I was writing these last words, I heard the cry of
+      a young person, as it sounded, for help. I ran to the river and jumped in,
+      and had the pleasure of saving a life. I got some bruises which have laid
+      me up for a day or two; but I am getting over them very well now, and you
+      need not worry about me at all. I will write again soon; so pray do not
+      fret yourself, for I have had no hurt that will trouble me for any time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, poor Susan Posey burst out crying, and cried as if her heart
+      would break. Oh dear! Oh dear! what should she do! He was almost killed,
+      she knew he was, or he had broken some of his bones. Oh dear! Oh dear! She
+      would go and see him, there!&mdash;she must and would. He would die, she
+      knew he would,&mdash;and so on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human element in
+      Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme trouble, should think
+      of him as a counsellor. But the wonderful relenting kind of look on his
+      grave features as he watched the little twins tumbling about his great
+      books, and certain marks of real sympathy he had sometimes shown for her
+      in her lesser woes, encouraged her, and she went straight to his study,
+      letter in hand. She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful
+      sanctuary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come in, Susan Posey,&rdquo; was its answer, in a pleasant tone. The old master
+      knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand on the panel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a sight! 'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a Sebastopol
+      which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and the terrible
+      Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile manifestations of the
+      most singular character. He was actually discharging a large sugar-plum at
+      the postern gate, which having been left unclosed, the missile would
+      certainly have reached one of the garrison, when he paused as the door
+      opened, and the great round spectacles and four wide, staring infants'
+      eyes were levelled at Miss Susan Posey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at this
+      manifestation. The old man had emptied his shelves of half their folios to
+      build up the fort, in the midst of which he had seated the two delighted
+      and uproarious babes. There was his Cave's &ldquo;Historia Literaria,&rdquo; and Sir
+      Walter Raleigh's &ldquo;History of the World,&rdquo; and a whole array of Christian
+      Fathers, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers,
+      with Effigies, and the Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and
+      Walton's Polyglot, supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's &ldquo;Acts
+      and Monuments&rdquo; on the other,&mdash;an odd collection, as folios from lower
+      shelves are apt to be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that it
+      fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the garrison
+      had been on short rations for some time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble. &ldquo;What now, Susan
+      Posey, my dear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble! What shall I do? What shall I do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way that
+      Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So Mr. Clement Lindsay has been saving a life, has he, and got some hard
+      knocks doing it, hey, Susan Posey? Well, well, Clement Lindsay is a brave
+      fellow, and there is no need of hiding his name, my child. Let me take the
+      letter again a moment, Susan Posey. What is the date of it? June 16th.
+      Yes,&mdash;yes,&mdash;yes!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He read the paragraph over again, and the signature too, if he wanted to;
+      for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to those round
+      spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not unbecoming blush,
+      opened the fold of the letter before she handed it back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, Susan Posey. He will come all right. His writing is steady, and
+      if he had broken any bones he would have mentioned it. It's a thing his
+      wife will be proud of, if he is ever married, Susan Posey,&rdquo; (blushes,)
+      &ldquo;and his children too,&rdquo; (more blushes running up to her back hair,) &ldquo;and
+      there 's nothing to be worried about. But I'll tell you what, my dear,
+      I've got a little business that calls me down the river tomorrow, and I
+      shouldn't mind stopping an hour at Alderbank and seeing how our young
+      friend Clement Lindsay is; and then, if he was going to have a long time
+      of it, why we could manage it somehow that any friend who had any special
+      interest in him could visit him, just to while away the tiresomeness of
+      being sick. That's it, exactly. I'll stop at Alderbank, Susan Posey. Just
+      clear up these two children for me, will you, my dear? Isosceles, come
+      now,&mdash;that 's a good child. Helminthia, carry these sugar-plums down&mdash;stairs
+      for me, and take good care of them, mind!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a case of gross bribery and corruption, for the fortress was
+      immediately, evacuated on the receipt of a large paper of red and white
+      comfits, and the garrison marched down&mdash;stairs much like conquerors,
+      under the lead of the young lady, who was greatly eased in mind by the
+      kind words and the promise of Mr. Byles Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he, in the mean time, was busy with thoughts she did not suspect. &ldquo;A
+      young person,&rdquo; he said to himself,&mdash;&ldquo;why a young person? Why not say
+      a boy, if it was a boy? What if this should be our handsome truant?&mdash;'June
+      16th, Thursday morning!'&mdash;About time to get to Alderbank by the
+      river, I should think. None of the boats missing? What then? She may have
+      made a raft, or picked up some stray skiff. Who knows? And then got
+      shipwrecked, very likely. There are rapids and falls farther along the
+      river. It will do no harm to go down there and look about, at any rate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On Saturday morning, therefore, Mr. Byles Gridley set forth to procure a
+      conveyance to make a visit, as he said, down the river, and perhaps be
+      gone a day or two. He went to a stable in the village, and asked if they
+      could let him have a horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man looked at him with that air of native superiority which the
+      companionship of the generous steed confers on all his associates, down to
+      the lightest weight among the jockeys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wal, I hain't got nothin' in the shape of a h'oss, Mr. Gridley. I've got
+      a mare I s'pose I could let y' have.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, very well,&rdquo; said the old master, with a twinkle in his eye as sly as
+      the other's wink,&mdash;he had parried a few jokes in his time,&mdash;&ldquo;they
+      charge half-price for mares always, I believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a new view of the subject. It rather took the wind out of the
+      stable-keeper, and set a most ammoniacal fellow, who stood playing with a
+      currycomb, grinning at his expense. But he rallied presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wal, I b'lieve they do for some mares, when they let 'em to some folks;
+      but this here ain't one o' them mares, and you ain't one o' them folks.
+      All my cattle's out but this critter, 'n' I don't jestly want to have
+      nobody drive her that ain't pretty car'ful,&mdash;she's faast, I tell ye,&mdash;don't
+      want no whip.&mdash;How fur d' d y' want t' go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley was quite serious now, and let the man know that he wanted the
+      mare and a light covered wagon, at once, to be gone for one or two days,
+      and would waive the question of sex in the matter of payment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alderbank was about twenty miles down the river by the road. On arriving
+      there, he inquired for the house where a Mr. Lindsay lived. There was only
+      one Lindsay family in town,&mdash;he must mean Dr. William Lindsay. His
+      house was up there a little way above the village, lying a few rods back
+      from the river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He found the house without difficulty, and knocked at the door. A
+      motherly-looking woman opened it immediately, and held her hand up as if
+      to ask him to speak and move softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does Mr. Clement Lindsay live here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is staying here for the present. He is a nephew of ours. He is in his
+      bed from an injury.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing very serious, I hope?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A bruise on his head,&mdash;not very bad, but the doctor was afraid of
+      erysipelas. Seems to be doing well enough now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there a young person here, a stranger?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is such a young person here. Do you come with any authority to make
+      inquiries?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do. A young friend of mine is missing, and I thought it possible I
+      might learn something here about it. Can I see this young person?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The matron came nearer to Byles Gridley, and said: &ldquo;This person is a young
+      woman disguised as a boy. She was rescued by my nephew at the risk of his
+      life, and she has been delirious ever since she has recovered her
+      consciousness. She was almost too far gone to be resuscitated, but Clement
+      put his mouth to hers and kept her breathing until her own breath returned
+      and she gradually came to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is she violent in her delirium?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not now. No; she is quiet enough, but wandering,&mdash;wants to know
+      where she is, and whose the strange faces are,&mdash;mine and my
+      husband's,&mdash;that 's Dr. Lindsay,&mdash;and one of my daughters, who
+      has watched with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If that is so, I think I had better see her. If she is the person I
+      suspect her to be, she will know me; and a familiar face may bring back
+      her recollections and put a stop to her wanderings. If she does not know
+      me, I will not stay talking with her. I think she will, if she is the one
+      I am seeking after. There is no harm in trying.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Lindsay took a good long look at the old man. There was no mistaking
+      his grave, honest, sturdy, wrinkled, scholarly face. His voice was assured
+      and sincere in its tones. His decent black coat was just what a scholar's
+      should be,&mdash;old, not untidy, a little shiny at the elbows with much
+      leaning on his study-table, but neatly bound at the cuffs, where worthy
+      Mrs. Hopkins had detected signs of fatigue and come to the rescue. His
+      very hat looked honest as it lay on the table. It had moulded itself to a
+      broad, noble head, that held nothing but what was true and fair, with a
+      few harmless crotchets just to fill in with, and it seemed to know it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good woman gave him her confidence at once. &ldquo;Is the person you are
+      seeking a niece or other relative of yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (Why did not she ask if the girl was his daughter? What is that look of
+      paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers and old
+      nurses know so well in men and in women?)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, she is not a relative. But I am acting for those who are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait a moment and I will go and see that the room is all right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She returned presently. &ldquo;Follow me softly, if you please. She is asleep,&mdash;so
+      beautiful,&mdash;so innocent!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Byles Gridley, Master of Arts, retired professor, more than sixty years
+      old, childless, loveless, stranded in a lonely study strewed with wrecks
+      of the world's thought, his work in life finished, his one literary
+      venture gone down with all it held, with nobody to care for him but
+      accidental acquaintances, moved gently to the side of the bed and looked
+      upon the pallid, still features of Myrtle Hazard. He strove hard against a
+      strange feeling that was taking hold of him, that was making his face act
+      rebelliously, and troubling his eyes with sudden films. He made a brief
+      stand against this invasion. &ldquo;A weakness,&mdash;a weakness!&rdquo; he said to
+      himself. &ldquo;What does all this mean? Never such a thing for these twenty
+      years! Poor child! poor child!&mdash;Excuse me, madam,&rdquo; he said, after a
+      little interval, but for what offence he did not mention. A great deal
+      might be forgiven, even to a man as old as Byles Gridley, looking upon
+      such a face,&mdash;so lovely, yet so marked with the traces of recent
+      suffering, and even now showing by its changes that she was struggling in
+      some fearful dream. Her forehead contracted, she started with a slight
+      convulsive movement, and then her lips parted, and the cry escaped from
+      them,&mdash;how heart-breaking when there is none to answer it,&mdash;&ldquo;Mother!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gone back again through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood to
+      that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she uttered was
+      answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of clinging lips, the
+      embrace of caressing arms!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is better to wake her,&rdquo; Mrs. Lindsay said; &ldquo;she is having a troubled
+      dream. Wake up, my child, here is a friend waiting to see you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid her hand very gently on Myrtle's forehead. Myrtle opened her
+      eyes, but they were vacant as yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are we dead?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Where am I? This is n't heaven&mdash;there are
+      no angels&mdash;Oh, no, no, no! don't send me to the other place&mdash;fifteen
+      years,&mdash;only fifteen years old&mdash;no father, no mother&mdash;nobody
+      loved me. Was it wicked in me to live?&rdquo; Her whole theological training was
+      condensed in that last brief question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man took her hand and looked her in the face, with a wonderful
+      tenderness in his squared features. &ldquo;Wicked to live, my dear? No indeed!
+      Here! look at me, my child; don't you know your old friend Byles Gridley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was awake now. The sight of a familiar countenance brought back a
+      natural train of thought. But her recollection passed over everything that
+      had happened since Thursday morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the boat I was in?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I have just been in the water,
+      and I was dreaming that I was drowned. Oh! Mr. Gridley, is that you? Did
+      you pull me out of the water?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, my dear, but you are out of it, and safe and sound: that is the main
+      point. How do you feel now you are awake?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She yawned, and stretched her arms and looked round, but did not answer at
+      first. This was all natural, and a sign that she was coming right. She
+      looked down at her dress. It was not inappropriate to her sex, being a
+      loose gown that belonged to one of the girls in the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel pretty well,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;but a little confused. My boat will
+      be gone, if you don't run and stop it now. How did you get me into dry
+      clothes so quick?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Byles Gridley found himself suddenly possessed by a large and
+      luminous idea of the state of things, and made up his mind in a moment as
+      to what he must do. There was no time to be lost. Every day, every hour,
+      of Myrtle's absence was not only a source of anxiety and a cause of
+      useless searching but it gave room for inventive fancies to imagine evil.
+      It was better to run some risk of injury to health, than to have her
+      absence prolonged another day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has this adventure been told about in the village, Mrs. Lindsay?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, we thought it best to wait until she could tell her own story,
+      expecting her return to consciousness every hour, and thinking there might
+      be some reason for her disguise which it would be kinder to keep quiet
+      about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know nothing about her, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a word. It was a great question whether to tell the story and make
+      inquiries; but she was safe, and could hardly bear disturbance, and, my
+      dear sir, it seemed too probable that there was some sad story behind this
+      escape in disguise, and that the poor child might need shelter and
+      retirement. We meant to do as well as we could for her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right, Mrs. Lindsay. You do not know who she is, then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir, and perhaps it is as well that I should not know. Then I shall
+      not have to answer any questions about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good, madam,&mdash;just as it should be. And your family, are they
+      as discreet as yourself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not one word of the whole story has been or will be told by any one of
+      us. That was agreed upon among us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now then, madam. My name, as you heard me say, is Byles Gridley. Your
+      husband will know it, perhaps; at any rate I will wait until he comes
+      back. This child is of good family and of good name. I know her well, and
+      mean, with your kind help, to save her from the consequences which her
+      foolish adventure might have brought upon her. Before the bells ring for
+      meeting to-morrow morning this girl must be in her bed at her home, at
+      Oxbow Village, and we must keep her story to ourselves as far as may be.
+      It will all blow over, if we do. The gossips will only know that she was
+      upset in the river and cared for by some good people,&mdash;good people
+      and sensible people too, Mrs. Lindsay. And now I want to see the young man
+      that rescued my friend here,&mdash;Clement Lindsay, I have heard his name
+      before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement was not a beauty for the moment, but Master Gridley saw well
+      enough that he was a young man of the right kind. He knew them at sight,
+      fellows with lime enough in their bones and iron enough in their blood to
+      begin with,&mdash;shapely, large-nerved, firm-fibred and fine-fibred, with
+      well-spread bases to their heads for the ground-floor of the faculties,
+      and well-vaulted arches for the upper range of apprehensions and
+      combinations. &ldquo;Plenty of basements,&rdquo; he used to say, &ldquo;without attics and
+      skylights. Plenty of skylights without rooms enough and space enough
+      below.&rdquo; But here was &ldquo;a three-story brain,&rdquo; he said to himself as he
+      looked at it, and this was the youth who was to find his complement in our
+      pretty little Susan Posey! His judgment may seem to have been hasty, but
+      he took the measure of young men of twenty at sight from long and
+      sagacious observation, as Nurse Byloe knew the &ldquo;heft&rdquo; of a baby the moment
+      she fixed her old eyes on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement was well acquainted with Byles Gridley, though he had never seen
+      him, for Susan's letters had had a good deal to say about him of late. It
+      was agreed between them that the story should be kept as quiet as
+      possible, and that the young girl should not know the name of her
+      deliverer,&mdash;it might save awkward complications. It was not likely
+      that she would be disposed to talk of her adventure, which had ended so
+      disastrously, and thus the whole story would soon die out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of the violent shock she had experienced was to change the
+      whole nature of Myrtle for the time. Her mind was unsettled: she could
+      hardly recall anything except the plunge over the fall. She was perfectly
+      docile and plastic,&mdash;was ready to go anywhere Mr. Gridley wanted her
+      to go, without any sign of reluctance. And so it was agreed that he should
+      carry her back in his covered wagon that very night. All possible
+      arrangements were made to render her journey comfortable. The fast mare
+      had to trot very gently, and the old master would stop and adjust the
+      pillows from time to time, and administer the restoratives which the
+      physician had got ready, all as naturally and easily as if he had been
+      bred a nurse, vastly to his own surprise, and with not a little gain to
+      his self-appreciation. He was a serviceable kind of body on occasion,
+      after all, was he not, hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At half past four o'clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the stray
+      lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the slumbering
+      household to receive back the wanderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such amorphous
+      guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a tempest of
+      petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented herself at the
+      door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking bundle of
+      clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or break in silence.
+      When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave face of the old master,
+      she thought it was all over with the poor girl she loved, and that this
+      was the undertaker's wagon bringing back only what had once been Myrtle
+      Hazard. She screamed aloud,&mdash;so wildly that Myrtle lifted her head
+      from the pillow against which she had rested it, and started forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it was
+      the girl she loved, and not her ghost. Then it all came over her,&mdash;she
+      had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by night, and been
+      rescued by the brave old man who had brought her back. What crying and
+      kisses and prayers and blessings were poured forth, in a confusion of
+      which her bodily costume was a fitting type, those who know the vocabulary
+      and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race may imagine better than we could
+      describe it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative. There were
+      awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she was to
+      have could be settled. What they were, it is needless to suggest; but
+      while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her &ldquo;responsibility&rdquo;
+       was removed, then with a fair share of pity and kindness, and other
+      lukewarm emotions,&mdash;while Miss Badlam waited for an explanation
+      before giving way to her feelings,&mdash;Mr. Gridley put the essential
+      facts before them in a few words. She had gone down the river some miles
+      in her boat, which was upset by a rush of the current, and she had come
+      very near being drowned. She was got out, however, by a person living near
+      by, and cared for by some kind women in a house near the river, where he
+      had been fortunate enough to discover her.&mdash;Who cut her hair off?
+      Perhaps those good people,&mdash;she had been out of her head. She was
+      alive and unharmed, at any rate, wanting only a few days' rest. They might
+      be very thankful to get her back, and leave her to tell the rest of her
+      story when she had got her strength and memory, for she was not quite
+      herself yet, and might not be for some days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so there she was at last laid in her own bed, listening again to the
+      ripple of the waters beneath her, Miss Silence sitting on one side looking
+      as sympathetic as her insufficient nature allowed her to look; the
+      Irishwoman uncertain between delight at Myrtle's return and sorrow for her
+      condition; and Miss Cynthia Badlam occupying herself about house-matters,
+      not unwilling to avoid the necessity of displaying her conflicting
+      emotions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before he left the house, Mr. Gridley repeated the statement in the most
+      precise manner,&mdash;some miles down the river&mdash;upset and nearly
+      drowned&mdash;rescued almost dead&mdash;brought to and cared for by kind
+      women in the house where he, Byles Gridley, found her. These were the
+      facts, and nothing more than this was to be told at present. They had
+      better be made known at once, and the shortest and best way would be to
+      have it announced by the minister at meeting that forenoon. With their
+      permission, he would himself write the note for Mr. Stoker to read, and
+      tell the other ministers that they might announce it to their people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bells rang for meeting, but the little household at The Poplars did
+      not add to the congregation that day. In the mean time Kitty Fagan had
+      gone down with Mr. Byles Gridley's note, to carry it to the Rev. Mr.
+      Stoker. But, on her way, she stopped at the house of one Mrs. Finnegan, a
+      particular friend of hers; and the great event of the morning furnishing
+      matter for large discourse, and various social allurements adding to the
+      fascination of having a story to tell, Kitty Fagan forgot her note until
+      meeting had begun and the minister had read the text of his sermon. &ldquo;Bless
+      my soul! and sure I 've forgot ahl about the letter!&rdquo; she cried all at
+      once, and away she tramped for the meeting-house. The sexton took the
+      note, which was folded, and said he would hand it up to the pulpit after
+      the sermon,&mdash;it would not do to interrupt the preacher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, as was said, a somewhat remarkable gift in
+      prayer,&mdash;an endowment by no means confined to profoundly spiritual
+      persons,&mdash;in fact, not rarely owing much of its force to a strong
+      animal nature underlying the higher attributes. The sweet singer of Israel
+      would never have written such petitions and such hymns if his manhood had
+      been less complete; the flavor of remembered frailties could not help
+      giving a character to his most devout exercises, or they would not have
+      come quite home to our common humanity. But there is no gift more
+      dangerous to the humility and sincerity of a minister. While his spirit
+      ought to be on its knees before the throne of grace, it is too apt to be
+      on tiptoe, following with admiring look the flight of its own rhetoric.
+      The essentially intellectual character of an extemporaneous composition
+      spoken to the Creator with the consciousness that many of his creatures
+      are listening to criticise or to admire, is the great argument for set
+      forms of prayer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The congregation on this particular Sunday was made up chiefly of women
+      and old men. The young men were hunting after Myrtle Hazard. Mr. Byles
+      Gridley was in his place, wondering why the minister did not read his
+      notice before the prayer. This prayer, was never reported, as is the
+      questionable custom with regard to some of these performances, but it was
+      wrought up with a good deal of rasping force and broad pathos. When he
+      came to pray for &ldquo;our youthful sister, missing from her pious home,
+      perhaps nevermore to return to her afflicted relatives,&rdquo; and the women and
+      old men began crying, Byles Gridley was on the very point of getting up
+      and cutting short the whole matter by stating the simple fact that she had
+      got back, all right, and suggesting that he had better pray for some of
+      the older and tougher sinners before him. But on the whole it would be
+      more decorous to wait, and perhaps he was willing to hear what the object
+      of his favorite antipathy had to say about it. So he waited through the
+      prayer. He waited through the hymn, &ldquo;Life is the time&rdquo;&mdash;He waited to
+      hear the sermon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister gave out his text from the Book of Esther, second chapter,
+      seventh verse: &ldquo;For she had neither father nor mother, and the maid was
+      fair and beautiful.&rdquo; It was to be expected that the reverend gentleman,
+      who loved to produce a sensation, would avail himself of the excitable
+      state of his audience to sweep the key-board of their emotions, while, as
+      we may, say, all the stops were drawn out. His sermon was from notes; for,
+      though absolutely extemporaneous composition may be acceptable to one's
+      Maker, it is not considered quite the thing in speaking to one's
+      fellow-mortals. He discoursed for a time on the loss of parents, and on
+      the dangers to which the unfortunate orphan is exposed. Then he spoke of
+      the peculiar risks of the tender female child, left without its natural
+      guardians. Warming with his subject, he dilated with wonderful unction on
+      the temptations springing from personal attractions. He pictured the &ldquo;fair
+      and beautiful&rdquo; women of Holy Writ, lingering over their names with
+      lover-like devotion. He brought Esther before his audience, bathed and
+      perfumed for the royal presence of Ahasuerus. He showed them the sweet
+      young Ruth, lying down in her innocence at the feet of the lord of the
+      manor. He dwelt with special luxury on the charms which seduced the royal
+      psalmist,&mdash;the soldier's wife for whom he broke the commands of the
+      decalogue, and the maiden for whose attentions, in his cooler years, he
+      violated the dictates of prudence and propriety. All this time Byles
+      Gridley had his stern eyes on him. And while he kindled into passionate
+      eloquence on these inspiring themes, poor Bathsheba, whom her mother had
+      sent to church that she might get a little respite from her home duties,
+      felt her blood growing cold in her veins, as the pallid image of the
+      invalid wife, lying on her bed of suffering, rose in the midst of the
+      glowing pictures which borrowed such warmth from her husband's
+      imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sermon, with its hinted application to the event of the past week, was
+      over at last. The shoulders of the nervous women were twitching with sobs.
+      The old men were crying in their vacant way. But all the while the face of
+      Byles Gridley, firm as a rock in the midst of this lachrymal inundation,
+      was kept steadily on the preacher, who had often felt the look that came
+      through the two round glasses searching into the very marrow of his bones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the sermon was finished, the sexton marched up through the broad aisle
+      and handed the note over the door of the pulpit to the clergyman, who was
+      wiping his face after the exertion of delivering his discourse. Mr. Stoker
+      looked at it, started, changed color,&mdash;his vision of &ldquo;The Dangers of
+      Beauty, a Sermon printed by Request,&rdquo; had vanished,&mdash;and passed the
+      note to Father Pemberton, who sat by him in the pulpit. With much pains he
+      deciphered its contents, for his eyes were dim with years, and, having
+      read it, bowed his head upon his hands in silent thanksgiving. Then he
+      rose in the beauty of his tranquil and noble old age, so touched with the
+      message he had to proclaim to his people, that the three deep furrows on
+      his forehead, which some said he owed to the three dogmas of original sin,
+      predestination, and endless torment, seemed smoothed for the moment, and
+      his face was as that of an angel while he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sisters and Brethren,&mdash;Rejoice with us, for we have found our lamb
+      which had strayed from the fold. This our daughter was dead and is alive
+      again; she was lost and is found. Myrtle Hazard, rescued from great peril
+      of the waters, and cared for by good Samaritans, is now in her home. Thou,
+      O Lord, who didst let the water-flood overflow her, didst not let the deep
+      swallow her up, nor the pit shut its mouth upon her. Let us return our
+      thanks to the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, who is
+      our God and Father, and who hath wrought this great deliverance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After his prayer, which it tried him sorely to utter in unbroken tones, he
+      gave out the hymn,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Lord, thou hast heard thy servant cry,
+     And rescued from the grave;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      but it was hardly begun when the leading female voice trembled and
+      stopped,&mdash;and another,&mdash;and then a third,&mdash;and Father
+      Pemberton, seeing that they were all overcome, arose and stretched out his
+      arms, and breathed over them his holy benediction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The village was soon alive with the news. The sexton forgot the solemnity
+      of the Sabbath, and the bell acted as if it was crazy, tumbling heels over
+      head at such a rate, and with such a clamor, that a good many thought
+      there was a fire, and, rushing out from every quarter, instantly caught
+      the great news with which the air was ablaze.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few of the young men who had come back went even further in their
+      demonstrations. They got a small cannon in readiness, and without waiting
+      for the going down of the sun, began firing rapidly, upon which the Rev.
+      Mr. Stoker sallied forth to put a stop to this violation of the Sabbath.
+      But in the mean time it was heard on all the hills, far and near. Some
+      said they were firing in the hope of raising the corpse; but many who
+      heard the bells ringing their crazy peals guessed what had happened.
+      Before night the parties were all in, one detachment bearing the body of
+      the bob-tailed catamount swung over a pole, like the mighty cluster of
+      grapes from Eshcol, and another conveying with wise precaution that
+      monstrous snapping-turtle which those of our friends who wish to see will
+      find among the specimens marked Chelydra, Serpentine in the great
+      collection at Cantabridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI. VEXED WITH A DEVIL.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was necessary at once to summon a physician to advise as to the
+      treatment of Myrtle, who had received a shock, bodily and mental, not
+      lightly to be got rid of, and very probably to be followed by serious and
+      varied disturbances. Her very tranquillity was suspicious, for there must
+      be something of exhaustion in it, and the reaction must come sooner or
+      later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut, at the age of ninety-two, very deaf, very nearly
+      blind, very feeble, liable to odd lapses of memory, was yet a wise
+      counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases, and on rare occasions was
+      still called upon to exercise his ancient skill. Here was a case in which
+      a few words from him might soothe the patient and give confidence to all
+      who were interested in her. Miss Silence Withers went herself to see him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Withers, father, wants to talk with you about her niece, Miss
+      Hazard,&rdquo; said Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Withers, Miss Withers?&mdash;Oh, Silence Withers,&mdash;lives up at
+      The Poplars. How's the Deacon, Miss Withers?&rdquo; [Ob. 1810.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My grandfather is not living, Dr. Hurlbut,&rdquo; she screamed into his ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dead, is he? Well, it isn't long since he was with us; and they come and
+      go,&mdash;they come and go. I remember his father, Major Gideon Withers.
+      He had a great red feather on training-days,&mdash;that was what made me
+      remember him. Who did you say was sick and wanted to see me, Fordyce?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Myrtle Hazard, father,&mdash;she has had a narrow escape from drowning,
+      and it has left her in a rather nervous state. They would like to have you
+      go up to The Poplars and take a look at her. You remember Myrtle Hazard?
+      She is the great-granddaughter of your old friend the Deacon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had to wait a minute before his thoughts would come to order; with a
+      little time, the proper answer would be evolved by the slow automatic
+      movement of the rusted mental machinery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the silent moment: &ldquo;Myrtle Hazard, Myrtle Hazard,&mdash;yes, yes, to
+      be sure! The old Withers stock,&mdash;good constitutions,&mdash;a little
+      apt to be nervous, one or two of 'em. I've given 'em a good deal of
+      valerian and assafoetida,&mdash;not quite so much since the new blood came
+      in. There is n't the change in folks people think,&mdash;same thing over
+      and over again. I've seen six fingers on a child that had a six-fingered
+      great-uncle, and I've seen that child's grandchild born with six fingers.
+      Does this girl like to have her own way pretty well, like the rest of the
+      family?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little too well, I suspect, father. You will remember all about her
+      when you come to see her and talk with her. She would like to talk with
+      you, and her aunt wants to see you too; they think there's nobody like the
+      'old Doctor'.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not too old to be pleased with this preference, and said he was
+      willing to go when they were ready. With no small labor of preparation he
+      was at last got to the house, and crept with his son's aid up to the
+      little room over the water, where his patient was still lying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a little too much color in Myrtle's cheeks and a glistening
+      lustre in her eyes that told of unnatural excitement. It gave a strange
+      brilliancy to her beauty, and might have deceived an unpractised observer.
+      The old man looked at her long and curiously, his imperfect sight excusing
+      the closeness of his scrutiny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laid his trembling hand upon her forehead, and then felt her pulse with
+      his shriveled fingers. He asked her various questions about herself, which
+      she answered with a tone not quite so calm as natural, but willingly and
+      intelligently. They thought she seemed to the old Doctor to be doing very
+      well, for he spoke cheerfully to her, and treated her in such a way that
+      neither she nor any of those around her could be alarmed. The younger
+      physician was disposed to think she was only suffering from temporary
+      excitement, and that it would soon pass off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They left the room to talk it over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It does not amount to much, I suppose, father,&rdquo; said Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut.
+      &ldquo;You made the pulse about ninety,&mdash;a little hard,&mdash;did n't you;
+      as I did? Rest, and low diet for a day or two, and all will be right,
+      won't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it the feeling of sympathy, or was it the pride of superior sagacity,
+      that changed the look of the old man's wrinkled features? &ldquo;Not so fast,&mdash;not
+      so fast, Fordyce,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I've seen that look on another face of the
+      same blood,&mdash;it 's a great many years ago, and she was dead before
+      you were born, my boy,&mdash;but I've seen that look, and it meant trouble
+      then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now. I see some danger of a brain
+      fever. And if she doesn't have that, then look out for some hysteric fits
+      that will make mischief. Take that handkerchief off of her head, and cut
+      her hair close, and keep her temples cool, and put some drawing plasters
+      to the soles of her feet, and give her some of my pilulae compositae, and
+      follow them with some doses of sal polychrest. I've been through it all
+      before&mdash;in that same house. Live folks are only dead folks warmed
+      over. I can see 'em all in that girl's face, Handsome Judith, to begin
+      with. And that queer woman, the Deacon's mother,&mdash;there 's where she
+      gets that hystericky look. Yes, and the black-eyed woman with the Indian
+      blood in her,&mdash;look out for that,&mdash;look out for that. And&mdash;and&mdash;my
+      son, do you remember Major Gideon Withers?&rdquo; [Ob. 1780.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why no, father, I can't say that I remember the Major; but I know the
+      picture very well. Does she remind you of him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused again, until the thoughts came slowly straggling, up to the
+      point where the question left him. He shook his head solemnly, and turned
+      his dim eyes on his son's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Four generations&mdash;four generations; man and wife,&mdash;yes, five
+      generations, for old Selah Withers took me in his arms when I was a child,
+      and called me 'little gal,' for I was in girl's clothes,&mdash;five
+      generations before this Hazard child I 've looked on with these old eyes.
+      And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every one of 'em in
+      this child's face, it's the forehead of this one, and it's the eyes of
+      that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look that I remember in
+      another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that same voice before&mdash;yes,
+      yes as long ago as when I was first married; for I remember Rachel used to
+      think I praised Handsome Judith's voice more than it deserved,&mdash;and
+      her face too, for that matter. You remember Rachel, my first wife,&mdash;don't
+      you, Fordyce?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, father, I don't remember her, but I know her portrait.&rdquo; (As he was
+      the son of the old Doctor's second wife, he could hardly be expected to
+      remember her predecessor.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old Doctor's sagacity was not in fault about the somewhat threatening
+      aspect of Myrtle's condition. His directions were followed implicitly; for
+      with the exception of the fact of sluggishness rather than loss of memory,
+      and of that confusion of dates which in slighter degrees is often felt as
+      early as middle-life, and increases in most persons from year to year, his
+      mind was still penetrating, and his advice almost as trustworthy, as in
+      his best days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very fortunate that the old Doctor ordered Myrtle's hair to be cut,
+      and Miss Silence took the scissors and trimmed it at once. So, whenever
+      she got well and was seen about, there would be no mystery about the loss
+      of her locks,&mdash;the Doctor had been afraid of brain fever, and ordered
+      them to cut her hair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many things are uncertain in this world, and among them the effect of a
+      large proportion of the remedies prescribed by physicians. Whether it was
+      by the use of the means ordered by the old Doctor, or by the efforts of
+      nature, or by both together, at any rate the first danger was averted, and
+      the immediate risk from brain fever soon passed over. But the impression
+      upon her mind and body had been too profound to be dissipated by a few
+      days' rest. The hysteric stage which the wise old man had apprehended
+      began to manifest itself by its usual signs, if anything can be called
+      usual in a condition the natural order of which is disorder and anomaly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the reader, if such there be, who believes in the absolute
+      independence and self-determination of the will, and the consequent total
+      responsibility of every human being for every irregular nervous action and
+      ill-governed muscular contraction, may as well lay down this narrative, or
+      he may lose all faith in poor Myrtle Hazard, and all patience with the
+      writer who tells her story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mental excitement so long sustained, followed by a violent shock to
+      the system, coming just at the period of rapid development, gave rise to
+      that morbid condition, accompanied with a series of mental and moral
+      perversions, which in ignorant ages and communities is attributed to the
+      influence of evil spirits, but for the better-instructed is the malady
+      which they call hysteria. Few households have ripened a growth of
+      womanhood without witnessing some of its manifestations, and its phenomena
+      are largely traded in by scientific pretenders and religious fanatics.
+      Into this cloud, with all its risks and all its humiliations, Myrtle
+      Hazard is about to enter. Will she pass through it unharmed, or wander
+      from her path, and fall over one of those fearful precipices which lie
+      before her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the ancient physician had settled the general plan of treatment, its
+      details and practical application were left to the care of his son. Dr.
+      Fordyce Hurlbut was a widower, not yet forty years old, a man of a fine
+      masculine aspect and a vigorous nature. He was a favorite with his female
+      patients,&mdash;perhaps many of them would have said because he was
+      good-looking and pleasant in his manners, but some thought in virtue of a
+      special magnetic power to which certain temperaments were impressible,
+      though there was no explaining it. But he himself never claimed any such
+      personal gift, and never attempted any of the exploits which some thought
+      were in his power if he chose to exercise his faculty in that direction.
+      This girl was, as it were, a child to him, for he had seen her grow up
+      from infancy, and had often held her on his knee in her early years. The
+      first thing he did was to get her a nurse, for he saw that neither of the
+      two women about her exercised a quieting influence upon her nerves. So he
+      got her old friend, Nurse Byloe, to come and take care of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old nurse looked calm enough at one or two of his first visits, but
+      the next morning her face showed that something had been going wrong.
+      &ldquo;Well, what has been the trouble, Nurse?&rdquo; the Doctor said, as soon as he
+      could get her out of the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's been attackted, Doctor, sence you been here, dreadful. It's them
+      high stirricks, Doctor, 'n' I never see 'em higher, nor more of 'em.
+      Laughin' as ef she would bust. Cryin' as ef she'd lost all her friends,
+      'n' was a follerin' their corpse to their graves. And spassums,&mdash;sech
+      spassums! And ketchin' at her throat, 'n' sayin' there was a great ball a
+      risin' into it from her stommick. One time she had a kind o' lockjaw like.
+      And one time she stretched herself out 'n' laid jest as stiff as ef she
+      was dead. And she says now that her head feels as ef a nail had been driv'
+      into it,&mdash;into the left temple, she says, and that's what makes her
+      look so distressed now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor came once more to her bedside. He saw that her forehead was
+      contracted, and that she was evidently suffering from severe pain
+      somewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is your uneasiness, Myrtle?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved her hand very slowly, and pressed it on her left temple. He laid
+      his hand upon the same spot, kept it there a moment, and then removed it.
+      She took it gently with her own, and placed it on her temple again. As he
+      sat watching her, he saw that her features were growing easier, and in a
+      short time her deep, even breathing showed that she was asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It beats all,&rdquo; the old nurse said. &ldquo;Why, she's been a complainin' ever
+      sence daylight, and she hain't slep' not a wink afore, sence twelve
+      o'clock las' night! It's j es' like them magnetizers,&mdash;I never heerd
+      you was one o' them kind, Dr. Hurlbut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't say how it is, Nurse,&mdash;I have heard people say my hand was
+      magnetic, but I never thought of its quieting her so quickly. No sleep
+      since twelve o'clock last night, you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a wink, 'n' actin' as ef she was possessed a good deal o' the time.
+      You read your Bible, Doctor, don't you? You're pious? Do you remember
+      about that woman in Scriptur' out of whom the Lord cast seven devils?
+      Well, I should ha' thought there was seventy devils in that gal last
+      night, from the way she carr'd on. And now she lays there jest as peaceful
+      as a new-born babe,&mdash;that is, accordin' to the sayin' about 'em; for
+      as to peaceful new-born babes, I never see one that come t' anything, that
+      did n't screech as ef the haouse was afire 'n' it wanted to call all the
+      fire-ingines within ten mild.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor smiled, but he became thoughtful in a moment. Did he possess a
+      hitherto unexercised personal power, which put the key of this young
+      girl's nervous system into his hands? The remarkable tranquillizing effect
+      of the contact of his hand with her forehead looked like an immediate
+      physical action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might have been a mere coincidence, however. He would not form an
+      opinion until his next visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that next visit it did seem as if some of Nurse Byloe's seventy devils
+      had possession of the girl. All the strange spasmodic movements, the
+      chokings, the odd sounds, the wild talk, the laughing and crying, were in
+      full blast. All the remedies which had been ordered seemed to have been of
+      no avail. The Doctor could hardly refuse trying his quasi magnetic
+      influence, and placed the tips of his fingers on her forehead. The result
+      was the same that had followed the similar proceeding the day before,&mdash;the
+      storm was soon calmed, and after a little time she fell into a quiet
+      sleep, as in the first instance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here was an awkward affair for the physician, to be sure! He held this
+      power in his hands, which no remedy and no other person seemed to possess.
+      How long would he be chained to her; and she to him, and what would be the
+      consequence of the mysterious relation which must necessarily spring up
+      between a man like him, in the plenitude of vital force, of strongly
+      attractive personality, and a young girl organized for victory over the
+      calmest blood and the steadiest resistance?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every day after this made matters worse. There was something almost
+      partaking of the miraculous in the influence he was acquiring over her.
+      His &ldquo;Peace, be still!&rdquo; was obeyed by the stormy elements of this young
+      soul, as if it had been a supernatural command. How could he resist the
+      dictate of humanity which called him to make his visits more frequent,
+      that her intervals of rest might be more numerous? How could he refuse to
+      sit at her bedside for a while in the evening, that she might be quieted,
+      instead of beginning the night sleepless and agitated?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor was a man of refined feeling as well as of principle, and he
+      had besides a sacred memory in the deepest heart of his affections. It was
+      the common belief in the village that he would never marry again, but that
+      his first and only love was buried in the grave of the wife of his youth.
+      It did not easily occur to him to suspect himself of any weakness with
+      regard to this patient of his, little more than a child in years. It did
+      not at once suggest itself to him that she, in her strange, excited
+      condition, might fasten her wandering thoughts upon him, too far removed
+      by his age, as it seemed, to strike the fancy of a young girl under almost
+      any conceivable conditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus it was that many of those beautiful summer evenings found him sitting
+      by his patient, the river rippling and singing beneath them, the moon
+      shining over them, sweet odors from the thickets on the banks of the
+      stream stealing in on the soft air that came through the open window, and
+      every time they were thus together, the subtile influence which bound them
+      to each other bringing them more and more into inexplicable harmonies and
+      almost spiritual identity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all this did not hinder the development of new and strange conditions
+      in Myrtle Hazard. Her will was losing its power. &ldquo;I cannot help it&rdquo;&mdash;the
+      hysteric motto&mdash;was her constant reply. It is not pleasant to confess
+      the truth, but she was rapidly undergoing a singular change of her moral
+      nature. She had been a truthful child. If she had kept her secret about
+      what she had found in the garret, she thought she was exercising her
+      rights, and she had never been obliged to tell any lies about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now she seemed to have lost the healthy instincts for veracity and
+      honesty. She feigned all sorts of odd symptoms, and showed a wonderful
+      degree of cunning in giving an appearance of truth to them. It became next
+      to impossible to tell what was real and what was simulated. At one time
+      she could not be touched ever so lightly without shrinking and crying out.
+      At another time she would squint, and again she would be half paralyzed
+      for a time. She would pretend to fast for days, living on food she had
+      concealed and took secretly in the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The nurse was getting worn out. Kitty Fagan would have had the priest come
+      to the house and sprinkle it with holy water. The two women were beginning
+      to get nervous themselves. The Rev. Mr. Stoker said in confidence to Miss
+      Silence, that there was reason to fear she might have been given over for
+      a time to the buffetings of Satan, and that perhaps his (Mr. Stoker's)
+      personal attentions might be useful in that case. And so it appeared that
+      the &ldquo;young doctor&rdquo; was the only being left with whom she had any complete
+      relations and absolute sympathy. She had become so passive in his hands
+      that it seemed as if her only healthy life was, as it were, transmitted
+      through him, and that she depended on the transfer of his nervous power,
+      as the plant upon the light for its essential living processes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two young men who had met in so unexpected a manner on board the ship
+      Swordfish had been reasonably discreet in relating their adventures.
+      Myrtle Hazard may or may not have had the plan they attributed to her;
+      however that was, they had looked rather foolish when they met, and had
+      not thought it worth while to be very communicative about the matter when
+      they returned. It had at least given them a chance to become a little
+      better acquainted with each other, and it was an opportunity which the
+      elder and more artful of the two meant to turn to advantage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all Myrtle's few friends only one was in the habit of seeing her often
+      during this period, namely, Olive Eveleth, a girl so quiet and sensible
+      that she, if anybody, could be trusted with her. But Myrtle's whole
+      character seemed to have changed, and Olive soon found that she was in
+      some mystic way absorbed into another nature. Except when the physician's
+      will was exerted upon her, she was drifting without any self-directing
+      power, and then any one of those manifold impulses which would in some
+      former ages have been counted as separate manifestations on the part of
+      distinct demoniacal beings might take possession of her. Olive did little,
+      therefore, but visit Myrtle from time to time to learn if any change had
+      occurred in her condition. All this she reported to Cyprian, and all this
+      was got out of him by Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That gentleman was far from being pleased with the look of things as they
+      were represented. What if the Doctor, who was after all in the prime of
+      life and younger-looking than some who were born half a dozen years after
+      him, should get a hold on this young woman,&mdash;girl now, if you will,
+      but in a very few years certain to come within possible, nay, not very
+      improbable, matrimonial range of him? That would be pleasant, wouldn't it?
+      It had happened sometimes, as he knew, that these magnetizing tricks had
+      led to infatuation on the part of the subjects of the wonderful influence.
+      So he concluded to be ill and consult the younger Dr. Hurlbut, and
+      incidentally find out how the land lay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next question was, what to be ill with. Some not ungentlemanly malady,
+      not hereditary, not incurable, not requiring any obvious change in habits
+      of life. Dyspepsia would answer the purpose well enough: so Mr. Murray
+      Bradshaw picked up a medical book and read ten minutes or more for that
+      complaint. At the end of this time he was an accomplished dyspeptic; for
+      lawyers half learn a thing quicker than the members of any other
+      profession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He presented himself with a somewhat forlorn countenance to Dr. Fordyce
+      Hurlbut, as suffering from some of the less formidable symptoms of that
+      affection. He got into a very interesting conversation with him,
+      especially about some nervous feelings which had accompanied his attack of
+      indigestion. Thence to nervous complaints in general. Thence to the case
+      of the young lady at The Poplars whom he was attending. The Doctor talked
+      with a certain reserve, as became his professional relations with his
+      patient; but it was plain enough that, if this kind of intercourse went on
+      much longer, it would be liable to end in some emotional explosion or
+      other, and there was no saying how it would at last turn out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw was afraid to meddle directly. He knew something more
+      about the history of Myrtle's adventure than any of his neighbors, and,
+      among other things, that it had given Mr. Byles Gridley a peculiar
+      interest in her, of which he could take advantage. He therefore artfully
+      hinted his fears to the old man, and left his hint to work itself out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However suspicious Master Gridley was of him and his motives, he thought
+      it worth while to call up at The Poplars and inquire for himself of the
+      nurse what was this new relation growing up between the physician and his
+      young patient.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She imparted her opinion to him in a private conversation with great
+      freedom. &ldquo;Sech doin's! sech doin's! The gal's jest as much bewitched as
+      ever any gal was sence them that was possessed in Scriptur'. And every day
+      it 's wus and wus. Ef that Doctor don't stop comin', she won't breathe
+      without his helpin' her to before long. And, Mr. Gridley, I don't like to
+      say so,&mdash;but I can't help thinkin' he's gettin' a little bewitched
+      too. I don't believe he means to take no kind of advantage of her; but,
+      Mr. Gridley, you've seen them millers fly round and round a candle, and
+      you know how it ginerally comes out. Men is men and gals is gals. I would
+      n't trust no man, not ef he was much under a hundred year old,&mdash;and
+      as for a gal&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mulieri ne mortuae quidem credendum est,&rdquo; said Mr. Gridley. &ldquo;You wouldn't
+      trust a woman even if she was dead, hey, Nurse?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not till she was buried, 'n' the grass growin' a foot high over her,&rdquo;
+       said Nurse Byloe, &ldquo;unless I'd know'd her sence she was a baby. I've know'd
+      this one sence she was two or three year old; but this gal ain't Myrtle
+      Hazard no longer,&mdash;she's bewitched into somethin' different. I'll
+      tell ye what, Mr. Gridley; you get old Dr. Hurlbut to come and see her
+      once a day for a week, and get the young doctor to stay away. I'll resk
+      it. She 'll have some dreadful tantrums at fust, but she'll come to it in
+      two or three, days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Byles Gridley groaned in spirit. He had come to this village to end
+      his days in peace, and here he was just going to make a martyr of himself
+      for the sake of a young person to whom he was under no obligation, except
+      that he had saved her from the consequences of her own foolish act, at the
+      expense of a great overturn of all his domestic habits. There was no help
+      for it. The nurse was right, and he must perform the disagreeable duty of
+      letting the Doctor know that he was getting into a track which might very
+      probably lead to mischief, and that he must back out as fast as he could.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At 2 P. M. Gifted Hopkins presented the following note at the Doctor's
+      door:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Byles Gridley would be much obliged to Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut if he
+      would call at his study this evening.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Odd, is n't it, father, the old man's asking me to come and see him?
+      Those old stub-twist constitutions never want patching.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Old man! old man! Who's that you call old,&mdash;not Byles Gridley, hey?
+      Old! old! Sixty year, more or less! How old was Floyer when he died,
+      Fordyce? Ninety-odd, was n't it? Had the asthma though, or he'd have lived
+      to be as old as Dr. Holyoke,&mdash;a hundred year and over. That's old.
+      But men live to be a good deal more than that sometimes. What does Byles
+      Gridley want of you, did you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sure I can't tell, father; I'll go and find out.&rdquo; So he went over to
+      Mrs. Hopkins's in the evening, and was shown up into the study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley treated the Doctor to a cup of such tea as bachelors
+      sometimes keep hid away in mysterious caddies. He presently began asking
+      certain questions about the grand climacteric, which eventful period of
+      life he was fast approaching. Then he discoursed of medicine, ancient and
+      modern, tasking the Doctor's knowledge not a little, and evincing a good
+      deal of acquaintance with old doctrines and authors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a few curious old medical books in his library, which he said he
+      should like to show Dr. Hurlbut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, now! What do you say to this copy of Joannes de Ketam, Venice,
+      1522? Look at these woodcuts,&mdash;the first anatomical pictures ever
+      printed, Doctor, unless these others of Jacobus Berengarius are older! See
+      this scene of the plague-patient, the doctor smelling at his pouncet-box,
+      the old nurse standing square at the bedside, the young nurse with the
+      bowl, holding back and turning her head away, and the old burial-hag
+      behind her, shoving her forward, a very curious book, Doctor, and has the
+      first phrenological picture in it ever made. Take a look, too, at my
+      Vesalius,&mdash;not the Leyden edition, Doctor, but the one with the grand
+      old original figures,&mdash;so good that they laid them to Titian. And
+      look here, Doctor, I could n't help getting this great folio Albinus,
+      1747,&mdash;and the nineteenth century can't touch it, Doctor,&mdash;can't
+      touch it for completeness and magnificence, so all the learned professors
+      tell me! Brave old fellows, Doctor, and put their lives into their books
+      as you gentlemen don't pretend to do nowadays. And good old fellows,
+      Doctor,&mdash;high-minded, scrupulous, conscientious, punctilious,&mdash;remembered
+      their duties to man and to woman, and felt all the responsibilities of
+      their confidential relation to families. Did you ever read the oldest of
+      medical documents,&mdash;the Oath of Hippocrates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor thought he had read it, but did not remember much about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It 's worth reading, Doctor,&mdash;it's worth remembering; and, old as it
+      is, it is just as good to-day as it was when it was laid down as a rule of
+      conduct four hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was delivered.
+      Let me read it to you, Dr. Hurlbut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something in Master Gridley's look that made the Doctor feel a
+      little nervous; he did not know just what was coming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley took out his great Hippocrates, the edition of Foesius, and
+      opened to the place. He turned so as to face the Doctor, and read the
+      famous Oath aloud, Englishing it as he went along. When he came to these
+      words which follow, he pronounced them very slowly and with special
+      emphasis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My life shall be pure and holy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Into whatever house I enter, I will go for the good of the patient:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will abstain from inflicting any voluntary injury, and from leading
+      away any, whether man or woman, bond or free.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor changed color as he listened, and the moisture broke out on his
+      forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley saw it, and followed up his advantage. &ldquo;Dr. Fordyce
+      Hurlbut, are you not in danger of violating the sanctities of your
+      honorable calling, and leading astray a young person committed to your
+      sacred keeping?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While saying these words, Master Gridley looked full upon him, with a face
+      so charged with grave meaning, so impressed with the gravity of his
+      warning accents, that the Doctor felt as if he were before some dread
+      tribunal, and remained silent. He was a member of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's
+      church, and the words he had just listened to were those of a sinful old
+      heathen who had never heard a sermon in his life; but they stung him, for
+      all that, as the parable of the prophet stung the royal transgressor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke at length, for the plain honest words had touched the right
+      spring of consciousness at the right moment; not too early, for he now saw
+      whither he was tending,&mdash;not too late, for he was not yet in the
+      inner spirals of the passion which whirls men and women to their doom in
+      ever-narrowing coils, that will not unwind at the command of God or man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke as one who is humbled by self-accusation, yet in a manly way, as
+      became his honorable and truthful character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Master Gridley,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I stand convicted before you. I know too well
+      what you are thinking of. It is true, I cannot continue my attendance on
+      Myrtle&mdash;on Miss Hazard, for you mean her&mdash;without peril to both
+      of us. She is not herself. God forbid that I should cease to be myself! I
+      have been thinking of a summer tour, and I will at once set out upon it,
+      and leave this patient in my father's hands. I think he will find strength
+      to visit her under the circumstances.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor went off the next morning without saying a word to Myrtle
+      Hazard, and his father made the customary visit in his place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night the spirit tare her, as may well be supposed, and so the second
+      night. But there was no help for it: her doctor was gone, and the old
+      physician, with great effort, came instead, sat by her, spoke kindly to
+      her, left wise directions to her attendants, and above all assured them
+      that, if they would have a little patience, they would see all this storm
+      blow over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the third night after his visit, the spirit rent her sore, and came out
+      of her, or, in the phrase of to-day, she had a fierce paroxysm, after
+      which the violence of the conflict ceased, and she might be called
+      convalescent so far as that was concerned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all this series of nervous disturbances left her in a very impressible
+      and excitable condition. This was just the state to invite the spiritual
+      manipulations of one of those theological practitioners who consider that
+      the treatment of all morbid states of mind short of raving madness belongs
+      to them and not to the doctors. This same condition was equally favorable
+      for the operations of any professional experimenter who would use the
+      flame of religious excitement to light the torch of an earthly passion. So
+      many fingers that begin on the black keys stray to the white ones before
+      the tune is played out!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Myrtle Hazard was in charge of any angelic guardian, the time was at
+      hand when she would need all celestial influences; for the Rev. Joseph
+      Bellamy Stoker was about to take a deep interest in her spiritual
+      welfare.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII. SKIRMISHING.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has called upon you, Susan Posey, has
+      he? And wants you to come and talk religion with him in his study, Susan
+      Posey, does he? Religion is a good thing, my dear, the best thing in the
+      world, and never better than when we are young, and no young people need
+      it more than young girls. There are temptations to all, and to them as
+      often as to any, Susan Posey. And temptations come to them in places where
+      they don't look for them, and from persons they never thought of as
+      tempters. So I am very glad to have your thoughts called to the subject of
+      religion. 'Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Susan Posey, my dear, I think you hard better not break in upon the
+      pious meditations of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker in his private study.
+      A monk's cell and a minister's library are hardly the places for young
+      ladies. They distract the attention of these good men from their devotions
+      and their sermons. If you think you must go, you had better take Mrs.
+      Hopkins with you. She likes religious conversation, and it will do her
+      good too, and save a great deal of time for the minister, conversing with
+      two at once. She is of discreet age, and will tell you when it is time to
+      come away,&mdash;you might stay too long, you know. I've known young
+      persons stay a good deal too long at these interviews,&mdash;a great deal
+      too long, Susan Posey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the fatherly counsel of Master Byles Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Susan was not very quick of apprehension, but she could not help seeing
+      the justice of Master Gridley's remark, that for a young person to go and
+      break in on the hours that a minister requires for his studies, without
+      being accompanied by a mature friend who would remind her when it was time
+      to go, would be taking an unfair advantage of his kindness in asking her
+      to call upon him. She promised, therefore, that she would never go without
+      having Mrs. Hopkins as her companion, and with this assurance her old
+      friend rested satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is altogether likely that he had some deeper reason for his advice than
+      those with which he satisfied the simple nature of Susan Posey. Of that it
+      will be easier to judge after a glance at the conditions and character of
+      the minister and his household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, in addition to the personal advantages already
+      alluded to, some other qualities which might prove attractive to many
+      women. He had, in particular, that art of sliding into easy intimacy with
+      them which implies some knowledge of the female nature, and, above all,
+      confidence in one's powers. There was little doubt, the gossips
+      maintained, that many of the younger women of his parish would have been
+      willing, in certain contingencies, to lift for him that other end of his
+      yoke under which poor Mrs. Stoker was fainting, unequal to the burden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That lady must have been some years older than her husband,&mdash;how many
+      we need not inquire too curiously,&mdash;but in vitality she had long
+      passed the prime in which he was still flourishing. She had borne him five
+      children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three of them.
+      Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of village life wearied
+      her; the parishioners expected too much of her as the minister's wife; she
+      had wanted more fresh air and more cheerful companionship; and her
+      thoughts had fed too much on death and sin,&mdash;good bitter tonics to
+      increase the appetite for virtue, but not good as food and drink for the
+      spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was another grief which lay hidden far beneath these obvious
+      depressing influences. She felt that she was no longer to her husband what
+      she had been to him, and felt it with something of self-reproach,&mdash;which
+      was a wrong to herself, for she had been a true and tender wife. Deeper
+      than all the rest was still another feeling, which had hardly risen into
+      the region of inwardly articulated thought, but lay unshaped beneath all
+      the syllabled trains of sleeping or waking consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister was often consulted by his parishioners upon spiritual
+      matters, and was in the habit of receiving in his study visitors who came
+      with such intent. Sometimes it was old weak-eyed Deacon Rumrill, in great
+      iron-bowed spectacles, with hanging nether lip and tremulous voice, who
+      had got his brain onto a muddle about the beast with two horns, or the
+      woman that fled into the wilderness, or other points not settled to his
+      mind in Scott's Commentary. The minister was always very busy at such
+      times, and made short work of his deacon's doubts. Or it might be that an
+      ancient woman, a mother or a grandmother in Israel, came with her
+      questions and her perplexities to her pastor; and it was pretty certain
+      that just at that moment he was very deep in his next sermon, or had a
+      pressing visit to make.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it would also happen occasionally that one of the tenderer ewe-lambs
+      of the flock needed comfort from the presence of the shepherd. Poor Mrs.
+      Stoker noticed, or thought she noticed, that the good man had more leisure
+      for the youthful and blooming sister than for the more discreet and
+      venerable matron or spinster. The sitting was apt to be longer; and the
+      worthy pastor would often linger awhile about the door, to speed the
+      parting guest, perhaps, but a little too much after the fashion of young
+      people who are not displeased with each other, and who often find it as
+      hard to cross a threshold single as a witch finds it to get over a running
+      stream. More than once, the pallid, faded wife had made an errand to the
+      study, and, after a keen look at the bright young cheeks, flushed with the
+      excitement of intimate spiritual communion, had gone back to her chamber
+      with her hand pressed against her heart, and the bitterness of death in
+      her soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of all these bodily and mental trials was, that the minister's
+      wife had fallen into a state of habitual invalidism, such as only women,
+      who feel all the nerves which in men are as insensible as telegraph-wires,
+      can experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor did not know what to make of her case,&mdash;whether she would
+      live or die,&mdash;whether she would languish for years, or, all at once,
+      roused by some strong impression, or in obedience to some unexplained
+      movement of the vital forces, take up her bed and walk. For her bed had
+      become her home, where she lived as if it belonged to her organism. There
+      she lay, a not unpleasing invalid to contemplate, always looking resigned,
+      patient, serene, except when the one deeper grief was stirred, always
+      arrayed with simple neatness, and surrounded with little tokens that
+      showed the constant presence with her of tasteful and thoughtful
+      affection. She did not know, nobody could know, how steadily, how silently
+      all this artificial life was draining the veins and blanching the cheek of
+      her daughter Bathsheba, one of the everyday, air-breathing angels without
+      nimbus or aureole who belong to every story which lets us into a few
+      households, as much as the stars and the flowers belong to everybody's
+      verses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bathsheba's devotion to her mother brought its own reward, but it was not
+      in the shape of outward commendation. Some of the more censorious members
+      of her father's congregation were severe in their remarks upon her
+      absorption in the supreme object of her care. It seems that this had
+      prevented her from attending to other duties which they considered more
+      imperative. They did n't see why she shouldn't keep a Sabbath-school as
+      well as the rest, and as to her not comin' to meetin' three times on
+      Sabbath day like other folks, they couldn't account for it, except because
+      she calculated that she could get along without the means of grace, bein'
+      a minister's daughter. Some went so far as to doubt if she had ever
+      experienced religion, for all she was a professor. There was a good many
+      indulged a false hope. To this, others objected her life of utter
+      self-denial and entire surrender to her duties towards her mother as some
+      evidence of Christian character. But old Deacon Rumrill put down that
+      heresy by showing conclusively from Scott's Commentary on Romans xi. 1-6,
+      that this was altogether against her chance of being called, and that the
+      better her disposition to perform good works, the more unlikely she was to
+      be the subject of saving grace. Some of these severe critics were good
+      people enough themselves, but they loved active work and stirring
+      companionship, and would have found their real cross if they had been
+      called to sit at an invalid's bedside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the Rev. Mr. Stoker, his duties did not allow him to give so much
+      time to his suffering wife as his feelings would undoubtedly have
+      prompted. He therefore relinquished the care of her (with great reluctance
+      we may naturally suppose) to Bathsheba, who had inherited not only her
+      mother's youthful smile, but that self-forgetfulness which, born with some
+      of God's creatures, is, if not &ldquo;grace,&rdquo; at least a manifestation of native
+      depravity which might well be mistaken for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The intimacy of mother and daughter was complete, except on a single
+      point. There was one subject on which no word ever passed between them.
+      The excuse of duties to others was by a tacit understanding a mantle to
+      cover all short-comings in the way of attention from the husband and
+      father, and no word ever passed between them implying a suspicion of the
+      loyalty of his affections. Bathsheba came at last so to fill with her
+      tenderness the space left empty in the neglected heart, that her mother
+      only spoke her habitual feeling when she said, &ldquo;I should think you were in
+      love with me, my darling, if you were not my daughter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a dangerous state of things for the minister. Strange suggestions
+      and unsafe speculations began to mingle with his dreams and reveries. The
+      thought once admitted that another's life is becoming superfluous and a
+      burden, feeds like a ravenous vulture on the soul. Woe to the man or woman
+      whose days are passed in watching the hour-glass through which the sands
+      run too slowly for longings that are like a skulking procession of
+      bloodless murders! Without affirming such horrors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker,
+      it would not be libellous to say that his fancy was tampering with future
+      possibilities, as it constantly happens with those who are getting
+      themselves into training for some act of folly, or some crime, it may be,
+      which will in its own time evolve itself as an idea in the consciousness,
+      and by and by ripen into fact.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must not be taken for granted that he was actually on the road to some
+      fearful deed, or that he was an utterly lost soul. He was ready to yield
+      to temptation if it came in his way; he would even court it, but he did
+      not shape out any plan very definitely in his mind, as a more desperate
+      sinner would have done. He liked the pleasurable excitement of emotional
+      relations with his pretty lambs, and enjoyed it under the name of
+      religious communion. There is a border land where one can stand on the
+      territory of legitimate instincts and affections, and yet be so near, the
+      pleasant garden of the Adversary, that his dangerous fruits and flowers
+      are within easy reach. Once tasted, the next step is like to be the
+      scaling of the wall. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was very fond of this border
+      land. His imagination was wandering over it too often when his pen was
+      travelling almost of itself along the weary parallels of the page before
+      him. All at once a blinding flash would come over him the lines of his
+      sermon would run together, the fresh manuscript would shrivel like a dead
+      leaf, and the rows of hard-hearted theology on the shelves before him, and
+      the broken-backed Concordance, and the Holy Book itself, would fade away
+      as he gave himself up to the enchantment of his delirious dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader will probably consider it a discreet arrangement that pretty
+      Susan Posey should seek her pastor in grave company. Mrs. Hopkins
+      willingly consented to the arrangement which had been proposed, and agreed
+      to go with the young lady on her visit to the Rev. Mr. Stoker's study.
+      They were both arrayed in their field-day splendors on this occasion.
+      Susan was lovely in her light curls and blue ribbons, and the becoming
+      dress which could not help betraying the modestly emphasized crescendos
+      and gently graded diminuendos of her figure. She was as round as if she
+      had been turned in a lathe, and as delicately finished as if she had been
+      modelled for a Flora. She had naturally an airy toss of the head and a
+      springy movement of the joints, such as some girls study in the glass (and
+      make dreadful work of it), so that she danced all over without knowing it,
+      like a little lively bobolink on a bulrush. In short, she looked fit to
+      spoil a homily for Saint Anthony himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hopkins was not less perfect in her somewhat different style. She
+      might be called impressive and imposing in her grand-costume, which she
+      wore for this visit. It was a black silk dress, with a crape shawl, a
+      firmly defensive bonnet, and an alpaca umbrella with a stern-looking and
+      decided knob presiding as its handle. The dried-leaf rustle of her silk
+      dress was suggestive of the ripe autumn of life, bringing with it those
+      golden fruits of wisdom and experience which the grave teachers of mankind
+      so justly prefer to the idle blossoms of adolescence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is needless to say that the visit was conducted with the most perfect
+      propriety in all respects. Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take upon herself
+      a large share of the conversation. The minister, on the other hand, would
+      have devoted himself more particularly to Miss Susan, but, with a very
+      natural make-believe obtuseness, the good woman drew his fire so
+      constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly any of his insinuating
+      looks, reached the tender object at which they were aimed. It is probable
+      that his features or tones betrayed some impatience at having thus been
+      foiled of his purpose, for Mrs. Hopkins thought he looked all the time as
+      if he wanted to get rid of her. The three parted, therefore, not in the
+      best humor all round. Mrs. Hopkins declared she'd see the minister in
+      Jericho before she'd fix herself up as if she was goin' to a weddin' to go
+      and see him again. Why, he did n't make any more of her than if she'd been
+      a tabby-cat. She believed some of these ministers thought women's souls
+      dried up like peas in a pod by the time they was forty year old; anyhow,
+      they did n't seem to care any great about 'em, except while they was green
+      and tender. It was all Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-usan, my dear!
+      but as for her, she might jest as well have gone with her apron on, for
+      any notice he took of her. She did n't care, she was n't goin' to be left
+      out when there was talkin' goin' on, anyhow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Susan Posey, on her part, said she did n't like him a bit. He looked so
+      sweet at her, and held his head on one side,&mdash;law! just as if he had
+      been a young beau! And,&mdash;don't tell,&mdash;but he whispered that he
+      wished the next time I came I wouldn't bring that Hopkins woman!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would not be fair to repeat what the minister said to himself; but we
+      may own as much as this, that, if worthy Mrs. Hopkins had heard it, she
+      would have treated him to a string of adjectives which would have greatly
+      enlarged his conceptions of the female vocabulary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII. BATTLE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In tracing the history of a human soul through its commonplace nervous
+      perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations, there is
+      danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject of such
+      weakness. It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses of a young girl; but
+      you who remember when_______ _________, only fifteen years old, untouched
+      by passion, unsullied in name, was found in the shallow brook where she
+      had sternly and surely sought her death,&mdash;(too true! too true!&mdash;ejus
+      animae Jesu miserere!&mdash;but a generation has passed since then,)&mdash;will
+      not smile so scornfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard no longer required the physician's visits, but her mind was
+      very far from being poised in the just balance of its faculties. She was
+      of a good natural constitution and a fine temperament; but she had been
+      overwrought by all that she had passed through, and, though happening to
+      have been born in another land, she was of American descent. Now, it has
+      long been noticed that there is something in the influences, climatic or
+      other, here prevailing, which predisposes to morbid religious excitement.
+      The graver reader will not object to seeing the exact statement of a
+      competent witness belonging to a by-gone century, confirmed as it is by
+      all that we see about us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no Experienced Minister of the Gospel who hath not in the Cases
+      of Tempted Souls often had this Experience, that the ill Cases of their
+      distempered Bodies are the frequent Occasion and Original of their
+      Temptations.&rdquo; &ldquo;The Vitiated Humours in many Persons, yield the Steams
+      whereinto Satan does insinuate himself, till he has gained a sort of
+      Possession in them, or at least an Opportunity to shoot into the Mind as
+      many Fiery Darts as may cause a sad Life unto them; yea, 't is well if
+      Self-Murder be not the sad end into which these hurried. People are thus
+      precipitated. New England, a country where Splenetic Maladies are
+      prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded
+      Numberless Instances, of even pious People, who have contracted these
+      Melancholy Indispositions which have unhinged them from all Service or
+      Comfort; yea, not a few Persons have been hurried thereby to lay Violent
+      Hands upon themselves at the last. These are among the unsearchable
+      Judgments of God!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Such are the words of the Rev. Cotton Mather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister had hardly recovered from his vexatious defeat in the
+      skirmish where the Widow Hopkins was his principal opponent, when he
+      received a note from Miss Silence Withers, which promised another and more
+      important field of conflict. It contained a request that he would visit
+      Myrtle Hazard, who seemed to be in a very excitable and impressible
+      condition, and who might perhaps be easily brought under those influences
+      which she had resisted from her early years, through inborn perversity of
+      character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Rev. Mr. Stoker received this note, he turned very pale,&mdash;which
+      was a bad sign. Then he drew a long breath or two, and presently a flush
+      tingled up to his cheek, where it remained a fixed burning glow. This may
+      have been from the deep interest he felt in Myrtle's spiritual welfare;
+      but he had often been sent for by aged sinners in more immediate peril,
+      apparently, without any such disturbance of the circulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To know whether a minister, young or still in flower; is in safe or
+      dangerous paths, there are two psychometers, a comparison between which
+      will give as infallible a return as the dry and wet bulbs of the ingenious
+      &ldquo;Hygrodeik.&rdquo; The first is the black broadcloth forming the knees of his
+      pantaloons; the second, the patch of carpet before his mirror. If the
+      first is unworn and the second is frayed and threadbare, pray for him. If
+      the first is worn and shiny, while the second keeps its pattern and
+      texture, get him to pray for you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Stoker should have gone down on his knees then and there, and
+      sought fervently for the grace which he was like to need in the dangerous
+      path just opening before him. He did not do this; but he stood up before
+      his looking-glass and parted his hair as carefully as if he had been
+      separating the saints of his congregation from the sinners, to send the
+      list to the statistical columns of a religious newspaper. He selected a
+      professional neckcloth, as spotlessly pure as if it had been washed in
+      innocency, and adjusted it in a tie which was like the white rose of
+      Sharon. Myrtle Hazard was, he thought, on the whole, the handsomest girl
+      he had ever seen; Susan Posey was to her as a buttercup from the meadow is
+      to a tiger-lily. He, knew the nature of the nervous disturbances through
+      which she had been passing, and that she must be in a singularly
+      impressible condition. He felt sure that he could establish intimate
+      spiritual relations with her by drawing out her repressed sympathies, by
+      feeding the fires of her religious imagination, by exercising all those
+      lesser arts of fascination which are so familiar to the Don Giovannis, and
+      not always unknown to the San Giovannis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the hard doctrines which he used to produce sensations with in the
+      pulpit, it would have been a great pity to worry so lovely a girl, in such
+      a nervous state, with them. He remembered a savory text about being made
+      all things to all men, which would bear application particularly well to
+      the case of this young woman. He knew how to weaken his divinity, on
+      occasion, as well as an old housewife to weaken her tea, lest it should
+      keep people awake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Stoker was a man of emotions. He loved to feel his heart
+      beat; he loved all the forms of non-alcoholic drunkenness, which are so
+      much better than the vinous, because they taste themselves so keenly,
+      whereas the other (according to the statement of experts who are familiar
+      with its curious phenomena) has a certain sense of unreality connected
+      with it. He delighted in the reflex stimulus of the excitement he produced
+      in others by working on their feelings. A powerful preacher is open to the
+      same sense of enjoyment&mdash;an awful, tremulous, goose-flesh sort of
+      state, but still enjoyment&mdash;that a great tragedian feels when he
+      curdles the blood of his audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Stoker was noted for the vividness of his descriptions of the future
+      which was in store for the great bulk of his fellow-townsmen and
+      fellow-worlds-men. He had three sermons on this subject, known to all the
+      country round as the sweating sermon, the fainting sermon, and the
+      convulsion-fit sermon, from the various effects said to have been produced
+      by them when delivered before large audiences. It might be supposed that
+      his reputation as a terrorist would have interfered with his attempts to
+      ingratiate himself with his young favorites. But the tragedian who is
+      fearful as Richard or as Iago finds that no hindrance to his success in
+      the part of Romeo. Indeed, women rather take to terrible people;
+      prize-fighters, pirates, highwaymen, rebel generals, Grand Turks, and
+      Bluebeards generally have a fascination for the sex; your virgin has a
+      natural instinct to saddle your lion. The fact, therefore, that the young
+      girl had sat under his tremendous pulpitings, through the sweating sermon,
+      the fainting sermon, and the convulsion-fit sermon, did not secure her
+      against the influence of his milder approaches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was naturally surprised at receiving a visit from him; but she was
+      in just that unbalanced state in which almost any impression is welcome.
+      He showed so much interest, first in her health, then in her thoughts and
+      feelings, always following her lead in the conversation, that before he
+      left her she felt as if she had made a great discovery; namely, that this
+      man, so formidable behind the guns of his wooden bastion, was a most
+      tenderhearted and sympathizing person when he came out of it unarmed. How
+      delightful he was as he sat talking in the twilight in low and tender
+      tones, with respectful pauses of listening, in which he looked as if he
+      too had just made a discovery,&mdash;of an angel, to wit, to whom he could
+      not help unbosoming his tenderest emotions, as to a being from another
+      sphere!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a new experience to Myrtle. She was all ready for the spiritual
+      manipulations of an expert. The excitability which had been showing itself
+      in spasms and strange paroxysms had been transferred to those nervous
+      centres, whatever they may be, cerebral or ganglionic, which are concerned
+      in the emotional movements of the religious nature. It was taking her at
+      an unfair disadvantage, no doubt. In the old communion, some priest might
+      have wrought upon her while in this condition, and we might have had at
+      this very moment among us another Saint Theresa or Jacqueline Pascal. She
+      found but a dangerous substitute in the spiritual companionship of a saint
+      like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      People think the confessional is unknown in our Protestant churches. It is
+      a great mistake. The principal change is, that there is no screen between
+      the penitent and the father confessor. The minister knew his rights, and
+      very soon asserted them. He gave aunt Silence to understand that he could
+      talk more at ease if he and his young disciple were left alone together.
+      Cynthia Badlam did not like this arrangement. She was afraid to speak
+      about it; but she glared at them aslant, with the look of a biting horse
+      when his eyes follow one sideways until they are all white but one little
+      vicious spark of pupil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not very long before the Rev. Mr. Stoker had established pretty
+      intimate relations with the household at The Poplars. He had reason to
+      think, he assured Miss Silence, that Myrtle was in a state of mind which
+      promised a complete transformation of her character. He used the phrases
+      of his sect, of course, in talking with the elderly lady; but the language
+      which he employed with the young girl was free from those mechanical
+      expressions which would have been like to offend or disgust her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to his rougher formulae, he knew better than to apply them to a
+      creature of her fine texture. If he had been disposed to do so, her simple
+      questions and answers to his inquiries would have made it difficult. But
+      it was in her bright and beautiful eyes, in her handsome features, and her
+      winning voice, that he found his chief obstacle. How could he look upon
+      her face in its loveliness, and talk to her as if she must be under the
+      wrath and curse of God for the mere fact of her existence? It seemed more
+      natural and it certainly was more entertaining, to question her in such a
+      way as to find out what kind of theology had grown up in her mind as the
+      result of her training in the complex scheme of his doctrinal school. And
+      as he knew that the merest child, so soon as it begins to think at all,
+      works out for itself something like a theory of human nature, he pretty
+      soon began sounding Myrtle's thoughts on this matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was her own idea; he would be pleased to know, about her natural
+      condition as one born of a sinful race, and her inherited liabilities on
+      that account?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle smiled like a little heathen, as she was, according to the standard
+      of her earlier teachings. That kind of talk used to worry her when she was
+      a child, sometimes. Yes, she remembered its coming back to her in a dream
+      she had, when&mdash;when&mdash;(She did not finish her sentence.) Did he
+      think she hated every kind of goodness and loved every kind of evil? Did
+      he think she was hateful to the Being who made her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister looked straight into the bright, brave, tender eyes, and
+      answered, &ldquo;Nothing in heaven or on earth could help loving you, Myrtle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pretty well for a beginning!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle saw nothing but pious fervor in this florid sentiment. But as she
+      was honest and clear-sighted, she could not accept a statement which
+      seemed so plainly in contradiction with his common teachings, without
+      bringing his flattering assertion to the test of another question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Did he suppose, she asked, that any persons could be Christians, who could
+      not tell the day or the year of their change from children of darkness to
+      children of light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shrewd clergyman, whose creed could be lax enough on occasion, had
+      provided himself with authorities of all kinds to meet these awkward
+      questions in casuistical divinity. He had hunted up recipes for spiritual
+      neuralgia, spasms, indigestion, psora, hypochondriasis, just as doctors do
+      for their bodily counterparts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To be sure they could. Why, what did the great Richard Baxter say in his
+      book on Infant Baptism? That at a meeting of many eminent Christians, some
+      of them very famous ministers, when it was desired that every one should
+      give an account of the time and manner of his conversion, there was but
+      one of them all could do it. And as for himself, Mr. Baxter said, he could
+      not remember the day or the year when he began to be sincere, as he called
+      it. Why, did n't President Wheelock say to a young man who consulted him,
+      that some persons might be true Christians without suspecting it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this was so very different from the uncompromising way in which
+      religious doctrines used to be presented to the young girl from the
+      pulpit, that it naturally opened her heart and warmed her affections.
+      Remember, if she needs excuse, that the defeated instincts of a strong
+      nature were rushing in upon her, clamorous for their rights, and that she
+      was not yet mature enough to understand and manage them. The paths of love
+      and religion are at the fork of a road which every maiden travels. If some
+      young hand does not open the turnpike gate of the first, she is pretty
+      sure to try the other, which has no toll-bar. It is also very commonly
+      noticed that these two paths, after diverging awhile, run into each other.
+      True love leads many wandering souls into the better way. Nor is it rare
+      to see those who started in company for the gates of pearl seated together
+      on the banks that border the avenue to that other portal, gathering the
+      roses for which it is so famous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with the most curious interest that the minister listened to the
+      various heresies into which her reflections had led her. Somehow or other
+      they did not sound so dangerous coming from her lips as when they were
+      uttered by the coarser people of the less rigorous denominations, or
+      preached in the sermons of heretical clergymen. He found it impossible to
+      think of her in connection with those denunciations of sinners for which
+      his discourses had been noted. Some of the sharp old church-members began
+      to complain that his exhortations were losing their pungency. The truth
+      was, he was preaching for Myrtle Hazard. He was getting bewitched and
+      driven beside himself by the intoxication of his relations with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this time she was utterly unconscious of any charm that she was
+      exercising, or of being herself subject to any personal fascination. She
+      loved to read the books of ecstatic contemplation which he furnished her.
+      She loved to sing the languishing hymns which he selected for her. She
+      loved to listen to his devotional rhapsodies, hardly knowing sometimes
+      whether she were in the body, or out of the body, while he lifted her upon
+      the wings of his passion-kindled rhetoric. The time came when she had
+      learned to listen for his step, when her eyes glistened at meeting him,
+      when the words he uttered were treasured as from something more than a
+      common mortal, and the book he had touched was like a saintly relic. It
+      never suggested itself to her for an instant that this was anything more
+      than such a friendship as Mercy might have cultivated with Great-Heart.
+      She gave her confidence simply because she was very young and innocent.
+      The green tendrils of the growing vine must wind round something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The seasons had been changing their scenery while the events we have told
+      were occurring, and the loveliest days of autumn were now shining. To
+      those who know the &ldquo;Indian summer&rdquo; of our Northern States, it is needless
+      to describe the influence it exerts on the senses and the soul. The
+      stillness of the landscape in that beautiful time is as if the planet were
+      sleeping, like a top, before it begins to rock with the storms of autumn.
+      All natures seem to find themselves more truly in its light; love grows
+      more tender, religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the
+      past, grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe
+      thoughts which he will tie in sheaves of verses by his winter fireside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The minister had got into the way of taking frequent walks with Myrtle,
+      whose health had seemed to require the open air, and who was fast
+      regaining her natural look. Under the canopy of the scarlet, orange, and
+      crimson leaved maples, of the purple and violet clad oaks, of the birches
+      in their robes of sunshine, and the beeches in their clinging drapery of
+      sober brown, they walked together while he discoursed of the joys of
+      heaven, the sweet communion of kindred souls, the ineffable bliss of a
+      world where love would be immortal and beauty should never know decay. And
+      while she listened, the strange light of the leaves irradiated the
+      youthful figure of Myrtle, as when the stained window let in its colors on
+      Madeline, the rose-bloom and the amethyst and the glory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes! we shall be angels together,&rdquo; exclaimed the Rev. Mr. Stoker. &ldquo;Our
+      souls were made for immortal union. I know it; I feel it in every throb of
+      my heart. Even in this world you are as an angel to me, lifting me into
+      the heaven where I shall meet you again, or it will not be heaven. Oh, if
+      on earth our communion could have been such as it must be hereafter! O
+      Myrtle, Myrtle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stretched out his hands as if to clasp hers between them in the rapture
+      of his devotion. Was it the light reflected from the glossy leaves of the
+      poison sumach which overhung the path that made his cheek look so pale?
+      Was he going to kneel to her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle turned her dark eyes on him with a simple wonder that saw an excess
+      of saintly ardor in these demonstrations, and drew back from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think of heaven always as the place where I shall meet my mother,&rdquo; she
+      said calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These words recalled the man to himself for a moment and he was silent.
+      Presently he seated himself on a stone. His lips were tremulous as he
+      said, in a low tone, &ldquo;Sit down by me, Myrtle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered, with something which chilled him in her voice, &ldquo;we
+      will not stay here any longer; it is time to go home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Full time!&rdquo; muttered Cynthia Badlam, whose watchful eyes had been upon
+      them, peering through a screen of yellow leaves, that turned her face pale
+      as if with deadly passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV. FLANK MOVEMENT.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Miss Cynthia Badlam was in the habit of occasionally visiting the Widow
+      Hopkins. Some said but then people will talk, especially in the country,
+      where they have not much else to do, except in haying-time. She had always
+      known the widow, long before Mr. Gridley came there to board, or any other
+      special event happened in her family. No matter what people said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Badlam called to see Mrs. Hopkins, then, and the two had a long talk
+      together, of which only a portion is on record. Here are such fragments as
+      have been preserved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would I do about it? Why, I'd put a stop to such carry'n's on,
+      mighty quick, if I had to tie the girl to the bedpost, and have a bulldog
+      that world take the seat out of any pair of black pantaloons that come
+      within forty rod of her,&mdash;that's what I'd do about it! He undertook
+      to be mighty sweet with our Susan one while, but ever sence he's been
+      talkin' religion with Myrtle Hazard he's let us alone. Do as I did when he
+      asked our Susan to come to his study,&mdash;stick close to your girl and
+      you 'll put a stop to all this business. He won't make love to two at
+      once, unless they 're both pretty young, I 'll warrant. Follow her round,
+      Miss Cynthy, and keep your eyes on her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have watched her like a cat, Mrs. Hopkins, but I can't follow her
+      everywhere,&mdash;she won't stand what Susan Posey 'll stand. There's no
+      use our talking to her,&mdash;we 've done with that at our house. You
+      never know what that Indian blood of hers will make her do. She's too
+      high-strung for us to bit and bridle. I don't want to see her name in the
+      paper again, alongside of that&rdquo; (She did not finish the sentence.) &ldquo;I'd
+      rather have her fished dead out of the river, or find her where she found
+      her uncle Malachi!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't think, Miss Cynthy, that the man means to inveigle the girl
+      with the notion of marryin' her by and by, after poor Mrs. Stoker's dead
+      and gone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Lord in heaven forbid!&rdquo; exclaimed Miss Cynthia, throwing up her
+      hands. &ldquo;A child of fifteen years old, if she is a woman to look at!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's too bad,&mdash;it's too bad to think of, Miss Cynthy; and there's
+      that poor woman dyin' by inches, and Miss Bathsheby settin' with her day
+      and night, she has n't got a bit of her father in her, it's all her
+      mother,&mdash;and that man, instead of bein' with her to comfort her as
+      any man ought to be with his wife, in sickness and in health, that's what
+      he promised. I 'm sure when my poor husband was sick.... To think of that
+      man goin' about to talk religion to all the prettiest girls he can find in
+      the parish, and his wife at home like to leave him so soon,&mdash;it's a
+      shame,&mdash;so it is, come now! Miss Cynthy, there's one of the best men
+      and one of the learnedest men that ever lived that's a real friend of
+      Myrtle Hazard, and a better friend to her than she knows of,&mdash;for
+      ever sence he brought her home, he feels jest like a father to her,&mdash;and
+      that man is Mr. Gridley, that lives in this house. It's him I 'll speak to
+      about the minister's carry'in's on. He knows about his talking sweet to
+      our Susan, and he'll put things to rights! He's a master hand when he does
+      once take hold of anything, I tell you that! Jest get him to shet up them
+      books of his, and take hold of anybody's troubles, and you'll see how he
+      'll straighten 'em out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pattering of little feet on the stairs, and the two small
+      twins, &ldquo;Sossy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Minthy,&rdquo; in the home dialect, came hand in hand into
+      the room, Miss Susan leaving them at the threshold, not wishing to
+      interrupt the two ladies, and being much interested also in listening to
+      Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who was reading some of his last poems to her, with
+      great delight to both of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The good woman rose to take them from Susan, and guide their uncertain
+      steps. &ldquo;My babies, I call 'em, Miss Cynthy. Ain't they nice children? Come
+      to go to bed, little dears? Only a few minutes, Miss Cynthy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took them into the bedroom on the same floor, where they slept, and,
+      leaving the door open, began undressing them. Cynthia turned her
+      rocking-chair round so as to face the open door. She looked on while the
+      little creatures were being undressed; she heard the few words they lisped
+      as their infant prayer, she saw them laid in their beds, and heard their
+      pretty good-night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A lone woman to whom all the sweet cares of maternity have been denied
+      cannot look upon a sight like this without feeling the void in her own
+      heart where a mother's affection should have nestled. Cynthia sat
+      perfectly still, without rocking, and watched kind Mrs. Hopkins at her
+      quasi parental task. A tear stole down her rigid face as she saw the
+      rounded limbs of the children bared in their white beauty, and their
+      little heads laid on the pillow. They were sleeping quietly when Mrs.
+      Hopkins left the room for a moment on some errand of her own. Cynthia rose
+      softly from her chair, stole swiftly to the bedside, and printed a long,
+      burning kiss on each of their foreheads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Mrs. Hopkins came back, she found the maiden lady sitting in her
+      place just as she left her, but rocking in her chair and sobbing as one in
+      sudden pangs of grief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a great trouble, Miss Cynthy,&rdquo; she said,&mdash;&ldquo;a great trouble to
+      have such a child as Myrtle to think of and to care for. If she was like
+      our Susan Posey, now!&mdash;but we must do the best we can; and if Mr.
+      Gridley once sets himself to it, you may depend upon it he 'll make it all
+      come right. I wouldn't take on about it if I was you. You let me speak to
+      our Mr. Gridley. We all have our troubles. It is n't everybody that can
+      ride to heaven in a C-spring shay, as my poor husband used to say; and
+      life 's a road that 's got a good many thank-you-ma'ams to go bumpin'
+      over, says he.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Badlam acquiesced in the philosophical reflections of the late Mr.
+      Ammi Hopkins, and left it to his widow to carry out her own suggestion in
+      reference to consulting Master Gridley. The good woman took the first
+      opportunity she had to introduce the matter, a little diffusely, as is
+      often the way of widows who keep boarders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's something going on I don't like, Mr. Gridley. They tell me that
+      Minister Stoker is following round after Myrtle Hazard, talking religion
+      at her jest about the same way he'd have liked to with our Susan, I
+      calculate. If he wants to talk religion to me or Silence Withers,&mdash;well,
+      no, I don't feel sure about Silence,&mdash;she ain't as young as she used
+      to be, but then ag'in she ain't so fur gone as some, and she's got money,&mdash;but
+      if he wants to talk religion with me, he may come and welcome. But as for
+      Myrtle Hazard, she's been sick, and it's left her a little flighty by what
+      they say, and to have a minister round her all the time ravin' about the
+      next world as if he had a latch-key to the front door of it, is no way to
+      make her come to herself again. I 've seen more than one young girl sent
+      off to the asylum by that sort of work, when, if I'd only had 'em, I'd
+      have made 'em sweep the stairs, and mix the puddin's, and tend the babies,
+      and milk the cow, and keep 'em too busy all day to be thinkin' about
+      themselves, and have 'em dress up nice evenin's and see some young folks
+      and have a good time, and go to meetin' Sundays, and then have done with
+      the minister, unless it was old Father Pemberton. He knows forty times as
+      much about heaven as that Stoker man does, or ever 's like to,&mdash;why
+      don't they run after him, I should like to know? Ministers are men, come
+      now; and I don't want to say anything against women, Mr. Gridley, but
+      women are women, that's the fact of it, and half of 'em are hystericky
+      when they're young; and I've heard old Dr. Hurlbut say many a time that he
+      had to lay in an extra stock of valerian and assafaetida whenever there
+      was a young minister round,&mdash;for there's plenty of religious ravin',
+      says he, that's nothin' but hysterics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [Mr. Fronde thinks that was the trouble with Bloody Queen Mary, but the
+      old physician did not get the idea from him.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, and what do you propose to do about the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker
+      and his young proselyte, Miss Myrtle Hazard?&rdquo; said Mr. Gridley, when Mrs.
+      Hopkins at last gave him a chance to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Gridley,&rdquo;&mdash;Mrs. Hopkins looked full upon him as she spoke,&mdash;&ldquo;people
+      used to say that you was a good man and a great man and one of the
+      learnedest men alive, but that you didn't know much nor care for much
+      except books. I know you used to live pretty much to yourself when you
+      first came to board in this house. But you've been very good to my son;
+      ... and if Gifted lives till you... till you are in... your grave... he
+      will write a poem&mdash;I know he will&mdash;that will tell your goodness
+      to babes unborn.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [Here Master Gridley groaned, and repeated to himself silently,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;Scindentur vestes gemmae frangentur et aurum,
+     Carmina quam tribuent fama perennis erit.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      All this inwardly, and without interrupting the worthy woman's talk.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if ever Gifted makes a book,&mdash;don't say anything about it, Mr.
+      Gridley, for goodness' sake, for he wouldn't have anybody know it, only I
+      can't help thinking that some time or other he will print a book,&mdash;and
+      if he does, I know whose name he'll put at the head of it,&mdash;'Dedicated
+      to B. G., with the gratitude and respect&mdash;' There, now, I had n't any
+      business to say a word about it, and it's only jest in case he does, you
+      know. I'm sure you deserve it all. You've helped him with the best of
+      advice. And you've been kind to me when I was in trouble. And you've been
+      like a grandfather&rdquo; [Master Gridley winced,&mdash;why could n't the woman
+      have said father?&mdash;that grand struck his ear like a spade going into
+      the gravel] &ldquo;to those babes, poor little souls! left on my door-step like
+      a couple of breakfast rolls,&mdash;only you know it's the baker left then.
+      I believe in you, Mr. Gridley, as I believe in my Maker and in Father
+      Pemberton,&mdash;but, poor man, he's old, and you won't be old these
+      twenty years yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [Master Gridley shook his head as if to say that was n't so, but felt
+      comforted and refreshed.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've got to help Myrtle Hazard again. You brought her home when she
+      come so nigh drowning. You got the old doctor to go and see her when she
+      come so nigh being bewitched with the magnetism and nonsense, whatever
+      they call it, and the young doctor was so nigh bein' crazy, too. I know,
+      for Nurse Byloe told me all about it. And now Myrtle's gettin' run away
+      with by that pesky Minister Stoker. Cynthy Badlam was here yesterday
+      crying and sobbing as if her heart would break about it. For my part, I
+      did n't think Cynthy cared so much for the girl as all that, but I saw her
+      takin' on dreadfully with my own eyes. That man's like a hen-hawk among
+      the chickens, first he picks up one, and then he picks up another. I
+      should like to know if nobody but young folks has souls to be saved, and
+      specially young women!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me all you know about Myrtle Hazard and Joseph Bellamy Stoker,&rdquo; said
+      Master Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon that good lady related all that Miss Badlam had imparted to her,
+      of which the reader knows the worst, being the interview of which the keen
+      spinster had been a witness, having followed them for the express purpose
+      of knowing, in her own phrase, what the minister was up to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not to be supposed that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet kindness
+      of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best of her
+      adventure. He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to consider
+      himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the thought that
+      he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been in the way of
+      considering himself, might perhaps do something even more important than
+      his previous achievement to save this young girl from the dangers that
+      surrounded her. He loved his classics and his old books; he took an
+      interest, too, in the newspapers and periodicals that brought the
+      fermenting thought and the electric life of the great world into his
+      lonely study; but these things just about him were getting strong hold on
+      him, and most of all the fortunes of this beautiful young woman. How
+      strange! For a whole generation he had lived in no nearer relation to his
+      fellow-creatures than that of a half-fossilized teacher; and all at once
+      he found himself face to face with the very most intense form of life, the
+      counsellor of threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled loveliness.
+      What business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of which he had
+      said in &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe,&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Every man leads or is led by
+      something that goes on four legs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes all
+      human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of dilatation
+      and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he were a head
+      taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an extra gallon of
+      air at every breath, Then&mdash;you who have written a book that holds
+      your heart-leaves between its pages will understand the movement&mdash;he
+      took down &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe&rdquo; for a refreshing draught from his own
+      wellspring. He opened as chance ordered it, and his eyes fell on the
+      following passage:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The true American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch, the
+      Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.' A homely
+      utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and hierarchies.
+      These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that some things can NOT be
+      done as well as others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, now!&rdquo; he said, talking to himself in his usual way, &ldquo;is n't that
+      good? It always seems to me that I find something to the point when I open
+      that book. 'Some things can be done as well as others,' can they? Suppose
+      I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle Hazard? I think I may
+      say I am old and incombustible enough to be trusted. She does not seem to
+      be a safe neighbor to very inflammable bodies?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was sitting in the room long known as the Study, or the Library,
+      when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her. Miss Cynthia,
+      who received him, led him to this apartment and left him alone with
+      Myrtle. She welcomed him very cordially, but colored as she did so,&mdash;his
+      visit was a surprise. She was at work on a piece of embroidery. Her first
+      instinctive movement was to thrust it out of sight with the thought of
+      concealment; but she checked this, and before the blush of detection had
+      reached her cheek, the blush of ingenuous shame for her weakness had
+      caught and passed it, and was in full possession. She sat with her worsted
+      pattern held bravely in sight, and her cheek as bright as its liveliest
+      crimson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Cynthia has let me in upon you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;or I should not have
+      ventured to disturb you in this way. A work of art, is it, Miss Myrtle
+      Hazard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridley,&mdash;for my pastor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! oh! That is well. A good old man. I have a great regard for the Rev.
+      Eliphalet Pemberton. I wish all ministers were as good and simple and
+      pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. And I wish all the young
+      people thought as much about their elders as you do, Miss Myrtle Hazard.
+      We that are old love little acts of kindness. You gave me more pleasure
+      than you knew of, my dear, when you worked that handsome cushion for me.
+      The old minister will be greatly pleased,&mdash;poor old man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father
+      Pemberton. They are for&mdash;Mr. Stoker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker! He is not an old man, the Rev. Joseph
+      Bellamy Stoker. He may perhaps be a widower before a great while.&mdash;Does
+      he know that you are working those slippers for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley. I meant them for a surprise to him. He has been
+      so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I thought anybody
+      did. He is so different from what I thought; he makes religion so
+      perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would agree with him, if they
+      could only hear him talk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Greatly interested in the souls of his people, is n't he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too much, almost, I am afraid. He says he has been too hard in his
+      sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his hearers
+      enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think he worries himself about the souls of young women rather
+      more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something in the tone of this question that helped its slightly
+      sarcastic expression. Myrtle's jealousy for her minister's sincerity was
+      roused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley? I am sure I wish you or anybody could
+      have heard him talk as I have. There is no age in souls, he says; and I am
+      sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No age in souls,&mdash;no age in souls. Souls of forty as young as souls
+      of fifteen; that 's it.&rdquo; Master Gridley did not say this loud. But he did
+      speak as follows: &ldquo;I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev. Joseph
+      Bellamy Stoker's love of being useful to people of all ages. You have had
+      comfort in his companionship, and there are others who might be very glad
+      to profit by it. I know a very excellent person who has had trials, and is
+      greatly interested in religious conversation. Do you think he would be
+      willing to let this friend of mine share in the privileges of spiritual
+      intercourse which you enjoy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was but one answer possible. Of course he would.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope it is so, my dear young lady. But listen to me one moment. I love
+      you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your own&mdash;grandfather.&rdquo;
+       (There was moral heroism in that word.) &ldquo;I love you as if you were of my
+      own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer me, I mean to keep
+      watch against all dangers that threaten you in mind, body, or estate. You
+      may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt me; but until you say you
+      distrust me, when any trouble comes near you, you will find me there. Now,
+      my dear child, you ought to know that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has
+      the reputation of being too fond of prosecuting religious inquiries with
+      young and handsome women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle's eyes fell,&mdash;a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,&mdash;a
+      very pretty girl, as you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about with
+      him. He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death, and
+      cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother's blood if nature did not tell
+      her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first good-looking
+      young woman he can get to listen to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man alone,
+      and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I would,&rdquo; said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts, her
+      shame, her pride, were all excited. &ldquo;Who is your friend, Mr. Gridley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An excellent woman,&mdash;Mrs. Hopkins. You know her, Gifted Hopkins's
+      mother, with whom I am residing. Shall the minister be given to understand
+      that you will see him hereafter in her company?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations. &ldquo;As you
+      say,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Is there nobody that I can trust, or is everybody
+      hunting me like a bird?&rdquo; She hid her face in her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can trust me, my dear,&rdquo; said Byles Gridley. &ldquo;Take your needle, my
+      child, and work at your pattern,&mdash;it will come out a rose by and by.
+      Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken patiently, and the
+      pattern will come out all right like the embroidery. You can trust me.
+      Good-by, my dear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let her finish the slippers,&rdquo; the old man said to himself as he trudged
+      home, &ldquo;and make 'em big enough for Father Pemberton. He shall have his
+      feet in 'em yet, or my name is n't Byles Gridley!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV. ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had ceased to
+      be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long entry of the
+      old mansion. Then she went to her little chamber and sat down in a sort of
+      revery. She could not doubt his sincerity, and there was something in her
+      own consciousness which responded to the suspicions he had expressed with
+      regard to the questionable impulses of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other words
+      which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest lessons and
+      our sharpest rebukes. The hint another gives us finds whole trains of
+      thought which have been getting themselves ready to be shaped in inwardly
+      articulated words, and only awaited the touch of a burning syllable, as
+      the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for a spark to become letters of
+      fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his
+      &ldquo;developing&rdquo; room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of the
+      truth just mentioned. There is nothing to be seen on the glass just taken
+      from the camera. But there is a potential, though invisible, picture hid
+      in the creamy film which covers it. Watch him as he pours a wash over it,
+      and you will see that miracle wrought which is at once a surprise and a
+      charm,&mdash;the sudden appearance of your own features where a moment
+      before was a blank without a vestige of intelligence or beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had called up
+      a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in the
+      consciousness of Myrtle Hazard. It was not merely their significance, it
+      was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting time. If they had been
+      uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was taking the first stitch on
+      the embroidered slippers, they would have been as useless as the artist's
+      developing solution on a plate which had never been exposed in the camera.
+      But she had been of late in training for her lesson in ways that neither
+      she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has shrugged his (or her)
+      shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps hear this one which
+      follows more cheerfully. The physician in the Arabian Nights made his
+      patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which contained
+      drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was the drugs that made the sick
+      man get well, or the exercise, is not of so much consequence as the fact
+      that he did at any rate get well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had given
+      her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed just now more
+      than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms. And so it happened that,
+      while he had been stimulating all those imaginative and emotional elements
+      of her nature which responded to the keys he loved to play upon, the
+      restoring influences of the sweet autumnal air, the mellow sunshine, the
+      soothing aspects of the woods and fields and sky, had been quietly doing
+      their work. The color was fast returning to her cheek, and the discords of
+      her feelings and her thoughts gradually resolving themselves into the
+      harmonious and cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health. It needed but
+      the timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of her
+      daily mode of being. The word had been spoken. She saw its truth; but how
+      hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast out an unworthy
+      intimate! How hard for any!&mdash;but for a girl so young, and who had as
+      yet found so little to love and trust, how cruelly hard!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue. Her eyes were fixed on
+      a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting. It was a very
+      singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been brought over by the
+      first emigrant of her race. The legs and arms were curiously turned in
+      spirals, the suggestions of which were half pleasing and half repulsive.
+      Instead of the claw-feet common in furniture of a later date, each of its
+      legs rested on a misshapen reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its
+      weight, as if it were squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature. Over
+      this chair hung the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and
+      arms, the specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left
+      wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich crimson
+      brocade. Over Myrtle's bed hung that other portrait, which was to her
+      almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa to trustful souls of the
+      Roman faith. She had longed for these pictures while she was in her
+      strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung up in her chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the constellations
+      which she had seen shining brightly almost overhead in the early evening,
+      when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in the very attitude in
+      which she was sitting hours before. Her lamp had burned out, and the
+      starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber. She started to find herself
+      sitting there, chilled and stiffened by long remaining in one posture; and
+      as her consciousness returned, a great fear seized her, and she sprang for
+      a match. It broke with the quick movement she made to kindle it, and she
+      snatched another as if a fiend were after her. It flashed and went out. Oh
+      the terror, the terror! The darkness seemed alive with fearful presences.
+      The lurid glare of her own eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain. She
+      tried one more match; it kindled as it should, and she lighted another
+      lamp. Her first impulse was to assure herself that nothing was changed in
+      the familiar objects around her. She held the lamp up to the picture of
+      Judith Pride. The beauty looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of
+      lofty recognition in her eyes; but there she was, as always. She turned
+      the light upon the pale face of the martyr-portrait. It looked troubled
+      and faded, as it seemed to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she
+      remembered from her childhood. Then she threw the light on the old chair,
+      and, shuddering, caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms
+      and legs, and the flattened reptiles on which it stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting there,
+      still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors. Two
+      women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of life,&mdash;so
+      it appeared to her,&mdash;yet both had long been what is called, in our
+      poor language, dead. One came in all the glory of her ripened beauty,
+      bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid animal
+      equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the lusty lovers
+      of complete muliebrity. The other,&mdash;how delicate, how translucent,
+      how aerial she seemed! yet real and true to the lineaments of her whom the
+      young girl looked upon as her hereditary protector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of loathing and scorn,
+      pointed to one of the reptiles beneath the feet of the chair. And while
+      Myrtle's eyes followed hers, the flattened and half-crushed creature
+      seemed to swell and spread like his relative in the old fable, like the
+      black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size, and at last of
+      colossal proportions. And, fearful to relate, the batrachian features
+      humanized themselves as the monster grew, and, shaping themselves more and
+      more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle saw in them a hideous likeness
+      of&mdash;No! no! it was too horrible, was that the face which had been so
+      close to hers but yesterday? were those the lips, the breath from which
+      had stirred her growing curls as he leaned over her while they read
+      together some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as much like a
+      love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A shadow of disgust&mdash;the
+      natural repugnance of loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and
+      she shrieked, as she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other
+      figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin hand
+      seemed to take hers. The warm life went out of her, and she was to herself
+      as a dimly conscious shadow that glided with passive acquiescence wherever
+      it was led. Presently she found herself in a half-lighted apartment, where
+      there were books on the shelves around, and a desk with loose manuscripts
+      lying on it, and a little mirror with a worn bit of carpet before it. And
+      while she looked, a great serpent writhed in through the half-open door,
+      and made the circuit of the room, laying one huge ring all round it, and
+      then, going round again, laid another ring over the first, and so on until
+      he was wound all round the room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving
+      a hollow in the centre; and then the serpent seemed to arch his neck in
+      the air, and bring his head close down to Myrtle's face; and the features
+      were not those of a serpent, but of a man, and it hissed out the words she
+      had read that very day in a little note which said, &ldquo;Come to my study
+      to-morrow, and we will read hymns together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and the
+      two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in their own.
+      Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to their influence,
+      and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for each would have led
+      her her own way,&mdash;whither she knew not. It was the strife of her
+      &ldquo;Vision,&rdquo; only in another form,&mdash;the contest of two lives her blood
+      inherited for the mastery of her soul. The might of beauty conquered.
+      Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the lovely phantom, which
+      seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished fire of life, and so like
+      herself as she would grow to be when noon should have ripened her into
+      maturity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
+      corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes, which
+      seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness. Then came a
+      confused sense of eager search for something that she knew was hidden,
+      whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards of a floor, or in some
+      hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in a forgotten drawer, or in a
+      heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but somewhere there was something
+      which she was to find, and which, once found, was to be her talisman. She
+      was in the midst of this eager search when she awoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her fears
+      she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what meaning
+      there was in this frightfully real dream. Her courage came back as her
+      senses assured her that all around her was natural, as when she left it.
+      She determined to follow the lead of the strange hint her nightmare had
+      given her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
+      upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and large
+      drawers below. &ldquo;That desk is yours, Myrtle,&rdquo; her uncle Malachi had once
+      said to her; &ldquo;and there is a trick or two about it that it will pay you to
+      study.&rdquo; Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about the mystery of the
+      old desk. All the little drawers, of which there were a considerable
+      number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as she thought, she had
+      carefully examined. She determined to make one more trial. It was the dead
+      of the night, and this was a fearful old place to be wandering about; but
+      she was possessed with an urgent feeling which would not let her wait
+      until daylight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stole like a ghost from her chamber. She glided along the narrow
+      entries as she had seemed to move in her dream. She opened the folding
+      doors of the great upright desk. She had always before examined it by
+      daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the little drawers out,
+      she had never thoroughly explored the recesses which received them. But in
+      her new-born passion of search, she held her light so as to illuminate all
+      these deeper spaces. At once she thought she saw the marks of pressure
+      with a finger. She pressed her own finger on this place, and, as it
+      yielded with a slight click, a small mahogany pilaster sprang forward,
+      revealing its well-kept secret that it was the mask of a tall, deep, very
+      narrow drawer. There was something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle turned it
+      over, a golden bracelet fell into her hand. She recognized it at once as
+      that which had been long ago the ornament of the fair woman whose portrait
+      hung in her chamber. She clasped it upon her wrist, and from that moment
+      she felt as if she were the captive of the lovely phantom who had been
+      with her in her dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The old man walked last night, God save us!&rdquo; said Kitty Fagan to Biddy
+      Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious discovery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI. VICTORY.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was an
+      unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her imagination
+      tangled together into a kind of vital coherence. The philosopher who goes
+      to the bottom of things will remark that all the elements of her fantastic
+      melodrama had been furnished her while waking. Master Byles Gridley's
+      penetrating and stinging caution was the text, and the grotesque carvings
+      and the portraits furnished the &ldquo;properties&rdquo; with which her own mind had
+      wrought up this scenic show.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so easy
+      to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the hour when
+      she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist. She felt a sudden
+      loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a saint. A young girl's
+      caprice? Possibly. A return of the natural instincts of girlhood with
+      returning health? Perhaps so. An impression produced by her dream? An
+      effect of an influx from another sphere of being? The working of Master
+      Byles Gridley's emphatic warning? The magic of her new talisman?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may safely leave these questions for the present. As we have to tell,
+      not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should have done
+      it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it would be to lay
+      bare all the springs of her action. Until this period, she had hardly
+      thought of herself as a born beauty. The flatteries she had received from
+      time to time were like the chips and splinters under the green wood, when
+      the chill women pretended to make a fire in the best parlor at The
+      Poplars, which had a way of burning themselves out, hardly warming, much
+      less kindling, the fore-stick and the back-log.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to look
+      upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet. Its suggestions betrayed
+      themselves in one of her first movements. Nothing could be soberer than
+      the cut of the dresses which the propriety of the severe household had
+      established as the rule of her costume. But the girl was no sooner out of
+      bed than a passion came over her to see herself in that less jealous
+      arrangement of drapery which the Beauty of the last century had insisted
+      on as presenting her most fittingly to the artist. She rolled up the
+      sleeves of her dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and
+      glanced from her glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the
+      glass. Myrtle was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things
+      untaught. She did not say in so many words, &ldquo;I too am a beauty,&rdquo; but she
+      could mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions of feature and
+      form which had made the original of the picture before her famous. The
+      same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded neck, the same
+      more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely shaped arms and
+      hands, and something very like the same features startled her by their
+      identity in the permanent image of the canvas and the fleeting one of the
+      mirror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world was hers then,&mdash;for she had not read romances and
+      love-letters without finding that beauty governs it in all times and
+      places. Who was this middle-aged minister that had been hanging round her
+      and talking to her about heaven, when there was not a single joy of earth
+      that she had as yet tasted? A man that had been saying all his fine things
+      to Miss Susan Posey, too, had he, before he had bestowed his attentions on
+      her? And to a dozen other girls, too, nobody knows who!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The revulsion was a very sadden one. Such changes of feeling are apt to be
+      sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with, and Myrtle
+      was not of a temperament or an age to act with much deliberation where a
+      pique came in to the aid of a resolve. Master Gridley guessed sagaciously
+      what would be the effect of his revelation, when he told her of the
+      particular attentions the minister had paid to pretty Susan Posey and
+      various other young women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully that morning, and made
+      himself as captivating as his professional costume allowed. He had drawn
+      down the shades of his windows so as to let in that subdued light which is
+      merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments, and wheeled up his
+      sofa so that two could sit at the table and read from the same book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain feverish
+      impatience, casting a glance now and then at the mirror as he passed it.
+      At last the bell rang, and he himself went to answer it, his heart
+      throbbing with expectation of meeting his lovely visitor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the bearer of sealed
+      despatches. Mistress Kitty Fagan was the young lady's substitute, and she
+      delivered into the hand of the astonished clergyman the following missive:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TO THE REV. MR. STOKER.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reverend Sir,&mdash;I shall not come to your study this day. I do not feel
+      that I have any more need of religious counsel at this time, and I am told
+      by a friend that there are others who will be glad to hear you talk on
+      this subject. I hear that Mrs. Hopkins is interested in religious
+      subjects, and would have been glad to see you in my company. As I cannot
+      go with her, perhaps Miss Susan Posey will take my place. I thank you for
+      all the good things you have said to me, and that you have given me so
+      much of your company. I hope we shall sing hymns together in heaven some
+      time, if we are good enough, but I want to wait for that awhile, for I do
+      not feel quite ready. I am not going to see you any more alone, reverend
+      sir. I think this is best, and I have good advice. I want to see more of
+      young people of my own age, and I have a friend, Mr. Gridley, who I think
+      is older than you are, that takes an interest in me; and as you have many
+      others that you must be interested in, he can take the place of a father
+      better than you can do. I return to you the hymn-book, I read one of those
+      you marked, and do not care to read any more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Respectfully yours,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MYRTLE HAZARD.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this awkwardly
+      written, but tolerably intelligible letter. What could he do about it? It
+      would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot Byles Gridley, and
+      strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which homicides he felt at the moment
+      that he could have committed. And here he was in a frantic paroxysm, and
+      the next day was Sunday, and his morning's discourse was unwritten. His
+      savage mediaeval theology came to his relief, and he clutched out of a
+      heap of yellow manuscripts his well-worn &ldquo;convulsion-fit&rdquo; sermon. He
+      preached it the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard
+      did not hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive Eveleth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII. SAINT AND SINNER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid wife
+      improved&mdash;somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
+      beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the physician
+      advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of her life by
+      going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful companionship. She
+      was therefore frequently at the house of Olive Eveleth; and as Myrtle
+      wanted to see young people, and had her own way now as never before, the
+      three girls often met at the parsonage. Thus they became more and more
+      intimate, and grew more and more into each other's affections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to be
+      found in all our towns and villages. Olive had been carefully trained, and
+      at the proper age confirmed. Bathsheba had been prayed for, and in due
+      time startled and converted. Myrtle was a simple daughter of Eve, with
+      many impulses like those of the other two girls, and some that required
+      more watching. She was not so safe, perhaps, as either of the other girls,
+      for this world or the next; but she was on some accounts more interesting,
+      as being a more genuine representative of that inexperienced and too
+      easily deluded, yet always cherished, mother of our race, whom we must
+      after all accept as embodying the creative idea of woman, and who might
+      have been alive and happy now (though at a great age) but for a single
+      fatal error.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's father,
+      was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a cultivated man, with
+      pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader, a neat writer, a safe
+      thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental pasturage, which his sermons
+      kept cropped moderately close without any exhausting demand upon the soil.
+      Olive had grown insensibly into her religious maturity, as into her bodily
+      and intellectual developments, which one might suppose was the natural
+      order of things in a well-regulated Christian&mdash;household, where the
+      children are brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with vague
+      apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious phrases and
+      graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age of fourteen
+      years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very commonly
+      considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the formation of
+      religious character. It began with a shivering sense of enormous guilt,
+      inherited and practised from her earliest infancy. Just as every breath
+      she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the air with carbonic acid,
+      so her every thought and feeling had been tainting the universe with sin.
+      This spiritual chill or rigor had in due order been followed by the
+      fever-flush of hope, and that in its turn had ushered in the last stage,
+      the free opening of all the spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation of
+      self-surrender.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Good Christians are made by many very different processes. Bathsheba had
+      taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was genuine, in
+      spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not understand that the
+      spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was the same as that which
+      poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the feet of her Lord, and led her
+      forth at early dawn with the other Mary to visit his sepulchre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-worn
+      formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity, hateful to
+      the Father in Heaven who made her. She had grown up in antagonism with all
+      that surrounded her. She had been talked to about her corrupt nature and
+      her sinful heart, until the words had become an offence and an insult.
+      Bathsheba knew her father's fondness for young company too well to suppose
+      that his intercourse with Myrtle had gone beyond the sentimental and
+      poetical stage, and was not displeased when she found that there was some
+      breach between them. Myrtle herself did not profess to have passed through
+      the technical stages of the customary spiritual paroxysm. Still, the
+      gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her and judged her kindly.
+      She was modest enough to think that perhaps the natural state of some
+      girls might be at least as good as her own after the spiritual change of
+      which she had been the subject. A manifest heresy, but not new, nor
+      unamiable, nor inexplicable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine of
+      Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before grace in
+      the election of a wife; because, saith he, &ldquo;it will be a hard Task, where
+      the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make an entire Conquest
+      whilst Life lasteth.&rdquo; An opinion apparently entertained by many modern
+      ecclesiastics, and one which may be considered very encouraging to those
+      young ladies of the politer circles who have a fancy for marrying bishops
+      and other fashionable clergymen. Not of course that &ldquo;grace&rdquo; is so rare a
+      gift among the young ladies of the upper social sphere; but they are in
+      the habit of using the word with a somewhat different meaning from that
+      which the good Bishop attached to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII. VILLAGE POET.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible for Myrtle to be frequently at Olive's without often
+      meeting Olive's brother, and her reappearance with the bloom on her cheek
+      was a signal which her other admirers were not likely to overlook as a
+      hint to recommence their flattering demonstrations; and so it was that she
+      found herself all at once the centre of attraction to three young men with
+      whom we have made some acquaintance, namely, Cyprian Eveleth, Gifted
+      Hopkins, and Murray Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the three girls were together at the house of Olive, it gave Cyprian
+      a chance to see something of Myrtle in the most natural way. Indeed, they
+      all became used to meeting him in a brotherly sort of relation; only, as
+      he was not the brother of two of them, it gave him the inside track, as
+      the sporting men say, with reference to any rivals for the good-will of
+      either of these. Of course neither Bathsheba nor Myrtle thought of him in
+      any other light than as Olive's brother, and would have been surprised
+      with the manifestation on his part of any other feeling, if it existed. So
+      he became very nearly as intimate with them as Olive was, and hardly
+      thought of his intimacy as anything more than friendship, until one day
+      Myrtle sang some hymns so sweetly that Cyprian dreamed about her that
+      night; and what young person does not know that the woman or the man once
+      idealized and glorified in the exalted state of the imagination belonging
+      to sleep becomes dangerous to the sensibilities in the waking hours that
+      follow? Yet something drew Cyprian to the gentler and more subdued nature
+      of Bathsheba, so that he often thought, like a gayer personage than
+      himself, whose divided affections are famous in song, that he could have
+      been blessed to share her faithful heart, if Myrtle had not bewitched him
+      with her unconscious and innocent sorceries. As for poor, modest
+      Bathsheba, she thought nothing of herself, but was almost as much
+      fascinated by Myrtle as if she had been one of the sex she was born to
+      make in love with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
+      Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins. This young gentleman had the enormous
+      advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical endowment. No
+      woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist the youth or man who
+      addresses her in verse. The thought that she is the object of a poet's
+      love is one which fills a woman's ambition more completely than all that
+      wealth or office or social eminence can offer. Do the young millionnaires
+      and the members of the General Court get letters from unknown ladies,
+      every day, asking for their autographs and photographs? Well, then!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very depth
+      of his soul. Could he not confer that immortality so dear to the human
+      heart? Not quite yet, perhaps,&mdash;though the &ldquo;Banner and Oracle&rdquo; gave
+      him already &ldquo;an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame,&rdquo; to quote its own
+      words,&mdash;but in that glorious summer of his genius, of which these
+      spring blossoms were the promise. It was a most formidable battery, then,
+      which Cyprian's first rival opened upon the fortress of Myrtle's
+      affections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-playful bet
+      with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he would bag a girl
+      within twelve months of date who should unite three desirable qualities,
+      specified in the bet, in a higher degree than any one of the five who were
+      on the matrimonial programme which she had laid out for him,&mdash;and
+      Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to win the bet. When a young fellow
+      like him, cool and clever, makes up his mind to bring down his bird, it is
+      no joke, but a very serious and a tolerably certain piece of business. Not
+      being made a fool of by any boyish nonsense,&mdash;passion and all that,&mdash;he
+      has a great advantage. Many a woman rejects a man because he is in love
+      with her, and accepts another because he is not. The first is thinking too
+      much of himself and his emotions,&mdash;the other makes a study of her and
+      her friends, and learns what ropes to pull. But then it must be remembered
+      that Murray Bradshaw had a poet for his rival, to say nothing of the
+      brother of a bosom friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The qualities of a young poet are so exceptional, and such interesting
+      objects of study, that a narrative like this can well afford to linger
+      awhile in the delineation of this most envied of all the forms of genius.
+      And by contrasting the powers and limitations of two such young persons as
+      Gifted Hopkins and Cyprian Eveleth, we may better appreciate the nature of
+      that divine inspiration which gives to poetry the superiority it claims
+      over every other form of human expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins had shown an ear for rhythm, and for the simpler forms of
+      music, from his earliest childhood. He began beating with his heels the
+      accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender age,&mdash;a
+      habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself, as, though
+      it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that which is
+      beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and emphasize by vigorous
+      downward movements the leading syllables in the tune of Auld Lang Syne,
+      yet it is apt to be too expressive when a large number of boots join in
+      the performance. He showed a remarkable talent for playing on one of the
+      less complex musical instruments, too limited in compass to satisfy
+      exacting ears, but affording excellent discipline to those who wish to
+      write in the simpler metrical forms,&mdash;the same which summons the hero
+      from his repose and stirs his blood in battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the time he was twelve years old he was struck with the pleasing
+      resemblance of certain vocal sounds which, without being the same, yet had
+      a curious relation which made them agree marvellously well in couples; as
+      eyes with skies; as heart with art, also with part and smart; and so of
+      numerous others, twenty or thirty pairs, perhaps, which number he
+      considerably increased as he grew older, until he may have had fifty or
+      more such pairs at his command.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The union of so extensive a catalogue of words which matched each other,
+      and of an ear so nice that it could tell if there were nine or eleven
+      syllables in an heroic line, instead of the legitimate ten, constituted a
+      rare combination of talents in the opinion of those upon whose judgment he
+      relied. He was naturally led to try his powers in the expression of some
+      just thought or natural sentiment in the shape of verse, that wonderful
+      medium of imparting thought and feeling to his fellow-creatures which a
+      bountiful Providence had made his rare and inestimable endowment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at about this period of his life, that is to say, when he was of
+      the age of thirteen, or we may perhaps say fourteen years, for we do not
+      wish to overstate his precocity, that he experienced a sensation so
+      entirely novel, that, to the best of his belief, it was such as no other
+      young person had ever known, at least in anything like the same degree.
+      This extraordinary emotion was brought on by the sight of Myrtle Hazard,
+      with whom he had never before had any near relations, as they had been at
+      different schools, and Myrtle was too reserved to be very generally known
+      among the young people of his age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it was that he broke forth in his virgin effort, &ldquo;Lines to M&mdash;&mdash;e,&rdquo;
+       which were published in the village paper, and were claimed by all
+      possible girls but the right one; namely, by two Mary Annes, one Minnie,
+      one Mehitable, and one Marthie, as she saw fit to spell the name borrowed
+      from her who was troubled about many things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The success of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to the
+      hymn-books as &ldquo;common metre,&rdquo; was such as to convince the youth that,
+      whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time to obtain a
+      livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true destiny was the
+      glorious career of a poet. It was a most pleasing circumstance, that his
+      mother, while she fully recognized the propriety of his being diligent in
+      the prosaic line of business to which circumstances had called him, was
+      yet as much convinced as he himself that he was destined to achieve
+      literary fame. She had read Watts and Select Hymns all through, she said,
+      and she did n't see but what Gifted could make the verses come out jest as
+      slick, and the sound of the rhymes jest as pooty, as Izik Watts or the
+      Selectmen, whoever they was,&mdash;she was sure they couldn't be the
+      selectmen of this town, wherever they belonged. It is pleasant to say that
+      the young man, though favored by nature with this rarest of talents, did
+      not forget the humbler duties that Heaven, which dresses few singing-birds
+      in the golden plumes of fortune, had laid upon him. After having received
+      a moderate amount of instruction at one of the less ambitious educational
+      institutions of the town, supplemented, it is true, by the judicious and
+      gratuitous hints of Master Gridley, the young poet, in obedience to a
+      feeling which did him the highest credit, relinquished, at least for the
+      time, the Groves of Academus, and offered his youth at the shrine of
+      Plutus, that is, left off studying and took to business. He became what
+      they call a &ldquo;clerk&rdquo; in what they call a &ldquo;store&rdquo; up in the huckleberry
+      districts, and kept such accounts as were required by the business of the
+      establishment. His principal occupation was, however, to attend to the
+      details of commerce as it was transacted over the counter. This industry
+      enabled him, to his great praise be it spoken, to assist his excellent
+      parent, to clothe himself in a becoming manner, so that he made a really
+      handsome figure on Sundays and was always of presentable aspect, likewise
+      to purchase a book now and then, and to subscribe for that leading
+      periodical which furnishes the best models to the youth of the country in
+      the various modes of composition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though Master Gridley was very kind to the young man, he was rather
+      disposed to check the exuberance of his poetical aspirations. The truth
+      was, that the old classical scholar did not care a great deal for modern
+      English poetry. Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap from the Greek
+      Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation of spirits; but he
+      did not think very much of &ldquo;your Keatses, and your Tennysons, and the
+      whole Hasheesh crazy lot,&rdquo; as he called the dreamily sensuous idealists
+      who belong to the same century that brought in ether and chloroform. He
+      rather shook his head at Gifted Hopkins for indulging so largely in
+      metrical composition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better stick to your ciphering, my young friend,&rdquo; he said to him, one
+      day. &ldquo;Figures of speech are all very well, in their way; but if you
+      undertake to deal much in them, you'll figure down your prospects into a
+      mighty small sum. There's some danger that it will take all the sense out
+      of you, if you keep writing verses at this rate. You young scribblers
+      think any kind of nonsense will do for the public, if it only has a string
+      of rhymes tacked to it. Cut off the bobs of your kite, Gifted Hopkins, and
+      see if it does n't pitch, and stagger, and come down head-foremost. Don't
+      write any stuff with rhyming tails to it that won't make a decent show for
+      itself after you've chopped all the rhyming tails off. That's my advice,
+      Gifted Hopkins. Is there any book you would like to have out of my
+      library? Have you ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had tried, the young man answered, on the recommendation of Cyprian
+      Eveleth, but had found it rather hard reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley lifted his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that some
+      had called Spenser the poet's poet. &ldquo;What a pity,&rdquo; he said to himself,
+      &ldquo;that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that William Murray
+      Bradshaw! What's the reason, I wonder, that all the little earthen pots
+      blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at such a great rate, while
+      the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do all their simmering inside?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth and all
+      their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone. The smiles of woman, in the
+      mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre. Fame beckoned him
+      upward from her templed steep. The rhymes which rose before him unbidden
+      were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on which he would climb to a heaven
+      of-glory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
+      anticipations of success. &ldquo;All up with the boy, if he's going to take to
+      rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar and weighing
+      out pounds of tea. Poor-house,&mdash;that 's what it'll end in. Poets, to
+      be sure! Sausage-makers! Empty skins of old phrases,&mdash;stuff 'em with
+      odds and ends of old thoughts that never were good for anything,&mdash;cut
+      'em up in lengths and sell'em to fools!
+      &ldquo;And if they ain't big fools enough to buy 'em, give'em away; and if you
+      can't do that, pay folks to take'em. Bah! what a fine style of genius
+      common-sense is! There's a passage in the book that would fit half these
+      addle-headed rhymesters. What is that saying of mine about &ldquo;squinting
+      brains?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took down &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe,&rdquo; and read:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    &ldquo;Of Squinting Brains.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen who
+      squint with their brains. It is an infirmity in one of the eyes, making
+      the two unequal in power, that makes men squint. Just so it is an
+      inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men idiots and
+      others rascals. I knows a fellow whose right half is a genius, but his
+      other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a friend perfectly honest on
+      one side, but who was sent to jail because the other had an inveterate
+      tendency in the direction of picking pockets and appropriating aes
+      alienum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins had
+      never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice might, to
+      a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative nature.
+      Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover of lonely
+      walks,&mdash;one who listened for the whispers of Nature and watched her
+      shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over everything. But
+      Cyprian had never shown the talent or the inclination for writing in
+      verse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being somewhat
+      older, and having had the advantage of academic and college culture, often
+      gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his powers, such as genius
+      frequently requires at the hands of humbler intelligences. Cyprian was
+      incapable of jealousy; and although the name of Gifted Hopkins was getting
+      to be known beyond the immediate neighborhood, and his autograph had been
+      requested by more than one young lady living in another county, he never
+      thought of envying the young poet's spreading popularity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor may be
+      inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed himself in
+      his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one which was held at
+      the &ldquo;store&rdquo; where he officiated as &ldquo;clerk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I become more and more assured, Cyprian,&rdquo; he said, leaning over the
+      counter, &ldquo;that I was born to be a poet. I feel it in my marrow. I must
+      succeed. I must win the laurel of fame. I must taste the sweets of&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Molasses,&rdquo; said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that moment,
+      bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, &ldquo;ma wants three gills of molasses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure. He served
+      the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness, made an entry
+      on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian. The very last piece I wrote was copied in
+      two papers. It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and&mdash;don't think I am
+      too vain&mdash;one young lady has told me that it reminded her of Pollok.
+      You never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises, and a
+      letter now and then. Do you find it an easy and pleasant exercise to make
+      rhymes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pleasant! Poetry is to me a delight and a passion. I never know what I am
+      going to write when I sit down. And presently the rhymes begin pounding in
+      my brain,&mdash;it seems as if there were a hundred couples of them,
+      paired like so many dancers,&mdash;and then these rhymes seem to take
+      possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in all sorts of
+      beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the verses run measuring
+      themselves out like&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ribbins,&mdash;any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins? Five eighths of a
+      yard, if you please, Mr. Hopkins. How's your folks?&rdquo; Then, in a lower
+      tone, &ldquo;Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were sweet pooty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid of
+      certain brass nails on the counter. He gave good measure, not prodigal,
+      for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very moderate strain on
+      the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with a contempt of
+      infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its genial mood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those bewitching
+      glances which the young poet&mdash;let us rather say the poet, without
+      making odious distinctions&mdash;is in the confirmed habit of receiving
+      from dear woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: &ldquo;I do not know where this talent, as my
+      friends call it, of mine, comes from. My father used to carry a chain for
+      a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the house he used to
+      measure land with. I don't see why that should make me a poet. My mother
+      was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so are other young men's
+      mothers, and yet they don't show poetical genius. But wherever I got it,
+      it comes as easy to me to write in verse as to write in prose, almost.
+      Don't you ever feel a longing to send your thoughts forth in verse,
+      Cyprian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often,&rdquo; Cyprian
+      answered; &ldquo;but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have
+      words that seem fitting to clothe them. I have imagined a great many
+      poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any kind.
+      Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'? If you have ever heard
+      her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and unversed poetry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without rhyme or
+      verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures that were
+      painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of nothing. How can you
+      tell that anything is poetry, I should like to know, if there is neither a
+      regular line with just so many syllables, nor a rhyme? Of course you
+      can't. I never have any thoughts too beautiful to put in verse: nothing
+      can be too beautiful for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyprian left the conversation at this point. It was getting more
+      suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the matter
+      over better with Olive. Just then a little boy came in, and bargained with
+      Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he placed against his
+      teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure almost equal to that of
+      the young poet reciting his own verses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry,&rdquo; Cyprian said,
+      as he left the &ldquo;store.&rdquo; &ldquo;All in one note, pretty much. Not a great many
+      tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and one or two more like them.
+      But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt it is as exciting to
+      Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius to express itself in a
+      poem.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting. He loved too well the sweet
+      intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies of
+      Milton. These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted Hopkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his
+      friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of
+      modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences of
+      rhyme. He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of
+      childhood, its simplicity, its reverence. It seemed as if nothing of all
+      that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for there was
+      no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and all else he
+      could not help idealizing into its own conception of itself, so to speak.
+      He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the flower, and the root as
+      well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his capacity of affection or
+      admiration on the blossom or bud upon which his friend the poet lavished
+      the wealth of his verse. Thus Nature took him into her confidence. She
+      loves the men of science well, and tells them all her family secrets,&mdash;who
+      is the father of this or that member of the group, who is brother, sister,
+      cousin, and so on, through all the circle of relationship. But there are
+      others to whom she tells her dreams; not what species or genus her lily
+      belongs to, but what vague thought it has when it dresses in white, or
+      what memory of its birthplace that is which we call its fragrance. Cyprian
+      was one of these. Yet he was not a complete nature. He required another
+      and a wholly different one to be the complement of his own. Olive came as
+      near it as a sister could, but&mdash;we must borrow an old image&mdash;moonlight
+      is no more than a cold and vacant glimmer on the sun-dial, which only
+      answers to the great flaming orb of day. If Cyprian could but find some
+      true, sweet-tempered, well-balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those
+      special imaginative gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to
+      him in the intense reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and
+      adorn her existence,&mdash;how she could direct and chasten and elevate
+      the character of all his thoughts and actions!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bathsheba,&rdquo; said Olive, &ldquo;it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more and
+      more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard. He has never got over the fancy he
+      took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and called her the
+      fire-hang-bird. Wouldn't they suit each other by and by, after Myrtle has
+      come to herself and grown into a beautiful and noble woman, as I feel sure
+      she will in due time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Myrtle is very lovely,&rdquo; Bathsheba answered, &ldquo;but is n't she a little too&mdash;flighty&mdash;for
+      one like your brother? Cyprian isn't more like other young men than Myrtle
+      is like other young girls. I have thought sometimes&mdash;I wondered
+      whether out-of-the-way people and common ones do not get along best
+      together. Does n't Cyprian want some more every-day kind of girl to keep
+      him straight? Myrtle is beautiful, beautiful,&mdash;fascinates everybody.
+      Has Mr. Bradshaw been following after her lately? He is taken with her
+      too. Didn't you ever think she would have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at
+      last? He looks to me like a man that would hold on desperately as a
+      lover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl, hardly
+      sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or nineteen, it
+      would have been plain sailing enough for Murray Bradshaw. But he knew what
+      a distance their ages seemed just now to put between them,&mdash;a
+      distance which would grow practically less and less with every year, and
+      he did not wish to risk anything so long as there was no danger of
+      interference. He rather encouraged Gifted Hopkins to write poetry to
+      Myrtle. &ldquo;Go in, Gifted,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there's no telling what may come of
+      it,&rdquo; and Gifted did go in at a great rate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with a
+      good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of Gifted
+      Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of Byron or Moore,
+      into which he would artfully throw so much meaning that Myrtle was almost
+      as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know what it meant, as she had been
+      by the religious fervors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke well of Cyprian Eveleth. A good young man,&mdash;limited, but
+      exemplary. Would succeed well as rector of a small parish. That required
+      little talent, but a good deal of the humbler sort of virtue. As for
+      himself, he confessed to ambition,&mdash;yes, a great deal of ambition. A
+      failing, he supposed, but not the worst of failings. He felt the instinct
+      to handle the larger interests of society. The village would perhaps lose
+      sight of him for a time; but he meant to emerge sooner or later in the
+      higher spheres of government or diplomacy. Myrtle must keep his secret.
+      Nobody else knew it. He could not help making a confidant of her,&mdash;a
+      thing he had never done before with any other person as to his plans in
+      life. Perhaps she might watch his career with more interest from her
+      acquaintance with him. He loved to think that there was one woman at least
+      who would be pleased to hear of his success if he succeeded, as with life
+      and health he would,&mdash;who would share his disappointment if fate
+      should not favor him.&mdash;So he wound and wreathed himself into her
+      thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not very long before Myrtle began to accept the idea that she was
+      the one person in the world whose peculiar duty it was to sympathize with
+      the aspiring young man whose humble beginnings she had the honor of
+      witnessing. And it is not very far from being the solitary confidant, and
+      the single source of inspiration, to the growth of a livelier interest,
+      where a young man and a young woman are in question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was at this time her own mistress as never before. The three young
+      men had access to her as she walked to and from meeting and in her
+      frequent rambles, besides the opportunities Cyprian had of meeting her in
+      his sister's company, and the convenient visits which, in connection with
+      the great lawsuit, Murray Bradshaw could make, without question, at The
+      Poplars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not long before Cyprian perceived that he could never pass a
+      certain boundary of intimacy with Myrtle. Very pleasant and sisterly
+      always she was with him; but she never looked as if she might mean more
+      than she said, and cherished a little spark of sensibility which might be
+      fanned into the flame of love. Cyprian felt this so certainly that he was
+      on the point of telling his grief to Bathsheba, who looked to him as if
+      she would sympathize as heartily with him as his own sister, and whose
+      sympathy would have a certain flavor in it,&mdash;something which one
+      cannot find in the heart of the dearest sister that ever lived. But
+      Bathsheba was herself sensitive, and changed color when Cyprian ventured a
+      hint or two in the direction of his thought, so that he never got so fax
+      as to unburden his heart to her about Myrtle, whom she admired so
+      sincerely that she could not have helped feeling a great interest in his
+      passion towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Gifted Hopkins, the roses that were beginning to bloom fresher and
+      fresher every day in Myrtle's cheeks unfolded themselves more and more
+      freely, to speak metaphorically, in his song. Every week she would receive
+      a delicately tinted note with lines to &ldquo;Myrtle awaking,&rdquo; or to &ldquo;Myrtle
+      retiring,&rdquo; (one string of verses a little too Musidora-ish, and which soon
+      found itself in the condition of a cinder, perhaps reduced to that state
+      by spontaneous combustion,) or to &ldquo;The Flower of the Tropics,&rdquo; or to the
+      &ldquo;Nymph of the River-side,&rdquo; or other poetical alias, such as bards affect
+      in their sieges of the female heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins was of a sanguine temperament. As he read and re-read his
+      verses it certainly seemed to him that they must reach the heart of the
+      angelic being to whom they were addressed. That she was slow in confessing
+      the impression they made upon her, was a favorable sign; so many girls
+      called his poems &ldquo;sweet pooty,&rdquo; that those charming words, though
+      soothing, no longer stirred him deeply. Myrtle's silence showed that the
+      impression his verses had made was deep. Time would develop her
+      sentiments; they were both young; his position was humble as yet; but when
+      he had become famous through the land-oh blissful thought!&mdash;the bard
+      of Oxbow Village would bear a name that any woman would be proud to
+      assume, and the M. H. which her delicate hands had wrought on the
+      kerchiefs she wore would yet perhaps be read, not Myrtle Hazard, but
+      Myrtle Hopkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX. SUSAN'S YOUNG MAN.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There seems no reasonable doubt that Myrtle Hazard might have made a safe
+      thing of it with Gifted Hopkins, (if so inclined,) provided that she had
+      only been secured against interference. But the constant habit of reading
+      his verses to Susan Posey was not without its risk to so excitable a
+      nature as that of the young poet. Poets were always capable of divided
+      affections, and Cowley's &ldquo;Chronicle&rdquo; is a confession that would fit the
+      whole tribe of them. It is true that Gifted had no right to regard Susan's
+      heart as open to the wiles of any new-comer. He knew that she considered
+      herself, and was considered by another, as pledged and plighted. Yet she
+      was such a devoted listener, her sympathies were so easily roused, her
+      blue eyes glistened so tenderly at the least poetical hint, such as
+      &ldquo;Never, oh never,&rdquo; &ldquo;My aching heart,&rdquo; &ldquo;Go, let me weep,&rdquo;&mdash;any of
+      those touching phrases out of the long catalogue which readily suggests
+      itself, that her influence was getting to be such that Myrtle (if really
+      anxious to secure him) might look upon it with apprehension, and the owner
+      of Susan's heart (if of a jealous disposition) might have thought it worth
+      while to make a visit to Oxbow Village to see after his property.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may seem not impossible that some friend had suggested as much as this
+      to the young lady's lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The caution would have been unnecessary, or at least premature. Susan was
+      loyal as ever to her absent friend. Gifted Hopkins had never yet presumed
+      upon the familiar relations existing between them to attempt to shake her
+      allegiance. It is quite as likely, after all, that the young gentleman
+      about to make his appearance in Oxbow Village visited the place of his own
+      accord, without a hint from anybody. But the fact concerns us more than
+      the reason of it, just now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who do you think is coming, Mr. Gridley? Who do you think is coming?&rdquo;
+       said Susan Posey, her face covered with a carnation such as the first
+      season may see in a city belle, but not the second.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Susan Posey, I suppose I must guess, though I am rather slow at
+      that business. Perhaps the Governor. No, I don't think it can be the
+      Governor, for you would n't look so happy if it was only his Excellency.
+      It must be the President, Susan Posey,&mdash;President James Buchanan.
+      Have n't I guessed right, now, tell me, my dear?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Mr. Gridley, you are too bad,&mdash;what do I care for governors and
+      presidents? I know somebody that's worth fifty million thousand
+      presidents,&mdash;and he 's coming,&mdash;my Clement is coming,&rdquo; said
+      Susan, who had by this time learned to consider the awful Byles Gridley as
+      her next friend and faithful counsellor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Susan could not stay long in the house after she got her note informing
+      her that her friend was soon to be with her. Everybody told everything to
+      Olive Eveleth, and Susan must run over to the parsonage to tell her that
+      there was a young gentleman coming to Oxbow Village; upon which Olive
+      asked who it was, exactly as if she did not know; whereupon Susan dropped
+      her eyes and said, &ldquo;Clement,&mdash;I mean Mr. Lindsay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was a fair piece of news now, and Olive had her bonnet on five
+      minutes after Susan was gone, and was on her way to Bathsheba's,&mdash;it
+      was too bad that the poor girl who lived so out of the world shouldn't
+      know anything of what was going on in it. Bathsheba had been in all the
+      morning, and the Doctor had said she must take the air every day; so
+      Bathsheba had on her bonnet a little after Olive had gone, and walked
+      straight up to The Poplars to tell Myrtle Hazard that a certain young
+      gentleman, Clement Lindsay, was coming to Oxbow Village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was perhaps fortunate that there was no special significance to Myrtle
+      in the name of Clement Lindsay. Since the adventure which had brought
+      these two young persons together, and, after coming so near a disaster,
+      had ended in a mere humiliation and disappointment, and but for Master
+      Gridley's discreet kindness might have led to foolish scandal, Myrtle had
+      never referred to it in any way. Nobody really knew what her plans had
+      been except Olive and Cyprian, who had observed a very kind silence about
+      the whole matter. The common version of the story was harmless, and near
+      enough to the truth,&mdash;down the river,&mdash;boat upset,&mdash;pulled
+      out,&mdash;taken care of by some women in a house farther down,&mdash;sick,
+      brain fever,&mdash;pretty near it, anyhow,&mdash;old Dr. Hurlbut called
+      in,&mdash;had her hair cut,&mdash;hystericky, etc., etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was contented with this statement, and asked no questions, and it
+      was a perfectly understood thing that nobody alluded to the subject in her
+      presence. It followed from all this that the name of Clement Lindsay had
+      no peculiar meaning for her. Nor was she like to recognize him as the
+      youth in whose company she had gone through her mortal peril, for all her
+      recollections were confused and dreamlike from the moment when she awoke
+      and found herself in the foaming rapids just above the fall, until that
+      when her senses returned, and she saw Master Byles Gridley standing over
+      her with that look of tenderness in his square features which had lingered
+      in her recollection, and made her feel towards him as if she were his
+      daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now this had its advantage; for as Clement was Susan's young man, and had
+      been so for two or three years, it would have been a great pity to have
+      any such curious relations established between him and Myrtle Hazard as a
+      consciousness on both sides of what had happened would naturally suggest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is this Clement Lindsay, Bathsheba?&rdquo; Myrtle asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Myrtle, don't you remember about Susan Posey's is-to-be,&mdash;the
+      young man that has been well, I don't know, but I suppose engaged to her
+      ever since they were children almost?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes, I remember now. Oh dear! I have forgotten so many things, I
+      should think I had been dead and was coming back to life again. Do you
+      know anything about him, Bathsheba? Did n't somebody say he was very
+      handsome? I wonder if he is really in love with Susan Posey. Such a simple
+      thing? I want to see him. I have seen so few young men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As Myrtle said these words, she lifted the sleeve a little on her left
+      arm, by a half-instinctive and half-voluntary movement. The glimmering
+      gold of Judith Pride's bracelet flashed out the yellow gleam which has
+      been the reddening of so many hands and the blackening of so, many souls
+      since that innocent sin-breeder was first picked up in the land of
+      Havilah. There came a sudden light into her eye, such as Bathsheba had
+      never seen there before. It looked to her as if Myrtle were saying
+      unconsciously to herself that she had the power of beauty, and would like
+      to try its influence on the handsome young man whom she was soon to meet,
+      even at the risk of unseating poor little Susan in his affections. This
+      pained the gentle and humble-minded girl, who, without having tasted the
+      world's pleasures, had meekly consecrated herself to the lowly duties
+      which lay nearest to her. For Bathsheba's phrasing of life was in the
+      monosyllables of a rigid faith. Her conceptions of the human soul were all
+      simplicity and purity, but elementary. She could not conceive the vast
+      license the creative energy allows itself in mingling the instincts which,
+      after long conflict, may come into harmonious adjustment. The flash which
+      Myrtle's eye had caught from the gleam of the golden bracelet filled
+      Bathsheba with a sudden fear that she was like to be led away by the
+      vanities of that world lying in wickedness of which the minister's
+      daughter had heard so much and seen so little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself. She only felt
+      a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love too often gives
+      us,&mdash;such as a child's trivial gesture or movement makes a parent
+      feel,&mdash;that impalpable something which in the slightest possible
+      inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone will sometimes leave a
+      sting behind it, even in a trusting heart. This was all. But it was true
+      that what she saw meant a great deal. It meant the dawning in Myrtle
+      Hazard of one of her as yet unlived secondary lives. Bathsheba's virgin
+      perceptions had caught a faint early ray of its glimmering twilight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has made
+      seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and that she
+      did not know about Susan's sentiments. Only, as they had kept so long to
+      each other, she supposed there must be love between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its
+      perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to look
+      upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds of
+      Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty fancies.
+      She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her, her eyes
+      fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified ancestress, but on that
+      other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to live in all the splendors of
+      her full-blown womanhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as the
+      glance at him already given might have foreshadowed. But his features had
+      a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and the sober tone of
+      his letter to Susan implied that something had given him a maturity beyond
+      his years. The story was not an uncommon one. At sixteen he had
+      dreamed-and told his dream. At eighteen he had awoke, and found, as he
+      believed, that a young heart had grown to his so that its life was
+      dependent on his own. Whether it would have perished if its filaments had
+      been gently disentangled from the object to which they had attached
+      themselves, experienced judges of such matters may perhaps question. To
+      justify Clement in his estimate of the danger of such an experiment, we
+      must remember that to young people in their teens a first passion is a
+      portentous and unprecedented phenomenon. The young man may have been
+      mistaken in thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and may have
+      done more than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it was the
+      mistake of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another's feelings
+      by his own. He measured the depth of his own rather by what he felt they
+      might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement was called a &ldquo;genius&rdquo; by those who knew him, and was consequently
+      in danger of being spoiled early. The risk is great enough anywhere, but
+      greatest in a new country, where there is an almost universal want of
+      fixed standards of excellence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a
+      planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work of eye
+      and hand. It would not have been strange if he thought he could do
+      everything, having gifts which were capable of various application,&mdash;and
+      being an American citizen. But though he was a good draughtsman, and had
+      made some reliefs and modelled some figures, he called himself only an
+      architect. He had given himself up to his art, not merely from a love of
+      it and talent for it, but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he
+      thought his country wanted a race of builders to clothe the new forms of
+      religious, social, and national life afresh from the forest, the quarry,
+      and the mine. Some thought he would succeed, others that he would be a
+      brilliant failure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grand notions,&mdash;grand notions,&rdquo; the master with whom he studied
+      said. &ldquo;Large ground plan of life,&mdash;splendid elevation. A little wild
+      in some of his fancies, perhaps, but he's only a boy, and he's the kind of
+      boy that sometimes grows to be a pretty big man. Wait and see,&mdash;wait
+      and see. He works days, and we can let him dream nights. There's a good
+      deal of him, anyhow.&rdquo; His fellow-students were puzzled. Those who thought
+      of their calling as a trade, and looked forward to the time when they
+      should be embodying the ideals of municipal authorities in brick and
+      stone, or making contracts with wealthy citizens, doubted whether Clement
+      would have a sharp eye enough for business. &ldquo;Too many whims, you know. All
+      sorts of queer ideas in his head,&mdash;as if a boy like him were going to
+      make things all over again!&rdquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt there was something of youthful extravagance in his plans and
+      expectations. But it was the untamed enthusiasm which is the source of all
+      great thoughts and deeds,&mdash;a beautiful delirium which age commonly
+      tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath the world furnishes gratis
+      proves a pretty certain cure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Creation is always preceded by chaos. The youthful architect's mind was
+      confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in upon it,
+      and which he had not yet had time or developed mature strength sufficient
+      to reduce to order. The young American of any freshness of intellect is
+      stimulated to dangerous excess by the conditions of life into which he is
+      born. There is a double proportion of oxygen in the New World air. The
+      chemists have not found it out yet, but human brains and breathing-organs
+      have long since made the discovery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his possibilities of
+      happiness in one direction, and he felt that there was a certain grandeur
+      in the recompense of working out his defeated instincts through the
+      ambitious medium of his noble art. Had not Pharaohs chosen it to proclaim
+      their longings for immortality, Caesars their passion for pomp and luxury,
+      and priests to symbolize their conceptions of the heavenly mansions? His
+      dreams were on a grand scale; such, after all, are the best possessions of
+      youth. Had he but been free, or mated with a nature akin to his own, he
+      would have felt himself as truly the heir of creation as any young man
+      that lived. But his lot was cast, and his youth had all the serious aspect
+      to himself of thoughtful manhood. In the region of his art alone he hoped
+      always to find freedom and a companionship which his home life could never
+      give him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank, but
+      was called unexpectedly back to the city. Happily Susan was not exacting;
+      she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance between them to
+      dare to question his actions. Perhaps she found a partial consolation in
+      the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried his new poems on her, which
+      was the next best thing to addressing them to her. &ldquo;Would that you were
+      with us at this delightful season,&rdquo; she wrote in the autumn; &ldquo;but no, your
+      Susan must not repine. Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
+     For absence makes thee doubly dear;
+     Ah! what is life while thou 'rt away?
+     'T is night without the orb of day!'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and promising
+      friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself. The letter, it is
+      unnecessary to state, was voluminous,&mdash;for a woman can tell her love,
+      or other matter of interest, over and over again in as many forms as
+      another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing the musical
+      changes of &ldquo;In Memoriam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long. They
+      convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could come
+      to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work he had to
+      keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any rate. But at
+      last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was coming; yes, it
+      was so nice, and, oh dear! should n't she be real happy to see him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for human
+      nature's daily food. Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could have told
+      herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have confessed to
+      certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of late, cast a shadow
+      on her seemingly bright future. With all the pleasure that the thought of
+      meeting Clement gave her, she felt a little tremor, a certain degree of
+      awe, in contemplating his visit. If she could have clothed her
+      self-humiliation in the gold and purple of the &ldquo;Portuguese Sonnets,&rdquo; it
+      would have been another matter; but the trouble with the most common
+      sources of disquiet is that they have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology
+      to air themselves in; the inward burning goes on without the relief and
+      gratifying display of the crater.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A friend of mine is coming to the village,&rdquo; she said to Mr. Gifted
+      Hopkins. &ldquo;I want you to see him. He is a genius,&mdash;as some other young
+      men are.&rdquo; (This was obviously personal, and the youthful poet blushed with
+      ingenuous delight.) &ldquo;I have known him for ever so many years. He and I are
+      very good friends.&rdquo; The poet knew that this meant an exclusive relation
+      between them; and though the fact was no surprise to him, his countenance
+      fell a little. The truth was, that his admiration was divided between
+      Myrtle, who seemed to him divine and adorable, but distant, and Susan, who
+      listened to his frequent poems, whom he was in the habit of seeing in
+      artless domestic costumes, and whose attractions had been gaining upon him
+      of late in the enforced absence of his divinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his desk,
+      attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the language of
+      one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he began thus&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               &ldquo;ANOTHER'S!
+
+     &ldquo;Another's!  Oh the pang, the smart!
+          Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge,
+     &mdash;The barbed fang has rent a heart
+          Which&mdash;which
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;judge&mdash;judge,&mdash;no, not judge. Budge, drudge, fudge&mdash;What a
+      disgusting language English is! Nothing fit to couple with such a word as
+      grudge! And the gush of an impassioned moment arrested in full flow,
+      stopped short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Judge,&mdash;budge,&mdash;drudge,&mdash;nudge, oh!&mdash;smudge,&mdash;misery!&mdash;fudge.
+      In vain,&mdash;futile,&mdash;no use,&mdash;all up for to-night!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While the poet, headed off in this way by the poverty of his native
+      tongue, sought inspiration by retiring into the world of dreams,&mdash;went
+      to bed, in short, his more fortunate rival was just entering the village,
+      where he was to make his brief residence at the house of Deacon Rumrill,
+      who, having been a loser by the devouring element, was glad to receive a
+      stray boarder when any such were looking about for quarters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some reason or other he was restless that evening, and took out a
+      volume he had brought with him to beguile the earlier hours of the night.
+      It was too late when he arrived to disturb the quiet of Mrs. Hopkins's
+      household, and whatever may have been Clement's impatience, he held it in
+      check, and sat tranquilly until midnight over the pages of the book with
+      which he had prudently provided himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hope you slept well last night,&rdquo; said the old Deacon, when Mr. Clement
+      came down to breakfast the next morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very well, thank you,&mdash;that is, after I got to bed. But I sat up
+      pretty late reading my favorite Scott. I am apt to forget how the hours
+      pass when I have one of his books in my hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The worthy Deacon looked at Mr. Clement with a sudden accession of
+      interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You couldn't find better reading, young man. Scott is my favorite author.
+      A great man. I have got his likeness in a gilt-frame hanging up in the
+      other room. I have read him all through three times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man's countenance brightened. He had not expected to find so
+      much taste for elegant literature in an old village deacon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are your favorites among his writings, Deacon? I suppose you have
+      your particular likings, as the rest of us have.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Deacon was flattered by the question. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;I can
+      hardly tell you. I like pretty much everything Scott ever wrote. Sometimes
+      I think it is one thing, and sometimes another. Great on Paul's Epistles,&mdash;don't
+      you think so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The honest fact was, that Clement remembered very little about &ldquo;Paul's
+      Letters to his Kinsfolk,&rdquo;&mdash;a book of Sir Walter's less famous than
+      many of his others; but he signified his polite assent to the Deacon's
+      statement, rather wondering at his choice of a favorite, and smiling at
+      his queer way of talking about the Letters as Epistles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid Scott is not so much read now-a-days as he once was, and as
+      he ought to be,&rdquo; said Mr. Clement: &ldquo;Such character, such nature and so
+      much grace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's it,&mdash;that's it, young man,&rdquo; the Deacon broke in,&mdash;&ldquo;Natur'
+      and Grace,&mdash;Natur' and Grace. Nobody ever knew better what those two
+      words meant than Scott did, and I'm very glad to see&mdash;you've chosen
+      such good wholesome reading. You can't set up too late, young man, to read
+      Scott. If I had twenty children, they should all begin reading Scott as
+      soon as they were old enough to spell sin,&mdash;and that's the first word
+      my little ones learned, next to 'pa' and I 'ma.' Nothing like beginning
+      the lessons of life in good season.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a grim old satirist!&rdquo; Clement said to himself. &ldquo;I wonder if the old
+      man reads other novelists.&mdash;Do tell me, Deacon, if you have read
+      Thackeray's last story?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thackeray's story? Published by the American Tract Society?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not exactly,&rdquo; Clement answered, smiling, and quite delighted to find such
+      an unexpected vein of grave pleasantry about the demure-looking
+      church-dignitary; for the Deacon asked his question without moving a
+      muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and smile.
+      First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for the immovable
+      solemnity of their features. Clement promised himself not a little
+      amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the venerable Deacon, who,
+      it was plain from his conversation, had cultivated a literary taste which
+      would make him a more agreeable companion than the common ecclesiastics of
+      his grade in country villages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After breakfast, Mr. Clement walked forth in the direction of Mrs.
+      Hopkins's house, thinking as he went of the pleasant surprise his visit
+      would bring to his longing and doubtless pensive Susan; for though she
+      knew he was coming, she did not know that he was at that moment in Oxbow
+      Village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he drew near the house, the first thing he saw was Susan Posey, almost
+      running against her just as he turned a corner. She looked wonderfully
+      lively and rosy, for the weather was getting keen and the frosts had begun
+      to bite. A young gentleman was walking at her side, and reading to her
+      from a paper he held in his hand. Both looked deeply interested,&mdash;so
+      much so that Clement felt half ashamed of himself for intruding upon them
+      so abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But lovers are lovers, and Clement could not help joining them. The first
+      thing, of course, was the utterance of two simultaneous exclamations,
+      &ldquo;Why, Clement!&rdquo; &ldquo;Why, Susan!&rdquo; What might have come next in the programme,
+      but for the presence of a third party, is matter of conjecture; but what
+      did come next was a mighty awkward look on the part of Susan Posey, and
+      the following short speech: &ldquo;Mr. Lindsay, let me introduce Mr. Hopkins, my
+      friend, the poet I 've written to you about. He was just reading two of
+      his poems to me. Some other time, Gifted&mdash;Mr. Hopkins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no, Mr. Hopkins,&mdash;pray go on,&rdquo; said Clement. &ldquo;I 'm very fond of
+      poetry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The poet did not require much urging, and began at once reciting over
+      again the stanzas which were afterwards so much admired in the &ldquo;Banner and
+      Oracle,&rdquo;&mdash;the first verse being, as the readers of that paper will
+      remember,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;She moves in splendor, like the ray
+     That flashes from unclouded skies,
+     And all the charms of night and day
+     Are mingled in her hair and eyes.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Clement, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone with his
+      beloved, commanded his feelings admirably. He signified his approbation of
+      the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the rhymes absolutely
+      without blemish. The stanzas reminded him forcibly of one of the greatest
+      poets of the century.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted flushed hot with pleasure. He had tasted the blood of his own
+      rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the bag
+      of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to drag his
+      piece away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps you will like these lines still better,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the style is
+      more modern:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;'O daughter of the spiced South,
+          Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine
+          That staineth with its hue divine
+       The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of two
+      rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement was cornered. It was necessary to say something for the poet's
+      sake,&mdash;perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense
+      responsible for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had spoken so
+      often and so enthusiastically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should think,
+      until of late years. You modelled this piece on the style of a famous
+      living English poet, did you not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,&mdash;I never imitate. Originality is, if
+      I may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte. Why, the
+      critics allow as much as that. See here, Mr. Lindsay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom a
+      cutting from a newspaper,&mdash;which dropped helplessly open of itself,
+      as if tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or creases, by
+      reason of having been often folded and unfolded read aloud as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The bard of Oxbow Pillage&mdash;our valued correspondent who writes over
+      the signature of G. H.&mdash;is, in our opinion, more remarkable for his
+      originality than for any other of his numerous gifts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated with
+      a sense of triumph. Susan could not help sharing his feeling of
+      satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without knowing
+      it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a little bit&mdash;the
+      merest infinitesimal atom&mdash;nearer to Gifted Hopkins, who was on one
+      side of her, while Clement walked on the other. Women love the conquering
+      party,&mdash;it is the way of their sex. And poets, as we have seen, are
+      well-nigh irresistible when they exert their dangerous power of
+      fascination upon the female heart. But Clement was above jealousy; and, if
+      he perceived anything of this movement, took no notice of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day. She was tender in her
+      expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little something in her
+      looks and language from time to time that Clement did not know exactly
+      what to make of. She colored once or twice when the young poet's name was
+      mentioned. She was not so full of her little plans for the future as she
+      had sometimes been, &ldquo;everything was so uncertain,&rdquo; she said. Clement asked
+      himself whether she felt quite as sure that her attachment would last as
+      she once did. But there were no reproaches, not even any explanations,
+      which are about as bad between lovers. There was nothing but an undefined
+      feeling on his side that she did not cling quite so closely to him,
+      perhaps, as he had once thought, and that, if he had happened to have been
+      drowned that day when he went down with the beautiful young woman, it was
+      just conceivable that Susan, who would have cried dreadfully, no doubt,
+      would in time have listened to consolation from some other young man,&mdash;possibly
+      from the young poet whose verses he had been admiring. Easy-crying widows
+      take new husbands soonest; there is nothing like wet weather for
+      transplanting, as Master Gridley used to say. Susan had a fluent natural
+      gift for tears, as Clement well knew, after the exercise of which she used
+      to brighten up like the rose which had been washed, just washed in a
+      shower, mentioned by Cowper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this visit
+      of Clement's than he had ever before known. He wandered about with a
+      dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance. He showed a falling-off
+      in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and disturbed his mother, for
+      she had filled the house with fragrant suggestions of good things coming,
+      in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was to be her guest at tea. And chiefly the
+      genteel form of doughnut called in the native dialect cymbal (Qu. Symbol?
+      B. G.) which graced the board with its plastic forms, suggestive of the
+      most pleasing objects,&mdash;the spiral ringlets pendent from the brow of
+      beauty; the magic circlet, which is the pledge of plighted affection,&mdash;the
+      indissoluble knot, which typifies the union of hearts, which organs were
+      also largely represented; this exceptional delicacy would at any other
+      time have claimed his special notice. But his mother remarked that he paid
+      little attention to these, and his, &ldquo;No, I thank you,&rdquo; when it came to the
+      preserved &ldquo;damsels,&rdquo; as some call them, carried a pang with it to the
+      maternal bosom. The most touching evidence of his unhappiness&mdash;whether
+      intentional or the result of accident was not evident was a broken heart,
+      which he left upon his plate, the meaning of which was as plain as
+      anything in the language of flowers. His thoughts were gloomy during that
+      day, running a good deal on the more picturesque and impressive methods of
+      bidding a voluntary farewell to a world which had allured him with visions
+      of beauty only to snatch them from his impassioned gaze. His mother saw
+      something of this, and got from him a few disjointed words, which led her
+      to lock up the clothes-line and hide her late husband's razors,&mdash;an
+      affectionate, yet perhaps unnecessary precaution, for self-elimination
+      contemplated from this point of view by those who have the natural outlet
+      of verse to relieve them is rarely followed by a casualty. It may rather
+      be considered as implying a more than average chance for longevity; as
+      those who meditate an&mdash;imposing finish naturally save themselves for
+      it, and are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and
+      this is apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to
+      write or a proof to be corrected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX. THE SECOND MEETING.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Miss Eveleth requests the pleasure of Mr. Lindsay's company to meet a few
+      friends on the evening of the Feast of St. Ambrose, December 7th,
+      Wednesday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE PARSONAGE, December 6th.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the luckiest thing in the world. They always made a little festival
+      of that evening at the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth's, in honor of his canonized
+      namesake, and because they liked to have a good time. It came this year
+      just at the right moment, for here was a distinguished stranger visiting
+      in the place. Oxbow Village seemed to be running over with its one extra
+      young man,&mdash;as may be seen sometimes in larger villages, and even in
+      cities of moderate dimensions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had called on Clement the day after his
+      arrival. He had already met the Deacon in the street, and asked some
+      questions about his transient boarder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very interesting young man, the Deacon said, much given to the reading
+      of pious books. Up late at night after he came, reading Scott's
+      Commentary. Appeared to be as fond of serious works as other young folks
+      were of their novels and romances and other immoral publications. He, the
+      Deacon, thought of having a few religious friends to meet the young
+      gentleman, if he felt so disposed; and should like to have him, Mr.
+      Bradshaw, come in and take a part in the exercises.&mdash;Mr. Bradshaw was
+      unfortunately engaged. He thought the young gentleman could hardly find
+      time for such a meeting during his brief visit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw expected naturally to see a youth of imperfect constitution,
+      and cachectic or dyspeptic tendencies, who was in training to furnish one
+      of those biographies beginning with the statement that, from his infancy,
+      the subject of it showed no inclination for boyish amusements, and so on,
+      until he dies out, for the simple reason that there was not enough of him
+      to live. Very interesting, no doubt, Master Byles Gridley would have said,
+      but had no more to do with good, hearty, sound life than the history of
+      those very little people to be seen in museums preserved in jars of
+      alcohol, like brandy peaches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Mr. Clement Lindsay presented himself, Mr. Bradshaw was a good deal
+      surprised to see a young fellow of such a mould. He pleased himself with
+      the idea that he knew a man of mark at sight, and he set down Clement in
+      that category at his first glance. The young man met his penetrating and
+      questioning look with a frank, ingenuous, open aspect, before which he
+      felt himself disarmed, as it were, and thrown upon other means of
+      analysis. He would try him a little in talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope you like these people you are with. What sort of a man do you find
+      my old friend the Deacon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement laughed. &ldquo;A very queer old character. Loves his joke as well, and
+      is as sly in making it, as if he had studied Joe Miller instead of the
+      Catechism.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw looked at the young man to know what he meant. Mr. Lindsay
+      talked in a very easy way for a serious young person. He was puzzled. He
+      did not see to the bottom of this description of the Deacon. With a
+      lawyer's instinct, he kept his doubts to himself and tried his witness
+      with a new question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you talk about books at all with the old man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To be sure I did. Would you believe it,&mdash;that aged saint is a great
+      novel-reader. So he tells me. What is more, he brings up his children to
+      that sort of reading, from the time when they first begin to spell. If
+      anybody else had told me such a story about an old country deacon, I
+      wouldn't have believed it; but he said so himself, to me, at breakfast
+      this morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw felt as if either he or Mr. Lindsay must certainly be in the
+      first stage of mild insanity, and he did not think that he himself could
+      be out of his wits. He must try one more question. He had become so
+      mystified that he forgot himself, and began putting his interrogation in
+      legal form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you state, if you please&mdash;I beg your pardon&mdash;may I ask who
+      is your own favorite author?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think just now I like to read Scott better than almost anybody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean the Rev. Thomas Scott, author of the Commentary?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement stared at Mr. Bradshaw, and wondered whether he was trying to make
+      a fool of him. The young lawyer hardly looked as if he could be a fool
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean Sir Walter Scott,&rdquo; he said, dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; said Mr. Bradshaw. He saw that there had been a slight
+      misunderstanding between the young man and his worthy host, but it was
+      none of his business, and there were other subjects of interest to talk
+      about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know one of our charming young ladies very well, I believe, Mr.
+      Lindsay. I think you are an old acquaintance of Miss Posey, whom we all
+      consider so pretty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Clement! The question pierced to the very marrow of his soul, but it
+      was put with the utmost suavity and courtesy, and honeyed with a
+      compliment to the young lady, too, so that there was no avoiding a direct
+      and pleasant answer to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have known the young lady you speak of for a long time,
+      and very well,&mdash;in fact, as you must have heard, we are something
+      more than friends. My visit here is principally on her account.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must give the rest of us a chance to see something of you during your
+      visit, Mr. Lindsay. I hope you are invited to Miss Eveleth's to-morrow
+      evening?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I got a note this morning. Tell me, Mr. Bradshaw, who is there that
+      I shall meet if I go? I have no doubt there are girls here in the village
+      I should like to see, and perhaps some young fellows that I should like to
+      talk with. You know all that's prettiest and pleasantest, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, we're a little place, Mr. Lindsay. A few nice people, the rest comme
+      Va, you know. High-bush blackberries and low-bush black-berries,&mdash;you
+      understand,&mdash;just so everywhere,&mdash;high-bush here and there,
+      low-bush plenty. You must see the two parsons' daughters,&mdash;Saint
+      Ambrose's and Saint Joseph's,&mdash;and another girl I want particularly
+      to introduce you to. You shall form your own opinion of her. I call her
+      handsome and stylish, but you have got spoiled, you know. Our young poet,
+      too, one we raised in this place, Mr. Lindsay, and a superior article of
+      poet, as we think,&mdash;that is, some of us, for the rest of us are
+      jealous of him, because the girls are all dying for him and want his
+      autograph. And Cyp,&mdash;yes, you must talk to Cyp,&mdash;he has ideas.
+      But don't forget to get hold of old Byles Master Gridley I mean&mdash;before
+      you go. Big head. Brains enough for a cabinet minister, and fit out a
+      college faculty with what was left over. Be sure you see old Byles. Set
+      him talking about his book, 'Thoughts on the Universe.' Did n't sell much,
+      but has got knowing things in it. I'll show you a copy, and then you can
+      tell him you know it, and he will take to you. Come in and get your dinner
+      with me to-morrow. We will dine late, as the city folks do, and after that
+      we will go over to the Rector's. I should like to show you some of our
+      village people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw liked the thought of showing the young man to some of his
+      friends there. As Clement was already &ldquo;done for,&rdquo; or &ldquo;bowled out,&rdquo; as the
+      young lawyer would have expressed the fact of his being pledged in the
+      matrimonial direction, there was nothing to be apprehended on the score of
+      rivalry. And although Clement was particularly good-looking, and would
+      have been called a distinguishable youth anywhere, Mr. Bradshaw considered
+      himself far more than his match, in all probability, in social
+      accomplishments. He expected, therefore, a certain amount of reflex credit
+      for bringing such a fine young fellow in his company, and a second
+      instalment of reputation from outshining him in conversation. This was
+      rather nice calculating, but Murray Bradshaw always calculated. With most
+      men life is like backgammon, half skill, and half luck, but with him it
+      was like chess. He never pushed a pawn without reckoning the cost, and
+      when his mind was least busy it was sure to be half a dozen moves ahead of
+      the game as it was standing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw gave Clement a pretty dinner enough for such a place as Oxbow
+      Village. He offered him some good wine, and would have made him talk so as
+      to show his lining, to use one of his own expressions, but Clement had
+      apparently been through that trifling experience, and could not be coaxed
+      into saying more than he meant to say. Murray Bradshaw was very curious to
+      find out how it was that he had become the victim of such a rudimentary
+      miss as Susan Posey. Could she be an heiress in disguise? Why no, of
+      course not; had not he made all proper inquiries about that when Susan
+      came to town? A small inheritance from an aunt or uncle, or some such
+      relative, enough to make her a desirable party in the eyes of certain
+      villagers perhaps, but nothing to allure a man like this, whose face and
+      figure as marketable possessions were worth say a hundred thousand in the
+      girl's own right, as Mr. Bradshaw put it roughly, with another hundred
+      thousand if his talent is what some say, and if his connection is a
+      desirable one, a fancy price,&mdash;anything he would fetch. Of course
+      not. Must have got caught when he was a child. Why the diavolo didn't he
+      break it off, then?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no fault to find with the modest entertainment at the Parsonage.
+      A splendid banquet in a great house is an admirable thing, provided always
+      its getting up did not cost the entertainer an inward conflict, nor its
+      recollection a twinge of economical regret, nor its bills a cramp of
+      anxiety. A simple evening party in the smallest village is just as
+      admirable in its degree, when the parlor is cheerfully lighted, and the
+      board prettily spread, and the guests are made to feel comfortable without
+      being reminded that anybody is making a painful effort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We know several of the young people who were there, and need not trouble
+      ourselves for the others. Myrtle Hazard had promised to come. She had her
+      own way of late as never before; in fact, the women were afraid of her.
+      Miss Silence felt that she could not be responsible for her any longer.
+      She had hopes for a time that Myrtle would go through the customary
+      spiritual paroxysm under the influence of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's assiduous
+      exhortations; but since she had broken off with him, Miss Silence had
+      looked upon her as little better than a backslider. And now that the girl
+      was beginning to show the tendencies which seemed to come straight down to
+      her from the belle of the last century, (whose rich physical developments
+      seemed to the under-vitalized spinster as in themselves a kind of offence
+      against propriety,) the forlorn woman folded her thin hands and looked on
+      hopelessly, hardly venturing a remonstrance for fear of some new
+      explosion. As for Cynthia, she was comparatively easy since she had,
+      through Mr. Byles Gridley, upset the minister's questionable arrangement
+      of religious intimacy. She had, in fact, in a quiet way, given Mr.
+      Bradshaw to understand that he would probably meet Myrtle at the Parsonage
+      if he dropped in at their small gathering. Clement walked over to Mrs.
+      Hopkins's after his dinner with the young lawyer, and asked if Susan was
+      ready to go with him. At the sound of his voice, Gifted Hopkins smote his
+      forehead, and called himself, in subdued tones, a miserable being. His
+      imagination wavered uncertain for a while between pictures of various
+      modes of ridding himself of existence, and fearful deeds involving the
+      life of others. He had no fell purpose of actually doing either, but there
+      was a gloomy pleasure in contemplating them as possibilities, and in
+      mentally sketching the &ldquo;Lines written in Despair&rdquo; which would be found in
+      what was but an hour before the pocket of the youthful bard, G. H., victim
+      of a hopeless passion. All this emotion was in the nature of a surprise to
+      the young man. He had fully believed himself desperately in love with
+      Myrtle Hazard; and it was not until Clement came into the family circle
+      with the right of eminent domain over the realm of Susan's affections,
+      that this unfortunate discovered that Susan's pretty ways and morning
+      dress and love of poetry and liking for his company had been too much for
+      him, and that he was henceforth to be wretched during the remainder of his
+      natural life, except so far as he could unburden himself in song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had asked the privilege of waiting upon Myrtle
+      to the little party at the Eveleths. Myrtle was not insensible to the
+      attractions of the young lawyer, though she had never thought of herself
+      except as a child in her relations with any of these older persons. But
+      she was not the same girl that she had been but a few months before. She
+      had achieved her independence by her audacious and most dangerous
+      enterprise. She had gone through strange nervous trials and spiritual
+      experiences which had matured her more rapidly than years of common life
+      would have done. She had got back her health, bringing with it a riper
+      wealth of womanhood. She had found her destiny in the consciousness that
+      she inherited the beauty belonging to her blood, and which, after sleeping
+      for a generation or two as if to rest from the glare of the pageant that
+      follows beauty through its long career of triumph, had come to the light
+      again in her life, and was to repeat the legends of the olden time in her
+      own history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle's wardrobe had very little of ornament, such as the modistes of the
+      town would have thought essential to render a young girl like her
+      presentable. There were a few heirlooms of old date, however, which she
+      had kept as curiosities until now, and which she looked over until she
+      found some lace and other convertible material, with which she enlivened
+      her costume a little for the evening. As she clasped the antique bracelet
+      around her wrist, she felt as if it were an amulet that gave her the power
+      of charming which had been so long obsolete in her lineage. At the bottom
+      of her heart she cherished a secret longing to try her fascinations on the
+      young lawyer. Who could blame her? It was not an inwardly expressed
+      intention,&mdash;it was the simple instinctive movement to subjugate the
+      strongest of the other sex who had come in her way, which, as already
+      said, is as natural to a woman as it is to a man to be captivated by the
+      loveliest of those to whom he dares to aspire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before William Murray Bradshaw and Myrtle Hazard had reached the
+      Parsonage, the girl's cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes were flashing
+      with a new excitement. The young man had not made love to her directly,
+      but he had interested her in herself by a delicate and tender flattery of
+      manner, and so set her fancies working that she was taken with him as
+      never before, and wishing that the Parsonage had been a mile farther from
+      The Poplars. It was impossible for a young girl like Myrtle to conceal the
+      pleasure she received from listening to her seductive admirer, who was
+      trying all his trained skill upon his artless companion. Murray Bradshaw
+      felt sure that the game was in his hands if he played it with only common
+      prudence. There was no need of hurrying this child,&mdash;it might startle
+      her to make downright love abruptly; and now that he had an ally in her
+      own household, and was to have access to her with a freedom he had never
+      before enjoyed, there was a refined pleasure in playing his fish,&mdash;this
+      gamest of golden-scaled creatures,&mdash;which had risen to his fly, and
+      which he wished to hook, but not to land, until he was sure it would be
+      worth his while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They entered the little parlor at the Parsonage looking so beaming, that
+      Olive and Bathsheba exchanged glances which implied so much that it would
+      take a full page to tell it with all the potentialities involved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How magnificent Myrtle is this evening, Bathsheba!&rdquo; said Cyprian Eveleth,
+      pensively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a handsome pair they are, Cyprian!&rdquo; said Bathsheba cheerfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyprian sighed. &ldquo;She always fascinates me whenever I look upon her. Is n't
+      she the very picture of what a poet's love should be,&mdash;a poem
+      herself,&mdash;a glorious lyric,&mdash;all light and music! See what a
+      smile the creature has! And her voice! When did you ever hear such tones?
+      And when was it ever so full of life before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bathsheba sighed. &ldquo;I do not know any poets but Gifted Hopkins. Does not
+      Myrtle look more in her place by the side of Murray Bradshaw than she
+      would with Gifted hitched on her arm?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then the poet made his appearance. He looked depressed, as if it had
+      cost him an effort to come. He was, however, charged with a message which
+      he must deliver to the hostess of the evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They 're coming presently,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;That young man and Susan. Wants you
+      to introduce him, Mr. Bradshaw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bell rang presently, and Murray Bradshaw slipped out into the entry to
+      meet the two lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How are you, my fortunate friend?&rdquo; he said, as he met them at the door.
+      &ldquo;Of course you're well and happy as mortal man can be in this vale of
+      tears. Charming, ravishing, quite delicious, that way of dressing your
+      hair, Miss Posey! Nice girls here this evening, Mr. Lindsay. Looked lovely
+      when I came out of the parlor. Can't say how they will show after this
+      young lady puts in an appearance.&rdquo; In reply to which florid speeches Susan
+      blushed, not knowing what else to do, and Clement smiled as naturally as
+      if he had been sitting for his photograph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt, in a vague way, that he and Susan were being patronized, which is
+      not a pleasant feeling to persons with a certain pride of character. There
+      was no expression of contempt about Mr. Bradshaw's manner or language at
+      which he could take offence. Only he had the air of a man who praises his
+      neighbor without stint, with a calm consciousness that he himself is out
+      of reach of comparison in the possessions or qualities which he is
+      admiring in the other. Clement was right in his obscure perception of Mr.
+      Bradshaw's feeling while he was making his phrases. That gentleman was, in
+      another moment, to have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature
+      he had just begun to tame. He was going to extinguish the pallid light of
+      Susan's prettiness in the brightness of Myrtle's beauty. He would bring
+      this young man, neutralized and rendered entirely harmless by his
+      irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face to face with a masterpiece of
+      young womanhood, and say to him, not in words, but as plainly as speech
+      could have told him, &ldquo;Behold my captive!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a proud moment for Murray Bradshaw. He had seen, or thought that he
+      had seen, the assured evidence of a speedy triumph over all the obstacles
+      of Myrtle's youth and his own present seeming slight excess of maturity.
+      Unless he were very greatly mistaken, he could now walk the course; the
+      plate was his, no matter what might be the entries. And this youth, this
+      handsome, spirited-looking, noble-aired young fellow, whose artist-eye
+      could not miss a line of Myrtle's proud and almost defiant beauty, was to
+      be the witness of his power, and to look in admiration upon his prize! He
+      introduced him to the others, reserving her for the last. She was at that
+      moment talking with the worthy Rector, and turned when Mr. Bradshaw spoke
+      to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Hazard, will you allow me to present to you my friend, Mr. Clement
+      Lindsay?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They looked full upon each other, and spoke the common words of
+      salutation. It was a strange meeting; but we who profess to tell the truth
+      must tell strange things, or we shall be liars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In poor little Susan's letter there was some allusion to a bust of
+      Innocence which the young artist had begun, but of which he had said
+      nothing in his answer to her. He had roughed out a block of marble for
+      that impersonation; sculpture was a delight to him, though secondary to
+      his main pursuit. After his memorable adventure, the image of the girl he
+      had rescued so haunted him that the pale ideal which was to work itself
+      out in the bust faded away in its perpetual presence, and&mdash;alas, poor
+      Susan! in obedience to the impulse that he could not control, he left
+      Innocence sleeping in the marble, and began modelling a figure of proud
+      and noble and imperious beauty, to which he gave the name of Liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The original which had inspired his conception was before him. These were
+      the lips to which his own had clung when he brought her back from the land
+      of shadows. The hyacinthine curl of her lengthening locks had added
+      something to her beauty; but it was the same face which had haunted him.
+      This was the form he had borne seemingly lifeless in his arms, and the
+      bosom which heaved so visibly before him was that which his eyes they were
+      the calm eyes of a sculptor, but of a sculptor hardly twenty years old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes,&mdash;her bosom was heaving. She had an unexplained feeling of
+      suffocation, and drew great breaths,&mdash;she could not have said why,&mdash;but
+      she could not help it; and presently she became giddy, and had a great
+      noise in her ears, and rolled her eyes about, and was on the point of
+      going into an hysteric spasm. They called Dr. Hurlbut, who was making
+      himself agreeable to Olive just then, to come and see what was the matter
+      with Myrtle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A little nervous turn,&mdash;that is all,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Open the window. Loose the ribbon round her neck. Rub her hands. Sprinkle
+      some water on her forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A few drops of cologne. Room too warm for her,&mdash;that 's all, I
+      think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle came to herself after a time without anything like a regular
+      paroxysm. But she was excitable, and whatever the cause of the disturbance
+      may have been, it seemed prudent that she should go home early; and the
+      excellent Rector insisted on caring for her, much to the discontent of Mr.
+      William Murray Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Demonish odd,&rdquo; said this gentleman, &ldquo;was n't it, Mr. Lindsay, that Miss
+      Hazard should go off in that way. Did you ever see her before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;have seen that young lady before,&rdquo; Clement answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you meet her?&rdquo; Mr. Bradshaw asked, with eager interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I met her in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,&rdquo; Clement answered, very
+      solemnly.&mdash;&ldquo;I leave this place to-morrow morning. Have you any
+      commands for the city?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knows how to shut a fellow up pretty well for a young one, doesn't he?&rdquo;
+       Mr. Bradshaw thought to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, no,&rdquo; he answered, recovering himself. &ldquo;Rather a melancholy
+      place to make acquaintance in, I should think, that Valley you spoke of. I
+      should like to know about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clement had the power of looking steadily into another person's eyes
+      in a way that was by no means encouraging to curiosity or favorable to the
+      process of cross-examination. Mr. Bradshaw was not disposed to press his
+      question in the face of the calm, repressive look the young man gave him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he was n't bagged, I shouldn't like the shape of things any too well,&rdquo;
+       he said to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation between Mr. Clement Lindsay and Miss Susan Posey, as they
+      walked home together, was not very brilliant. &ldquo;I am going to-morrow
+      morning,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I must bid you good-by tonight.&rdquo; Perhaps it is as
+      well to leave two lovers to themselves, under these circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before he went he spoke to his worthy host, whose moderate demands he had
+      to satisfy, and with whom he wished to exchange a few words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And by the way, Deacon, I have no use for this book, and as it is in a
+      good type, perhaps you would like it. Your favorite, Scott, and one of his
+      greatest works. I have another edition of it at home, and don't care for
+      this volume.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you, thank you, Mr. Lindsay, much obleeged. I shall read that copy
+      for your sake, the best of books next to the Bible itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After Mr. Lindsay had gone, the Deacon looked at the back of the book.
+      &ldquo;Scott's Works, Vol. IX.&rdquo; He opened it at hazard, and happened to fall on
+      a well-known page, from which he began reading aloud, slowly,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;When Izrul, of the Lord beloved,
+     Out of the land of bondage came.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The whole hymn pleased the grave Deacon. He had never seen this work of
+      the author of the Commentary. No matter; anything that such a good man
+      wrote must be good reading, and he would save it up for Sunday. The
+      consequence of this was, that, when the Rev. Mr. Stoker stopped in on his
+      way to meeting on the &ldquo;Sabbath,&rdquo; he turned white with horror at the
+      spectacle of the senior Deacon of his church sitting, open-mouthed and
+      wide-eyed, absorbed in the pages of &ldquo;Ivanhoe,&rdquo; which he found enormously
+      interesting; but, so far as he had yet read, not occupied with religious
+      matters so much as he had expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle had no explanation to give of her nervous attack. Mr. Bradshaw
+      called the day after the party, but did not see her. He met her walking,
+      and thought she seemed a little more distant than common. That would never
+      do. He called again at The Poplars a few days afterwards, and was met in
+      the entry by Miss Cynthia, with whom he had a long conversation on matters
+      involving Myrtle's interests and their own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI. MADNESS?
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clement Lindsay returned to the city and his usual labors in a state
+      of strange mental agitation. He had received an impression for which he
+      was unprepared. He had seen for the second time a young girl whom, for the
+      peace of his own mind, and for the happiness of others, he should never
+      again have looked upon until Time had taught their young hearts the lesson
+      which all hearts must learn, sooner or later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What shall the unfortunate person do who has met with one of those
+      disappointments, or been betrayed into one of those positions, which do
+      violence to all the tenderest feelings, blighting the happiness of youth,
+      and the prospects of after years?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the person is a young man, he has various resources. He can take to the
+      philosophic meerschaum, and nicotine himself at brief intervals into a
+      kind of buzzing and blurry insensibility, until he begins to &ldquo;color&rdquo; at
+      last like the bowl of his own pipe, and even his mind gets the tobacco
+      flavor. Or he can have recourse to the more suggestive stimulants, which
+      will dress his future up for him in shining possibilities that glitter
+      like Masonic regalia, until the morning light and the waking headache
+      reveal his illusion. Some kind of spiritual anaesthetic he must have, if
+      he holds his grief fast tied to his heartstrings. But as grief must be fed
+      with thought, or starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so
+      busy in other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of that
+      ravening passion. To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to end in
+      putting all the mental machinery into disorder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already fought,
+      and that he had conquered. He believed that he had subdued himself
+      completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow of
+      disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had assigned
+      him in his companion, and share with it all of his own larger being it was
+      capable, not of comprehending, but of apprehending.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had deceived himself. The battle was not fought and won. There had been
+      a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the enemy&mdash;intrenched
+      in the very citadel of life&mdash;had rallied, and would make another
+      desperate attempt to retrieve his defeat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The haste with which the young man had quitted the village was only a
+      proof that he felt his danger. He believed that, if he came into the
+      presence of Myrtle Hazard for the third time, he should be no longer
+      master of his feelings. Some explanation must take place between them, and
+      how was it possible that it should be without emotion? and in what do all
+      emotions shared by a young man with such a young girl as this tend to find
+      their last expression?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work. He would give
+      himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams of what might have been. His
+      plans were never so carefully finished, and his studies were never so
+      continuous as now. But the passion still wrought within him, and, if he
+      drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep until he could endure
+      it no longer, and must give it some manifestation. He had covered up the
+      bust of Liberty so closely, that not an outline betrayed itself through
+      the heavy folds of drapery in which it was wrapped. His thoughts recurred
+      to his unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he could find
+      a silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was torture to keep
+      imprisoned in his soul. The cold stone would tell them, but without
+      passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of himself into
+      a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered from a presence
+      which, lovely as it was, stood between him and all that made him seem
+      honorable and worthy to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He uncovered the bust which he had but half shaped, and struck the first
+      flake from the glittering marble. The toil, once begun, fascinated him
+      strangely, and after the day's work was done, and at every interval he
+      could snatch from his duties, he wrought at his secret task.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clement is graver than ever,&rdquo; the young men said at the office. &ldquo;What's
+      the matter, do you suppose? Turned off by the girl they say he means to
+      marry by and by? How pale he looks too! Must have something worrying him:
+      he used to look as fresh as a clove pink.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The master with whom he studied saw that he was losing color, and looking
+      very much worn; and determined to find out, if he could, whether he was
+      not overworking himself. He soon discovered that his light was seen
+      burning late into the night, that he was neglecting his natural rest, and
+      always busy with some unknown task, not called for in his routine of duty
+      or legitimate study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something is wearing on you, Clement,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You are killing yourself
+      with undertaking too much. Will you let me know what keeps you so busy
+      when you ought to be asleep, or taking your ease and comfort in some way
+      or other?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nobody but himself had ever seen his marble or its model. He had now
+      almost finished it, laboring at it with such sleepless devotion, and he
+      was willing to let his master have a sight of his first effort of the
+      kind,&mdash;for he was not a sculptor, it must be remembered, though he
+      had modelled in clay, not without some success, from time to time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The master climbed the stairs with him up to his modest chamber. A closely
+      shrouded bust stood on its pedestal in the light of the solitary window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is my ideal personage,&rdquo; Clement said. &ldquo;Wait one moment, and you
+      shall see how far I have caught the character of our uncrowned queen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The master expected, very naturally, to see the conventional young woman
+      with classical wreath or feather headdress, whom we have placed upon our
+      smallest coin, so that our children may all grow up loving Liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Clement withdrew the drapery that covered his work, the master stared
+      at it in amazement. He looked at it long and earnestly, and at length
+      turned his eyes, a little moistened by some feeling which thus betrayed
+      itself, upon his scholar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is no ideal, Clement. It is the portrait of a very young but very
+      beautiful woman. No common feeling could have guided your hand in shaping
+      such a portrait from memory. This must be that friend of yours of whom I
+      have often heard as an amiable young person. Pardon me, for you know that
+      nobody cares more for you than I do,&mdash;I hope that you are happy in
+      all your relations with this young friend of yours. How could one be
+      otherwise?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was hard to bear, very hard. He forced a smile. &ldquo;You are partly right,&rdquo;
+       he said. &ldquo;There is a resemblance, I trust, to a living person, for I had
+      one in my mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did n't you tell me once, Clement, that you were attempting a bust of
+      Innocence? I do not see any block in your room but this. Is that done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Done with!&rdquo; Clement answered; and, as he said it, the thought stung
+      through him that this was the very stone which was to have worn the
+      pleasant blandness of pretty Susan's guileless countenance. How the new
+      features had effaced the recollection of the others!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a few days more Clement had finished his bust. His hours were again
+      vacant to his thick-coming fancies. While he had been busy with his
+      marble, his hands had required his attention, and he must think closely of
+      every detail upon which he was at work. But at length his task was done,
+      and he could contemplate what he had made of it. It was a triumph for one
+      so little exercised in sculpture. The master had told him so, and his own
+      eye could not deceive him. He might never succeed in any repetition of his
+      effort, but this once he most certainly had succeeded. He could not
+      disguise from himself the source of this extraordinary good fortune in so
+      doubtful and difficult an attempt. Nor could he resist the desire of
+      contemplating the portrait bust, which&mdash;it was foolish to talk about
+      ideals&mdash;was not Liberty, but Myrtle Hazard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was too nearly like the story of the ancient sculptor; his own work was
+      an over-match for its artist. Clement had made a mistake in supposing that
+      by giving his dream a material form he should drive it from the possession
+      of his mind. The image in which he had fixed his recollection of its
+      original served only to keep her living presence before him. He thought of
+      her as she clasped her arms around him, and they were swallowed up in the
+      rushing waters, coming so near to passing into the unknown world together.
+      He thought of her as he stretched her lifeless form upon the bank, and
+      looked for one brief moment on her unsunned loveliness,&mdash;&ldquo;a sight to
+      dream of, not to tell.&rdquo; He thought of her as his last fleeting glimpse had
+      shown her, beautiful, not with the blossomy prettiness that passes away
+      with the spring sunshine, but with a rich vitality of which noble outlines
+      and winning expression were only the natural accidents. And that singular
+      impression which the sight of him had produced upon her,&mdash;how
+      strange! How could she but have listened to him,&mdash;to him, who was, as
+      it were, a second creator to her, for he had bought her back from the
+      gates of the unseen realm,&mdash;if he had recalled to her the dread
+      moments they had passed in each other's arms, with death, not love, in all
+      their thoughts. And if then he had told her how her image had remained
+      with him, how it had colored all his visions, and mingled with all his
+      conceptions, would not those dark eyes have melted as they were turned
+      upon him? Nay, how could he keep the thought away, that she would not have
+      been insensible to his passion, if he could have suffered its flame to
+      kindle in his heart? Did it not seem as if Death had spared them for Love,
+      and that Love should lead them together through life's long journey to the
+      gates of Death?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never! never! never! Their fates were fixed. For him, poor insect as he
+      was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his wingless
+      mate! For her&mdash;he thought he saw her doom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless egotist,
+      who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all
+      around her? Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not perhaps
+      have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for him, for it
+      takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe analytically what we know
+      as soon as we see it; but he felt in his inner consciousness all that we
+      must tell for him. Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing, capable of
+      winning a woman infinitely above himself, incapable of understanding her,&mdash;oh,
+      if he could but touch him with the angel's spear, and bid him take his
+      true shape before her whom he was gradually enveloping in the silken
+      meshes of his subtle web! He would make a place for her in the world,&mdash;oh
+      yes, doubtless. He would be proud of her in company, would dress her
+      handsomely, and show her off in the best lights. But from the very hour
+      that he felt his power over her firmly established, he would begin to
+      remodel her after his own worldly pattern. He would dismantle her of her
+      womanly ideals, and give her in their place his table of market-values. He
+      would teach her to submit her sensibilities to her selfish interest, and
+      her tastes to the fashion of the moment, no matter which world or
+      half-world it came from. &ldquo;As the husband is, the wife is,&rdquo;&mdash;he would
+      subdue her to what he worked in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the wife of
+      Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he did, from the
+      few times he had seen him. He would be rich by and by, very probably. He
+      looked like one of those young men who are sharp, and hard enough to come
+      to fortune. Then she would have to take her place in the great social
+      exhibition where the gilded cages are daily opened that the animals may be
+      seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and the sound of
+      impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable life, where
+      wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an existence which has
+      all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy
+      which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How many fashionable
+      women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself
+      as a relief from the desperate monotony of dressing, dawdling, and
+      driving!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This could not go on so forever. Clement had placed a red curtain so as to
+      throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which his fancy
+      turned to the semblance of life. He would sit and look at the features his
+      own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed as if the lips moved,
+      sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as if they were ready to
+      speak to him. His companions began to whisper strange things of him in the
+      studio,&mdash;that his eye was getting an unnatural light,&mdash;that he
+      talked as if to imaginary listeners,&mdash;in short, that there was a look
+      as if something were going wrong with his brain, which it might be feared
+      would spoil his fine intelligence. It was the undecided battle, and the
+      enemy, as in his noblest moments he had considered the growing passion,
+      was getting the better of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which had smiled and
+      whispered away his peace, when the post-man brought him a letter. It was
+      from the simple girl to whom he had given his promise. We know how she
+      used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent feelings, and the
+      trifling matters that were going on in her little village world. But now
+      she wrote in sadness. Something, she did not too clearly explain what, had
+      grieved her, and she gave free expression to her feelings. &ldquo;I have no one
+      that loves me but you,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;and if you leave me I must droop and
+      die. Are you true to me, dearest Clement,&mdash;true as when we promised
+      each other that we would love while life lasted? Or have you forgotten one
+      who will never cease to remember that she was once your own Susan?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement dropped the letter from his hand, and sat a long hour looking at
+      the exquisitely wrought features of her who had come between him and honor
+      and his plighted word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length he arose, and, lifting the bust tenderly from its pedestal, laid
+      it upon the cloth with which it had been covered. He wrapped it closely,
+      fold upon fold, as the mother whom man condemns and God pities wraps the
+      child she loves before she lifts her hand against its life. Then he took a
+      heavy hammer and shattered his lovely idol into shapeless fragments. The
+      strife was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII. A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. William Murray Bradshaw was in pretty intimate relations with Miss
+      Cynthia Badlam. It was well understood between them that it might be of
+      very great advantage to both of them if he should in due time become the
+      accepted lover of Myrtle Hazard. So long as he could be reasonably secure
+      against interference, he did not wish to hurry her in making her decision.
+      Two things he did wish to be sure of, if possible, before asking her the
+      great question;&mdash;first, that she would answer it in the affirmative;
+      and secondly, that certain contingencies, the turning of which was not as
+      yet absolutely capable of being predicted, should happen as he expected.
+      Cynthia had the power of furthering his wishes in many direct and indirect
+      ways, and he felt sure of her cooperation. She had some reason to fear his
+      enmity if she displeased him, and he had taken good care to make her
+      understand that her interests would be greatly promoted by the success of
+      the plan which he had formed, and which was confided to her alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept the most careful eye on every possible source of disturbance to
+      this quietly maturing plan. He had no objection to have Gifted Hopkins
+      about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him. The youthful bard
+      entertained her very innocently with his bursts of poetry, but she was in
+      no danger from a young person so intimately associated with the
+      yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-paper parcel. There was
+      Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any very particular solicitude.
+      Myrtle had evidently found out that she was handsome and stylish and all
+      that, and it was not very likely she would take up with such a bashful,
+      humble, country youth as this. He could expect nothing beyond a possible
+      rectorate in the remote distance, with one of those little pony chapels to
+      preach in, which, if it were set up on a stout pole, would pass for a
+      good-sized martin-house. Cyprian might do to practise on, but there was no
+      danger of her looking at him in a serious way. As for that youth, Clement
+      Lindsay, if he had not taken himself off as he did, Murray Bradshaw
+      confessed to himself that he should have felt uneasy. He was too
+      good-looking, and too clever a young fellow to have knocking about among
+      fragile susceptibilities. But on reflection he saw there could be no
+      danger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All up with him,&mdash;poor diavolo! Can't understand it&mdash;such a
+      little sixpenny miss&mdash;pretty enough boiled parsnip blonde, if one
+      likes that sort of thing&mdash;pleases some of the old boys, apparently.
+      Look out, Mr. L. remember Susanna and the Elders. Good!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Safe enough if something new doesn't turn up. Youngish. Sixteen's a
+      little early. Seventeen will do. Marry a girl while she's in the gristle,
+      and you can shape her bones for her. Splendid creature without her
+      trimmings. Wants training. Must learn to dance, and sing something besides
+      psalm-tunes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw began humming the hymn, &ldquo;When I can read my title clear,&rdquo;
+       adding some variations of his own. &ldquo;That 's the solo for my prima donna!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time Myrtle seemed to be showing some new developments. One
+      would have said that the instincts of the coquette, or at least of the
+      city belle, were coming uppermost in her nature. Her little nervous attack
+      passed away, and she gained strength and beauty every day. She was
+      becoming conscious of her gifts of fascination, and seemed to please
+      herself with the homage of her rustic admirers. Why was it that no one of
+      them had the look and bearing of that young man she had seen but a moment
+      the other evening? To think that he should have taken up with such a
+      weakling as Susan Posey! She sighed, and not so much thought as felt how
+      kind it would have been in Heaven to have made her such a man. But the
+      image of the delicate blonde stood between her and all serious thought of
+      Clement Lindsay. She saw the wedding in the distance, and very foolishly
+      thought to herself that she could not and would not go to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Clement Lindsay was gone, and she must content herself with such
+      worshippers as the village afforded. Murray Bradshaw was surprised and
+      confounded at the easy way in which she received his compliments, and
+      played with his advances, after the fashion of the trained ball-room
+      belles, who know how to be almost caressing in manner, and yet are really
+      as far off from the deluded victim of their suavities as the topmost
+      statue of the Milan cathedral from the peasant that kneels on its floor.
+      He admired her all the more for this, and yet he saw that she would be a
+      harder prize to win than he had once thought. If he made up his mind that
+      he would have her, he must go armed with all implements, from the red
+      hackle to the harpoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The change which surprised Murray Bradshaw could not fail to be noticed by
+      all those about her. Miss Silence had long ago come to pantomime, rolling
+      up of eyes, clasping of hands, making of sad mouths, and the rest,&mdash;but
+      left her to her own way, as already the property of that great firm of
+      World &amp; Co. which drives such sharp bargains for young souls with the
+      better angels. Cynthia studied her for her own purposes, but had never
+      gained her confidence. The Irish servant saw that some change had come
+      over her, and thought of the great ladies she had sometimes looked upon in
+      the old country. They all had a kind of superstitious feeling about
+      Myrtle's bracelet, of which she had told them the story, but which Kitty
+      half believed was put in the drawer by the fairies, who brought her
+      ribbons and partridge feathers, and other slight adornments with which she
+      contrived to set off her simple costume, so as to produce those effects
+      which an eye for color and cunning fingers can bring out of almost
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins was now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the two
+      great attractions to which he was exposed. Myrtle looked so immensely
+      handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to meeting, for
+      she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton was going to be
+      the preacher, that the young poet was on the point of going down on his
+      knees to her, and telling her that his heart was hers and hers alone. But
+      he suddenly remembered that he had on his best trousers, and the idea of
+      carrying the marks of his devotion in the shape of two dusty impressions
+      on his most valued article of apparel turned the scale against the
+      demonstration. It happened the next morning, that Susan Posey wore the
+      most becoming ribbon she had displayed for a long time, and Gifted was so
+      taken with her pretty looks that he might very probably have made the same
+      speech to her that he had been on the point of making to Myrtle the day
+      before, but that he remembered her plighted affections, and thought what
+      he should have to say for himself when Clement Lindsay, in a frenzy of
+      rage and jealousy, stood before him, probably armed with as many deadly
+      instruments as a lawyer mentions by name in an indictment for murder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cyprian Eveleth looked very differently on the new manifestations Myrtle
+      was making of her tastes and inclinations. He had always felt dazzled, as
+      well as attracted, by her; but now there was something in her expression
+      and manner which made him feel still more strongly that they were intended
+      for different spheres of life. He could not but own that she was born for
+      a brilliant destiny,&mdash;that no ball-room would throw a light from its
+      chandeliers too strong for her,&mdash;that no circle would be too
+      brilliant for her to illuminate by her presence. Love does not thrive
+      without hope, and Cyprian was beginning to see that it was idle in him to
+      think of folding these wide wings of Myrtle's so that they would be shut
+      up in any cage he could ever offer her. He began to doubt whether, after
+      all, he might not find a meeker and humbler nature better adapted to his
+      own. And so it happened that one evening after the three girls, Olive,
+      Myrtle, and Bathsheba, had been together at the Parsonage, and Cyprian,
+      availing himself of a brother's privilege, had joined them, he found he
+      had been talking most of the evening with the gentle girl whose voice had
+      grown so soft and sweet, during her long ministry in the sick-chamber,
+      that it seemed to him more like music than speech. It would not be fair to
+      say that Myrtle was piqued to see that Cyprian was devoting himself to
+      Bathsheba. Her ambition was already reaching beyond her little village
+      circle, and she had an inward sense that Cyprian found a form of sympathy
+      in the minister's simple-minded daughter which he could not ask from a
+      young woman of her own aspirations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such was the state of affairs when Master Byles Gridley was one morning
+      surprised by an early call from Myrtle. He had a volume of Walton's
+      Polyglot open before him, and was reading Job in the original, when she
+      entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, bless me, is that my young friend Miss Myrtle Hazard?&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+      &ldquo;I might call you Keren-Happuch, which is Hebrew for Child of Beauty, and
+      not be very far out of the way, Job's youngest daughter, my dear. And what
+      brings my young friend out in such good season this morning? Nothing going
+      wrong up at our ancient mansion, The Poplars, I trust?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to talk with you, dear Master Gridley,&rdquo; she answered. She looked
+      as if she did not know just how to begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anything that interests you, Myrtle, interests me. I think you have some
+      project in that young head of yours, my child. Let us have it, in all its
+      dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness. I think I can guess, Myrtle,
+      that we have a little plan of some kind or other. We don't visit Papa Job
+      quite so early as this without some special cause,&mdash;do we, Miss
+      Keren-Happuch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to go to the city&mdash;to school,&rdquo; Myrtle said, with the
+      directness which belonged to her nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is precisely what I want you to do myself, Miss Myrtle Hazard. I
+      don't like to lose you from the village, but I think we must spare you for
+      a while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're the best and dearest man that ever lived. What could have made you
+      think of such a thing for me, Mr. Gridley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because you are ignorant, my child,&mdash;partly I want to see you fitted
+      to take a look at the world without feeling like a little country miss.
+      Has your aunt Silence promised to bear your expenses while you are in the
+      city? It will cost a good deal of money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not said a word to her about it. I am sure I don't know what she
+      would say. But I have some money, Mr. Gridley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed him a purse with gold, telling him how she came by it. &ldquo;There
+      is some silver besides. Will it be enough?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, my child, we must not meddle with that. Your aunt will let me put
+      it in the bank for you, I think, where it will be safe. But that shall not
+      make any difference. I have got a little money lying idle, which you may
+      just as well have the use of as not. You can pay it back perhaps some time
+      or other; if you did not, it would not make much difference. I am pretty
+      much alone in the world, and except a book now and then&mdash;Aut liberos
+      aut libros, as our valiant heretic has it,&mdash;you ought to know a
+      little Latin, Myrtle, but never mind&mdash;I have not much occasion for
+      money. You shall go to the best school that any of our cities can offer,
+      Myrtle, and you shall stay there until we agree that you are fitted to
+      come back to us an ornament to Oxbow Village, and to larger places than
+      this if you are called there. We have had some talk about it, your aunt
+      Silence and I, and it is all settled. Your aunt does not feel very rich
+      just now, or perhaps she would do more for you. She has many pious and
+      poor friends, and it keeps her funds low. Never mind, my child, we will
+      have it all arranged for you, and you shall begin the year 1860 in Madam
+      Delacoste's institution for young ladies. Too many rich girls and
+      fashionable ones there, I fear, but you must see some of all kinds, and
+      there are very good instructors in the school,&mdash;I know one,&mdash;he
+      was a college boy with me,&mdash;and you will find pleasant and good
+      companions there, so he tells me; only don't be in a hurry to choose your
+      friends, for the least desirable young persons are very apt to cluster
+      about a new-comer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was bewildered with the suddenness of the prospect thus held out to
+      her. It is a wonder that she did not bestow an embrace upon the worthy old
+      master. Perhaps she had too much tact. It is a pretty way enough of
+      telling one that he belongs to a past generation, but it does tell him
+      that not over-pleasing fact. Like the title of Emeritus Professor, it is a
+      tribute to be accepted, hardly to be longed for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the curtain rises again, it will show Miss Hazard in a new character,
+      and surrounded by a new world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII. MYRTLE HAZARD AT THE CITY SCHOOL.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw was obliged to leave town for a week or two on business
+      connected with the great land-claim. On his return, feeling in pretty good
+      spirits, as the prospects looked favorable, he went to make a call at The
+      Poplars. He asked first for Miss Hazard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bliss your soul, Mr. Bridshaw,&rdquo; answered Mistress Kitty Fagan, &ldquo;she's
+      been gahn nigh a wake. It's to the city, to the big school, they've sint
+      her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This announcement seemed to make a deep impression on Murray Bradshaw, for
+      his feelings found utterance in one of the most energetic forms of
+      language to which ears polite or impolite are accustomed. He next asked
+      for Miss Silence, who soon presented herself. Mr. Bradshaw asked, in a
+      rather excited way, &ldquo;Is it possible, Miss Withers, that your niece has
+      quitted you to go to a city school?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Silence answered, with her chief&mdash;mourner expression, and her
+      death-chamber tone: &ldquo;Yes, she has left us for a season. I trust it may not
+      be her destruction. I had hoped in former years that she would become a
+      missionary, but I have given up all expectation of that now. Two whole
+      years, from the age of four to that of six, I had prevailed upon her to
+      give up sugar,&mdash;the money so saved to go to a graduate of our
+      institution&mdash;who was afterwards&mdash;&mdash;he labored among the
+      cannibal-islanders. I thought she seemed to take pleasure in this small
+      act of self-denial, but I have since suspected that Kitty gave her secret
+      lumps. It was by Mr. Gridley's advice that she went, and by his pecuniary
+      assistance. What could I do? She was bent on going, and I was afraid she
+      would have fits, or do something dreadful, if I did not let her have her
+      way. I am afraid she will come back to us spoiled. She has seemed so fond
+      of dress lately, and once she spoke of learning&mdash;yes, Mr. Bradshaw,
+      of learning to&mdash;dance! I wept when I heard of it. Yes, I wept.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was such a tremendous thing to think of, and especially to speak of
+      in Mr. Bradshaw's presence, for the most pathetic image in the world to
+      many women is that of themselves in tears,&mdash;that it brought a return
+      of the same overflow, which served as a substitute for conversation until
+      Miss Badlam entered the apartment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Cynthia followed the same general course of remark. They could not
+      help Myrtle's going if they tried. She had always maintained that, if they
+      had only once broke her will when she was little, they would have kept the
+      upper hand of her; but her will never was broke. They came pretty near it
+      once, but the child would n't give in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Cynthia went to the door with Mr. Bradshaw, and the conversation
+      immediately became short and informal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Demonish pretty business! All up for a year or more,&mdash;hey?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't blame me,&mdash;I couldn't stop her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me her address,&mdash;I 'll write to her. Any young men teach in the
+      school?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't tell you. She'll write to Olive and Bathsheba, and I'll find out
+      all about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw went home and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Clymer Ketchum,
+      of 24 Carat Place, containing many interesting remarks and inquiries, some
+      of the latter relating to Madam Delacoste's institution for the education
+      of young ladies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While this was going on at Oxbow Village, Myrtle was establishing herself
+      at the rather fashionable school to which Mr. Gridley had recommended her.
+      Mrs. or Madam Delacoste's boarding-school had a name which on the whole it
+      deserved pretty well. She had some very good instructors for girls who
+      wished to get up useful knowledge in case they might marry professors or
+      ministers. They had a chance to learn music, dancing, drawing, and the way
+      of behaving in company. There was a chance, too, to pick up available
+      acquaintances, for many rich people sent their daughters to the school,
+      and it was something to have been bred in their company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the usual division of the scholars into a first and second set,
+      according to the social position, mainly depending upon the fortune, of
+      the families to which they belonged. The wholesale dealer's daughter very
+      naturally considered herself as belonging to a different order from the
+      retail dealer's daughter. The keeper of a great hotel and the editor of a
+      widely circulated newspaper were considered as ranking with the wholesale
+      dealers, and their daughters belonged also to the untitled nobility which
+      has the dollar for its armorial bearing. The second set had most of the
+      good scholars, and some of the prettiest girls; but nobody knew anything
+      about their families, who lived off the great streets and avenues, or
+      vegetated in country towns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard's advent made something like a sensation. They did not know
+      exactly what to make of her. Hazard? Hazard? No great firm of that name.
+      No leading hotel kept by any Hazard, was there? No newspaper of note
+      edited by anybody called Hazard, was there? Came from where? Oxbow
+      Village. Oh, rural district. Yes.&mdash;Still they could not help owning
+      that she was handsome, a concession which of course had to be made with
+      reservations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think she's vuiry good-lookin'?&rdquo; said a Boston girl to a New
+      York girl. &ldquo;I think she's real pooty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dew, indeed. I didn't think she was haaf so handsome the feeest time I
+      saw her,&rdquo; answered the New York girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a pity she had n't been bawn in Bawston!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and moved very young to Ne Yock!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And married a sarsaparilla man, and lived in Fiff Avenoo, and moved in
+      the fust society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better dew that than be strong-mainded, and dew your own cook'n, and live
+      in your own kitch'n.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't forgit to send your card when you are Mrs. Old Dr. Jacob!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed I shaan't. What's the name of the alley, and which bell?&rdquo; The New
+      York girl took out a memorandum-book as if to put it down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had n't you better let me write it for you, dear?&rdquo; said the Boston girl.
+      &ldquo;It is as well to have it legible, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take it,&rdquo; said the New York girl. &ldquo;There 's tew York shill'ns in it when
+      I hand it to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your whole quarter's allowance, I bullieve,&mdash;ain't it?&rdquo; said the
+      Boston girl.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will be
+      strictly attended to in this institution. The most correct standards of
+      pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example. It will be the
+      special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils out of all
+      provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-bred English
+      scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity.&rdquo;&mdash;Extract
+      from the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste's Boarding-school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls. Striking, they all agreed,
+      but then the criticisms began. Many of the girls chattered a little broken
+      French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had been half educated
+      in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which are to social operators
+      what his cutting instruments are to the surgeon. Her face she allowed was
+      handsome; but her style, according to this oracle, was a little
+      bourgeoise, and her air not exactly comme il faut. More specifically, she
+      was guilty of contours fortement prononces,&mdash;corsage de paysanne,&mdash;quelque
+      chose de sauvage, etc., etc. This girl prided herself on her figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demi-Parisian girl had christened
+      her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of Myrtle's face,
+      but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy girl's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and Trojans
+      over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live freshman. She
+      was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as they could find out,
+      but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of a queen, and she looked
+      as if a few stylish dresses and a season or two would make her a belle of
+      the first water. She had that air of indifference to their little looks
+      and whispered comments which is surest to disarm all the critics of a
+      small tattling community. On the other hand, she came to this school to
+      learn, and not to play; and the modest and more plainly dressed girls,
+      whose fathers did not sell by the cargo, or keep victualling
+      establishments for some hundreds of people, considered her as rather in
+      sympathy with them than with the daughters of the rough-and-tumble
+      millionnaires who were grappling and rolling over each other in the golden
+      dust of the great city markets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets. She came
+      with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to supply
+      them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over the heads of
+      the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists. She learned,
+      therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced instructors. Her somewhat
+      rude sketching soon began to show something of the artist's touch. Her
+      voice, which had only been taught to warble the simplest melodies, after a
+      little training began to show its force and sweetness and flexibility in
+      the airs that enchant drawing-room audiences. She caught with great
+      readiness the manner of the easiest girls, unconsciously, for she
+      inherited old social instincts which became nature with the briefest
+      exercise. Not much license of dress was allowed in the educational
+      establishment of Madam Delacoste, but every girl had an opportunity to
+      show her taste within the conventional limits prescribed. And Myrtle soon
+      began to challenge remark by a certain air she contrived to give her
+      dresses, and the skill with which she blended their colors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell you what, girls,&rdquo; said Miss Berengaria Topping, female
+      representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous
+      Planet Hotel, &ldquo;she's got style, lots of it. I call her perfectly splendid,
+      when she's got up in her swell clothes. That oriole's wing she wears in
+      her bonnet makes her look gorgeous, she'll be a stunning Pocahontas for
+      the next tableau.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only merchantable
+      article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from, thought she could be
+      made presentable in the first circles if taken in hand in good season. So
+      it came about that, before many weeks had passed over her as a scholar in
+      the great educational establishment, she might be considered as on the
+      whole the most popular girl in the whole bevy of them. The studious ones
+      admired her for her facility of learning, and her extraordinary appetite
+      for every form of instruction, and the showy girls, who were only enduring
+      school as the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of society,
+      recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be like to make
+      a sensation sooner or later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered themselves
+      the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who submitted her to a more
+      trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many horses does your papa keep?&rdquo; asked Miss Florence Smythe. &ldquo;We
+      keep nine, and a pony for Edgar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not keep any
+      horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an
+      acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-bonnet-maker)
+      that the school was getting common, she was afraid,&mdash;they were
+      letting in persons one knew nothing about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate used
+      in the household from which Myrtle came. Her father had just bought a
+      complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a good deal of
+      china at her own home,&mdash;old china, which had been a hundred years in
+      the family, some of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hundred years old!&rdquo; exclaimed Miss Clare Browne. &ldquo;What queer-looking
+      stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as new and bright!
+      Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for us. Have you got any
+      handsome pictures in your house?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have a good many portraits of members of the family,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;some
+      of them older than the china.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One was a great beauty in her time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How jolly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,&mdash;burned
+      to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How very very wicked! It was n't nice a bit, was it? Ain't you telling me
+      stories? Was that a hundred years ago?&mdash;But you 've got some new
+      pictures and things, have n't you? Who furnished your parlors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stuff and nonsense. I don't believe it. What color are your
+      carriage-horses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse but a
+      cow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not keep any horses! Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with a
+      pair of number two. What she would have been tempted to do with it, if she
+      had been a boy, we will not stop to guess. After all, the questions amused
+      her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss Clara Browne. Of that
+      young lady's ancestral claims to distinction there is no need of
+      discoursing. Her &ldquo;papaa&rdquo; commonly said sir in talking with a gentleman,
+      and her &ldquo;mammaa&rdquo; would once in a while forget, and go down the area steps
+      instead of entering at the proper door; but they lived behind a brown
+      stone front, which veneers everybody's antecedents with a facing of
+      respectability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss
+      Florence Smythe,&mdash;that the school was getting dreadful common, and
+      they were letting in very queer folks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
+      thousand would have been so unprepared to meet. She knew absolutely
+      nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons
+      were quite familiar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens and
+      Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally,
+      perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let alone. One of the
+      talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, is n't 'Pickwick' nice?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; Myrtle replied; &ldquo;I never tasted any.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature. &ldquo;Tasted any! Why,
+      I mean the 'Pickwick Papers,' Dickens's story. Don't you think they're
+      nice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n't know
+      anything about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! did you never read any novels?&rdquo; said the young lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, to be sure I have,&rdquo; said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the great
+      trunk and its contents. &ldquo;I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and 'Evelina,' and
+      'Tristram Shandy'&rdquo; (naughty girl!), &ldquo;and the 'Castle of Otranto,' and the
+      'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' and 'Don Quixote'&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The young lady burst out laughing. &ldquo;Stop! stop! for mercy's sake,&rdquo; she
+      cried. &ldquo;You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and come back to
+      life again. Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat! You ought to powder
+      your hair and wear patches.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got the oddest girl here,&rdquo; this young lady wrote home. &ldquo;She has n't
+      read any book that is n't a thousand years old. One of the girls says she
+      wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I believe that
+      is, that was a bug ever so long ago. Her name, she says, is Myrtle Hazard,
+      but I call her Rip Van Myrtle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled to
+      lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few young
+      gentlemen were admitted. One of these took place about a month after
+      Myrtle had joined the school. The girls were all in their best, and by and
+      by they were to have a tableau. Myrtle came out in all her force. She
+      dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome woman of the past
+      generation whom she resembled. The very spirit of the dead beauty seemed
+      to animate every feature and every movement of the young girl whose
+      position in the school was assured from that moment. She had a good solid
+      foundation to build upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading
+      girls of the style of pretensions illustrated by some of their talk which
+      has been given. There is no possible success without some opposition as a
+      fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other, if it
+      does not hit or trample on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston
+      Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called the
+      great &ldquo;swell&rdquo; among the privileged young gentlemen who were present at the
+      gathering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara? By Jove,
+      she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being a
+      first-class beauty. Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara. If a girl
+      can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like that, I know a
+      good many who had better begin their nap without waiting. If I were
+      Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,&mdash;eh, Clara?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by the
+      depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her own. A
+      little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost precisely the same
+      sensation, produced in a very economical way by Mr. Livingston Jenkins's
+      repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments to her, only with a change in
+      the arrangement of the proper names. The two young ladies were left
+      feeling comparatively comfortable with regard to each other, each
+      intending to repeat Mr. Livingston Jenkins's remark about her friend to
+      such of her other friends as enjoyed clever sayings, but not at all
+      comfortable with reference to Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently considered
+      by the leading &ldquo;swell&rdquo; of their circle as the most noticeable personage of
+      the assembly. The individual exception in each case did very well as a
+      matter of politeness, but they knew well enough what he meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet on
+      her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth. It was as if it had
+      just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red blood and
+      tingling all over with swift nerve-currents. Life had never looked to her
+      as it did that evening. It was the swan's first breasting the water,&mdash;bred
+      on the desert sand, with vague dreams of lake and river, and strange
+      longings as the mirage came and dissolved, and at length afloat upon the
+      sparkling wave. She felt as if she had for the first time found her
+      destiny. It was to please, and so to command, to rule with gentle sway in
+      virtue of the royal gift of beauty,&mdash;to enchant with the commonest
+      exercise of speech, through the rare quality of a voice which could not
+      help being always gracious and winning, of a manner which came to her as
+      an inheritance of which she had just found the title. She read in the eyes
+      of all that she was more than any other the centre of admiration. Blame
+      her who may, the world was a very splendid vision as it opened before her
+      eyes in its long vista of pleasures and of triumphs. How different the
+      light of these bright saloons from the glimmer of the dim chamber at The
+      Poplars! Silence Withers was at that very moment looking at the portraits
+      of Anne Holyoake and of Judith Pride. &ldquo;The old picture seems to me to be
+      fading faster than ever,&rdquo; she was thinking. But when she held her lamp
+      before the other, it seemed to her that the picture never was so fresh
+      before, and that the proud smile upon its lips was more full of conscious
+      triumph than she remembered it. A reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts,
+      for she believed that the martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost
+      descendant, and that the beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant
+      spiritual company with which she had long consorted in the under-world,
+      was pleasing herself with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring
+      her news from the Satanic province overhead, where she herself had so long
+      indulged in the profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux. The
+      girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look &ldquo;stunning&rdquo; or &ldquo;gorgeous&rdquo; or
+      &ldquo;jolly,&rdquo; or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas, was not far out of
+      the way, and it was so evident to the managing heads that she would make a
+      fine appearance in that character, that the &ldquo;Rescue of Captain John Smith&rdquo;
+       was specially got up to show her off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of Indian
+      blood in her veins. It was one of those family legends which some of the
+      members are a little proud of, and others are willing to leave
+      uninvestigated. But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she felt
+      perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals, and she
+      had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague recollections which
+      must have come from the old warriors and hunters and their dusky brides.
+      The Indians who visited the neighborhood recognized something of their own
+      race in her dark eyes, as the reader may remember they told the persons
+      who were searching after her. It had almost frightened her sometimes to
+      find how like a wild creature she felt when alone in the woods. Her senses
+      had much of that delicacy for which the red people are noted, and she
+      often thought she could follow the trail of an enemy, if she wished to
+      track one through the forest, as unerringly as if she were a Pequot or a
+      Mohegan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle, as they dressed her for
+      the part she was to take. Had she never worn that painted robe before? Was
+      it the first time that these strings of wampum had ever rattled upon her
+      neck and arms? And could it be that the plume of eagle's feathers with
+      which they crowned her dark, fast-lengthening locks had never shadowed her
+      forehead until now? She felt herself carried back into the dim ages when
+      the wilderness was yet untrodden save by the feet of its native lords.
+      Think of her wild fancy as we may, she felt as if that dusky woman of her
+      midnight vision on the river were breathing for one hour through her lips.
+      If this belief had lasted, it is plain enough where it would have carried
+      her. But it came into her imagination and vivifying consciousness with the
+      putting on of her unwonted costume, and might well leave her when she put
+      it off. It is not for us, who tell only what happened, to solve these
+      mysteries of the seeming admission of unhoused souls into the fleshly
+      tenements belonging to air-breathing personalities. A very little more,
+      and from that evening forward the question would have been treated in full
+      in all the works on medical jurisprudence published throughout the limits
+      of Christendom. The story must be told or we should not be honest with the
+      reader.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TABLEAU 1. Captain John Smith (Miss Euphrosyne de Lacy) was to be
+      represented prostrate and bound, ready for execution; Powhatan (Miss
+      Florence Smythe) sitting upon a log; savages with clubs (Misses Clara
+      Browne, A. Van Boodle, E. Van Boodle, Heister, Booster, etc., etc.)
+      standing around; Pocahontas holding the knife in her hand, ready to cut
+      the cords with which Captain John Smith is bound.&mdash;Curtain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TABLEAU 2. Captain John Smith released and kneeling before Pocahontas,
+      whose hand is extended in the act of raising him and presenting him to her
+      father. Savages in various attitudes of surprise. Clubs fallen from their
+      hands. Strontian flame to be kindled.&mdash;Curtain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a portion of the programme for the evening, as arranged behind
+      the scenes. The first part went off with wonderful eclat, and at its close
+      there were loud cries for Pocahontas. She appeared for a moment. Bouquets
+      were flung to her; and a wreath, which one of the young ladies had
+      expected for herself in another part, was tossed upon the stage, and laid
+      at her feet. The curtain fell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put the wreath on her for the next tableau,&rdquo; some of them whispered, just
+      as the curtain was going to rise, and one of the girls hastened to place
+      it upon her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The disappointed young lady could not endure it, and, in a spasm of
+      jealous passion, sprang at Myrtle, snatched it from her head, and trampled
+      it under her feet at the very instant the curtain was rising. With a cry
+      which some said had the blood-chilling tone of an Indian's battle-shriek,
+      Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her arm against the girl who had
+      thus rudely assailed her. The girl sank to the ground, covering her eyes
+      in her terror. Myrtle, with her arm still lifted, and the blade glistening
+      in her hand, stood over her, rigid as if she had been suddenly changed to
+      stone. Many of those looking on thought all this was a part of the show,
+      and were thrilled with the wonderful acting. Before those immediately
+      around her had had time to recover from the palsy of their fright Myrtle
+      had flung the knife away from her, and was kneeling, her head bowed and
+      her hands crossed upon her breast. The audience went into a rapture of
+      applause as the curtain came suddenly down; but Myrtle had forgotten all
+      but the dread peril she had just passed, and was thanking God that his
+      angel&mdash;her own protecting spirit, as it seemed to her had stayed the
+      arm which a passion such as her nature had never known, such as she
+      believed was alien to her truest self, had lifted with deadliest purpose.
+      She alone knew how extreme the danger had been. &ldquo;She meant to scare her,&mdash;that
+      's all,&rdquo; they said. But Myrtle tore the eagle's feathers from her hair,
+      and stripped off her colored beads, and threw off her painted robe. The
+      metempsychosis was far too real for her to let her wear the semblance of
+      the savage from whom, as she believed, had come the lawless impulse at the
+      thought of which her soul recoiled in horror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pocahontas has got a horrid headache,&rdquo; the managing young ladies gave it
+      out, &ldquo;and can't come to time for the last tableau.&rdquo; So this all passed
+      over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with no small
+      addition to her local fame,&mdash;for it must have been acting; &ldquo;and was
+      n't it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if she was going to
+      stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with
+      new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact with
+      those who were least agreeable to meet. The low-bred youth who amuse
+      themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls who try to
+      show off their gentility to those whom they think less important than
+      themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but they make themselves
+      odiously prominent before the quiet and modest young people have had time
+      to gain the new scholar's confidence. Myrtle found friends in due time,
+      some of them daughters of rich people, some poor girls, who came with the
+      same sincerity of purpose as herself. But not one was her match in the
+      facility of acquiring knowledge. Not one promised to make such a mark in
+      society, if she found an opening into its loftier circles. She was by no
+      means ignorant of her natural gifts, and she cultivated them with the
+      ambition which would not let her rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During her stay at the great school, she made but one visit to Oxbow
+      Village. She did not try to startle the good people with her
+      accomplishments, but they were surprised at the change which had taken
+      place in her. Her dress was hardly more showy, for she was but a
+      school-girl, but it fitted her more gracefully. She had gained a softness
+      of expression, and an ease in conversation, which produced their effect on
+      all with whom she came in contact. Her aunt's voice lost something of its
+      plaintiveness in talking with her. Miss Cynthia listened with involuntary
+      interest to her stories of school and school-mates. Master Byles Gridley
+      accepted her as the great success of his life, and determined to make her
+      his chief heiress, if there was any occasion for so doing. Cyprian told
+      Bathsheba that Myrtle must come to be a great lady. Gifted Hopkins
+      confessed to Susan Posey that he was afraid of her, since she had been to
+      the great city school. She knew too much and looked too much like a queen,
+      for a village boy to talk with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. William Murray Bradshaw tried all his fascinations upon her, but she
+      parried compliments so well, and put off all his nearer advances so
+      dexterously, that he could not advance beyond the region of florid
+      courtesy, and never got a chance, if so disposed, to risk a question which
+      he would not ask rashly, believing that, if Myrtle once said No, there
+      would be little chance of her ever saying Yes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV. MUSTERING OF FORCES.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Not long after the tableau performance had made Myrtle Hazard's name
+      famous in the school and among the friends of the scholars, she received
+      the very flattering attention of a call from Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24
+      Carat Place. This was in consequence of a suggestion from Mr. Livingston
+      Jenkins, a particular friend of the family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They've got a demonish splendid school-girl over there,&rdquo; he said to that
+      lady, &ldquo;made the stunningest looking Pocahontas at the show there the other
+      day. Demonish plucky looking filly as ever you saw. Had a row with another
+      girl,&mdash;gave the war-whoop, and went at her with a knife. Festive,&mdash;hey?
+      Say she only meant to scare her,&mdash;looked as if she meant to stick
+      her, anyhow. Splendid style. Why can't you go over to the shop and make
+      'em trot her out?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would, just as
+      soon as she could find a moment's leisure,&mdash;which, as she had nothing
+      in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon. Myrtle in the mean
+      time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an extraordinary
+      honor was awaiting her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a
+      leisure morning, did at last occur. An elegant carriage, with a coachman
+      in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and wearing a
+      hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal of Madam
+      Delacoste's establishment. A card was sent in bearing the open sesame of
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place. Miss Myrtle Hazard
+      was summoned as a matter of course, and the fashionable woman and the
+      young girl sat half an hour together in lively conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner
+      which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply
+      unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion. Then it was so delightful
+      to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,&mdash;one who was as
+      artistically composed as a poem or an opera,&mdash;in whose costume a kind
+      of various rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray that
+      nodded on her bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her sandal. As for
+      the lady, she was captivated with Myrtle. There is nothing that your
+      fashionable woman, who has ground and polished her own spark of life into
+      as many and as glittering social facets as it will bear, has a greater
+      passion for than a large rough diamond, which knows nothing of the sea of
+      light it imprisons, and which it will be her pride to have cut into a
+      brilliant under her own eye, and to show the world for its admiration and
+      her own reflected glory. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire
+      inventory of Myrtle's natural endowments before the interview was over.
+      She had no marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing bait
+      Myrtle would be at one of her stylish parties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which
+      explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,&mdash;all
+      which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she had found out a good part
+      of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school,&rdquo; he wrote.
+      &ldquo;There is a young girl there I take an interest in. She is handsome and
+      interesting; and&mdash;though it is a shame to mention such a thing has
+      possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued. Why can't you
+      make her acquaintance and be civil to her? A country girl, but fine old
+      stock, and will make a figure some time or other, I tell you. Myrtle
+      Hazard,&mdash;that's her name. A mere schoolgirl. Don't be malicious and
+      badger me about her, but be polite to her. Some of these country girls
+      have got 'blue blood' in them, let me tell you, and show it plain enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;In huckleberry season!&rdquo;) said Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, in a parenthesis,&mdash;and
+      went on reading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't think I'm one of your love-in-a-cottage sort, to have my head
+      turned by a village beauty. I've got a career before me, Mrs. K., and I
+      know it. But this is one of my pets, and I want you to keep an eye on her.
+      Perhaps when she leaves school you wouldn't mind asking her to come and
+      stay with you a little while. Possibly I may come and see how she is
+      getting on if you do,&mdash;won't that tempt you, Mrs. C. K.?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum wrote back to her relative how she had already made
+      the young lady's acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Livingston Jerkins (you remember him) picked her out of the whole lot of
+      girls as the 'prettiest filly in the stable.' That's his horrid way of
+      talking. But your young milkmaid is really charming, and will come into
+      form like a Derby three-year-old. There, now, I've caught that odious
+      creature's horse-talk, myself. You're dead in love with this girl, Murray,
+      you know you are.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all, I don't know but you're right. You would make a good country
+      lawyer enough, I don't doubt. I used to think you had your ambitions, but
+      never mind. If you choose to risk yourself on 'possibilities,' it is not
+      my affair, and she's a beauty, there's no mistake about that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are some desirable partis at the school with your dulcinea. There
+      's Rose Bugbee. That last name is a good one to be married from. Rose is a
+      nice girl,&mdash;there are only two of them. The estate will cut up like
+      one of the animals it was made out of, you know,&mdash;the
+      sandwich-quadruped. Then there 's Berengaria. Old Topping owns the Planet
+      Hotel among other things,&mdash;so big, they say, there's always a bell
+      ringing from somebody's room day and night the year round. Only child&mdash;unit
+      and six ciphers carries diamonds loose in her pocket&mdash;that's the
+      story&mdash;good-looking&mdash;lively&mdash;a little slangy called
+      Livingston Jerkins 'Living Jingo' to his face one day. I want you to see
+      my lot before you do anything serious. You owe something to the family,
+      Mr. William Murray Bradshaw! But you must suit yourself, after all: if you
+      are contented with a humble position in life, it is nobody's business that
+      I know of. Only I know what life is, Murray B. Getting married is jumping
+      overboard, any way you look at it, and if you must save some woman from
+      drowning an old maid, try to find one with a cork jacket, or she 'll carry
+      you down with her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw was calculating enough, but he shook his head over this
+      letter. It was too demonish cold-blooded for him, he said to himself. (Men
+      cannot pardon women for saying aloud what they do not hesitate to think in
+      silence themselves.) Never mind,&mdash;he must have Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's
+      house and influence for his own purposes. Myrtle Hazard must become her
+      guest, and then if circumstances were favorable, he was certain obtaining
+      her aid in his project.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The opportunity to invite Myrtle to the great mansion presented itself
+      unexpectedly. Early in the spring of 1861 there were some cases of
+      sickness in Madam Delacoste's establishment, which led to closing the
+      school for a while. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum took advantage of the dispersion
+      of the scholars to ask Myrtle to come and spend some weeks with her. There
+      were reasons why this was more agreeable to the young girl than returning
+      to Oxbow Village, and she very gladly accepted the invitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very remarkable that a man living as Master Byles Gridley had lived
+      for so long a time should all at once display such liberality as he showed
+      to a young woman who had no claim upon him, except that he had rescued her
+      from the consequences of her own imprudence and warned her against
+      impending dangers. Perhaps he cared more for her than if the obligation
+      had been the other way,&mdash;students of human nature say it is commonly
+      so. At any rate, either he had ampler resources than it was commonly
+      supposed, or he was imprudently giving way to his generous impulses, or he
+      thought he was making advances which would in due time be returned to him.
+      Whatever the reason was, he furnished her with means, not only for her
+      necessary expenses, but sufficient to afford her many of the elegances
+      which she would be like to want in the fashionable society with which she
+      was for a short time to mingle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was so well pleased with the young lady she was
+      entertaining, that she thought it worth while to give a party while Myrtle
+      was staying with her. She had her jealousies and rivalries, as women of
+      the world will, sometimes, and these may have had their share in leading
+      her to take the trouble a large party involved. She was tired of the airs
+      of Mrs. Pinnikle, who was of the great Apex family, and her terribly
+      accomplished daughter Rhadamartha, and wanted to crush the young lady, and
+      jaundice her mother, with a girl twice as brilliant and ten times
+      handsomer. She was very willing, also, to take the nonsense out of the
+      Capsheaf girls, who thought themselves the most stylish personages of
+      their city world, and would bite their lips well to see themselves
+      distanced by a country miss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time circumstances were promising to bring into Myrtle's
+      neighborhood several of her old friends and admirers. Mrs. Clymer Ketchum
+      had written to Murray Bradshaw that she had asked his pretty milkmaid to
+      come and stay awhile with her, but he had been away on business, and only
+      arrived in the city a day or two before the party. But other young fellows
+      had found out the attractions of the girl who was &ldquo;hanging out at the
+      Clymer Ketchum concern,&rdquo; and callers were plenty, reducing tete-a-tetes in
+      a corresponding ratio. He did get one opportunity, however, and used it
+      well. They had so many things to talk about in common, that she could not
+      help finding him good company. She might well be pleased, for he was an
+      adept in the curious art of being agreeable, as other people are in chess
+      or billiards, and had made a special study of her tastes, as a physician
+      studies a patient's constitution. What he wanted was to get her thoroughly
+      interested in himself, and to maintain her in a receptive condition until
+      such time as he should be ready for a final move. Any day might furnish
+      the decisive motive; in the mean time he wished only to hold her as
+      against all others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was well for her, perhaps, that others had flattered her into a certain
+      consciousness of her own value. She felt her veins full of the same rich
+      blood as that which had flushed the cheeks of handsome Judith in the long
+      summer of her triumph. Whether it was vanity, or pride, or only the
+      instinctive sense of inherited force and attraction, it was the best of
+      defences. The golden bracelet on her wrist seemed to have brought as much
+      protection with it as if it had been a shield over her heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But far away in Oxbow Village other events were in preparation. The
+      &ldquo;fugitive pieces&rdquo; of Mr. Gifted Hopkins had now reached a number so
+      considerable, that, if collected and printed in large type, with plenty of
+      what the unpleasant printers call &ldquo;fat,&rdquo;&mdash;meaning thereby blank
+      spaces,&mdash;upon a good, substantial, not to say thick paper, they might
+      perhaps make a volume which would have substance enough to bear the title,
+      printed lengthwise along the back, &ldquo;Hopkins's Poems.&rdquo; Such a volume that
+      author had in contemplation. It was to be the literary event of the year
+      1861.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not mature such a project, one which he had been for some time
+      contemplating, without consulting Mr. Byles Gridley, who, though he had
+      not unfrequently repressed the young poet's too ardent ambition, had yet
+      always been kind and helpful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley was seated in his large arm-chair, indulging himself in the
+      perusal of a page or two of his own work before repeatedly referred to.
+      His eye was glistening, for it had just rested on the following passage:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is infinite pathos in unsuccessful authorship. The book that
+      perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature. The great asylum of
+      Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in leaky
+      garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shut the book, for the page grew a little dim as he finished this
+      elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt its
+      truth than when it was written,&mdash;than on that memorable morning when
+      he saw the advertisement in all the papers, &ldquo;This day published, 'Thoughts
+      on the Universe.' By Byles Gridley, A. M.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment he heard a knock at his door. He closed his eyelids
+      forcibly for ten seconds, opened them, and said cheerfully, &ldquo;Come in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins entered. He had a collection of manuscripts in his hands
+      which it seemed to him would fill a vast number of pages. He did not know
+      that manuscript is to type what fresh dandelions are to the dish of greens
+      that comes to table, of which last Nurse Byloe, who considered them very
+      wholesome spring grazing for her patients, used to say that they &ldquo;biled
+      down dreadful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have brought the autographs of my poems, Master Gridley, to consult you
+      about making arrangements for publication. They have been so well received
+      by the public and the leading critics of this part of the State, that I
+      think of having them printed in a volume. I am going to the city for that
+      purpose. My mother has given her consent. I wish to ask you several
+      business questions. Shall I part with the copyright for a downright sum of
+      money, which I understand some prefer doing, or publish on shares, or take
+      a percentage on the sales? These, I believe, are the different ways taken
+      by authors.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley was altogether too considerate to reply with the words which
+      would most naturally have come to his lips. He waited as if he were
+      gravely pondering the important questions just put to him, all the while
+      looking at Gifted with a tenderness which no one who had not buried one of
+      his soul's children could have felt for a young author trying to get
+      clothing for his new-born intellectual offspring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said presently, &ldquo;you had better talk with an intelligent and
+      liberal publisher, and be guided by his advice. I can put you in
+      correspondence with such a person, and you had better trust him than me a
+      great deal. Why don't you send your manuscript by mail?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, Mr. Gridley? Trust my poems, some of which are unpublished, to the
+      post-office? No, sir, I could never make up my mind to such a risk. I mean
+      to go to the city myself, and read them to some of the leading publishers.
+      I don't want to pledge myself to any one of them. I should like to set
+      them bidding against each other for the copyright, if I sell it at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley gazed upon the innocent youth with a sweet wonder in his eyes
+      that made him look like an angel, a little damaged in the features by
+      time, but full of celestial feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will cost you something to make this trip, Gifted. Have you the means
+      to pay for your journey and your stay at a city hotel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted blushed. &ldquo;My mother has laid by a small sum for me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;She
+      knows some of my poems by heart, and she wants to see them all in print.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley closed his eyes very firmly again, as if thinking, and
+      opened them as soon as the foolish film had left them. He had read many a
+      page of &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe&rdquo; to his own old mother, long, long years
+      ago, and she had often listened with tears of modest pride that Heaven had
+      favored her with a son so full of genius.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'll tell you what, Gifted,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I have been thinking for a good
+      while that I would make a visit to the city, and if you have made up your
+      mind to try what you can do with the publishers, I will take you with me
+      as a companion. It will be a saving to you and your good mother, for I
+      shall bear the expenses of the expedition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins came very near going down on his knees. He was so overcome
+      with gratitude that it seemed as if his very coattails wagged with his
+      emotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take it quietly,&rdquo; said Master Gridley. &ldquo;Don't make a fool of yourself.
+      Tell your mother to have some clean shirts and things ready for you, and
+      we will be off day after to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted hastened to impart the joyful news to his mother, and to break the
+      fact to Susan Posey that he was about to leave them for a while, and rush
+      into the deliriums and dangers of the great city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Susan smiled. Gifted hardly knew whether to be pleased with her sympathy,
+      or vexed that she did not take his leaving more to heart. The smile held
+      out bravely for about a quarter of a minute. Then there came on a little
+      twitching at the corners of the mouth. Then the blue eyes began to shine
+      with a kind of veiled glimmer. Then the blood came up into her cheeks with
+      a great rush, as if the heart had sent up a herald with a red flag from
+      the citadel to know what was going on at the outworks. The message that
+      went back was of discomfiture and capitulation. Poor Susan was overcome,
+      and gave herself up to weeping and sobbing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight was too much for the young poet. In a wild burst of passion he
+      seized her hand, and pressed it to his lips, exclaiming, &ldquo;Would that you
+      could be mine forever!&rdquo; and Susan forgot all that she ought to have
+      remembered, and, looking half reproachfully but half tenderly through her
+      tears, said, in tones of infinite sweetness, &ldquo;O Gifted!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV. THE POET AND THE PUBLISHER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was settled that Master Byles Gridley and Mr. Gifted Hopkins should
+      leave early in the morning of the day appointed, to take the nearest train
+      to the city. Mrs. Hopkins labored hard to get them ready, so that they
+      might make a genteel appearance among the great people whom they would
+      meet in society. She brushed up Mr. Gridley's best black suit, and bound
+      the cuffs of his dress-coat, which were getting a little worried. She held
+      his honest-looking hat to the fire, and smoothed it while it was warm,
+      until one would have thought it had just been ironed by the hatter
+      himself. She had his boots and shoes brought into a more brilliant
+      condition than they had ever known: if Gifted helped, it was to his credit
+      as much as if he had shown his gratitude by polishing off a copy of verses
+      in praise of his benefactor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she had got Mr. Gridley's encumbrances in readiness for the journey,
+      she devoted herself to fitting out her son Gifted. First, she had down
+      from the garret a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but covered with
+      leather, and adorned with brass-headed nails, by the cunning disposition
+      of which, also, the paternal initials stood out on the rounded lid, in the
+      most conspicuous manner. It was his father's trunk, and the first thing
+      that went into it, as the widow lifted the cover, and the smothering
+      shut-up smell struck an old chord of associations, was a single tear-drop.
+      How well she remembered the time when she first unpacked it for her young
+      husband, and the white shirt bosoms showed their snowy plaits! O dear,
+      dear!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But women decant their affection, sweet and sound, out of the old bottles
+      into the new ones,&mdash;off from the lees of the past generation, clear
+      and bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive it. Gifted
+      Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder. She had not only the common
+      attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring, but she felt that her
+      race was to be rendered illustrious by his genius, and thought proudly of
+      the time when some future biographer would mention her own humble name, to
+      be held in lasting remembrance as that of the mother of Hopkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So she took great pains to equip this brilliant but inexperienced young
+      man with everything he could by any possibility need during his absence.
+      The great trunk filled itself until it bulged with its contents like a
+      boa-constrictor who has swallowed his blanket. Best clothes and common
+      clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes, flannels and linens, socks and
+      collars, with handkerchiefs enough to keep the pickpockets busy for a
+      week, with a paper of gingerbread and some lozenges for gastralgia, and
+      &ldquo;hot drops,&rdquo; and ruled paper to write letters on, and a little Bible, and
+      a phial with hiera picra, and another with paregoric, and another with
+      &ldquo;camphire&rdquo; for sprains and bruises.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &mdash;Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the
+      pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster. He carried also
+      the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large pocketbook,
+      tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution, pinned into his
+      breast-pocket. He talked about having a pistol, in case he were attacked
+      by any of the ruffians who are so numerous in the city, but Mr. Gridley
+      told him, No! he would certainly shoot himself, and he shouldn't think of
+      letting him take a pistol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went forth, Mentor and Telemachus, at the appointed time, to dare the
+      perils of the railroad and the snares of the city. Mrs. Hopkins was firm
+      up to near the last moment, when a little quiver in her voice set her eyes
+      off, and her face broke up all at once, so that she had to hide it behind
+      her handkerchief. Susan Posey showed the truthfulness of her character in
+      her words to Gifted at parting. &ldquo;Farewell,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and think of me
+      sometimes while absent. My heart is another's, but my friendship, Gifted&mdash;my
+      friendship&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Both were deeply affected. He took her hand and would have raised it to
+      his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it,
+      exclaiming, &ldquo;O Gifted!&rdquo; this time with a tone of tender reproach which
+      made him feel like a profligate. He tore himself away, and when at a safe
+      distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with a tearful smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Byles Gridley must have had some good dividends from some of his
+      property of late. There is no other way of accounting for the handsome
+      style in which he did things on their arrival in the city. He went to a
+      tailor's and ordered a new suit to be sent home as soon as possible, for
+      he knew his wardrobe was a little rusty. He looked Gifted over from head
+      to foot, and suggested such improvements as would recommend him to the
+      fastidious eyes of the selecter sort of people, and put him in his own
+      tailor's hands, at the same time saying that all bills were to be sent to
+      him, B. Gridley, Esq., parlor No. 6, at the Planet Hotel. Thus it came to
+      pass that in three days from their arrival they were both in an eminently
+      presentable condition. In the mean time the prudent Mr. Gridley had been
+      keeping the young man busy, and amusing himself by showing him such of the
+      sights of the city and its suburbs as he thought would combine instruction
+      with entertainment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were both properly equipped and ready for the best company, Mr.
+      Gridley said to the young poet, who had found it very hard to contain his
+      impatience, that they would now call together on the publisher to whom he
+      wished to introduce him, and they set out accordingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My name is Gridley,&rdquo; he said with modest gravity, as he entered the
+      publisher's private room. &ldquo;I have a note of introduction here from one of
+      your authors, as I think he called himself, a very popular writer for whom
+      you publish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The publisher rose and came forward in the most cordial and respectful
+      manner. &ldquo;Mr. Gridley? Professor Byles Gridley,&mdash;author of 'Thoughts
+      on the Universe'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The brave-hearted old man colored as if he had been a young girl. His dead
+      book rose before him like an apparition. He groped in modest confusion for
+      an answer. &ldquo;A child I buried long ago, my dear sir,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Its
+      title-page was its tombstone. I have brought this young friend with me,&mdash;this
+      is Mr. Gifted Hopkins of Oxbow Village,&mdash;who wishes to converse with
+      you about&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have come, sir&mdash;&rdquo; the young poet began, interrupting him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me look at your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Popkins,&rdquo; said the
+      publisher, interrupting in his turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hopkins, if you please, sir,&rdquo; Gifted suggested mildly, proceeding to
+      extract the manuscript, which had got wedged into his pocket, and seemed
+      to be holding on with all its might. He was wondering all the time over
+      the extraordinary clairvoyance of the publisher, who had looked through so
+      many thick folds, broadcloth, lining, brown paper, and seen his poems
+      lying hidden in his breast-pocket. The idea that a young person coming on
+      such an errand should have to explain his intentions would have seemed
+      very odd to the publisher. He knew the look which belongs to this class of
+      enthusiasts just as a horse-dealer knows the look of a green purchaser
+      with the equine fever raging in his veins. If a young author had come to
+      him with a scrap of manuscript hidden in his boots, like Major Andre's
+      papers, the publisher would have taken one glance at him and said, &ldquo;Out
+      with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was battling for the refractory scroll with his pocket, which
+      turned half wrong side out, and acted as things always do when people are
+      nervous and in a hurry, the publisher directed his conversation again to
+      Master Byles Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A remarkable book, that of yours, Mr. Gridley, would have a great run if
+      it were well handled. Came out twenty years too soon,&mdash;that was the
+      trouble. One of our leading scholars was speaking of it to me the other
+      day. 'We must have a new edition,' he said; people are just ripe for that
+      book.' Did you ever think of that? Change the form of it a little, and
+      give it a new title, and it will be a popular book. Five thousand or more,
+      very likely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley felt as if he had been rapidly struck on the forehead with a
+      dozen distinct blows from a hammer not quite big enough to stun him. He
+      sat still without saying a word. He had forgotten for the moment all about
+      poor Gifted Hopkins, who had got out his manuscript at last, and was
+      calming the disturbed corners of it. Coming to himself a little, he took a
+      large and beautiful silk handkerchief, one of his new purchases, from his
+      pocket, and applied it to his face, for the weather seemed to have grown
+      very warm all at once. Then he remembered the errand on which he had come,
+      and thought of this youth, who had got to receive his first hard lesson in
+      life, and whom he had brought to this kind man that it should be gently
+      administered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You surprise me,&rdquo; he said,&mdash;&ldquo;you surprise me. Dead and buried. Dead
+      and buried. I had sometimes thought that&mdash;at some future period,
+      after I was gone, it might&mdash;but I hardly know what to say about your
+      suggestions. But here is my young friend, Mr. Hopkins, who would like to
+      talk with you, and I will leave him in your hands. I am at the Planet
+      Hotel, if you should care to call upon me. Good morning. Mr. Hopkins will
+      explain everything to you more at his ease, without me, I am confident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley could not quite make up his mind to stay through the
+      interview between the young poet and the publisher. The flush of hope was
+      bright in Gifted's eye and cheek, and the good man knew that young hearts
+      are apt to be over-sanguine, and that one who enters a shower-bath often
+      feels very differently from the same person when he has pulled the string.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have brought you my Poems in the original autographs, sir,&rdquo; said Mr.
+      Gifted Hopkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laid the manuscript on the table, caressing the leaves still with one
+      hand, as loath to let it go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What disposition had you thought of making of them?&rdquo; the publisher asked,
+      in a pleasant tone. He was as kind a man as lived, though he worked the
+      chief engine in a chamber of torture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to read you a few specimens of the poems,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;with
+      reference to their proposed publication in a volume.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By all means,&rdquo; said the kind publisher, who determined to be very patient
+      with the protege of the hitherto little-known, but remarkable writer,
+      Professor Gridley. At the same time he extended his foot in an accidental
+      sort of way, and pressed it on the right hand knob of three which were
+      arranged in a line beneath the table. A little bell in a distant apartment&mdash;the
+      little bell marked C&mdash;gave one slight note; loud enough to start a
+      small boy up, who looked at the clock, and knew that he was to go and call
+      the publisher in just twenty-five minutes. &ldquo;A, five minutes; B, ten
+      minutes; C, twenty-five minutes &ldquo;;&mdash;that was the youngster's working
+      formula. Mr. Hopkins was treated to the full allowance of time, as being
+      introduced by Professor Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young man laid open the manuscript so that the title-page, written out
+      very handsomely in his own hand, should win the eye of the publisher.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               BLOSSOMS OF THE SOUL.
+           A WREATH OF VERSE; Original.
+
+               BY GIFTED HOPKINS.
+
+    &ldquo;a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.&rdquo;&mdash;Gray.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I read you some of the rhymed pieces first, or some of the
+      blank-verse poems, sir?&rdquo; Gifted asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Read what you think is best,&mdash;a specimen of your first-class style
+      of composition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will read you the very last poem I have written,&rdquo; he said, and he
+      began:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+              &ldquo;THE TRIUMPH OF SONG.
+
+     &ldquo;I met that gold-haired maiden, all too dear;
+     And I to her: Lo! thou art very fair,
+     Fairer than all the ladies in the world
+     That fan the sweetened air with scented fans,
+     And I am scorched with exceeding love,
+     Yea, crisped till my bones are dry as straw.
+     Look not away with that high-arched brow,
+     But turn its whiteness that I may behold,
+     And lift thy great eyes till they blaze on mine,
+     And lay thy finger on thy perfect mouth,
+     And let thy lucent ears of careen pearl
+     Drink in the murmured music of my soul,
+     As the lush grass drinks in the globed dew;
+     For I have many scrolls of sweetest rhyme
+     I will unroll and make thee glad to hear.
+
+     &ldquo;Then she: O shaper of the marvellous phrase
+     That openeth woman's heart as Both a key,
+     I dare not hear thee&mdash;lest the bolt should slide
+     That locks another's heart within my own.
+     Go, leave me,&mdash;and she let her eyelids fall,
+     And the great tears rolled from her large blue eyes.
+
+     &ldquo;Then I: If thou not hear me, I shall die,
+     Yea, in my desperate mood may lift my hand
+     And do myself a hurt no leach can mend;
+     For poets ever were of dark resolve,
+     And swift stern deed
+
+     &ldquo;That maiden heard no more,
+     But spike: Alas! my heart is very weak,
+     And but for&mdash;Stay!  And if some dreadful morn,
+     After great search and shouting thorough the wold,
+     We found thee missing,&mdash;strangled,&mdash;drowned i' the mere,
+     Then should I go distraught and be clean mad!
+
+     &ldquo;O poet, read! read all thy wondrous scrolls.
+     Yea, read the verse that maketh glad to hear!
+     Then I began and read two sweet, brief hours,
+     And she forgot all love save only mine!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is all this from real life?&rdquo; asked the publisher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It&mdash;no, sir&mdash;not exactly from real life&mdash;that is, the
+      leading female person is not wholly fictitious&mdash;and the incident is
+      one which might have happened. Shall I read you the poems referred to in
+      the one you have just heard, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Allow me, one moment. Two hours' reading, I think, you said. I fear I
+      shall hardly be able to spare quite time to hear them all. Let me ask what
+      you intend doing with these productions, Mr.&mdash;&mdash;rr Poplins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hopkins, if you please, sir, not Poplins,&rdquo; said Gifted, plaintively. He
+      expressed his willingness to dispose of the copyright, to publish on
+      shares, or perhaps to receive a certain percentage on the profits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose we take a glass of wine together, Mr.&mdash;Hopkins, before we
+      talk business,&rdquo; the publisher said, opening a little cupboard and taking
+      therefrom a decanter and two glasses. He saw the young man was looking
+      nervous. He waited a few minutes, until the wine had comforted his
+      epigastrium, and diffused its gentle glow through his unspoiled and
+      consequently susceptible organisation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted followed him into a dingy apartment in the attic, where one sat at
+      a great table heaped and piled with manuscripts. By him was a huge basket,
+      ha'f full of manuscripts also. As they entered he dropped another
+      manuscript into the basket and looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me,&rdquo; said Gifted, &ldquo;what are these papers, and who is he that looks
+      upon them and drops them into the basket?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are the manuscript poems that we receive, and the one sitting at
+      the table is commonly spoken of among us as 'The Butcher'. The poems he
+      drops into the basket are those rejected as of no account.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But does he not read the poems before he rejects them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He tastes them. Do you eat a cheese before you buy it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what becomes of all those that he drops into the basket?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If they are not claimed by their author in proper season, they go to the
+      devil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; said Gifted, with his eyes stretched very round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the paper factory, where they have a horrid machine they call the
+      devil, that tears everything to bits,&mdash;as the critics treat our
+      authors, sometimes, sometimes, Mr. Hopkins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted devoted a moment to silent reflection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this instructive sight they returned together to the publisher's
+      private room. The wine had now warmed the youthful poet's praecordia, so
+      that he began to feel a renewed confidence in his genius and his fortunes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to know what that critic of yours would say to my
+      manuscript,&rdquo; he said boldly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can try it if you want to,&rdquo; the publisher replied, with an ominous
+      dryness of manner which the sanguine youth did not perceive, or,
+      perceiving, did not heed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we manage to get an impartial judgment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I'll arrange that. He always goes to his luncheon about this time.
+      Raw meat and vitriol punch,&mdash;that 's what the authors say. Wait till
+      we hear him go, and then I will lay your manuscript so that he will come
+      to it among the first after he gets back. You shall see with your own eyes
+      what treatment it gets. I hope it may please him, but you shall see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went back to the publisher's private room and talked awhile. Then the
+      little office-boy came up with some vague message about a gentleman&mdash;business&mdash;wants
+      to see you, sir, etc., according to the established programme; all in a
+      vacant, mechanical sort of way, as if he were a talking-machine just
+      running down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The publisher told the boy that he was engaged, and the gentleman must
+      wait. Very soon they heard The Butcher's heavy footstep as he went out to
+      get his raw meat and vitriol punch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, then,&rdquo; said the publisher, and led forth the confiding literary lamb
+      once more, to enter the fatal door of the critical shambles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hand me your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Hopkins. I will lay it so
+      that it shall be the third of these that are coming to hand. Our friend
+      here is a pretty good judge of verse, and knows a merchantable article
+      about as quick as any man in his line of business. If he forms a favorable
+      opinion of your poems, we will talk over your propositions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted was conscious of a very slight tremor as he saw his precious
+      manuscript deposited on the table, under two others, and over a pile of
+      similar productions. Still he could not help feeling that the critic would
+      be struck by his title. The quotation from Gray must touch his feelings.
+      The very first piece in the collection could not fail to arrest him. He
+      looked a little excited, but he was in good spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will be looking about here when our friend comes back,&rdquo; the publisher
+      said. &ldquo;He is a very methodical person, and will sit down and go right to
+      work just as if we were not here. We can watch him, and if he should
+      express any particular interest in your poems, I will, if you say so,
+      carry you up to him and reveal the fact that you are the author of the
+      works that please him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They waited patiently until The Butcher returned, apparently refreshed by
+      his ferocious refection, and sat down at his table. He looked comforted,
+      and not in ill humor. The publisher and the poet talked in low tones, as
+      if on business of their own, and watched him as he returned to his labor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Butcher took the first manuscript that came to hand, read a stanza
+      here and there, turned over the leaves, turned back and tried again,&mdash;shook
+      his head&mdash;held it for an instant over the basket, as if doubtful,&mdash;and
+      let it softly drop. He took up the second manuscript, opened it in several
+      places, seemed rather pleased with what he read, and laid it aside for
+      further examination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took up the third. &ldquo;Blossoms of the Soul,&rdquo; etc. He glared at it in a
+      dreadfully ogreish way. Both the looker-ons held their breath. Gifted
+      Hopkins felt as if half a glass more of that warm sherry would not hurt
+      him. There was a sinking at the pit of his stomach, as if he was in a
+      swing, as high as he could go, close up to the swallows' nests and
+      spiders' webs. The Butcher opened the manuscript at random, read ten
+      seconds, and gave a short low grunt. He opened again, read ten seconds,
+      and gave another grunt, this time a little longer and louder. He opened
+      once more, read five seconds, and, with something that sounded like the
+      snort of a dangerous animal, cast it impatiently into the basket, and took
+      up the manuscript that came next in order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins stood as if paralyzed for a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Safe, perfectly safe,&rdquo; the publisher said to him in a whisper. &ldquo;I'll get
+      it for you presently. Come in and take another glass of wine,&rdquo; he said,
+      leading him back to his own office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I thank you,&rdquo; he said faintly, &ldquo;I can bear it. But this is dreadful,
+      sir. Is this the way that genius is welcomed to the world of letters?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The publisher explained to him, in the kindest manner, that there was an
+      enormous over-production of verse, and that it took a great part of one
+      man's time simply to overhaul the cart-loads of it that were trying to get
+      themselves into print with the imprimatur of his famous house. &ldquo;You are
+      young, Mr. Hopkins. I advise you not to try to force your article of
+      poetry on the market. The B&mdash;&mdash;, our friend, there, that is,
+      knows a thing that will sell as soon as he sees it. You are in independent
+      circumstances, perhaps? If so, you can print&mdash;at your own expense&mdash;whatever
+      you choose. May I take the liberty to ask your&mdash;profession?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted explained that he was &ldquo;clerk&rdquo; in a &ldquo;store,&rdquo; where they sold dry
+      goods and West India goods, and goods promiscuous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, well, then,&rdquo; the publisher said, &ldquo;you will understand me. Do you know
+      a good article of brown sagas when you see it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins rather thought he did. He knew at sight whether it was a
+      fair, salable article or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just so. Now our friend, there, knows verses that are salable and
+      unsalable as well as you do brown sugar.&mdash;Keep quiet now, and I will
+      go and get your manuscript for you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, Mr. Hopkins, take your poems,&mdash;they will give you a
+      reputation in your village, I don't doubt, which, is pleasant, but it will
+      cost you a good deal of money to print them in a volume. You are very
+      young: you can afford to wait. Your genius is not ripe yet, I am
+      confident, Mr. Hopkins. These verses are very well for a beginning, but a
+      man of promise like you, Mr. Hopkins, must n't throw away his chance by
+      premature publication! I should like to make you a present of a few of the
+      books we publish. By and by, perhaps, we can work you into our series of
+      poets; but the best pears ripen slowly, and so with genius.&mdash;Where
+      shall I send the volumes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted answered, to parlor No. 6, Planet Hotel, where he soon presented
+      himself to Master Gridley, who could guess pretty well what was coming.
+      But he let him tell his story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I try the other publishers?&rdquo; said the disconsolate youth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would n't, my young friend, I would n't. You have seen the best one of
+      them&mdash;all. He is right about it, quite right: you are young, and had
+      better wait. Look here, Gifted, here is something to please you. We are
+      going to visit the gay world together. See what has been left here this
+      forenoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He showed him two elegant notes of invitation requesting the pleasure of
+      Professor Byles Gridley's and of Mr. Gifted Hopkins's company on Thursday
+      evening, as the guests of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0026" id="link2HCH0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVI. MRS. CLYMER KETCHUM'S PARTY.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard had flowered out as beyond question the handsomest girl of
+      the season, There were hints from different quarters that she might
+      possibly be an heiress. Vague stories were about of some contingency which
+      might possibly throw a fortune into her lap. The young men about town
+      talked of her at the clubs in their free-and-easy way, but all agreed that
+      she was the girl of the new crop,&mdash;&ldquo;best filly this grass,&rdquo; as
+      Livingston Jenkins put it. The general understanding seemed to be that the
+      young lawyer who had followed her to the city was going to capture her.
+      She seemed to favor him certainly as much as anybody. But Myrtle saw many
+      young men now, and it was not so easy as it would once have been to make
+      out who was an especial favorite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been times when Murray Bradshaw would have offered his heart and
+      hand to Myrtle at once, if he had felt sure that she would accept him. But
+      he preferred playing the safe game now, and only wanted to feel sure of
+      her. He had done his best to be agreeable, and could hardly doubt that he
+      had made an impression. He dressed well when in the city,&mdash;even
+      elegantly,&mdash;he had many of the lesser social accomplishments, was a
+      good dancer, and compared favorably in all such matters with the more
+      dashing young fellows in society. He was a better talker than most of
+      them, and he knew more about the girl he was dealing with than they could
+      know. &ldquo;You have only got to say the word, Murray,&rdquo; Mrs. Clymer Ketchum
+      said to her relative, &ldquo;and you can have her. But don't be rash. I believe
+      you can get Berengaria if you try; and there 's something better there
+      than possibilities.&rdquo; Murray Bradshaw laughed, and told Mrs. Clymer Ketchum
+      not to worry about him; he knew what he was doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It so happened that Myrtle met Master Byles Gridley walking with Mr.
+      Gifted Hopkins the day before the party. She longed to have a talk with
+      her old friend, and was glad to have a chance of pleasing her poetical
+      admirer. She therefore begged her hostess to invite them both to her party
+      to please her, which she promised to do at once. Thus the two elegant
+      notes were accounted for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though her acquaintances were chiefly in the world of
+      fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weakness for what she called
+      clever people. She therefore always variegated her parties with a streak
+      of young artists and writers, and a literary lady or two; and, if she
+      could lay hands on a first-class celebrity, was as happy as an Amazon who
+      had captured a Centaur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's a demonish clever young fellow by the name of Lindsay,&rdquo; Mr.
+      Livingston Jenkins said to her a little before the day of the party.
+      &ldquo;Better ask him. They say he 's the rising talent in his line,
+      architecture mainly, but has done some remarkable things in the way of
+      sculpture. There's some story about a bust he made that was quite
+      wonderful. I'll find his address for you.&rdquo; So Mr. Clement Lindsay got his
+      invitation, and thus Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party promised to bring
+      together a number of persons with whom we are acquainted, and who were
+      acquainted with each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum knew how to give a party. Let her only have carte
+      blanche for flowers, music, and champagne, she used to tell her lord, and
+      she would see to the rest,&mdash;lighting the rooms, tables, and toilet.
+      He needn't be afraid: all he had to do was to keep out of the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Subdivision of labor is one of the triumphs of modern civilization. Labor
+      was beautifully subdivided in this lady's household. It was old Ketchum's
+      business to make money, and he understood it. It was Mrs. K.'s business to
+      spend money, and she knew how to do it. The rooms blazed with light like a
+      conflagration; the flowers burned like lamps of many-colored flame; the
+      music throbbed into the hearts of the promenaders and tingled through all
+      the muscles of the dancers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was in her glory. Her point d'Alenyon must have
+      spoiled ever so many French girls' eyes. Her bosom heaved beneath a kind
+      of breastplate glittering with a heavy dew of diamonds. She glistened and
+      sparkled with every movement, so that the admirer forgot to question too
+      closely whether the eyes matched the brilliants, or the cheeks glowed like
+      the roses. Not far from the great lady stood Myrtle Hazard. She was
+      dressed as the fashion of the day demanded, but she had added certain
+      audacious touches of her own, reminiscences of the time when the dead
+      beauty had flourished, and which first provoked the question and then the
+      admiration of the young people who had a natural eye for effect. Over the
+      long white glove on her left arm was clasped a rich bracelet, of so quaint
+      an antique pattern that nobody had seen anything like it, and as some one
+      whispered that it was &ldquo;the last thing out,&rdquo; it was greatly admired by the
+      fashion-plate multitude, as well as by the few who had a taste of their
+      own. If the soul of Judith Pride, long divorced from its once beautifully
+      moulded dust, ever lived in dim consciousness through any of those who
+      inherited her blood, it was then and there that she breathed through the
+      lips of Myrtle Hazard. The young girl almost trembled with the ecstasy of
+      this new mode of being, soliciting every sense with light, with perfume,
+      with melody,&mdash;all that could make her feel the wonderful complex
+      music of a fresh life when all its chords first vibrate together in
+      harmony. Miss Rhadamantha Pinnikle, whose mother was an Apex (of whose
+      race it was said that they always made an obeisance when the family name
+      was mentioned, and had all their portraits painted with halos round their
+      heads), found herself extinguished in this new radiance. Miss Victoria
+      Capsheaf stuck to the wall as if she had been a fresco on it. The
+      fifty-year-old dynasties were dismayed and dismounted. Myrtle fossilized
+      them as suddenly as if she had been a Gorgon instead of a beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The guests in whom we may have some interest were in the mean time making
+      ready for the party, which was expected to be a brilliant one; for 24
+      Carat Place was well known for the handsome style of its entertainments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement Lindsay was a little surprised by his invitation. He had, however,
+      been made a lion of several times of late, and was very willing to amuse
+      himself once in a while with a peep into the great world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was but an empty show to him at best, for his lot was cast, and he
+      expected to lead a quiet domestic life after his student days were over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Byles Gridley had known what society was in his earlier time, and
+      understood very well that all a gentleman of his age had to do was to
+      dress himself in his usual plain way, only taking a little more care in
+      his arrangements than was needed in the latitude of Oxbow Village. But
+      Gifted must be looked after, that he should not provoke the unamiable
+      comments of the city youth by any defect or extravagance of costume. The
+      young gentleman had bought a light sky-blue neckerchief, and a very large
+      breast-pin containing a gem which he was assured by the vender was a
+      genuine stone. He considered that both these would be eminently effective
+      articles of dress, and Mr. Gridley had some trouble to convince him that a
+      white tie and plain shirt-buttons would be more fitted to the occasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morning of the day of the great party Mr. William Murray Bradshaw
+      received a brief telegram, which seemed to cause him great emotion, as he
+      changed color, uttered a forcible exclamation, and began walking up and
+      down his room in a very nervous kind of way. It was a foreshadowing of a
+      certain event now pretty sure to happen. Whatever bearing this telegram
+      may have had upon his plans, he made up his mind that he would contrive an
+      opportunity somehow that very evening to propose himself as a suitor to
+      Myrtle Hazard. He could not say that he felt as absolutely certain of
+      getting the right answer as he had felt at some previous periods. Myrtle
+      knew her price, he said to himself, a great deal better than when she was
+      a simple country girl. The flatteries with which she had been surrounded,
+      and the effect of all the new appliances of beauty, which had set her off
+      so that she could not help seeing her own attractions, rendered her harder
+      to please and to satisfy. A little experience in society teaches a young
+      girl the arts and the phrases which all the Lotharios have in common.
+      Murray Bradshaw was ready to land his fish now, but he was not quite sure
+      that she was yet hooked, and he had a feeling that by this time she knew
+      every fly in his book. However, as he had made up his mind not to wait
+      another day, he addressed himself to the trial before him with a
+      determination to succeed, if any means at his command would insure
+      success. He arrayed himself with faultless elegance: nothing must be
+      neglected on such an occasion. He went forth firm and grave as a general
+      going into a battle where all is to be lost or won. He entered the blazing
+      saloon with the unfailing smile upon his lips, to which he set them as he
+      set his watch to a particular hour and minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rooms were pretty well filled when he arrived and made his bow before
+      the blazing, rustling, glistening, waving, blushing appearance under which
+      palpitated, with the pleasing excitement of the magic scene over which its
+      owner presided, the heart of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum. He turned to Myrtle
+      Hazard, and if he had ever doubted which way his inclinations led him, he
+      could doubt no longer. How much dress and how much light can a woman bear?
+      That is the way to measure her beauty. A plain girl in a simple dress, if
+      she has only a pleasant voice, may seem almost a beauty in the rosy
+      twilight. The nearer she comes to being handsome, the more ornament she
+      will bear, and the more she may defy the sunshine or the chandelier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw was fairly dazzled with the brilliant effect of Myrtle in
+      full dress. He did not know before what handsome arms she had,&mdash;Judith
+      Pride's famous arms&mdash;which the high-colored young men in top-boots
+      used to swear were the handsomest pair in New England&mdash;right over
+      again. He did not know before with what defiant effect she would light up,
+      standing as she did directly under a huge lustre, in full flower of flame,
+      like a burning azalea. He was not a man who intended to let his sentiments
+      carry him away from the serious interests of his future, yet, as he looked
+      upon Myrtle Hazard, his heart gave one throb which made him feel in every
+      pulse that this way a woman who in her own right, simply as a woman, could
+      challenge the homage of the proudest young man of her time. He hardly knew
+      till this moment how much of passion mingled with other and calmer motives
+      of admiration. He could say I love you as truly as such a man could ever
+      speak these words, meaning that he admired her, that he was attracted to
+      her, that he should be proud of her as his wife, that he should value
+      himself always as the proprietor of so rare a person, that no appendage to
+      his existence would take so high a place in his thoughts. This implied
+      also, what is of great consequence to a young woman's happiness in the
+      married state, that she would be treated with uniform politeness, with
+      satisfactory evidences of affection, and with a degree of confidence quite
+      equal to what a reasonable woman should expect from a very superior man,
+      her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Myrtle could have looked through the window in the breast against which
+      only authors are privileged to flatten their features, it is for the
+      reader to judge how far the programme would have satisfied her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Less than this, a great deal less, does appear to satisfy many young
+      women; and it may be that the interior just drawn, fairly judged, belongs
+      to a model lover and husband. Whether it does or not, Myrtle did not see
+      this picture. There was a beautifully embroidered shirt-bosom in front of
+      that window through which we have just looked, that intercepted all sight
+      of what was going on within. She only saw a man, young, handsome, courtly,
+      with a winning tongue, with an ambitious spirit, whose every look and tone
+      implied his admiration of herself, and who was associated with her past
+      life in such a way that they alone appeared like old friends in the midst
+      of that cold alien throng. It seemed as if he could not have chosen a more
+      auspicious hour than this; for she never looked so captivating, and her
+      presence must inspire his lips with the eloquence of love. And she&mdash;was
+      not this delirious atmosphere of light and music just the influence to
+      which he would wish to subject her before trying the last experiment of
+      all which can stir the soul of a woman? He knew the mechanism of that
+      impressionable state which served Coleridge so excellently well,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    &ldquo;All impulses of soul and sense
+     Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve
+     The music, and the doleful tale,
+     The rich and balmy eve,&rdquo;&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      though he hardly expected such startling results as happened in that case,&mdash;which
+      might be taken as an awful warning not to sing moving ballads to young
+      ladies of susceptible feelings, unless one is prepared for very serious
+      consequences. Without expecting that Myrtle would rush into his arms, he
+      did think that she could not help listening to him in the intervals of the
+      delicious music, in some recess where the roses and jasmines and
+      heliotropes made the air heavy with sweetness, and the crimson curtains
+      drooped in heavy folds that half hid their forms from the curious eyes all
+      round them. Her heart would swell like Genevieve's as he told her in
+      simple phrase that she was his life, his love, his all,&mdash;for in some
+      two or three words like these he meant to put his appeal, and not in fine
+      poetical phrases: that would do for Gifted Hopkins and rhyming tom-tits of
+      that feather.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full of his purpose, involving the plans of his whole life, implying, as
+      he saw clearly, a brilliant future or a disastrous disappointment, with a
+      great unexploded mine of consequences under his feet, and the spark ready
+      to fall into it, he walked about the gilded saloon with a smile upon his
+      lips so perfectly natural and pleasant, that one would have said he was as
+      vacant of any aim, except a sort of superficial good-matured disposition
+      to be amused, as the blankest-eyed simpleton who had tied himself up in a
+      white cravat and come to bore and be bored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet under this pleasant smile his mind was so busy with its thoughts that
+      he had forgotten all about the guests from Oxbow Village who, as Myrtle
+      had told him, were to come this evening. His eye was all at once caught by
+      a familiar figure, and he recognized Master Byles Gridley, accompanied by
+      Mr. Gifted Hopkins, at the door of the saloon. He stepped forward at once
+      to meet, and to present them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley in evening costume made an eminently dignified and respectable
+      appearance. There was an unusual look of benignity upon his firmly moulded
+      features, and an air of ease which rather surprised Mr. Bradshaw, who did
+      not know all the social experiences which had formed a part of the old
+      Master's history. The greeting between them was courteous, but somewhat
+      formal, as Mr. Bradshaw was acting as one of the masters of ceremony. He
+      nodded to Gifted in an easy way, and led them both into the immediate
+      Presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is my friend Professor Gridley, Mrs. Ketchum, whom I have the honor
+      of introducing to you,&mdash;a very distinguished scholar, as I have no
+      doubt you are well aware. And this is my friend Mr. Gifted Hopkins, a
+      young poet of distinction, whose fame will reach you by and by, if it has
+      not come to your ears already.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two gentlemen went through the usual forms, the poet a little crushed
+      by the Presence, but doing his best. While the lady was making polite
+      speeches to them, Myrtle Hazard came forward. She was greatly delighted to
+      meet her old friend, and even looked upon the young poet with a degree of
+      pleasure she would hardly have expected to receive from his company. They
+      both brought with them so many reminiscences of familiar scenes and
+      events, that it was like going back for the moment to Oxbow Village. But
+      Myrtle did not belong to herself that evening, and had no opportunity to
+      enter into conversation just then with either of them. There was to be
+      dancing by and by, and the younger people were getting impatient that it
+      should begin. At last the music sounded the well-known summons, and the
+      floors began to ring to the tread of the dancers. As usual on such
+      occasions there were a large number of noncombatants, who stood as
+      spectators around those who were engaged in the campaign of the evening.
+      Mr. Byles Gridley looked on gravely, thinking of the minuets and the
+      gavots of his younger days. Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who had never acquired the
+      desirable accomplishment of dancing, gazed with dazzled and admiring eyes
+      at the wonderful evolutions of the graceful performers. The music stirred
+      him a good deal; he had also been introduced to one or two young persons
+      as Mr. Hopkins, the poet, and he began to feel a kind of excitement, such
+      as was often the prelude of a lyric burst from his pen. Others might have
+      wealth and beauty, he thought to himself, but what were these to the gift
+      of genius? In fifty years the wealth of these people would have passed
+      into other hands. In fifty years all these beauties would be dead, or
+      wrinkled and double-wrinkled great-grandmothers. And when they were all
+      gone and forgotten, the name of Hopkins would be still fresh in the
+      world's memory. Inspiring thought! A smile of triumph rose to his lips; he
+      felt that the village boy who could look forward to fame as his
+      inheritance was richer than all the millionnaires, and that the words he
+      should set in verse would have an enduring lustre to which the whiteness
+      of pearls was cloudy, and the sparkle of diamonds dull.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his eyes, which had been cast down in reflection, to look upon
+      these less favored children of Fortune, to whom she had given nothing but
+      perishable inheritances. Two or three pairs of eyes, he observed, were
+      fastened upon him. His mouth perhaps betrayed a little self-consciousness,
+      but he tried to show his features in an aspect of dignified
+      self-possession. There seemed to be remarks and questionings going on,
+      which he supposed to be something like the following:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Which is it? Which is it?&mdash;Why, that one, there,&mdash;that young
+      fellow,&mdash;don't you see?&mdash;What young fellow are you two looking
+      at? Who is he? What is he?&mdash;Why, that is Hopkins, the poet.&mdash;Hopkins,
+      the poet! Let me see him! Let me see him! Hopkins? What! Gifted Hopkins?
+      etc., etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins did not hear these words except in fancy, but he did
+      unquestionably find a considerable number of eyes concentrated upon him,
+      which he very naturally interpreted as an evidence that he had already
+      begun to enjoy a foretaste of the fame of which he should hereafter have
+      his full allowance. Some seemed to be glancing furtively, some appeared as
+      if they wished to speak, and all the time the number of those looking at
+      him seemed to be increasing. A vision came through his fancy of himself as
+      standing on a platform, and having persons who wished to look upon him and
+      shake hands with him presented, as he had heard was the way with great
+      people when going about the country. But this was only a suggestion, and
+      by no means a serious thought, for that would have implied infatuation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins was quite right in believing that he attracted many eyes.
+      At last those of Myrtle Hazard were called to him, and she perceived that
+      an accident was making him unenviably conspicuous. The bow of his rather
+      large white neck-tie had slid round and got beneath his left ear. A not
+      very good-natured or well-bred young fellow had pointed out the subject of
+      this slight misfortune to one or two others of not much better taste or
+      breeding, and thus the unusual attention the youthful poet was receiving
+      explained itself. Myrtle no sooner saw the little accident of which her
+      rural friend was the victim than she left her place in the dance with a
+      simple courage which did her credit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to speak to you a minute,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Come into this alcove.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the courageous young lady not only told Gifted what had happened to
+      him, but found a pin somehow, as women always do on a pinch, and had him
+      in presentable condition again almost before the bewildered young man knew
+      what was the matter. On reflection it occurred to him, as it has to other
+      provincial young persons going to great cities, that he might perhaps have
+      been hasty in thinking himself an object of general curiosity as yet.
+      There had hardly been time for his name to have become very widely known.
+      Still, the feeling had been pleasant for the moment, and had given him an
+      idea of what the rapture would be, when, wherever he went, the monster
+      digit (to hint a classical phrase) of the collective admiring public would
+      be lifted to point him out, and the whisper would pass from one to
+      another, &ldquo;That's him! That's Hopkins!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Murray Bradshaw had been watching the opportunity for carrying out his
+      intentions, with his pleasant smile covering up all that was passing in
+      his mind, and Master Byles Gridley, looking equally unconcerned, had been
+      watching him. The young man's time came at last. Some were at the
+      supper-table, some were promenading, some were talking, when he managed to
+      get Myrtle a little apart from the rest, and led her towards one of the
+      recesses in the apartment, where two chairs were invitingly placed. Her
+      cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling,&mdash;the influences to
+      which he had trusted had not been thrown away upon her. He had no idea of
+      letting his purpose be seen until he was fully ready. It required all his
+      self-mastery to avoid betraying himself by look or tone, but he was so
+      natural that Myrtle was thrown wholly off her guard. He meant to make her
+      pleased with herself at the outset, and that not by point-blank flattery,
+      of which she had had more than enough of late, but rather by suggestion
+      and inference, so that she should find herself feeling happy without
+      knowing how. It would be easy to glide from that to the impression she had
+      produced upon him, and get the two feelings more or less mingled in her
+      mind. And so the simple confession he meant to make would at length evolve
+      itself logically, and hold by a natural connection to the first agreeable
+      train of thought which he had called up. Not the way, certainly, that most
+      young men would arrange their great trial scene; but Murray Bradshaw was a
+      lawyer in love as much as in business, and considered himself as pleading
+      a cause before a jury of Myrtle Hazard's conflicting motives. What would
+      any lawyer do in a jury case but begin by giving the twelve honest men and
+      true to understand, in the first place, that their intelligence and virtue
+      were conceded by all, and that he himself had perfect confidence in them,
+      and leave them to shape their verdict in accordance with these
+      propositions and his own side of the case?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the honeyed
+      accents of the young pleader. He flattered her with so much tact, that she
+      thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips of an admiration
+      which he only shared with all around him. But in him he made it seem
+      discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very real. This it evidently
+      was which had led him to trust her with his ambitions and his plans,&mdash;they
+      might be delusions, but he could never keep them from her, and she was the
+      one woman in the world to whom he thought he could safely give his
+      confidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dread moment was close at hand. Myrtle was listening with an
+      instinctive premonition of what was coming,&mdash;ten thousand mothers and
+      grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it all
+      in preceding generations until time reached backwards to the sturdy savage
+      who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down the primeval
+      great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his hole in the rock, or
+      into the tree where he had made his nest. Why should not the coming
+      question announce itself by stirring in the pulses and thrilling in the
+      nerves of the descendant of all these grandmothers?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind
+      elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of Schehallion.
+      Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster than so healthy a
+      girl ought to breathe in a state of repose. The steady nerves of William
+      Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and tremors tingling through them,
+      as he came nearer and nearer the few simple words with which he was to
+      make Myrtle Hazard the mistress of his destiny. His tones were becoming
+      lower and more serious; there were slight breaks once or twice in the
+      conversation; Myrtle had cast down her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is but one word more to add,&rdquo; he murmured softly, as he bent
+      towards her&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A grave voice interrupted him. &ldquo;Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw,&rdquo; said Master
+      Bytes Gridley, &ldquo;I wish to present a young gentleman to my friend here. I
+      promised to show him the most charming young person I have the honor to be
+      acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge. Miss Hazard, I have the
+      pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance my distinguished young
+      friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Once mere, for the third time, these two young persons stood face to face.
+      Myrtle was no longer liable to those nervous seizures which any sudden
+      impression was liable to produce when she was in her half-hysteric state
+      of mind and body. She turned to the new-comer, who found himself
+      unexpectedly submitted to a test which he would never have risked of his
+      own will. He must go through it, cruel as it was, with the easy
+      self-command which belongs to a gentleman in the most trying social
+      exigencies. He addressed her, therefore, in the usual terms of courtesy,
+      and then turned and greeted Mr. Bradshaw, whom he had never met since
+      their coming together at Oxbow Village. Myrtle was conscious, the instant
+      she looked upon Clement Lindsay, of the existence of some peculiar
+      relation between them; but what, she could not tell. Whatever it was, it
+      broke the charm which had been weaving between her and Murray Bradshaw. He
+      was not foolish enough to make a scene. What fault could he find with
+      Clement Lindsay, who had only done as any gentleman would do with a lady
+      to whom he had just been introduced, addressed a few polite words to her?
+      After saying those words, Clement had turned very courteously to him, and
+      they had spoken with each other. But Murray Bradshaw could not help seeing
+      that Myrtle had transferred her attention, at least for the moment, from
+      him to the new-comer. He folded his arms and waited,&mdash;but he waited
+      in vain. The hidden attraction which drew Clement to the young girl with
+      whom he had passed into the Valley of the Shadow of Death overmastered all
+      other feelings, and he gave himself up to the fascination of her presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inward rage of Murray Bradshaw at being interrupted just at the moment
+      when he was, as he thought, about to cry checkmate and finish the first
+      great game he had ever played may well be imagined. But it could not be
+      helped. Myrtle had exercised the customary privilege of young ladies at
+      parties, and had turned from talking with one to talking with another,&mdash;that
+      was all. Fortunately, for him the young man who had been introduced at
+      such a most critical moment was not one from whom he need apprehend any
+      serious interference. He felt grateful beyond measure to pretty Susan
+      Posey, who, as he had good reason for believing, retained her hold upon
+      her early lover, and was looking forward with bashful interest to the time
+      when she should become Mrs. Lindsay. It was better to put up quietly with
+      his disappointment; and, if he could get no favorable opportunity that
+      evening to resume his conversation at the interesting point where he left
+      it off, he would call the next day and bring matters to a conclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He called accordingly the next morning, but was disappointed in not seeing
+      Myrtle. She had hardly slept that night, and was suffering from a bad
+      headache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had just
+      left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0027" id="link2HCH0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVII. MINE AND COUNTERMINE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect on
+      the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody especially
+      interested knew but himself. We may conjecture that it announced some
+      fact, which had leaked out a little prematurely, relating to the issue of
+      the great land-case in which the firm was interested. However that might
+      be, Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard that Myrtle had suddenly left the city
+      for Oxbow Village,&mdash;for what reason he puzzled himself to guess,&mdash;than
+      he determined to follow her at once, and take up the conversation he had
+      begun at the party where it left off. And as the young poet had received
+      his quietus for the present at the publisher's, and as Master Gridley had
+      nothing specially to detain him, they too returned at about the same time,
+      and so our old acquaintances were once more together within the familiar
+      precincts where we have been accustomed to see them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
+      remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of the
+      detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the habit of
+      keeping an eye on mischievous students. If any underhand contrivance was
+      at work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he was interested, he
+      was a dangerous person for the plotters, for he had plenty of time to
+      attend to them, and would be apt to take a kind of pleasure in matching
+      his wits against another crafty person's,&mdash;such a one, for instance,
+      as Mr. Macchiavelli Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the
+      party; at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner. When he found
+      that the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he suspected
+      something more than a coincidence. When he learned that he was assiduously
+      visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close communication with Miss
+      Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was pressing the siege of Myrtle's
+      heart. But that there was some difficulty in the way was equally clear to
+      him, for he ascertained, through channels which the attentive reader will
+      soon have means of conjecturing, that Myrtle had seen him but once in the
+      week following his return, and that in the presence of her dragons. She
+      had various excuses when he called,&mdash;headaches, perhaps, among the
+      rest, as these are staple articles on such occasions. But Master Gridley
+      knew his man too well to think that slight obstacles would prevent his
+      going forward to effect his purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think he will get her; if he holds on,&rdquo; the old man said to himself,
+      &ldquo;and he won't let go in a hurry, if there were any real love about it&mdash;but
+      surely he is incapable of such a human weakness as the tender passion.
+      What does all this sudden concentration upon the girl mean? He knows
+      something about her that we don't know,&mdash;that must be it. What did he
+      hide that paper for, a year ago and more? Could that have anything to do
+      with his pursuit of Myrtle Hazard today?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley paused as he asked this question of himself, for a luminous
+      idea had struck him. Consulting daily with Cynthia Badlam, was he? Could
+      there be a conspiracy between these two persons to conceal some important
+      fact, or to keep something back until it would be for their common
+      interest to have it made known?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Mistress Kitty Fagan was devoted, heart and soul, to Myrtle Hazard,
+      and ever since she had received the young girl from Mr. Gridley's hands,
+      when he brought her back safe and sound after her memorable adventure, had
+      considered him as Myrtle's best friend and natural protector. These simple
+      creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated people,
+      with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the
+      live facts which are going on about them. Mr. Gridley had met her, more or
+      less accidentally, several times of late, and inquired very particularly
+      about Myrtle, and how she got along at the house since her return, and
+      whether she was getting over her headaches, and how they treated her in
+      the family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bliss your heart, Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; Kitty said to him on one of these
+      occasions, &ldquo;it's ahltogither changed intirely. Sure Miss Myrtle does jist
+      iverythin' she likes, an' Miss Withers niver middles with her at ahl,
+      excip' jist to roll up her eyes an' look as if she was the hid-moorner at
+      a funeril whiniver Miss Myrtle says she wants to do this or that, or to go
+      here or there. It's Miss Badlam that's ahlwiz after her, an' a-watchin'
+      her,&mdash;she thinks she's cunnin'er than a cat, but there 's other folks
+      that's got eyes an' ears as good as hers. It's that Mr. Bridshaw that's a
+      puttin' his head together with Miss Badlam for somethin' or other, an' I
+      don't believe there's no good in it, for what does the fox an' the cat be
+      a whisperin' about, as if they was thaves an' incind'ries, if there ain't
+      no mischief hatchin'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Kitty,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;what mischief do you think is going on, and who is
+      to be harmed?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; she answered, &ldquo;if there ain't somebody to be chated
+      somehow, then I don't know an honest man and woman from two rogues. An'
+      have n't I heard Miss Myrtle's name whispered as if there was somethin'
+      goin' on agin' her, an' they was afraid the tahk would go out through the
+      doors, an' up through the chimbley? I don't want to tell no tales, Mr.
+      Gridley, nor to hurt no honest body, for I'm a poor woman, Mr. Gridley,
+      but I comes of dacent folks, an' I vallies my repitation an' character as
+      much as if I was dressed in silks and satins instead of this mane old
+      gown, savin' your presence, which is the best I 've got, an' niver a
+      dollar to buy another. But if I iver I hears a word, Mr. Gridley, that
+      manes any kind of a mischief to Miss Myrtle,&mdash;the Lard bliss her soul
+      an' keep ahl the divils away from her!&mdash;I'll be runnin' straight down
+      here to tell ye ahl about it,&mdash;be right sure o' that, Mr. Gridley.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing must happen to Myrtle,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that we can help. If you see
+      anything more that looks wrong, you had better come down here at once and
+      let me know, as you say you will. At once, you understand. And, Kitty, I
+      am a little particular about the dress of people who come to see me, so
+      that if you would just take the trouble to get you a tidy pattern of
+      gingham or calico, or whatever you like of that sort for a gown, you would
+      please me; and perhaps this little trifle will be a convenience to you
+      when you come to pay for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty thanked him with all the national accompaniments, and trotted off to
+      the store, where Mr. Gifted Hopkins displayed the native amiability of his
+      temper by fumbling down everything in the shape of ginghams and calicoes
+      they had on the shelves, without a murmur at the taste of his customer,
+      who found it hard to get a pattern sufficiently emphatic for her taste.
+      She succeeded at last, and laid down a five-dollar bill as if she were as
+      used to the pleasing figure on its face as to the sight of her own five
+      digits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Byles Gridley had struck a spade deeper than he knew into his first
+      countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples about the means
+      of obtaining information which might have embarrassed a diplomatist of
+      higher degree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0028" id="link2HCH0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXVIII. MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;Is Miss Hazard in, Kitty?&rdquo;
+     </h3>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, but she won't see nobody.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the meaning of that, Kitty? Here is the third time within three
+      days you've told me I could n't see her. She saw Mr. Gridley yesterday, I
+      know; why won't she see me to-day?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Y' must ask Miss Myrtle what the rason is, it's none o' my business, Mr.
+      Bridshaw. That's the order she give me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is Miss Badlam in?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, an' I 'll go cahl her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bedad,&rdquo; said Kitty Fagan to herself, &ldquo;the cat an' the fox is goin' to
+      have another o' thim big tahks togither, an' sure the old hole for the
+      stove-pipe has niver been stopped up yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Cynthia went into the parlor together, and Mistress
+      Kitty retired to her kitchen. There was a deep closet belonging to this
+      apartment, separated by a partition from the parlor. There was a round
+      hole high up in this partition through which a stove-pipe had once passed.
+      Mistress Kitty placed a stool just under this opening, upon which, as on a
+      pedestal, she posed herself with great precaution in the attitude of the
+      goddess of other people's secrets, that is to say, with her head a little
+      on one side, so as to bring her liveliest ear close to the opening. The
+      conversation which took place in the hearing of the invisible third party
+      began in a singularly free-and-easy manner on Mr. Bradshaw's part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the d&mdash;&mdash; is the reason I can't see Myrtle, Cynthia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's more than I can tell you, Mr. Bradshaw. I can watch her goings on,
+      but I can't account for her tantrums.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say she has had some of her old nervous whims,&mdash;has the doctor
+      been to see her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No indeed. She has kept to herself a good deal, but I don't think there's
+      anything in particular the matter with her. She looks well enough, only
+      she seems a little queer,&mdash;as girls do that have taken a fancy into
+      their heads that they're in love, you know,&mdash;absent-minded, does n't
+      seem to be interested in things as you would expect after being away so
+      long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw looked as if this did not please him particularly. If he was
+      the object of her thoughts she would not avoid him, surely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you kept your eye on her steadily?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't believe there is an hour we can't account for,&mdash;Kitty and I
+      between us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you sure you can depend on Kitty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [&ldquo;Depind on Kitty, is it? Oh, an' to be sure ye can depind on Kitty to
+      kape watch at the stove-pipe hole, an' to tell all y'r plottin's an'
+      contrivin's to them that'll get the cheese out o' y'r mousetrap for ye
+      before ye catch any poor cratur in it.&rdquo; This was the inaudible comment of
+      the unseen third party.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I can depend on her as far as I trust her. All she knows is
+      that she must look out for the girl to see that she does not run away or
+      do herself a mischief. The Biddies don't know much, but they know enough
+      to keep a watch on the&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chickens.&rdquo; Mr. Bradshaw playfully finished the sentence for Miss Cynthia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [&ldquo;An' on the foxes, an' the cats, an' the wazels, an' the hen-hahks, an'
+      ahl the other bastes,&rdquo; added the invisible witness, in unheard soliloquy.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ain't sure whether she's quite as stupid as she looks,&rdquo; said the
+      suspicious young lawyer. &ldquo;There's a little cunning twinkle in her eye
+      sometimes that makes me think she might be up to a trick on occasion. Does
+      she ever listen about to hear what people are saying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't trouble yourself about Kitty Fagan,' for pity's sake, Mr. Bradshaw.
+      The Biddies are all alike, and they're all as stupid as owls, except when
+      you tell 'em just what to do, and how to do it. A pack of priest-ridden
+      fools!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap. The stout muscles
+      gave an involuntary jerk. The substantial frame felt the thrill all
+      through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing creaked sharply
+      under its burden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw started. He got up and opened softly all the doors leading
+      from the room, one after another, and looked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I heard a noise as if somebody was moving, Cynthia. It's just
+      as well to keep our own matters to ourselves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you wait till this old house keeps still, Mr. Bradshaw, you might as
+      well wait till the river has run by. It's as full of rats and mice as an
+      old cheese is of mites. There's a hundred old rats in this house, and
+      that's what you hear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [&ldquo;An' one old cat; that's what I hear.&rdquo; Third party.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told you, Cynthia, I must be off on this business to-morrow. I want to
+      know that everything is safe before I go. And, besides, I have got
+      something to say to you that's important, very important, mind you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up once more and opened every door softly and looked out. He fixed
+      his eye suspiciously on a large sofa at the other side of the room, and
+      went, looking half ashamed of his extreme precaution, and peeped under it,
+      to see if there was any one hidden thereto listen. Then he came back and
+      drew his chair close up to the table at which Miss Badlam had seated
+      herself. The conversation which followed was in a low tone, and a portion
+      of it must be given in another place in the words of the third party. The
+      beginning of it we are able to supply in this connection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Cynthia; you know what I am going for. It's all right, I feel
+      sure, for I have had private means of finding out. It's a sure thing; but
+      I must go once more to see that the other fellows don't try any trick on
+      us. You understand what is for my advantage is for yours, and, if I go
+      wrong, you go overboard with me. Now I must leave the&mdash;you know&mdash;behind
+      me. I can't leave it in the house or the office: they might burn up. I
+      won't have it about me when I am travelling. Draw your chair a little more
+      this way. Now listen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      [&ldquo;Indade I will,&rdquo; said the third party to herself. The reader will find
+      out in due time whether she listened to any purpose or not.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time Myrtle, who for some reason was rather nervous and
+      restless, had found a pair of half-finished slippers which she had left
+      behind her. The color came into her cheeks when she remembered the state
+      of mind she was in when she was working on them for the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+      She recollected Master Gridley's mistake about their destination, and
+      determined to follow the hint he had given. It would please him better if
+      she sent them to good Father Pemberton, she felt sure, than if he should
+      get them himself. So she enlarged them somewhat, (for the old man did not
+      pinch his feet, as the younger clergyman was in the habit of doing, and
+      was, besides, of portly dimensions, as the old orthodox three-deckers were
+      apt to be,) and worked E. P. very handsomely into the pattern, and sent
+      them to him with her love and respect, to his great delight; for old
+      ministers do not have quite so many tokens of affection from fair hands as
+      younger ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What made Myrtle nervous and restless? Why had she quitted the city so
+      abruptly, and fled to her old home, leaving all the gayeties behind her
+      which had so attracted and dazzled her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not betrayed herself at the third meeting with the young man who
+      stood in such an extraordinary relation to her,&mdash;who had actually
+      given her life from his own breath,&mdash;as when she met him for the
+      second time. Whether his introduction to her at the party, just at the
+      instant when Murray Bradshaw was about to make a declaration, saved her
+      from being in another moment the promised bride of that young gentleman,
+      or not, we will not be so rash as to say. It looked, certainly, as if he
+      was in a fair way to carry his point; but perhaps she would have
+      hesitated, or shrunk back, when the great question came to stare her in
+      the face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was excited, at any rate, by the conversation, so that, when Clement
+      was presented to her, her thoughts could not at once be all called away
+      from her other admirer, and she was saved from all danger of that sudden
+      disturbance which had followed their second meeting. Whatever impression
+      he made upon her developed itself gradually,&mdash;still, she felt
+      strangely drawn towards him. It was not simply in his good looks, in his
+      good manners, in his conversation, that she found this attraction, but
+      there was a singular fascination which she felt might be dangerous to her
+      peace, without explaining it to herself in words. She could hardly be in
+      love with this young artist; she knew that his affections were plighted to
+      another, a fact which keeps most young women from indulging unruly
+      fancies; yet her mind was possessed by his image to such an extent that it
+      left little room for that of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard had been just ready to enter on a career of worldly vanity
+      and ambition. It is hard to blame her, for we know how she came by the
+      tendency. She had every quality, too, which fitted her to shine in the gay
+      world; and the general law is, that those who have the power have the
+      instinct to use it. We do not suppose that the bracelet on her arm was an
+      amulet, but it was a symbol. It reminded her of her descent; it kept alive
+      the desire to live over the joys and excitements of a bygone generation.
+      If she had accepted Murray Bradshaw, she would have pledged herself to a
+      worldly life. If she had refused him, it would perhaps have given her a
+      taste of power that might have turned her into a coquette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This new impression saved her for the time. She had come back to her nest
+      in the village like a frightened bird; her heart was throbbing, her nerves
+      were thrilling, her dreams were agitated; she wanted to be quiet, and
+      could not listen to the flatteries or entreaties of her old lover.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a strong will and a subtle intellect that had arrayed their force
+      and skill against the ill-defended citadel of Myrtle's heart. Murray
+      Bradshaw was perfectly determined, and not to be kept back by any trivial
+      hindrances, such as her present unwillingness to accept him, or even her
+      repugnance to him, if a freak of the moment had carried her so far. It was
+      a settled thing: Myrtle Hazard must become Mrs. Bradshaw; and nobody could
+      deny that, if he gave her his name, they had a chance, at least, for a
+      brilliant future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0029" id="link2HCH0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIX. MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'd like to go down to the store this mornin', Miss Withers, plase. Sure
+      I've niver a shoe to my fut, only jist these two that I've got on, an' one
+      other pair, and thim is so full of holes that whin I 'm standin' in 'em
+      I'm outside of 'em intirely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can go, Kitty,&rdquo; Miss Silence answered, funereally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon Kitty Fagan proceeded to array herself in her most tidy apparel,
+      including a pair of shoes not exactly answering to her description, and
+      set out straight for the house of the Widow Hopkins. Arrived at that
+      respectable mansion, she inquired for Mr. Gridley, and was informed that
+      he was at home. Had a message for him,&mdash;could she see him in his
+      study? She could if she would wait a little while. Mr. Gridley was busy
+      just at this minute. Sit down, Kitty, and warm yourself at the
+      cooking-stove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mistress Kitty accepted Mrs. Hopkins's hospitable offer, and presently
+      began orienting herself, and getting ready to make herself agreeable. The
+      kindhearted Mrs. Hopkins had gathered about her several other pensioners
+      besides the twins. These two little people, it may be here mentioned, were
+      just taking a morning airing in charge of Susan Posey, who strolled along
+      in company with Gifted Hopkins on his way to the store.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mistress Kitty soon began the conversational blandishments so natural to
+      her good-humored race. &ldquo;It's a little blarney that'll jist suit th' old
+      lady,&rdquo; she said to herself, as she made her first conciliatory advance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An' sure an' it's a beautiful kitten you've got there, Mrs. Hopkins. An'
+      it's a splendid mouser she is, I'll be bound. Does n't she look as if
+      she'd clans the house out o'them little bastes, bad luck to em.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hopkins looked benignantly upon the more than middle-aged tabby,
+      slumbering as if she had never known an enemy, and turned smiling to
+      Mistress Kitty. &ldquo;Why, bless your heart, Kitty, our old puss would n't know
+      a mouse by sight, if you showed her one. If I was a mouse, I'd as lieves
+      have a nest in one of that old cat's ears as anywhere else. You couldn't
+      find a safer place for one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indade, an' to be sure she's too big an' too handsome a pussy to be after
+      wastin' her time on them little bastes. It's that little tarrier dog of
+      yours, Mrs. Hopkins, that will be after worryin' the mice an' the rats,
+      an' the thaves too, I 'll warrant. Is n't he a fust-rate-lookin'
+      watch-dog, an' a rig'ler rat-hound?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hopkins looked at the little short-legged and short-winded animal of
+      miscellaneous extraction with an expression of contempt and affection,
+      mingled about half and half. &ldquo;Worry 'em! If they wanted to sleep, I rather
+      guess he would worry 'em! If barkin' would do their job for 'em, nary a
+      mouse nor rat would board free gratis in my house as they do now. Noisy
+      little good-for-nothing tike,&mdash;ain't you, Fret?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mistress Kitty was put back a little by two such signal failures. There
+      was another chance, however, to make her point, which she presently
+      availed herself of,&mdash;feeling pretty sure this time that she should
+      effect a lodgement. Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing Kitty, first
+      with one eye and then with the other, evidently preparing to make a
+      remark, but awkward with a stranger. &ldquo;That 's a beautiful part y 've got
+      there,&rdquo; Kitty said, buoyant with the certainty that she was on safe ground
+      this time; &ldquo;and tahks like a book, I 'll be bound. Poll! Poll! Poor Poll!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put forth her hand to caress the intelligent and affable bird, which,
+      instead of responding as expected, &ldquo;squawked,&rdquo; as our phonetic language
+      has it, and, opening a beak imitated from a tooth-drawing instrument of
+      the good old days, made a shrewd nip at Kitty's forefinger. She drew it
+      back with a jerk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An' is that the way your part tahks, Mrs. Hopkins?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talks, bless you, Kitty! why, that parrot hasn't said a word this ten
+      year. He used to say Poor Poll! when we first had him, but he found it was
+      easier to squawk, and that's all he ever does nowadays,&mdash;except bite
+      once in a while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, an' to be sure,&rdquo; Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her
+      defeats, &ldquo;if you'll kape a cat that does n't know a mouse when she sees
+      it, an' a dog that only barks for his livin', and a part that only squawks
+      an' bites an' niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-hearted woman
+      that's alive, an' bliss ye, if ye was only a good Catholic, the Holy
+      Father 'd make a saint of ye in less than no time!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite of her
+      three successive discomfitures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You may come up now, Kitty,&rdquo; said Mr. Gridley over the stairs. He had
+      just finished and sealed a letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars? And how does our
+      young lady seem to be of late?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whisht! whisht! your honor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bradshaw's lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive listener.
+      She opened every door in the room, &ldquo;by your lave,&rdquo; as she said. She looked
+      all over the walls to see if there was any old stovepipe hole or other
+      avenue to eye or ear. Then she went, in her excess of caution, to the
+      window. She saw nothing noteworthy except Mr. Gifted Hopkins and the
+      charge he convoyed, large and small, in the distance. The whole living
+      fleet was stationary for the moment, he leaning on the fence with his
+      cheek on his hand, in one of the attitudes of the late Lord Byron; she,
+      very near him, listening, apparently, in the pose of Mignon aspirant au
+      ciel, as rendered by Carlo Dolce Scheffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr. Gridley, who
+      told her to sit down, which she did, first making a catch at her apron to
+      dust the chair with, and then remembering that she had left that part of
+      her costume at home.&mdash;Automatic movements, curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between Mr.
+      Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for herself as
+      the reporter of the occasion. She then repeated to him, in her own way,
+      that part of the conversation which has been already laid before the
+      reader. There is no need of going over the whole of this again in Kitty's
+      version, but we may fit what followed into the joints of what has been
+      already told.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He cahled her Cynthy, d' ye see, Mr. Gridley, an' tahked to her jist as
+      asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he did. An'
+      so, says he, I'm goin' away, says he, an' I'm goin' to be gahn siveral
+      days, or perhaps longer, says he, an' you'd better kape it, says he.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Keep what, Kitty? What was it he wanted her to keep?&rdquo; said Mr. Gridley,
+      who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot, and meant to
+      follow it. He was getting impatient with the &ldquo;says he's&rdquo; with which Kitty
+      double-leaded her discourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An' to be sure ain't I tellin' you, Mr. Gridley, jist as fast as my
+      breath will let me? An' so, says he, you'd better kape it, says he, mixed
+      up with your other paupers, says he,&rdquo; (Mr. Gridley started,) &ldquo;an' thin we
+      can find it in the garret, says he, whinever we want it, says he. An' if
+      it all goes right out there, says he, it won't be lahng before we shall
+      want to find it, says he. And I can dipind on you, says he, for we're both
+      in the same boat, says he, an' you knows what I knows, says he, an' I
+      knows what you knows, says be. And thin he taks a stack o' paupers out of
+      his pocket, an' he pulls out one of 'em, an' he says to her, says he,
+      that's the pauper, says he, an' if you die, says be, niver lose sight of
+      that day or night, says he, for it's life an' dith to both of us, says he.
+      An' thin he asks her if she has n't got one o' them paupers&mdash;what is
+      't they cahls 'em?&mdash;divilops, or some sich kind of a name&mdash;that
+      they wraps up their letters in; an' she says no, she has n't got none
+      that's big enough to hold it. So he says, give me a shate o' pauper, says
+      he. An' thin he takes the pauper that she give him, an' he folds it up
+      like one o' them&mdash;divilops, if that's the name of 'em; and thin he
+      pulls a stick o' salin'-wax out of his pocket, an' a stamp, an' he takes
+      the pauper an' puts it into th' other pauper, along with the rest of the
+      paupers, an' thin he folds th' other pauper over the paupers, and thin he
+      lights a candle, an' he milts the salin'-wax, and he sales up the pauper
+      that was outside th' other paupers, an' he writes on the back of the
+      pauper, an' thin he hands it to Miss Badlam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you see the paper that he showed her before he fastened it up with
+      the others, Kitty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did see it, indade, Mr. Gridley, and it's the truth I'm tellin' ye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you happen to notice anything about it, Kitty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did, indade, Mr. Gridley. It was a longish kind of a pauper, and there
+      was some blotches of ink on the back of it,&mdash;an' they looked like a
+      face without any mouth, for, says I, there's two spots for the eyes, says
+      I, and there's a spot for the nose, says I, and there's niver a spot for
+      the mouth, says I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the substance of what Master Byles Gridley got out of Kitty
+      Fagan. It was enough, yes, it was too much. There was some deep-laid plot
+      between Murray Bradshaw and Cynthia Badlam, involving the interests of
+      some of the persons connected with the late Malachi Withers; for that the
+      paper described by Kitty was the same that he had seen the young man
+      conceal in the Corpus Juris Civilis, it was impossible to doubt. If it had
+      been a single spot an the back of it, or two, he might have doubted. But
+      three large spots &ldquo;blotches&rdquo; she had called them, disposed thus *.*
+      &mdash;would not have happened to be on two different papers, in all human
+      probability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After grave consultation of all his mental faculties in committee of the
+      whole, he arrived at the following conclusion,&mdash;that Miss Cynthia
+      Badlam was the depositary of a secret involving interests which he felt it
+      his business to defend, and of a document which was fraudulently withheld
+      and meant to be used for some unfair purpose. And most assuredly, Master
+      Gridley said to himself, he held a master-key, which, just so certainly as
+      he could make up his mind to use it, would open any secret in the keeping
+      of Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He proceeded, therefore, without delay, to get ready for a visit to that
+      lady at The Poplars. He meant to go thoroughly armed, for he was a very
+      provident old gentleman. His weapons were not exactly of the kind which a
+      housebreaker would provide himself with, but of a somewhat peculiar
+      nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Weapon number one was a slip of paper with a date and a few words written
+      upon it. &ldquo;I think this will fetch the document,&rdquo; he said to himself, &ldquo;if
+      it comes to the worst. Not if I can help it,&mdash;not if I can help it.
+      But if I cannot get at the heart of this thing otherwise, why, I must come
+      to this. Poor woman!&mdash;Poor woman!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Weapon number two was a small phial containing spirits of hartshorn, sal
+      volatile, very strong, that would stab through the nostrils, like a
+      stiletto, deep into the gray kernels that lie in the core of the brain.
+      Excellent in cases of sudden syncope or fainting, such as sometimes
+      require the opening of windows, the dashing on of cold water, the cutting
+      of stays, perhaps, with a scene of more or less tumultuous perturbation
+      and afflux of clamorous womanhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So armed, Byles Gridley, A. M., champion of unprotected innocence, grasped
+      his ivory-handled cane and sallied forth on his way to The Poplars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0030" id="link2HCH0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXX. MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      MISS Cynthia Badlam was seated in a small parlor which she was accustomed
+      to consider her own during her long residences at The Poplars. The entry
+      stove warmed it but imperfectly, and she looked pinched and cold, for the
+      evenings were still pretty sharp, and the old house let in the chill
+      blasts, as old houses are in the habit of doing. She was sitting at her
+      table, with a little trunk open before her. She had taken some papers from
+      it, which she was looking over, when a knock at her door announced a
+      visitor, and Master Byles Gridley entered the parlor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he came into the room, she gathered the papers together and replaced
+      them in the trunk, which she locked, throwing an unfinished piece of
+      needle-work over it, putting the key in her pocket, and gathering herself
+      up for company. Something of all this Master Gridley saw through his round
+      spectacles, but seemed not to see, and took his seat like a visitor making
+      a call of politeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A visitor at such an hour, of the male sex, without special provocation,
+      without social pretext, was an event in the life of the desolate spinster.
+      Could it be&mdash;No, it could not&mdash;and yet&mdash;and yet! Miss
+      Cynthia threw back the rather common-looking but comfortable shawl which
+      covered her shoulders, and showed her quite presentable figure, arrayed
+      with a still lingering thought of that remote contingency which might yet
+      offer itself at some unexpected moment; she adjusted the carefully plaited
+      cap, which was not yet of the lasciate ogni speranza pattern, and as she
+      obeyed these instincts of her sex, she smiled a welcome to the
+      respectable, learned, and independent bachelor. Mr. Gridley had a frosty
+      but kindly age before him, with a score or so of years to run, which it
+      was after all not strange to fancy might be rendered more cheerful by the
+      companionship of a well-conserved and amiably disposed woman, if any such
+      should happen to fall in his way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That smile came very near disconcerting the plot of Master Byles Gridley.
+      He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as he thought,
+      against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down all resistance.
+      He had come armed with an instrument of torture worse than the
+      thumb-screw, worse than the pulleys which attempt the miracle of adding a
+      cubit to the stature, worse than the brazier of live coals brought close
+      to the naked soles of the feet,&mdash;an instrument which, instead of
+      trifling with the nerves, would clutch all the nerve-centres and the heart
+      itself in its gripe, and hold them until it got its answer, if the white
+      lips had life enough left to shape one. And here was this unfortunate
+      maiden lady smiling at him, setting her limited attractions in their best
+      light, pleading with him in that natural language which makes any
+      contumacious bachelor feel as guilty as Cain before any single woman. If
+      Mr. Gridley had been alone, he would have taken a good sniff at his own
+      bottle of sal volatile; for his kind heart sunk within him as he thought
+      of the errand upon which he had come. It would not do to leave the subject
+      of his vivisection under any illusion as to the nature of his designs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good evening, Miss Badlam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I have come to visit you on a
+      matter of business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What was the internal panorama which had unrolled itself at the instant of
+      his entrance, and which rolled up as suddenly at the sound of his serious
+      voice and the look of his grave features? It cannot be reproduced, though
+      pages were given to it; for some of the pictures were near, and some were
+      distant; some were clearly seen, and some were only hinted; some were not
+      recognized in the intellect at all, and yet they were implied, as it were,
+      behind the others. Many times we have all found ourselves glad or sorry,
+      and yet we could not tell what thought it was that reflected the sunbeam
+      or cast the shadow. Look into Cynthia's suddenly exalted consciousness and
+      see the picture, actual and potential, unroll itself in all its details of
+      the natural, the ridiculous, the selfish, the pitiful, the human.
+      Glimpses, hints, echoes, suggestions, involving tender sentiments hitherto
+      unknown, we may suppose, to that unclaimed sister's breast,&mdash;pleasant
+      excitement of receiving congratulations from suddenly cordial friends; the
+      fussy delights of buying furniture and shopping for new dresses,&mdash;(it
+      seemed as if she could hear herself saying, &ldquo;Heavy silks,&mdash;best
+      goods, if you please,&rdquo;)&mdash;with delectable thumping down of flat-sided
+      pieces of calico, cambric, &ldquo;rep,&rdquo; and other stiffs, and rhythmic evolution
+      of measured yards, followed by sharp snip of scissors, and that cry of
+      rending tissues dearer to woman's ear than any earthly sound until she
+      hears the voice of her own first-born, (much of this potentially,
+      remember,)&mdash;thoughts of a comfortable settlement, an imposing social
+      condition, a cheerful household, and by and by an Indian summer of serene
+      widowhood,&mdash;all these, and infinite other involved possibilities had
+      mapped themselves in one long swift flash before Cynthia's inward eye, and
+      all vanished as the old man spoke those few words. The look on his face,
+      and the tone of his cold speech, had instantly swept them all away, like a
+      tea-set sliding in a single crash from a slippery tray.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What could be the &ldquo;business&rdquo; on which he had come to her with that solemn
+      face?&mdash;she asked herself, as she returned his greeting and offered
+      him a chair. She was conscious of a slight tremor as she put this question
+      to her own intelligence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are we like to be alone and undisturbed?&rdquo; Mr. Gridley asked. It was a
+      strange question,&mdash;men do act strangely sometimes. She hardly knew.
+      whether to turn red or white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, there is nobody like to come in at present,&rdquo; she answered. She did
+      not know what to make of it. What was coming next,&mdash;a declaration, or
+      an accusation of murder?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My business,&rdquo; Mr. Gridley said, very gravely, &ldquo;relates to this. I wish to
+      inspect papers which I have reason to believe exist, and which have
+      reference to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers. Can you help me to
+      get sight of any of these papers not to be found at the Registry of Deeds
+      or the Probate Office?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me, Mr. Gridley, but may I ask you what particular concern you
+      have with the affairs of my relative, Cousin Malachi Withers, that's been
+      dead and buried these half-dozen years?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps it would take some time to answer that question fully, Miss
+      Badlam. Some of these affairs do concern those I am interested in, if not
+      myself directly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I ask who the person or persons may be on whose account you wish to
+      look at papers belonging to my late relative, Malachi Withers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can ask me almost anything, Miss Badlam, but I should really be very
+      much obliged if you would answer my question first. Can you help me to get
+      a sight of any papers relating to the estate of Malachi Withers, not to be
+      found at the Registry of Deeds or the Probate Office,&mdash;any of which
+      you may happen to have any private and particular knowledge?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon, Mr. Gridley; but I don't understand why you come to me
+      with such questions. Lawyer Penhallow is the proper person, I should
+      think, to go to. He and his partner that was&mdash;Mr. Wibird, you know&mdash;settled
+      the estate, and he has got the papers, I suppose, if there are any, that
+      ain't to be found in the offices you mention.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley moved his chair a little, so as to bring Miss Badlam's face a
+      little more squarely in view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does Mr. William Murray Bradshaw know anything about any papers, such as
+      I am referring to, that may have been sent to the office?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady felt a little moisture stealing through all her pores, and at the
+      same time a certain dryness of the vocal organs, so that her answer came
+      in a slightly altered tone which neither of them could help noticing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better ask Mr. William Murray Bradshaw yourself about that,&rdquo; she
+      answered. She felt the hook now, and her spines were rising, partly with
+      apprehension, partly with irritation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has that young gentleman ever delivered into your hands any papers
+      relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your safe
+      keeping?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you mean by asking me these questions, Mr. Gridley? I don't
+      choose to be catechised about Murray Bradshaw's business. Go to him, if
+      you please, if you want to find out about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse my persistence, Miss Badlam, but I must prevail upon you to answer
+      my question. Has Mr. William Murray Bradshaw ever delivered into your
+      hands any papers relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for
+      your safe keeping?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you suppose I am going to answer such questions as you are putting me
+      because you repeat them over, Mr. Gridley? Indeed I sha'n't. Ask him, if
+      you please, whatever you wish to know about his doings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew herself up and looked savagely at him. She had talked herself
+      into her courage. There was a color in her cheeks and a sparkle in her
+      eye; she looked dangerous as a cobra.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Cynthia Badlam,&rdquo; Master Gridley said, very deliberately, &ldquo;I am
+      afraid we do not entirely understand each other. You must answer my
+      question precisely, categorically, point-blank, and on the instant. Will
+      you do this at once, or will you compel me to show you the absolute
+      necessity of your doing it, at the expense of pain to both of us? Six
+      words from me will make you answer all my questions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't say six words, nor sixty, Mr. Gridley, that will make me answer
+      one question I do not choose to. I defy you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will not say one, Miss Cynthia Badlam. There are some things one does
+      not like to speak in words. But I will show you a scrap of paper,
+      containing just six words and a date; not one word more nor one less. You
+      shall read them. Then I will burn the paper in the flame of your lamp. As
+      soon after that as you feel ready, I will ask the same question again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley took out from his pocket-book a scrap of paper, and handed
+      it to Cynthia Badlam. Her hand shook as she received it, for she was
+      frightened as well as enraged, and she saw that Mr. Gridley was in earnest
+      and knew what he was doing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She read the six words, he looking at her steadily all the time, and
+      watching her as if he had just given her a drop of prussic acid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No cry. No sound from her lips. She stared as if half stunned for one
+      moment, then turned her head and glared at Mr. Gridley as if she would
+      have murdered him if she dared. In another instant her face whitened, the
+      scrap of paper fluttered to the floor, and she would have followed it but
+      for the support of both Mr. Gridley's arms. He disengaged one of them
+      presently, and felt in his pocket for the sal volatile. It served him
+      excellently well, and stung her back again to her senses very quickly. All
+      her defiant aspect had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; he said, as he lighted the scrap of paper in the flame. &ldquo;You
+      understand me, and you see that I must be answered the next time I ask my
+      question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She opened her lips as if to speak. It was as when a bell is rung in a
+      vacuum,&mdash;no words came from them,&mdash;only a faint gasping sound,
+      an effort at speech. She was caught tight in the heart-screw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't hurry yourself, Miss Cynthia,&rdquo; he said, with a certain relenting
+      tenderness of manner. &ldquo;Here, take another sniff of the smelling-salts. Be
+      calm, be quiet,&mdash;I am well disposed towards you,&mdash;I don't like
+      to give you trouble. There, now, I must have the answer to that question;
+      but take your time, take your time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me some water,&mdash;some water!&rdquo; she said, in a strange hoarse
+      whisper. There was a pitcher of water and a tumbler on an old marble
+      sideboard near by. He filled the tumbler, and Cynthia emptied it as if she
+      had just been taken from the rack, and could have swallowed a bucketful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want to know?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to know all that you can tell me about a certain paper, or certain
+      papers, which I have reason to believe Mr. William Murray Bradshaw
+      committed to your keeping.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is only one paper of any consequence. Do you want to make him kill
+      me? or do you want to make me kill myself?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither, Miss Cynthia, neither. I wish to see that paper, but not for any
+      bad purpose. Don't you think, on the whole, you have pretty good reason to
+      trust me? I am a very quiet man, Miss Cynthia. Don't be afraid of me; only
+      do what I ask,&mdash;it will be a great deal better for you in the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She thrust her trembling hand into her pocket, and took out the key of the
+      little trunk. She drew the trunk towards her, put the key in the lock, and
+      opened it. It seemed like pressing a knife into her own bosom and turning
+      the blade. That little trunk held all the records of her life the forlorn
+      spinster most cherished;&mdash;a few letters that came nearer to
+      love-letters than any others she had ever received; an album, with flowers
+      of the summers of 1840 and 1841 fading between its leaves; two papers
+      containing locks of hair, half of a broken ring, and other insignificant
+      mementos which had their meaning, doubtless, to her,&mdash;such a
+      collection as is often priceless to one human heart, and passed by as
+      worthless in the auctioneer's inventory. She took the papers out
+      mechanically, and laid them on the table. Among them was an oblong packet,
+      sealed with what appeared to be the office seal of Messrs. Penhallow and
+      Bradshaw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you allow me to take that envelope containing papers, Miss Badlam?&rdquo;
+       Mr. Gridley asked, with a suavity and courtesy in his tone and manner that
+      showed how he felt for her sex and her helpless position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to obey his will as if she had none of her own left. She passed
+      the envelope to him, and stared at him vacantly while he examined it. He
+      read on the back of the package: &ldquo;Withers Estate&mdash;old papers&mdash;of
+      no importance apparently. Examine hereafter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I ask when, where, and of whom you obtained these papers, Miss
+      Badlam?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have pity on me, Mr. Gridley,&mdash;have pity on me. I am a lost woman if
+      you do not. Spare me! for God's sake, spare me! There will no wrong come
+      of all this, if you will but wait a little while. The paper will come to
+      light when it is wanted, and all will be right. But do not make me answer
+      any more questions, and let me keep this paper. O Mr. Gridley! I am in the
+      power of a dreadful man&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean Mr. William Murray Bradshaw?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has there not been some understanding between you that he should become
+      the approved suitor of Miss Myrtle Hazard?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Cynthia wrung her hands and rocked herself backward and forward in her
+      misery, but answered not a word. What could she answer, if she had plotted
+      with this &ldquo;dreadful man&rdquo; against a young and innocent girl, to deliver her
+      over into his hands, at the risk of all her earthly hopes and happiness?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley waited long and patiently for any answer she might have the
+      force to make. As she made none, he took upon himself to settle the whole
+      matter without further torture of his helpless victim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This package must go into the hands of the parties who had the settlement
+      of the estate of the late Malachi Withers. Mr. Penhallow is the survivor
+      of the two gentlemen to whom that business was intrusted. How long is Mr.
+      William Murray Bradshaw like to be away?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps a few days,&mdash;perhaps weeks,&mdash;and then he will come back
+      and kill me,&mdash;or&mdash;or&mdash;worse! Don't take that paper, Mr.
+      Gridley,&mdash;he isn't like you! you would n't&mdash;but he would&mdash;he
+      would send me to everlasting misery to gain his own end, or to save
+      himself. And yet he is n't every way bad, and if he did marry Myrtle she'd
+      think there never was such a man,&mdash;for he can talk her heart out of
+      her, and the wicked in him lies very deep and won't ever come out,
+      perhaps, if the world goes right with him.&rdquo; The last part of this sentence
+      showed how Cynthia talked with her own conscience; all her mental and
+      moral machinery lay open before the calm eyes of Master Byles Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His thoughts wandered a moment from the business before him; he had just
+      got a new study of human nature, which in spite of himself would be
+      shaping itself into an axiom for an imagined new edition of &ldquo;Thoughts on
+      the Universe,&rdquo; something like this, &ldquo;The greatest saint may be a sinner
+      that never got down to 'hard pan.'&rdquo; It was not the time to be framing
+      axioms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poh! poh!&rdquo; he said to himself; &ldquo;what are you about making phrases, when
+      you have got a piece of work like this in hand?&rdquo; Then to Cynthia, with
+      great gentleness and kindness of manner: &ldquo;Have no fear about any
+      consequences to yourself. Mr. Penhallow must see that paper&mdash;I mean
+      those papers. You shall not be a loser nor a sufferer if you do your duty
+      now in these premises.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley, treating her, as far as circumstances permitted, like a
+      gentleman, had shown no intention of taking the papers either stealthily
+      or violently. It must be with her consent. He had laid the package down
+      upon the table, waiting for her to give him leave to take it. But just as
+      he spoke these last words, Cynthia, whose eye had been glancing furtively
+      at it while he was thinking out his axiom, and taking her bearings to it
+      pretty carefully, stretched her hand out, and, seizing the package, thrust
+      it into the sanctuary of her bosom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Penhallow must see those papers, Miss Cynthia Badlam,&rdquo; Mr. Gridley
+      repeated calmly. &ldquo;If he says they or any of them can be returned to your
+      keeping, well and good. But see them he must, for they have his office
+      seal and belong in his custody, and, as you see by the writing on the
+      back, they have not been examined. Now there may be something among them
+      which is of immediate importance to the relatives of the late deceased
+      Malachi Withers, and therefore they must be forthwith submitted to the
+      inspection of the surviving partner of the firm of Wibird and Penhallow.
+      This I propose to do, with your consent, this evening. It is now
+      twenty-five minutes past eight by the true time, as my watch has it. At
+      half past eight exactly I shall have the honor of bidding you good
+      evening, Miss Cynthia Badlam, whether you give me those papers or not. I
+      shall go to the office of Jacob Penhallow, Esquire, and there make one of
+      two communications to him; to wit, these papers and the facts connected
+      therewith, or another statement, the nature of which you may perhaps
+      conjecture.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no need of our speculating as to what Mr. Byles Gridley, an
+      honorable and humane man, would have done, or what would have been the
+      nature of that communication which he offered as an alternative to the
+      perplexed woman. He had not at any rate miscalculated the strength of his
+      appeal, which Cynthia interpreted as he expected. She bore the heart-screw
+      about two minutes. Then she took the package from her bosom, and gave it
+      with averted face to Master Byles Gridley, who, on receiving it, made her
+      a formal but not unkindly bow, and bade her good evening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One would think it had been lying out in the dew,&rdquo; he said, as he left
+      the house and walked towards Mr. Penhallow's residence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0031" id="link2HCH0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXI. MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CONSULTS WITH JACOB PENHALLOW, ESQUIRE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Lawyer Penhallow was seated in his study, his day's work over, his feet in
+      slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which Sir Walter
+      Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old Reports. He was a
+      knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but honest, and therefore less
+      ready to suspect the honesty of others. He had a great belief in his young
+      partner's ability, and, though he knew him to be astute, did not think him
+      capable of roguery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was at his request that Mr. Bradshaw had undertaken his journey, which,
+      as he believed,&mdash;and as Mr. Bradshaw had still stronger evidence of a
+      strictly confidential nature which led him to feel sure,&mdash;would end
+      in the final settlement of the great land claim in favor of their client.
+      The case had been dragging along from year to year, like an English
+      chancery suit; and while courts and lawyers and witnesses had been
+      sleeping, the property had been steadily growing. A railroad had passed
+      close to one margin of the township, some mines had been opened in the
+      county, in which a village calling itself a city had grown big enough to
+      have a newspaper and Fourth of July orations. It was plain that the
+      successful issue of the long process would make the heirs of the late
+      Malachi Withers possessors of an ample fortune, and it was also plain that
+      the firm of Penhallow and Bradshaw were like to receive, in such case, the
+      largest fee that had gladdened the professional existence of its members.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Penhallow had his book open before him, but his thoughts were
+      wandering from the page. He was thinking of his absent partner, and the
+      probable results of his expedition. What would be the consequence if all
+      this property came into the possession of Silence Withers? Could she have
+      any liberal intentions with reference to Myrtle Hazard, the young girl who
+      had grown up with her, or was the common impression true, that she was
+      bent on endowing an institution, and thus securing for herself a favorable
+      consideration in the higher courts, where her beneficiaries would be, it
+      might be supposed, influential advocates? He could not help thinking that
+      Mr. Bradshaw believed that Myrtle Hazard would eventually come to a part at
+      least of this inheritance. For the story was, that he was paying his court
+      to the young lady whenever he got an opportunity, and that he was
+      cultivating an intimacy with Miss Cynthia Badlam. &ldquo;Bradshaw wouldn't make
+      a move in that direction,&rdquo; Mr. Penhallow said to himself, &ldquo;until he felt
+      pretty sure that it was going to be a paying business. If he was only a
+      young minister now, there'd be no difficulty about it. Let any man, young
+      or old, in a clerical white cravat, step up to Myrtle Hazard, and ask her
+      to be miserable in his company through this wretched life, and aunt
+      Silence would very likely give them her blessing, and add something to it
+      that the man in the white cravat would think worth even more than that
+      was. But I don't know what she'll say to Bradshaw. Perhaps he 'd better
+      have a hint to go to meeting a little more regularly. However, I suppose
+      he knows what he's about.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was thinking all this over when a visitor was announced, and Mr. Byles
+      Gridley entered the study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good evening, Mr. Penhallow,&rdquo; Mr. Gridley said, wiping his forehead.
+      &ldquo;Quite warm, is n't it, this evening?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Warm!&rdquo; said Mr. Penhallow, &ldquo;I should think it would freeze pretty thick
+      to-night. I should have asked you to come up to the fire and warm
+      yourself. But take off your coat, Mr. Gridley,&mdash;very glad to see you.
+      You don't come to the house half as often as you come to the office. Sit
+      down, sit down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley took off his outside coat and sat down. &ldquo;He does look warm,
+      does n't he?&rdquo; Mr. Penhallow thought. &ldquo;Wonder what has heated up the old
+      gentleman so. Find out quick enough, for he always goes straight to
+      business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Penhallow,&rdquo; Mr. Gridley began at once, &ldquo;I have come on a very grave
+      matter, in which you are interested as well as myself, and I wish to lay
+      the whole of it before you as explicitly as I can, so that we may settle
+      this night before I go what is to be done. I am afraid the good standing
+      of your partner, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, is concerned in the matter.
+      Would it be a surprise to you, if he had carried his acuteness in some
+      particular case like the one I am to mention beyond the prescribed
+      limits?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The question was put so diplomatically that there was no chance for an
+      indignant denial of the possibility of Mr. Bradshaw's being involved in
+      any discreditable transaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is possible,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;that Bradshaw's keen wits may have
+      betrayed him into sharper practice than I should altogether approve in any
+      business we carried on together. He is a very knowing young man, but I
+      can't think he is foolish enough, to say nothing of his honesty, to make
+      any false step of the kind you seem to hint. I think he might on occasion
+      go pretty near the line, but I don't believe he would cross it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Permit me a few questions, Mr. Penhallow. You settled the estate of the
+      late Malachi Withers, did you not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Wibird and myself settled it together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you received any papers from any of the family since the settlement
+      of the estate?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let me see. Yes; a roll of old plans of the Withers Place, and so forth,&mdash;not
+      of much use, but labelled and kept. An old trunk with letters and
+      account-books, some of them in Dutch,&mdash;mere curiosities. A year ago
+      or more, I remember that Silence sent me over some papers she had found in
+      an odd corner,&mdash;the old man hid things like a magpie. I looked over
+      most of them,&mdash;trumpery not worth keeping,&mdash;old leases and so
+      forth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you recollect giving some of them to Mr. Bradshaw to look over?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now I come to think of it, I believe I did; but he reported to me, if I
+      remember right, that they amounted to nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If any of those papers were of importance, should you think your junior
+      partner ought to keep them from your knowledge?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I need not answer that question, Mr. Gridley. Will you be so good as to
+      come at once to the facts on which you found your suspicions, and which
+      lead you to put these questions to me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Thereupon Mr. Gridley proceeded to state succinctly the singular behavior
+      of Murray Bradshaw in taking one paper from a number handed to him by Mr.
+      Penhallow, and concealing it in a volume. He related how he was just on
+      the point of taking out the volume which contained the paper, when Mr.
+      Bradshaw entered and disconcerted him. He had, however, noticed three
+      spots on the paper by which he should know it anywhere. He then repeated
+      the substance of Kitty Fagan's story, accenting the fact that she too
+      noticed three remarkable spots on the paper which Mr. Bradshaw had pointed
+      out to Miss Badlam as the one so important to both of them. Here he rested
+      the case for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Penhallow looked thoughtful. There was something questionable in the
+      aspect of this business. It did obviously suggest the idea of an underhand
+      arrangement with Miss Cynthia, possibly involving some very grave
+      consequences. It would have been most desirable, he said, to have
+      ascertained what these papers, or rather this particular paper, to which
+      so much importance was attached, amounted to. Without that knowledge there
+      was nothing, after all, which it might not be possible to explain. He
+      might have laid aside the spotted paper to examine for some object of mere
+      curiosity. It was certainly odd that the one the Fagan woman had seen
+      should present three spots so like those on the other paper, but people
+      did sometimes throw treys at backgammon, and that which not rarely
+      happened with two dice of six faces might happen if they had sixty or six
+      hundred faces. On the whole, he did not see that there was any ground, so
+      far, for anything more than a vague suspicion. He thought it not unlikely
+      that Mr. Bradshaw was a little smitten with the young lady up at The
+      Poplars, and that he had made some diplomatic overtures to the duenna,
+      after the approved method of suitors. She was young for Bradshaw,&mdash;very
+      young,&mdash;but he knew his own affairs. If he chose to make love to a
+      child, it was natural enough that he should begin by courting her nurse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Byles Gridley lost himself for half a minute in a most
+      discreditable inward discussion as to whether Laura Penhallow was probably
+      one or two years older than Mr. Bradshaw. That was his way, he could not
+      help it. He could not think of anything without these mental parentheses.
+      But he came back to business at the end of his half-minute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can lay the package before you at this moment, Mr. Penhallow. I have
+      induced that woman in whose charge it was left to intrust it to my
+      keeping, with the express intention of showing it to you. But it is
+      protected by a seal, as I have told you, which I should on no account
+      presume to meddle with.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Gridley took out the package of papers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How damp it is!&rdquo; Mr. Penhallow said; &ldquo;must have been lying in some very
+      moist neighborhood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very,&rdquo; Mr. Gridley answered, with a peculiar expression which said,
+      &ldquo;Never mind about that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did the party give you possession of these documents without making any
+      effort to retain them?&rdquo; the lawyer asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not precisely. It cost some effort to induce Miss Badlam to let them go
+      out of her hands. I hope you think I was justified in making the effort I
+      did, not without a considerable strain upon my feelings, as well as her
+      own, to get hold of the papers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That will depend something on what the papers prove to be, Mr. Gridley. A
+      man takes a certain responsibility in doing just what you have done. If,
+      for instance, it should prove that this envelope contained matters
+      relating solely to private transactions between Mr. Bradshaw and Miss
+      Badlam, concerning no one but themselves,&mdash;and if the words on the
+      back of the envelope and the seal had been put there merely as a
+      protection for a package containing private papers of a delicate but
+      perfectly legitimate character&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lawyer paused, as careful experts do, after bending the bow of an
+      hypothesis, before letting the arrow go. Mr. Gridley felt very warm
+      indeed, uncomfortably so, and applied his handkerchief to his face. Could
+      n't be anything in such a violent supposition as that, and yet such a
+      crafty fellow as that Bradshaw,&mdash;what trick was he not up to? Absurd!
+      Cynthia was not acting,&mdash;Rachel would n't be equal to such a
+      performance!&mdash;&ldquo;why then, Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; the lawyer continued, &ldquo;I don't
+      see but what my partner would have you at an advantage, and, if disposed
+      to make you uncomfortable, could do so pretty effectively. But this, you
+      understand, is only a supposed case, and not a very likely one. I don't
+      think it would have been prudent in you to meddle with that seal. But it
+      is a very different matter with regard to myself. It makes no difference,
+      so far as I am concerned, where this package came from, or how it was
+      obtained. It is just as absolutely within my control as any piece of
+      property I call my own. I should not hesitate, if I saw fit, to break this
+      seal at once, and proceed to the examination of any papers contained
+      within the envelope. If I found any paper of the slightest importance
+      relating to the estate, I should act as if it had never been out of my
+      possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose, however, I chose to know what was in the package, and, having
+      ascertained, act my judgment about returning it to the party from whom you
+      obtained it. In such case I might see fit to restore or cause it to be
+      restored, to the party, without any marks of violence having been used
+      being apparent. If everything is not right, probably no questions would be
+      asked by the party having charge of the package. If there is no underhand
+      work going on, and the papers are what they profess to be, nobody is
+      compromised but yourself, so far as I can see, and you are compromised at
+      any rate, Mr. Gridley, at least in the good graces of the party from whom
+      you obtained the documents. Tell that party that I took the package
+      without opening it, and shall return it, very likely, without breaking the
+      seal. Will consider of the matter, say a couple of days. Then you shall
+      hear from me, and she shall hear from you. So. So. Yes, that's it. A nice
+      business. A thing to sleep on. You had better leave the whole matter of
+      dealing with the package to me. If I see fit to send it back with the seal
+      unbroken, that is my affair. But keep perfectly quiet, if you please, Mr.
+      Gridley, about the whole matter. Mr. Bradshaw is off, as you know, and the
+      business on which he is gone is important,&mdash;very important. He can be
+      depended on for that; he has acted all along as if he had a personal
+      interest in the success of our firm beyond his legal relation to it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Penhallow's light burned very late in the office that night, and the
+      following one. He looked troubled and absent-minded, and when Miss Laura
+      ventured to ask him how long Mr. Bradshaw was like to be gone, he answered
+      her in such a way that the girl who waited at table concluded that he did
+      n't mean to have Miss Laury keep company with Mr. Bradshaw, or he'd never
+      have spoke so dreadful hash to her when she asked about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0032" id="link2HCH0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXII. SUSAN POSEY'S TRIAL.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A day or two after Myrtle Hazard returned to the village, Master Byles
+      Gridley, accompanied by Gifted Hopkins, followed her, as has been already
+      mentioned, to the same scene of the principal events of this narrative.
+      The young man had been persuaded that it would be doing injustice to his
+      talents to crowd their fruit prematurely upon the market. He carried his
+      manuscript back with him, having relinquished the idea of publishing for
+      the present. Master Byles Gridley, on the other hand, had in his pocket a
+      very flattering proposal, from the same publisher to whom he had
+      introduced the young poet, for a new and revised edition of his work,
+      &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe,&rdquo; which was to be remodelled in some respects,
+      and to have a new title not quite so formidable to the average reader.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be hardly fair to Susan Posey to describe with what delight and
+      innocent enthusiasm she welcomed back Gifted Hopkins. She had been so
+      lonely since he was away? She had read such of his poems as she possessed&mdash;duplicates
+      of his printed ones, or autographs which he had kindly written out for her&mdash;over
+      and over again, not without the sweet tribute of feminine sensibility,
+      which is the most precious of all testimonials to a poet's power over the
+      heart. True, her love belonged to another,&mdash;but then she was so used
+      to Gifted! She did so love to hear him read his poems,&mdash;and Clement
+      had never written that &ldquo;little bit of a poem to Susie,&rdquo; which she had
+      asked him for so long ago! She received him therefore with open arms,&mdash;not
+      literally, of course, which would have been a breach of duty and
+      propriety, but in a figurative sense, which it is hoped no reader will
+      interpret to her discredit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young poet was in need of consolation. It is true that he had seen
+      many remarkable sights during his visit to the city; that he had got
+      &ldquo;smarted up,&rdquo; as his mother called it, a good deal; that he had been to
+      Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party, where he had looked upon life in all its
+      splendors; and that he brought back many interesting experiences, which
+      would serve to enliven his conversation for a long time. But he had failed
+      in the great enterprise he had undertaken. He was forced to confess to his
+      revered parent, and his esteemed friend Susan Posey, that his genius,
+      which was freely acknowledged, was not thought to be quite ripe as yet. He
+      told the young lady some particulars of his visit to the publisher, how he
+      had listened with great interest to one of his poems, &ldquo;The Triumph of
+      Song,&rdquo;&mdash;how he had treated him with marked and flattering attention;
+      but that he advised him not to risk anything prematurely, giving him the
+      hope that by and by he would be admitted into that series of illustrious
+      authors which it was the publisher's privilege to present to the reading
+      public. In short, he was advised not to print. That was the net total of
+      the matter, and it was a pang to the susceptible heart of the poet. He had
+      hoped to have come home enriched by the sale of his copyright, and with
+      the prospect of seeing his name before long on the back of a handsome
+      volume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted's mother did all in her power to console him in his disappointment.
+      There was plenty of jealous people always that wanted to keep young folks
+      from rising in the world. Never mind, she did n't believe but what Gifted
+      could make jest as good verses as any of them that they kept such a talk
+      about. She had a fear that he might pine away in consequence of the mental
+      excitement he had gone through, and solicited his appetite with her
+      choicest appliances,&mdash;of which he partook in a measure which showed
+      that there was no immediate cause of alarm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Susan Posey was more than a consoler,&mdash;she was an angel to him in
+      this time of his disappointment. &ldquo;Read me all the poems over again,&rdquo; she
+      said,&mdash;&ldquo;it is almost the only pleasure I have left, to hear you read
+      your beautiful verses.&rdquo; Clement Lindsay had not written to Susan quite so
+      often of late as at some former periods of the history of their love.
+      Perhaps it was that which had made her look paler than usual for some
+      little time. Something was evidently preying on her. Her only delight
+      seemed to be in listening to Gifted as he read, sometimes with fine
+      declamatory emphasis, sometimes in low, tremulous tones, the various poems
+      enshrined in his manuscript. At other times she was sad, and more than
+      once Mrs. Hopkins had seen a tear steal down her innocent cheek, when
+      there seemed to be no special cause for grief. She ventured to speak of it
+      to Master Byles Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our Susan's in trouble, Mr. Gridley, for some reason or other that's
+      unbeknown to me, and I can't help wishing you could jest have a few words
+      with her. You're a kind of a grandfather, you know, to all the young
+      folks, and they'd tell you pretty much everything about themselves. I
+      calc'late she is n't at ease in her mind about somethin' or other, and I
+      kind o' think, Mr. Gridley, you could coax it out of her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Was there ever anything like it?&rdquo; said Master Byles Gridley to himself.
+      &ldquo;I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take care of at this
+      rate. Susan Posey in trouble, too! Well, well, well, it's easier to get a
+      birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a big ship off the rocks. Susan
+      Posey's trouble will be come at easily enough; but Myrtle Hazard floats in
+      deeper water. We must make Susan Posey tell her own story, or let her tell
+      it, for it will all come out of itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going to dust the books in the open shelves this morning. I wonder
+      if Miss Susan Posey would n't like to help for half an hour or so,&rdquo; Master
+      Gridley remarked at the breakfast-table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The amiable girl's very pleasant countenance lighted up at the thought of
+      obliging the old man who had been so kind to her and so liberal to her
+      friend, the poet. She would be delighted to help him; she would dust them
+      all for him, if he wanted her to. No, Master Gridley said, he always
+      wanted to have a hand in it; and, besides, such a little body as she was
+      could not lift those great folios out of the lower shelves without
+      overstraining herself; she might handle the musketry and the light
+      artillery, but he must deal with the heavy guns himself. &ldquo;As low down as
+      the octavos, Susan Posey, you shall govern; below that, the Salic law.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Susan did not know much about the Salic law; but she knew he meant that he
+      would dust the big books and she would attend to the little ones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very young and a very pretty girl is sometimes quite charming in a
+      costume which thinks of nothing less than of being attractive. Susan
+      appeared after breakfast in the study, her head bound with a kerchief of
+      bright pattern, a little jacket she had outgrown buttoned, in spite of
+      opposition, close about her up to the throat, round which a white
+      handkerchief was loosely tied, and a pair of old gauntlets protecting her
+      hands, so that she suggested something between a gypsy, a jaunty
+      soubrette, and the fille du regiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley took out a great volume from the lower shelf,&mdash;a folio
+      in massive oaken covers with clasps Like prison hinges, bearing the
+      stately colophon, white on a ground of vermilion, of Nicholas Jenson and
+      his associates. He opened the volume,&mdash;paused over its blue, and
+      scarlet initial letter,&mdash;he turned page after page, admiring its
+      brilliant characters, its broad, white marginal rivers, and the narrower
+      white creek that separated the black-typed twin-columns, he turned back to
+      the beginning and read the commendatory paragraph, &ldquo;Nam ipsorum omnia
+      fidgent tum correctione dignissima, tum cura imprimendo splendida ac
+      miranda,&rdquo; and began reading, &ldquo;Incipit proemium super apparatum
+      decretalium....&rdquo; when it suddenly occurred to him that this was not
+      exactly doing what he had undertaken to do, and he began whisking an
+      ancient bandanna about the ears of the venerable volume. All this time
+      Miss Susan Posey was catching the little books by the small of their
+      backs, pulling them out, opening them, and clapping them together,
+      'p-'p-'p! 'p-'p-'p! and carefully caressing all their edges with a regular
+      professional dusting-cloth, so persuasively that they yielded up every
+      particle that a year had drifted upon them, and came forth refreshed and
+      rejuvenated. This process went on for a while, until Susan had worked down
+      among the octavos and Master Gridley had worked up among the quartos. He
+      had got hold of Calmet's Dictionary, and was caught by the article
+      Solomon, so that he forgot his occupation again. All at once it struck him
+      that everything was very silent,&mdash;the 'p-'p-'p! of clapping the books
+      had ceased, and the light rustle of Susan's dress was no longer heard. He
+      looked up and saw her standing perfectly still, with a book in one hand
+      and her duster in the other. She was lost in thought, and by the shadow on
+      her face and the glistening of her blue eyes he knew it was her hidden
+      sorrow that had just come back to her. Master Gridley shut up his book,
+      leaving Solomon to his fate, like the worthy Benedictine he was reading,
+      without discussing the question whether he was saved or not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Susan Posey, child, what is your trouble?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor Susan was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least touch
+      upsets, and fell to crying. It took her some time to get down the waves of
+      emotion so that speech would live upon them. At last it ventured out,&mdash;showing
+      at intervals, like the boat rising on the billow, sinking into the hollow,
+      and climbing again into notice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Mr. Grid-ley&mdash;I can't&mdash;I can't&mdash;tell you or&mdash;any-body&mdash;what
+      's the mat-mat-matter. My heart will br-br-break.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, no, child,&rdquo; said Mr. Gridley, sympathetically stirred a little
+      himself by the sight of Susan in tears and sobbing and catching her
+      breath, &ldquo;that mustn't be, Susan Posey. Come off the steps, Susan Posey,
+      and stop dusting the books,&mdash;I can finish them,&mdash;and tell me all
+      about your troubles. I will try to help you out of them, and I have begun
+      to think I know how to help young people pretty well. I have had some
+      experience at it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Susan cried and sobbed all the more uncontrollably and convulsively.
+      Master Gridley thought he had better lead her at once to what he felt
+      pretty sure was the source of her grief, and that, when she had had her
+      cry out, she would probably make the hole in the ice he had broken big
+      enough in a very few minutes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think something has gone wrong between you and your friend, the young
+      gentleman with whom you are in intimate relations, my child, and I think
+      you had better talk freely with me, for I can perhaps give you a little
+      counsel that will be of service.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Susan cried herself quiet at last. &ldquo;There's nobody in the world like you,
+      Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I've been wanting to tell you something ever
+      so long. My friend&mdash;Mr. Clem&mdash;Clement Lindsay does n't care for
+      me as he used to,&mdash;I know he does n't. He hasn't written to me for&mdash;I
+      don't know but it's a month. And O Mr. Gridley! he's such a great man, and
+      I am such a simple person,&mdash;I can't help thinking&mdash;he would be
+      happier with somebody else than poor little Susan Posey!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This last touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do those who
+      indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly, as a
+      horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before she
+      recovered her conversational road-gait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; she began again, at length, &ldquo;if I only dared to tell him
+      what I think,&mdash;that perhaps it would be happier for us both&mdash;if
+      we could forget each other! Ought I not to tell him so? Don't you think he
+      would find another to make him happy? Wouldn't he forgive me for telling
+      him he was free? Were we not too young to know each other's hearts when we
+      promised each other that we would love as long as we lived? Sha'n't I
+      write him a letter this very day and tell him all? Do you think it would
+      be wrong in me to do it? O Mr. Gridley, it makes me almost crazy to think
+      about it. Clement must be free! I cannot, cannot hold him to a promise he
+      does n't want to keep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There were so many questions in this eloquent rhapsody of Susan's that
+      they neutralized each other, as one might say, and Master Gridley had time
+      for reflection. His thoughts went on something in this way:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty clear case! Guess Mr. Clement can make up his mind to it. Put it
+      well, did n't she? Not a word about our little Gifted! That's the trouble.
+      Poets! how they do bewitch these schoolgirls! And having a chance every
+      day, too, how could you expect her to stand it?&rdquo; Then aloud: &ldquo;Susan Posey,
+      you are a good, honest little girl as ever was. I think you and Clement
+      were too hasty in coming together for life before you knew what life
+      meant. I think if you write Clement a letter, telling him that you cannot
+      help fearing that you two are not perfectly adapted to each other, on
+      account of certain differences for which neither of you is responsible,
+      and that you propose that each should release the other from the pledge
+      given so long ago,&mdash;in that case, I say, I believe he will think no
+      worse of you for so doing, and may perhaps agree that it is best for both
+      of you to seek your happiness elsewhere than in each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The book-dusting came to as abrupt a close as the reading of Lancelot.
+      Susan went straight to her room, dried her tears so as to write in a fair
+      hand, but had to stop every few lines and take a turn at the
+      &ldquo;dust-layers,&rdquo; as Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's friend used to call the fountains
+      of sensibility. It would seem like betraying Susan's confidence to reveal
+      the contents of this letter, but the reader may be assured that it was
+      simple and sincere and very sweetly written, without the slightest
+      allusion to any other young man, whether of the poetical or cheaper human
+      varieties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not long before Susan received a reply from Clement Lindsay. It was
+      as kind and generous and noble as she could have asked. It was
+      affectionate, as a very amiable brother's letter might be, and candidly
+      appreciative of the reasons Susan had assigned for her proposal. He gave
+      her back her freedom, not that he should cease to feel an interest in her,
+      always. He accepted his own release, not that he would ever think she
+      could be indifferent to his future fortunes. And within a very brief
+      period of time after sending his answer to Susan Posey, whether he wished
+      to see her in person, or whether he had some other motive, he had packed
+      his trunk, and made his excuses for an absence of uncertain length at the
+      studio, and was on his way to Oxbow Village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0033" id="link2HCH0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXIII. JUST AS YOU EXPECTED.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The spring of 1861 had now arrived,&mdash;that eventful spring which was
+      to lift the curtain and show the first scene of the first act in the
+      mighty drama which fixed the eyes of mankind during four bloody years. The
+      little schemes of little people were going on in all our cities and
+      villages without thought of the fearful convulsion which was soon coming
+      to shatter the hopes and cloud the prospects of millions. Our little Oxbow
+      Village, which held itself by no means the least of human centres, was the
+      scene of its own commotions, as intense and exciting to those concerned as
+      if the destiny of the nation had been involved in them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clement Lindsay appeared suddenly in that important locality, and
+      repaired to his accustomed quarters at the house of Deacon Rumrill. That
+      worthy person received him with a certain gravity of manner, caused by his
+      recollections of the involuntary transgression into which Mr. Lindsay had
+      led him by his present of &ldquo;Ivanhoe.&rdquo;&mdash;He was, on the whole, glad to
+      see him, for his finances were not yet wholly recovered from the injury
+      inflicted on them by the devouring element. But he could not forget that
+      his boarder had betrayed him into a breach of the fourth commandment, and
+      that the strict eyes of his clergyman had detected him in the very
+      commission of the offence. He had no sooner seen Mr. Clement comfortably
+      installed, therefore, than he presented himself at the door of his chamber
+      with the book, enveloped in strong paper and very securely tied round with
+      a stout string.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is your vollum, Mr. Lindsay,&rdquo; the Deacon said. &ldquo;I understand it is
+      not the work of that great and good mahn who I thought wrote it. I did not
+      see anything immoral in it as fur as I read, but it belongs to what I
+      consider a very dangerous class of publications. These novels and romances
+      are awfully destructive to our youth. I should recommend you, as a young
+      man of principle, to burn the vollum. At least I hope you will not leave
+      it about anywhere unless it is carefully tied up. I have written upon the
+      paper round it to warn off all the young persons of my household from
+      meddling with it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      True enough, Mr. Clement saw in strong black letters on the back of the
+      paper wrapping his unfortunate &ldquo;Ivanhoe,&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+      &ldquo;DANGEROUS READING FOR CHRISTIAN YOUTH.
+
+      &ldquo;TOUCH NOT THE UNCLEAN THING.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you said you had Scott's picture hung up in your parlor, Deacon
+      Rumrill,&rdquo; he said, a little amused with the worthy man's fear and
+      precautions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the great Scott's likeness that I have in my parlor,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I
+      will show it to you if you will come with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clement followed the Deacon into that sacred apartment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the portrait of the great Scott,&rdquo; he said, pointing to an
+      engraving of a heavy-looking person whose phrenological developments were
+      a somewhat striking contrast to those of the distinguished Sir Walter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will take good care that none of your young people see this volume,&rdquo;
+       Mr. Clement said; &ldquo;I trust you read it yourself, however, and found
+      something to please you in it. I am sure you are safe from being harmed by
+      any such book. Did n't you have to finish it, Deacon, after you had once
+      begun?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I&mdash;I&mdash;perused a consid'able portion of the work,&rdquo; the
+      Deacon answered, in a way that led Mr. Clement to think he had not stopped
+      much short of Finis. &ldquo;Anything new in the city?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing except what you've all had,&mdash;Confederate States establishing
+      an army and all that,&mdash;not very new either. What has been going on
+      here lately, Deacon?&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mr. Lindsay, not a great deal. My new barn is pretty nigh done.
+      I've got as fine a litter of pigs as ever you see. I don't know whether
+      you're a judge of pigs or no. The Hazard gal's come back, spilt, pooty
+      much, I guess. Been to one o' them fashionable schools,&mdash;I 've heerd
+      that she 's learnt to dance. I've heerd say that that Hopkins boy's round
+      the Posey gal, come to think, she's the one you went with some when you
+      was here,&mdash;I 'm gettin' kind o' forgetful. Old Doctor Hurlbut's
+      pretty low,&mdash;ninety-four year old,&mdash;born in '67,&mdash;folks
+      ain't ginerally very spry after they're ninety, but he held out
+      wonderful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How's Mr. Bradshaw?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, the young squire, he's off travellin' somewhere in the West, or to
+      Washin'ton, or somewhere else,&mdash;I don't jestly know where. They say
+      that he's follerin' up the courts in the business about old Malachi's
+      estate. I don' know much about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The news got round Oxbow Village very speedily that Mr. Clement Lindsay,
+      generally considered the accepted lover of Miss Susan Posey, had arrived
+      in that place. Now it had come to be the common talk of the village that
+      young Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were getting to be mighty thick with
+      each other, and the prevailing idea was that Clement's visit had reference
+      to that state of affairs. Some said that Susan had given her young man the
+      mitten, meaning thereby that she had signified that his services as a
+      suitor were dispensed with. Others thought there was only a wavering in
+      her affection for her lover, and that he feared for her constancy, and had
+      come to vindicate his rights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the young fellows, who were doubtless envious of Gifted's
+      popularity with the fair sex, attempted in the most unjustifiable manner
+      to play upon his susceptible nature. One of them informed him that he had
+      seen that Lindsay fellah raound taown with the darndest big stick y' ever
+      did see. Looked kind o' savage and wild like. Another one told him that
+      perhaps he'd better keep a little shady; that are chap that had got the
+      mittin was praowlin' abaout&mdash;with a pistil,&mdash;one o' them
+      Darringers,&mdash;abaout as long as your thumb, an' fire a bullet as big
+      as a p'tatah-ball,&mdash;'a fellah carries one in his breeches-pocket, an'
+      shoots y' right threugh his own pahnts, withaout ever takin' on it aout of
+      his pocket. The stable-keeper, who, it may be remembered, once exchanged a
+      few playful words with Mr. Gridley, got a hint from some of these
+      unfeeling young men, and offered the resources of his stable to the youth
+      supposed to be in peril.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 've got a faast colt, Mr. Hopkins, that 'll put twenty mild betwixt you
+      an' this here village, as quick as any four huffs 'll dew it in this here
+      caounty, if you should want to get away suddin. I've heern tell there was
+      some lookin' raound here that wouldn't be wholesome to meet,&mdash;jest
+      say the word, Mr. Hopkins, an' I 'll have ye on that are colt's back in
+      less than no time, an' start ye off full jump. There's a good many that's
+      kind o' worried for fear something might happen to ye, Mr. Hopkins,&mdash;y'
+      see fellahs don't like to have other chaps cuttin' on 'em aout with their
+      gals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted Hopkins had become excessively nervous by this time. It is true
+      that everything in his intimacy with Susan Posey, so far, might come under
+      the general head of friendship; but he was conscious that something more
+      was in both their thoughts. Susan had given him mysterious hints that her
+      relations with Clement had undergone a change, but had never had quite
+      courage enough, perhaps had too much delicacy, to reveal the whole truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted was walking home, deeply immersed in thoughts excited by the hints
+      which hail been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his imagination, when
+      all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement Lindsay coming straight
+      towards him. Gifted was unarmed, except with a pair of blunt scissors,
+      which he carried habitually in his pocket. What should he do? Should he
+      fly? But he was never a good runner, being apt to find himself scant o'
+      breath, like Hamlet, after violent exercise. His demeanor on the occasion
+      did credit to his sense of his own virtuous conduct and his
+      self-possession. He put his hand out, while yet at a considerable
+      distance, and marched up towards Clement, smiling with all the native
+      amiability which belonged to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To his infinite relief, Clement put out his hand to grasp the one offered
+      him, and greeted the young poet in the most frank and cordial manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how is Miss Susan Posey, Mr. Hopkins?&rdquo; asked Clement, in the most
+      cheerful tone. &ldquo;It is a long while since I have seen her, and you must
+      tell her that I hope I shall not leave the village without finding time to
+      call upon her. She and I are good friends always, Mr. Hopkins, though
+      perhaps I shall not be quite so often at your mother's as I was during my
+      last visit to Oxbow Village.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Gifted felt somewhat as the subject of one of those old-fashioned forms of
+      argument, formerly much employed to convince men of error in matters of
+      religion, must have felt when the official who superintended the
+      stretching-machine said, &ldquo;Slack up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He told Mr. Clement all about Susan, and was on the point of saying that
+      if he, Mr. Clement, did not claim any engrossing interest in her, he,
+      Gifted, was ready to offer her the devotion of a poet's heart. Mr.
+      Clement, however, had so many other questions to ask him about everybody
+      in the village, more particularly concerning certain young persons in whom
+      he seemed to be specially interested, that there was no chance to work in
+      his own revelations of sentiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement Lindsay had come to Oxbow Village with a single purpose. He could
+      now venture to trust himself in the presence of Myrtle Hazard. He was
+      free, and he knew nothing to show that she had lost the liberty of
+      disposing of her heart. But after an experience such as he had gone
+      through, he was naturally distrustful of himself, and inclined to be
+      cautious and reserved in yielding to a new passion. Should he tell her the
+      true relations in which they stood to each other,&mdash;that she owed her
+      life to him, and that he had very nearly sacrificed his own in saving
+      hers? Why not? He had a claim on her gratitude for what he had done in her
+      behalf, and out of this gratitude there might naturally spring a warmer
+      feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, he could not try to win her affections by showing that he had paid for
+      them beforehand. She seemed to be utterly unconscious of the fact that it
+      was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters. If the thought came
+      to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it would be time enough to tell
+      her the story. If not, the moment might arrive when he could reveal to her
+      the truth that he was her deliverer, without accusing himself of bribing
+      her woman's heart to reward him for his services. He would wait for that
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the most natural thing in the world that Mr. Lindsay, a young
+      gentleman from the city, should call to see Miss Hazard, a young lady whom
+      he had met recently at a party. To that pleasing duty he addressed himself
+      the evening after his arrival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The young gentleman's goin' a courtin', I calc'late,&rdquo; was the remark of
+      the Deacon's wife when she saw what a comely figure Mr. Clement showed at
+      the tea-table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very hahnsome young mahn,&rdquo; the Deacon replied, &ldquo;and looks as if he
+      might know consid'able. An architect, you know,&mdash;a sort of a builder.
+      Wonder if he has n't got any good plans for a hahnsome pigsty. I suppose
+      he 'd charge somethin' for one, but it couldn't be much, an' he could take
+      it out in board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better ask him,&rdquo; his wife&mdash;said; &ldquo;he looks mighty pleasant; there's
+      nothin' lost by askin', an' a good deal got sometimes, grandma used to
+      say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Deacon followed her advice. Mr. Clement was perfectly good-natured
+      about it, asked the Deacon the number of snouts in his menagerie, got an
+      idea of the accommodations required, and sketched the plaza of a neat, and
+      appropriate edifice for the Porcellarium, as Master Gridley afterwards
+      pleasantly christened it, which was carried out by the carpenter, and
+      stands to this day a monument of his obliging disposition, and a proof
+      that there is nothing so humble that taste cannot be shown in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What'll be your charge for the plan of the pigsty, Mr. Lindsay?&rdquo; the
+      Deacon inquired with an air of interest,&mdash;he might have become
+      involved more deeply than he had intended. &ldquo;How much should you call about
+      right for the picter an' figgerin'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you're quite welcome to my sketch of a plan, Deacon. I've seen much
+      showier buildings tenanted by animals not very different from those your
+      edifice is meant for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Clement found the three ladies sitting together in the chill, dim
+      parlor at The Poplars. They had one of the city papers spread out on the
+      table, and Myrtle was reading aloud the last news from Charleston Harbor.
+      She rose as Mr. Clement entered, and stepped forward to meet him. It was a
+      strange impression this young man produced upon her,&mdash;not through the
+      common channels of the intelligence, not exactly that &ldquo;magnetic&rdquo; influence
+      of which she had had experience at a former time. It did not over come her
+      as at the moment of their second meeting. But it was something she must
+      struggle against, and she had force and pride and training enough now to
+      maintain her usual tranquillity, in spite of a certain inward commotion
+      which seemed to reach her breathing and her pulse by some strange,
+      inexplicable mechanism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle, it must be remembered, was no longer the simple country girl who
+      had run away at fifteen, but a young lady of seventeen, who had learned
+      all that more than a year's diligence at a great school could teach her,
+      who had been much with girls of taste and of culture, and was familiar
+      with the style and manners of those who came from what considered itself
+      the supreme order in the social hierarchy. Her natural love for
+      picturesque adornment was qualified by a knowledge of the prevailing modes
+      not usual in so small a place as Oxbow Village. All this had not failed to
+      produce its impression on those about her. Persons who, like Miss Silence
+      Withers, believe, not in education, inasmuch as there is no healthy nature
+      to be educated, but in transformation, worry about their charges up to a
+      certain period of their lives. Then, if the transformation does not come,
+      they seem to think their cares and duties are at an end, and, considering
+      their theories of human destiny, usually accept the situation with
+      wonderful complacency. This was the stage which Miss Silence Withers had
+      reached with reference to Myrtle. It made her infinitely more agreeable,
+      or less disagreeable, as the reader may choose one or the other statement,
+      than when she was always fretting about her &ldquo;responsibility.&rdquo; She even
+      began to take an interest in some of Myrtle's worldly experiences, and
+      something like a smile would now and then disarrange the chief-mourner
+      stillness of her features, as Myrtle would tell some lively story she had
+      brought away from the gay society she had frequented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cynthia Badlam kept her keen eyes on her like a hawk. Murray Bradshaw was
+      away, and here was this handsome and agreeable youth coming in to poach on
+      the preserve of which she considered herself the gamekeeper. What did it
+      mean? She had heard the story about Susan's being off with her old love
+      and on with a new one. Ah ha! this is the game, is it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clement Lindsay passed not so much a pleasant evening, as one of strange,
+      perplexed, and mingled delight and inward conflict. He had found his
+      marble once more turned to flesh and blood, and breathing before him. This
+      was the woman he was born for; her form was fit to model his proudest
+      ideal from, her eyes melted him when they rested for an instant on his
+      face,&mdash;her voice reached the hidden sensibilities of his inmost
+      nature; those which never betray their existence until the outward chord
+      to which they vibrate in response sends its message to stir them. But was
+      she not already pledged to that other,&mdash;that cold-blooded,
+      contriving, venal, cynical, selfish, polished, fascinating man of the
+      world, whose artful strategy would pass with nine women out of ten for the
+      most romantic devotion?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If he had known the impression he made, he would have felt less anxiety
+      with reference to this particular possibility. Miss Silence expressed
+      herself gratified with his appearance, and thought he looked like a good
+      young man,&mdash;he reminded her of a young friend of hers who&mdash;[It
+      was the same who had gone to one of the cannibal islands as a missionary,&mdash;and
+      stayed there.] Myrtle was very quiet. She had nothing to say about
+      Clement, except that she had met him at a party in the city, and found him
+      agreeable. Miss Cynthia wrote a letter to Murray Bradshaw that very
+      evening, telling him that he had better come back to Oxbow Village as
+      quickly as he could, unless he wished to find his place occupied by an
+      intruder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the mean time, the country was watching the garrison in Charleston
+      Harbor. All at once the first gun of the four years' cannonade hurled its
+      ball against the walls of Fort Sumter. There was no hamlet in the land
+      which the reverberations of that cannon-roar did not reach. There was no
+      valley so darkened by overshadowing hills that it did not see the American
+      flag hauled down on the 13th of April. There was no loyal heart in the
+      North that did not answer to the call of the country to its defenders
+      which went forth two days later. The great tide of feeling reached the
+      locality where the lesser events of our narrative were occurring. A
+      meeting of the citizens was instantly called. The venerable Father
+      Pemberton opened it with a prayer that filled every soul with courage and
+      high resolve. The young farmers and mechanics of that whole region joined
+      the companies to which they belonged, or organized in squads and marched
+      at once, or got ready to march, to the scene of conflict.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The contagion of warlike patriotism reached the most peacefully inclined
+      young persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My country calls me,&rdquo; Gifted Hopkins said to Susan Posey, &ldquo;and I am
+      preparing to obey her summons. If I can pass the medical examination,
+      which it is possible I may, though I fear my constitution <i>may</i> be thought
+      too weak, and if no obstacle impedes me, I think of marching in the ranks
+      of the Oxbow Invincibles. If I go, Susan, and I fall, will you not
+      remember me... as one who... cherished the tenderest... sentiments...
+      towards you... and who had looked forward to the time when... when....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes told the rest. He loved!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Susan forgot all the rules of reserve to which she had been trained. What
+      were cold conventionalities at such a moment? &ldquo;Never! never!&rdquo; she said,
+      throwing her arms about his neck and mingling her tears with his, which
+      were flowing freely. &ldquo;Your country does not need your sword... but it does
+      need... your pen. Your poems will inspire... our soldiers.... The Oxbow
+      Invincibles will march to victory, singing your songs.... If you go... and
+      if you... fall... O Gifted!... I... I... yes, I shall die too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His love was returned. He was blest!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Susan,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;my own Susan, I yield to your wishes at every
+      sacrifice. Henceforth they will be my law. Yes, I will stay and encourage
+      my brave countrymen to go forward to the bloody field. My voice shall urge
+      them on to the battle-ground. I will give my dearest breath to stimulate
+      their ardor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O Susan! My own, own Susan!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While these interesting events had been going on beneath the modest roof
+      of the Widow Hopkins, affairs had been rapidly hastening to a similar
+      conclusion under the statelier shadow of The Poplars. Clement Lindsay was
+      so well received at his first visit that he ventured to repeat it several
+      times, with so short intervals that it implied something more than a
+      common interest in one of the members of the household. There was no room
+      for doubt who this could be, and Myrtle Hazard could not help seeing that
+      she was the object of his undisguised admiration. The belief was now
+      general in the village that Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were either
+      engaged or on the point of being so; and it was equally understood that,
+      whatever might be the explanation, she and her former lover had parted
+      company in an amicable manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Love works very strange transformations in young women. Sometimes it leads
+      them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,&mdash;their whole
+      thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so as to keep
+      out all other images. Poor darlings! We smile at their little vanities, as
+      if they were very trivial things compared with the last Congressman's
+      speech or the great Election Sermon; but Nature knows well what she is
+      about. The maiden's ribbon or ruffle means a great deal more for her than
+      the judge's wig or the priest's surplice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in this way that the gentle emotion awaking in the breast of
+      Myrtle Hazard betrayed itself. As the thought dawned in her consciousness
+      that she was loved, a change came over her such as the spirit that
+      protected her, according to the harmless fancy she had inherited, might
+      have wept for joy to behold, if tears could flow from angelic eyes. She
+      forgot herself and her ambitions,&mdash;the thought of shining in the
+      great world died out in the presence of new visions of a future in which
+      she was not to be her own,&mdash;of feelings in the depth of which the
+      shallow vanities which had drawn her young eyes to them for a while seemed
+      less than nothing. Myrtle had not hitherto said to herself that Clement
+      was her lover, yet her whole nature was expanding and deepening in the
+      light of that friendship which any other eye could have known at a glance
+      for the great passion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cynthia Badlam wrote a pressing letter to Murray Bradshaw. &ldquo;There is no
+      time to be lost; she is bewitched, and will be gone beyond hope if this
+      business is not put a stop to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Love moves in an accelerating ratio; and there comes a time when the
+      progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings two
+      young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer together,
+      into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an infinity between the
+      moment when all is told and that which went just before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were sitting together by themselves in the dimly lighted parlor. They
+      had told each other many experiences of their past lives, very freely, as
+      two intimate friends of different sex might do. Clement had happened to
+      allude to Susan, speaking very kindly and tenderly of her. He hoped this
+      youth to whom she was attached would make her life happy. &ldquo;You know how
+      simple-hearted and good she is; her image will always be a pleasant one in
+      my memory,&mdash;second to but one other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle ought, according to the common rules of conversation, to have
+      asked, What other? but she did not. She may have looked as if she wanted
+      to ask,&mdash;she may have blushed or turned pale, perhaps she could not
+      trust her voice; but whatever the reason was, she sat still, with downcast
+      eyes. Clement waited a reasonable time, but, finding it was of no use,
+      began again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your image is the one other,&mdash;the only one, let me say, for all else
+      fades in its presence,&mdash;your image fills all my thought. Will you
+      trust your life and happiness with one who can offer you so little beside
+      his love? You know my whole heart is yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether Myrtle said anything in reply or not, whether she acted like
+      Coleridge's Genevieve,&mdash;that is, &ldquo;fled to him and wept,&rdquo; or suffered
+      her feelings to betray themselves in some less startling confession, we
+      will leave untold. Her answer, spoken or silent, could not have been a
+      cruel one, for in another moment Clement was pressing his lips to hers,
+      after the manner of accepted lovers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our lips have met to-day for the second time,&rdquo; he said, presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him in wonder. What did he mean? The second time! How
+      assuredly he spoke! She looked him calmly in the face, and awaited his
+      explanation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a singular story to tell you. On the morning of the 16th of June,
+      now nearly two years ago, I was sitting in my room at Alderbank, some
+      twenty miles down the river, when I heard a cry for help coming from the
+      river. I ran down to the bank, and there I saw a boy in an old boat&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When it came to the &ldquo;boy&rdquo; in the old boat, Myrtle's cheeks flamed so that
+      she could not bear it, and she covered her face with both her hands. But
+      Clement told his story calmly through to the end, sliding gently over its
+      later incidents, for Myrtle's heart was throbbing violently, and her
+      breath a little catching and sighing, as when she had first lived with the
+      new life his breath had given her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you ask me for myself, when you could have claimed me?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted a free gift, Myrtle,&rdquo; Clement answered, &ldquo;and I have it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat in silence, lost in the sense of that new life which had suddenly
+      risen on their souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door-bell rang sharply. Kitty Fagan answered its summons, and
+      presently entered the parlor and announced that Mr. Bradshaw was in the
+      library, and wished to see the ladies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0034" id="link2HCH0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXIV. MURRAY BRADSHAW PLAYS HIS LAST CARD.
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      &ldquo;How can I see that man this evening, Mr. Lindsay?&rdquo;
+     </h3>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I not be Clement, dearest? I would not see him at all, Myrtle. I
+      don't believe you will find much pleasure in listening to his fine
+      speeches.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot endure it.&mdash;Kitty, tell him I am engaged, and cannot see
+      him this evening. No, no! don't say engaged, say very much occupied.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty departed, communing with herself in this wise:&mdash;&ldquo;Ockipied, is
+      it? An' that's what ye cahl it when ye 're kapin' company with one young
+      gintleman an' don't want another young gintleman to come in an' help the
+      two of ye? Ye won't get y'r pigs to market to-day, Mr. Bridshaw, no, nor
+      to-morrow, nayther, Mr. Bridshaw. It's Mrs. Lindsay that Miss Myrtle is
+      goin' to be,&mdash;an' a big cake there'll be at the weddin' frosted all
+      over,&mdash;won't ye be plased with a slice o' that, Mr. Bridshaw?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With these reflections in her mind, Mistress Kitty delivered her message,
+      not without a gleam of malicious intelligence in her look that stung Mr.
+      Bradshaw sharply. He had noticed a hat in the entry, and a little stick by
+      it which he remembered well as one he had seen carried by Clement Lindsay.
+      But he was used to concealing his emotions, and he greeted the two older
+      ladies who presently came into the library so pleasantly, that no one who
+      had not studied his face long and carefully would have suspected the
+      bitterness of heart that lay hidden far down beneath his deceptive smile.
+      He told Miss Silence, with much apparent interest, the story of his
+      journey. He gave her an account of the progress of the case in which the
+      estate of which she inherited the principal portion was interested. He did
+      not tell her that a final decision which would settle the right to the
+      great claim might be expected at any moment, and he did not tell her that
+      there was very little doubt that it would be in favor of the heirs of
+      Malachi Withers. He was very sorry he could not see Miss Hazard that
+      evening,&mdash;hoped he should be more fortunate to-morrow forenoon, when
+      he intended to call again,&mdash;had a message for her from one of her
+      former school friends, which he was anxious to give her. He exchanged
+      certain looks and hints with Miss Cynthia, which led her to withdraw and
+      bring down the papers he had entrusted to her. At the close of his visit,
+      she followed him into the entry with a lamp, as was her common custom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's the meaning of all this, Cynthia? Is that fellow making love to
+      Myrtle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm afraid so, Mr. Bradshaw. He's been here several times, and they seem
+      to be getting intimate. I couldn't do anything to stop it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me the papers,&mdash;quick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Cynthia pulled the package from her pocket. Murray Bradshaw looked sharply
+      at it. A little crumpled,&mdash;crowded into her pocket. Seal unbroken.
+      All safe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall come again to-morrow forenoon. Another day and it will be all up.
+      The decision of the court will be known. It won't be my fault if one visit
+      is not enough.&mdash;You don't suppose Myrtle is in love with this
+      fellow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She acts as&mdash;if she might be. You know he's broke with Susan Posey,
+      and there's nothing to hinder. If you ask my opinion, I think it's your
+      last chance: she is n't a girl to half do things, and if she has taken to
+      this man it will be hard to make her change her mind. But she's young, and
+      she has had a liking for you, and if you manage it well there's no
+      telling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Two notes passed between Myrtle Hazard and Master Byles Gridley that
+      evening. Mistress Kitty Fagan, who had kept her ears pretty wide open,
+      carried them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw went home in a very desperate state of feeling. He had
+      laid his plans, as he thought, with perfect skill, and the certainty of
+      their securing their end. These papers were to have been taken from the
+      envelope, and found in the garret just at the right moment, either by
+      Cynthia herself or one of the other members of the family, who was to be
+      led on, as it were accidentally, to the discovery. The right moment must
+      be close at hand. He was to offer his hand&mdash;and heart, of course&mdash;to
+      Myrtle, and it was to be accepted. As soon as the decision of the land
+      case was made known, or not long afterwards, there was to be a search in
+      the garret for papers, and these were to be discovered in a certain dusty
+      recess, where, of course, they would have been placed by Miss Cynthia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now the one condition which gave any value to these arrangements
+      seemed like to fail. This obscure youth&mdash;this poor fool, who had been
+      on the point of marrying a simpleton to whom he had made a boyish promise&mdash;was
+      coming between him and the object of his long pursuit,&mdash;the woman who
+      had every attraction to draw him to herself. It had been a matter of pride
+      with Murray Bradshaw that he never lost his temper so as to interfere with
+      the precise course of action which his cool judgment approved; but now he
+      was almost beside himself with passion. His labors, as he believed, had
+      secured the favorable issue of the great case so long pending. He had
+      followed Myrtle through her whole career, if not as her avowed lover, at
+      least as one whose friendship promised to flower in love in due season.
+      The moment had come when the scene and the characters in this village
+      drama were to undergo a change as sudden and as brilliant as is seen in
+      those fairy spectacles where the dark background changes to a golden
+      palace and the sober dresses are replaced by robes of regal splendor. The
+      change was fast approaching; but he, the enchanter, as he had thought
+      himself, found his wand broken, and his power given to another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not sleep during that night. He paced his room, a prey to
+      jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him from
+      feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour. He thought of all
+      that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own intolerable anguish.
+      Of revenge. If Myrtle rejected his suit, should he take her life on the
+      spot, that she might never be another's,&mdash;that neither man nor woman
+      should ever triumph over him,&mdash;the proud ambitious man, defeated,
+      humbled, scorned? No! that was a meanness of egotism which only the most
+      vulgar souls could be capable of. Should he challenge her lover? It was
+      not the way of the people and time, and ended in absurd complications, if
+      anybody was foolish enough to try it. Shoot him? The idea floated through
+      his mind, for he thought of everything; but he was a lawyer, and not a
+      fool, and had no idea of figuring in court as a criminal. Besides, he was
+      not a murderer,&mdash;cunning was his natural weapon, not violence. He had
+      a certain admiration of desperate crime in others, as showing nerve and
+      force, but he did not feel it to be his own style of doing business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the night he made every arrangement for leaving the village the
+      next day, in case he failed to make any impression on Myrtle Hazard and
+      found that his chance was gone. He wrote a letter to his partner, telling
+      him that he had left to join one of the regiments forming in the city. He
+      adjusted all his business matters so that his partner should find as
+      little trouble as possible. A little before dawn he threw himself on the
+      bed, but he could not sleep; and he rose at sunrise, and finished his
+      preparations for his departure to the city.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning dragged along slowly. He could not go to the office, not
+      wishing to meet his partner again. After breakfast he dressed himself with
+      great care, for he meant to show himself in the best possible aspect. Just
+      before he left the house to go to The Poplars, he took the sealed package
+      from his trunk, broke open the envelope, took from it a single paper,&mdash;it
+      had some spots on it which distinguished it from all the rest,&mdash;put
+      it separately in his pocket, and then the envelope containing the other
+      papers. The calm smile he wore on his features as he set forth cost him a
+      greater effort than he had ever made before to put it on. He was moulding
+      his face to the look with which he meant to present himself; and the
+      muscles had been sternly fixed so long that it was a task to bring them to
+      their habitual expression in company,&mdash;that of ingenuous good-nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was shown into the parlor at The Poplars; and Kitty told Myrtle that he
+      had called and inquired for her and was waiting down stairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell him I will be down presently,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And, Kitty, now mind just
+      what I tell you. Leave your kitchen door open, so that you can hear
+      anything fall in the parlor. If you hear a book fall,&mdash;it will be a
+      heavy one, and will make some noise,&mdash;run straight up here to my
+      little chamber, and hang this red scarf out of the window. The left-hand
+      side-sash, mind, so that anybody can see it from the road. If Mr. Gridley
+      calls, show him into the parlor, no matter who is there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty Fagan looked amazingly intelligent, and promised that she would do
+      exactly as she was told. Myrtle followed her down stairs almost
+      immediately, and went into the parlor, where Mr. Bradshaw was waiting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never in his calmest moments had he worn a more insinuating smile on his
+      features than that with which he now greeted Myrtle. So gentle, so
+      gracious, so full of trust, such a completely natural expression of a
+      kind, genial character did it seem, that to any but an expert it would
+      have appeared impossible that such an effect could be produced by the
+      skilful balancing of half a dozen pairs of little muscles that manage the
+      lips and the corners of the mouth. The tones of his voice were subdued
+      into accord with the look of his features; his whole manner was
+      fascinating, as far as any conscious effort could make it so. It was just
+      one of those artificially pleasing effects that so often pass with such as
+      have little experience of life for the genuine expression of character and
+      feeling. But Myrtle had learned the look that shapes itself on the
+      features of one who loves with a love that seeketh not its own, and she
+      knew the difference between acting and reality. She met his insinuating
+      approach with a courtesy so carefully ordered that it was of itself a
+      sentence without appeal. Artful persons often interpret sincere ones by
+      their own standard. Murray Bradshaw thought little of this somewhat formal
+      address,&mdash;a few minutes would break this thin film to pieces. He was
+      not only a suitor with a prize to gain, he was a colloquial artist about
+      to employ all the resources of his specialty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He introduced the conversation in the most natural and easy way, by giving
+      her the message from a former school-mate to which he had referred,
+      coloring it so delicately, as he delivered it, that it became an
+      innocent-looking flattery. Myrtle found herself in a rose-colored
+      atmosphere, not from Murray Bradshaw's admiration, as it seemed, but only
+      reflected by his mind from another source. That was one of his arts,
+      always, if possible, to associate himself incidentally, as it appeared,
+      and unavoidably, with an agreeable impression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Myrtle was betrayed into smiling and being pleased before he had said a
+      word about himself or his affairs. Then he told her of the adventures and
+      labors of his late expedition; of certain evidence which at the very last
+      moment he had unearthed, and which was very probably the turning-point in
+      the case. He could not help feeling that she must eventually reap some
+      benefit from the good fortune with which his efforts had been attended.
+      The thought that it might yet be so had been a great source of
+      encouragement to him,&mdash;it would always be a great happiness to him to
+      remember that he had done anything to make her happy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was very glad that he had been so far successful,&mdash;she did not
+      know that it made much difference to her, but she was obliged to him for
+      the desire of serving her that he had expressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My services are always yours, Miss Hazard. There is no sacrifice I would
+      not willingly make for your benefit. I have never had but one feeling
+      toward you. You cannot be ignorant of what that feeling is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, Mr. Bradshaw, it has been one of kindness. I have to thank you
+      for many friendly attentions, for which I hope I have never been
+      ungrateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Kindness is not all that I feel towards you, Miss Hazard. If that were
+      all, my lips would not tremble as they do now in telling you my feelings.&mdash;I
+      love you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang the great confession on Myrtle a little sooner than he had
+      meant. It was so hard to go on making phrases! Myrtle changed color a
+      little, for she was startled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The seemingly involuntary movement she made brought her arm against a
+      large dictionary, which lay very near the edge of the table on which it
+      was resting. The book fell with a loud noise to the floor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There it lay. The young man awaited her answer; he did not think of polite
+      forms at such a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It cannot be, Mr. Bradshaw,&mdash;it must not be. I have known you long,
+      and I am not ignorant of all your brilliant qualities, but you must not
+      speak to me of love. Your regard,&mdash;your friendly interest, tell me
+      that I shall always have these, but do not distress me with offering more
+      than these.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not ask you to give me your love in return; I only ask you not to
+      bid me despair. Let me believe that the time may come' when you will
+      listen to me,&mdash;no matter how distant. You are young,&mdash;you have a
+      tender heart,&mdash;you would not doom one who only lives for you to
+      wretchedness,&mdash;so long that we have known each other. It cannot be
+      that any other has come between us&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle blushed so deeply that there was no need of his finishing his
+      question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean, Myrtle Hazard, that you have cast me aside for another?&mdash;for
+      this stranger&mdash;this artist&mdash;who was with you yesterday when I
+      came, bringing with me the story of all I had done for you, yes, for you,&mdash;and
+      was ignominiously refused the privilege of seeing you?&rdquo; Rage and jealousy
+      had got the better of him this time. He rose as he spoke, and looked upon
+      her with such passion kindling in his eyes that he seemed ready for any
+      desperate act.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have thanked you for any services you may have rendered me, Mr.
+      Bradshaw,&rdquo; Myrtle answered, very calmly, &ldquo;and I hope you will add one more
+      to them by sparing me this rude questioning. I wished to treat you as a
+      friend; I hope you will not render that impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had recovered himself for one more last effort. &ldquo;I was impatient:
+      overlook it, I beg you. I was thinking of all the happiness I have labored
+      to secure for you, and of the ruin to us both it would be if you
+      scornfully rejected the love I offer you,&mdash;if you refuse to leave me
+      any hope for the future,&mdash;if you insist on throwing yourself away on
+      this man, so lately pledged to another. I hold the key of all your earthly
+      fortunes in my hand. My love for you inspired me in all that I have done,
+      and, now that I come to lay the result of my labors at your feet, you turn
+      from me, and offer my reward to a stranger. I do not ask you to say this
+      day that you will be mine,&mdash;I would not force your inclinations,&mdash;but
+      I do ask you that you will hold yourself free of all others, and listen to
+      me as one who may yet be more than a friend. Say so much as this, Myrtle,
+      and you shall have such a future as you never dreamed of. Fortune,
+      position, all that this world can give, shall be yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never! never! If you could offer me the whole world, or take away from me
+      all that the world can give, it would make no difference to me. I cannot
+      tell what power you hold over me, whether of life and death, or of wealth
+      and poverty; but after talking to me of love, I should not have thought
+      you would have wronged me by suggesting any meaner motive. It is only
+      because we have been on friendly terms so long that I have listened to you
+      as I have done. You have said more than enough, and I beg you will allow
+      me to put an end to this interview.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose to leave the room. But Murray Bradshaw had gone too far to
+      control himself,&mdash;he listened only to the rage which blinded him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not yet!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Stay one moment, and you shall know what your pride
+      and self-will have cost you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle stood, arrested, whether by fear, or curiosity, or the passive
+      subjection of her muscles to his imperious will, it would be hard to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw took out the spotted paper from his breast-pocket, and
+      held it up before her. &ldquo;Look here!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;This would have made
+      you rich,&mdash;it would have crowned you a queen in society,&mdash;it
+      would have given you all, and more than all, that you ever dreamed of
+      luxury, of splendor, of enjoyment; and I, who won it for you, would have
+      taught you how to make life yield every bliss it had in store to your
+      wishes. You reject my offer unconditionally?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle expressed her negative only by a slight contemptuous movement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Murray Bradshaw walked deliberately to the fireplace, and laid the spotted
+      paper upon the burning coals. It writhed and curled, blackened, flamed,
+      and in a moment was a cinder dropping into ashes. He folded his arms, and
+      stood looking at the wreck of Myrtle's future, the work of his cruel hand.
+      Strangely enough, Myrtle herself was fascinated, as it were, by the
+      apparent solemnity of this mysterious sacrifice. She had kept her eyes
+      steadily on him all the time, and was still gazing at the altar on which
+      her happiness had been in some way offered up, when the door was opened by
+      Kitty Fagan, and Master Byles Gridley was ushered into the parlor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Too late, old man!&rdquo; Murray Bradshaw exclaimed, in a hoarse and savage
+      voice, as he passed out of the room, and strode through the entry and down
+      the avenue. It was the last time the old gate of The Poplars was to open
+      or close for him. The same day he left the village; and the next time his
+      name was mentioned it was as an officer in one of the regiments just
+      raised and about marching to the seat of war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0035" id="link2HCH0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXV. THE SPOTTED PAPER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      What Master Gridley may have said to Myrtle Hazard that served to calm her
+      after this exciting scene cannot now be recalled. That Murray Bradshaw
+      thought he was inflicting a deadly injury on her was plain enough. That
+      Master Gridley did succeed in convincing her that no great harm had
+      probably been done her is equally certain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like all bachelors who have lived a lonely life, Master Byles Gridley had
+      his habits, which nothing short of some terrestrial convulsion&mdash;or
+      perhaps, in his case, some instinct that drove him forth to help somebody
+      in trouble&mdash;could possibly derange. After his breakfast, he always
+      sat and read awhile,&mdash;the paper, if a new one came to hand, or some
+      pleasant old author,&mdash;if a little neglected by the world of readers,
+      he felt more at ease with him, and loved him all the better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But on the morning after his interview with Myrtle Hazard, he had received
+      a letter which made him forget newspapers, old authors, almost everything,
+      for the moment. It was from the publisher with whom he had had a
+      conversation, it may be remembered, when he visited the city, and was to
+      this effect: That Our Firm propose to print and stereotype the work
+      originally published under the title of &ldquo;Thoughts on the Universe&rdquo;; said
+      work to be remodelled according to the plan suggested by the Author, with
+      the corrections, alterations, omissions, and additions proposed by him;
+      said work to be published under the following title, to wit: ________
+      ________: said work to be printed in 12mo, on paper of good quality, from
+      new types, etc., etc., and for every copy thereof printed the author to
+      receive, etc., etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over, to
+      know if it could be really so. So it really was. His book had disappeared
+      from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet the ground and
+      never germinate disappear. At last it had got a certain value as a
+      curiosity for book-hunters. Some one of them, keener-eyed than the rest,
+      had seen that there was a meaning and virtue in this unsuccessful book,
+      for which there was a new audience educated since it had tried to breathe
+      before its time. Out of this had grown at last the publisher's proposal.
+      It was too much: his heart swelled with joy, and his eyes filled with
+      tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How could he resist the temptation? He took down his own particular copy
+      of the book, which was yet to do him honor as its parent, and began
+      reading. As his eye fell on one paragraph after another, he nodded
+      approval of this sentiment or opinion, he shook his head as if questioning
+      whether this other were not to be modified or left out, he condemned a
+      third as being no longer true for him as when it was written, and he
+      sanctioned a fourth with his hearty approval. The reader may like a few
+      specimens from this early edition, now a rarity. He shall have them, with
+      Master Gridley's verbal comments. The book, as its name implied, contained
+      &ldquo;Thoughts&rdquo; rather than consecutive trains of reasoning or continuous
+      disquisitions. What he read and remarked upon were a few of the more
+      pointed statements which stood out in the chapters he was turning over.
+      The worth of the book must not be judged by these almost random specimens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THE BEST THOUGHT, LIKE THE MOST PERFECT DIGESTION, IS DONE UNCONSCIOUSLY.&mdash;Develop
+      that.&mdash;Ideas at compound interest in the mind.&mdash;Be aye sticking
+      in an idea,&mdash;while you're sleeping it'll be growing. Seed of a
+      thought to-day,&mdash;flower to-morrow&mdash;next week&mdash;ten years
+      from now, etc.&mdash;Article by and by for the....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;CAN THE INFINITE BE SUPPOSED TO SHIFT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ULTIMATE
+      DESTINY OF ANY CREATED THING TO THE FINITE? OUR THEOLOGIANS PRETEND THAT
+      IT CAN. I DOUBT.&mdash;Heretical. Stet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;PROTESTANTISM MEANS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. BUT IT IS AFRAID OF ITS OWN
+      LOGIC.&mdash;Stet. No logical resting-place short of None of your
+      business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THE SUPREME SELF-INDULGENCE IS TO SURRENDER THE WILL TO A SPIRITUAL
+      DIRECTOR.&mdash;Protestantism gave up a great luxury.&mdash;Did it though?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;ASIATIC MODES OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH DO NOT EXPRESS THE 'RELATIONS IN
+      WHICH THE AMERICAN FEELS HIM SELF TO STAND TO HIS SUPERIORS IN THIS OR ANY
+      OTHER SPHERE OF BEING. REPUBLICANISM MUST HAVE ITS OWN RELIGIOUS
+      PHRASEOLOGY, WHICH IS NOT THAT BORROWED FROM ORIENTAL DESPOTISMS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;IDOLS AND DOGMAS IN PLACE OF CHARACTER; PILLS AND THEORIES IN PLACE OF
+      WHOLESOME LIVING. SEE THE HISTORIES OF THEOLOGY AND MEDICINE PASSIM.&mdash;Hits
+      'em.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.' DO YOU MEAN TO SAY JEAN CHAUVIN, THAT
+      'HEAVEN LIES ABOUT US IN OUR INFANCY'?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN OF YOUR ORGANIZATION? YOUR SOUL WAS IN A HURRY, AND
+      MADE A RUSH FOR A BODY. THERE ARE PATIENT SPIRITS THAT HAVE WAITED FROM
+      ETERNITY, AND NEVER FOUND PARENTS FIT TO BE BORN OF.&mdash;How do you know
+      anything about all that? Dele.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WHAT SWEET, SMOOTH VOICES THE NEGROES HAVE! A HUNDRED GENERATIONS FED ON
+      BANANAS.&mdash;COMPARE THEM WITH OUR APPLE-EATING WHITE FOLKS!&mdash;It
+      won't do. Bananas came from the West Indies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;TO TELL A MAN'S TEMPERAMENT BY HIS HANDWRITING. SEE IF THE DOTS OF HIS
+      I'S RUN AHEAD OR NOT, AND IF THEY DO, HOW FAR.&mdash;I have tried that&mdash;on
+      myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MARRYING INTO SOME FAMILIES IS THE NEXT THING TO BEING CANONIZED.&mdash;Not
+      so true now as twenty or thirty years ago. As many bladders, but more
+      pins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;FISH AND DANDIES ONLY KEEP ON ICE.&mdash;Who will take? Explain in note
+      how all warmth approaching blood heat spoils fops and flounders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;FLYING IS A LOST ART AMONG MEN AND REPTILES. BATS FLY, AND MEN OUGHT TO.
+      TRY A LIGHT TURBINE. RISE A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE SLANTING,&mdash;RISE
+      HALF A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE SLANTING, AND SO ON. OR SLANT UP
+      AND SLANT DOWN.&mdash;Poh! You ain't such a fool as to think that is new,&mdash;are
+      you?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Put in my telegraph project. Central station. Cables with insulated wires
+      running to it from different quarters of the city. These form the
+      centripetal system. From central station, wires to all the livery stables,
+      messenger stands, provision shops, etc., etc. These form the centrifugal
+      system. Any house may have a wire in the nearest cable at small cost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED AFTER THE CONTINENTS HAVE GONE UNDER, AND
+      COME UP AGAIN, AND DRIED, AND BRED NEW RACES? HAVE YOUR NAME STAMPED ON
+      ALL YOUR PLATES AND CUPS AND SAUCERS. NOTHING OF YOU OR YOURS WILL LAST
+      LIKE THOSE. I NEVER SIT DOWN AT MY TABLE WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE CHINA
+      SERVICE, AND SAYING, 'HERE ARE MY MONUMENTS. THAT BUTTER-DISH IS MY URN.
+      THIS SOUP-PLATE IS MY MEMORIAL TABLET.' NO NEED OF A SKELETON AT MY
+      BANQUETS! I FEED FROM MY TOMBSTONE AND READ MY EPITAPH AT THE BOTTOM OF
+      EVERY TEACUP.&mdash;Good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He fell into a revery as he finished reading this last sentence. He
+      thought of the dim and dread future,&mdash;all the changes that it would
+      bring to him, to all the living, to the face of the globe, to the order of
+      earthly things. He saw men of a new race, alien to all that had ever
+      lived, excavating with strange, vast engines the old ocean-bed now become
+      habitable land. And as the great scoops turned out the earth they had
+      fetched up from the unexplored depths, a relic of a former simple
+      civilization revealed the fact that here a tribe of human beings had lived
+      and perished.&mdash;Only the coffee-cup he had in his hand half an hour
+      ago.&mdash;Where would he be then? and Mrs. Hopkins, and Gifted, and
+      Susan, and everybody? and President Buchanan? and the Boston State-House?
+      and Broadway?&mdash;O Lord, Lord, Lord! And the sun perceptibly smaller,
+      according to the astronomers, and the earth cooled down a number of
+      degrees, and inconceivable arts practised by men of a type yet undreamed
+      of, and all the fighting creeds merged in one great universal&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A knock at his door interrupted his revery. Miss Susan Posey informed him
+      that a gentleman was waiting below who wished to see him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Show him up to my study, Susan Posey, if you please,&rdquo; said Master
+      Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Penhallow presented himself at Mr. Gridley's door with a countenance
+      expressive of a very high state of excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have heard the news, Mr. Gridley, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What news, Mr. Penhallow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;First, that my partner has left very unexpectedly to enlist in a regiment
+      just forming. Second, that the great land case is decided in favor of the
+      heirs of the late Malachi Withers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your partner must have known about it yesterday?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He did, even before I knew it. He thought himself possessed of a very
+      important document, as you know, of which he has made, or means to make,
+      some use. You are aware of the artifice I employed to prevent any possible
+      evil consequences from any action of his. I have the genuine document, of
+      course. I wish you to go over with me to The Poplars, and I should be glad
+      to have good old Father Pemberton go with us; for it is a serious matter,
+      and will be a great surprise to more than one of the family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They walked together to the old house, where the old clergyman had lived
+      for more than half a century. He was used to being neglected by the people
+      who ran after his younger colleague; and the attention paid him in asking
+      him to be present on an important occasion, as he understood this to be,
+      pleased him greatly. He smoothed his long white locks, and called a
+      grand-daughter to help make him look fitly for such an occasion, and,
+      being at last got into his grandest Sunday aspect, took his faithful
+      staff, and set out with the two gentlemen for The Poplars. On the way, Mr.
+      Penhallow explained to him the occasion of their visit, and the general
+      character of the facts he had to announce. He wished the venerable
+      minister to prepare Miss Silence Withers for a revelation which would
+      materially change her future prospects. He thought it might be well, also,
+      if he would say a few words to Myrtle Hazard, for whom a new life, with
+      new and untried temptations, was about to open. His business was, as a
+      lawyer, to make known to these parties the facts just come to his own
+      knowledge affecting their interests. He had asked Mr. Gridley to go with
+      him, as having intimate relations with one of the parties referred to, and
+      as having been the principal agent in securing to that party the
+      advantages which were to accrue to her from the new turn of events. &ldquo;You
+      are a second parent to her, Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Your vigilance, your
+      shrewdness, and your-spectacles have saved her. I hope she knows the full
+      extent of her obligations to you, and that she will always look to you for
+      counsel in all her needs. She will want a wise friend, for she is to begin
+      the world anew.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What had happened, when she saw the three grave gentlemen at the door
+      early in the forenoon, Mistress Kitty Fagan could not guess. Something
+      relating to Miss Myrtle, no doubt: she wasn't goin' to be married right
+      off to Mr. Clement,&mdash;was she,&mdash;and no church, nor cake, nor
+      anything? The gentlemen were shown into the parlor. &ldquo;Ask Miss Withers to
+      go into the library, Kitty,&rdquo; said Master Gridley. &ldquo;Dr. Pemberton wishes to
+      speak with her.&rdquo; The good old man was prepared for a scene with Miss
+      Silence. He announced to her, in a kind and delicate way, that she must
+      make up her mind to the disappointment of certain expectations which she
+      had long entertained, and which, as her lawyer, Mr. Penhallow, had come to
+      inform her and others, were to be finally relinquished from this hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To his great surprise, Miss Silence received this communication almost
+      cheerfully. It seemed more like a relief to her than anything else. Her
+      one dread in this world was her &ldquo;responsibility &ldquo;; and the thought that
+      she might have to account for ten talents hereafter, instead of one, had
+      often of late been a positive distress to her. There was also in her mind
+      a secret disgust at the thought of the hungry creatures who would swarm
+      round her if she should ever be in a position to bestow patronage. This
+      had grown upon her as the habits of lonely life gave her more and more of
+      that fastidious dislike to males in general, as such, which is not rare in
+      maidens who have seen the roses of more summers than politeness cares to
+      mention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Father Pemberton then asked if he could see Miss Myrtle Hazard a few
+      moments in the library before they went into the parlor, where they were
+      to meet Mr. Penhallow and Mr. Gridley, for the purpose of receiving the
+      lawyer's communication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What change was this which Myrtle had undergone since love had touched her
+      heart, and her visions of worldly enjoyment had faded before the thought
+      of sharing and ennobling the life of one who was worthy of her best
+      affections,&mdash;of living for another, and of finding her own noblest
+      self in that divine office of woman? She had laid aside the bracelet which
+      she had so long worn as a kind of charm as well as an ornament. One would
+      have said her features had lost something of that look of imperious beauty
+      which had added to her resemblance to the dead woman whose glowing
+      portrait hung upon her wall. And if it could be that, after so many
+      generations, the blood of her who had died for her faith could show in her
+      descendants veins, and the soul of that elect lady of her race look out
+      from her far-removed offspring's dark eyes, such a transfusion of the
+      martyr's life and spiritual being might well seem to manifest itself in
+      Myrtle Hazard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The large-hearted old man forgot his scholastic theory of human nature as
+      he looked upon her face. He thought he saw in her the dawning of that
+      grace which some are born with; which some, like Myrtle, only reach
+      through many trials and dangers; which some seem to show for a while and
+      then lose; which too many never reach while they wear the robes of earth,
+      but which speaks of the kingdom of heaven already begun in the heart of a
+      child of earth. He told her simply the story of the occurrences which had
+      brought them together in the old house, with the message the lawyer was to
+      deliver to its inmates. He wished to prepare her for what might have been
+      too sudden a surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Myrtle was not wholly unprepared for some such revelation. There was
+      little danger that any such announcement would throw her mind from its
+      balance after the inward conflict through which she had been passing. For
+      her lover had left her almost as soon as he had told her the story of his
+      passion, and the relation in which he stood to her. He, too, had gone to
+      answer his country's call to her children, not driven away by crime and
+      shame and despair, but quitting all&mdash;his new-born happiness, the art
+      in which he was an enthusiast, his prospects of success and honor&mdash;to
+      obey the higher command of duty. War was to him, as to so many of the
+      noble youth who went forth, only organized barbarism, hateful but for the
+      sacred cause which alone redeemed it from the curse that blasted the first
+      murderer. God only knew the sacrifice such young men as he made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How brief Myrtle's dream had been! She almost doubted, at some moments,
+      whether she would not awake from it, as from her other visions, and find
+      it all unreal. There was no need of fearing any undue excitement of her
+      mind after the alternations of feeling she had just experienced. Nothing
+      seemed of much moment to her which could come from without,&mdash;her real
+      world was within, and the light of its day and the breath of its life came
+      from her love, made holy by the self-forgetfulness on both sides which was
+      born with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only one member of the household was in danger of finding the excitement
+      more than she could bear. Miss Cynthia knew that all Murray Bradshaw's
+      plans, in which he had taken care that she should have a personal
+      interest, had utterly failed. What he had done with the means of revenge
+      in his power,&mdash;if, indeed, they were still in his power,&mdash;she
+      did not know. She only knew that there had been a terrible scene, and that
+      he had gone, leaving it uncertain whether he would ever return. It was
+      with fear and trembling that she heard the summons which went forth, that
+      the whole family should meet in the parlor to listen to a statement from
+      Mr. Penhallow. They all gathered as requested, and sat round the room,
+      with the exception of Mistress Kitty Fagan, who knew her place too well to
+      be sittin' down with the likes o' them, and stood with attentive ears in
+      the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Penhallow then read from a printed paper the decision of the Supreme
+      Court in the land case so long pending, where the estate of the late
+      Malachi Withers was the claimant, against certain parties pretending to
+      hold under an ancient grant. The decision was in favor of the estate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This gives a great property to the heirs,&rdquo; Mr. Penhallow remarked, &ldquo;and
+      the question as to who these heirs are has to be opened. For the will
+      under which Silence Withers, sister of the deceased, has inherited is
+      dated some years previous to the decease, and it was not very strange that
+      a will of later date should be discovered. Such a will has been
+      discovered. It is the instrument I have here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard opened her eyes very widely, for the paper Mr. Penlallow
+      held looked exactly like that which Murray Bradshaw had burned, and, what
+      was curious, had some spots on it just like some she had noticed on that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This will,&rdquo; Mr. Penhallow said, &ldquo;signed by witnesses dead or absent from
+      this place, makes a disposition of the testator's property in some
+      respects similar to that of the previous one, but with a single change,
+      which proves to be of very great importance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Penhallow proceeded to read the will. The important change in the
+      disposition of the property was this: in case the land claim was decided
+      in favor of the estate, then, in addition to the small provision made for
+      Myrtle Hazard, the property so coming to the estate should all go to her.
+      There was no question about the genuineness and the legal sufficiency of
+      this instrument. Its date was not very long after the preceding one, at a
+      period when, as was well known, he had almost given up the hope of gaining
+      his case, and when the property was of little value compared to that which
+      it had at present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A long silence followed this reading. Then, to the surprise of all, Miss
+      Silence Withers rose, and went to Myrtle Hazard, and wished her joy with
+      every appearance of sincerity. She was relieved of a great responsibility.
+      Myrtle was young and could bear it better. She hoped that her young
+      relative would live long to enjoy the blessings Providence had bestowed
+      upon her, and to use them for the good of the community, and especially
+      the promotion of the education of deserving youth. If some fitting person
+      could be found to advise Myrtle, whose affairs would require much care, it
+      would be a great relief to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They all went up to Myrtle and congratulated her on her change of fortune.
+      Even Cynthia Badlam got out a phrase or two which passed muster in the
+      midst of the general excitement. As for Kitty Fagan, she could not say a
+      word, but caught Myrtle's hand and kissed it as if it belonged to her own
+      saint; and then, suddenly applying her apron to her eyes, retreated from a
+      scene which was too much for her, in a state of complete mental beatitude
+      and total bodily discomfiture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Silence asked the old minister to make a prayer, and he stretched his
+      hands up to Heaven, and called down all the blessings of Providence upon
+      all the household, and especially upon this young handmaiden, who was to
+      be tried with prosperity, and would need all aid from above to keep her
+      from its dangers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Mr. Penhallow asked Myrtle if she had any choice as to the friend who
+      should have charge of her affairs. Myrtle turned to Master Byles Gridley,
+      and said, &ldquo;You have been my friend and protector so far, will you continue
+      to be so hereafter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Gridley tried very hard to begin a few words of thanks to her for
+      her preference, but finding his voice a little uncertain, contented
+      himself with pressing her hand and saying, &ldquo;Most willingly, my dear
+      daughter!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0036" id="link2HCH0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXXVI. CONCLUSION.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune came
+      out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in marriage to Mr.
+      Clement Lindsay. But her friends hardly knew how to congratulate her on
+      this last event. Her lover was gone, to risk his life, not improbably to
+      lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by wounds, or worn out with
+      disease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of trial.
+      They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's determination had
+      nerved her for womanly endurance. They had not learned that a great cause
+      makes great souls, or reveals them to themselves,&mdash;a lesson taught by
+      so many noble examples in the times that followed. Myrtle's only desire
+      seemed to be to labor in some way to help the soldiers and their families.
+      She appeared to have forgotten everything for this duty; she had no time
+      for regrets, if she were disposed to indulge them, and she hardly asked a
+      question as to the extent of the fortune which had fallen to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next number of the &ldquo;Banner and Oracle&rdquo; contained two announcements
+      which she read with some interest when her attention was called to them.
+      They were as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late
+      decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property estimated at
+      a million of dollars or more. It consists of a large tract of land
+      purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers, now become of
+      immense value by the growth of a city in its neighborhood, the opening of
+      mines, etc., etc. It is rumored that the lovely and highly educated
+      heiress has formed a connection looking towards matrimony with a certain
+      distinguished artist.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has been
+      among the first to respond to the call of the country for champions to
+      defend her from traitors. We understand that he has obtained a captaincy
+      in the __th regiment, about to march to the threatened seat of war. May
+      victory perch on his banners!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the very
+      hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for the common
+      cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the camp and the
+      field, the other in the not less needful work which the good women carried
+      on at home, or wherever their services were needed. Clement&mdash;now
+      Captain Lindsay&mdash;returned at the end of his first campaign charged
+      with a special office. Some months later, after one of the great battles,
+      he was sent home wounded. He wore the leaf on his shoulder which entitled
+      him to be called Major Lindsay. He recovered from his wound only too
+      rapidly, for Myrtle had visited him daily in the military hospital where
+      he had resided for treatment; and it was bitter parting. The telegraph
+      wires were thrilling almost hourly with messages of death, and the long
+      pine boxes came by almost every train,&mdash;no need of asking what they
+      held.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the eagle
+      on his shoulder,&mdash;he was Colonel Lindsay. The lovers could not part
+      again of their own free will. Some adventurous women had followed their
+      husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she could play the part of
+      the Maid of Saragossa on occasion. So Clement asked her if she would
+      return with him as his wife; and Myrtle answered, with as much willingness
+      to submit as a maiden might fairly show under such circumstances, that she
+      would do his bidding. Thereupon, with the shortest possible legal notice,
+      Father Pemberton was sent for, and the ceremony was performed in the
+      presence of a few witnesses in the large parlor at The Poplars, which was
+      adorned with flowers, and hung round with all the portraits of the dead
+      members of the family, summoned as witnesses to the celebration. One
+      witness looked on with unmoved features, yet Myrtle thought there was a
+      more heavenly smile on her faded lips than she had ever seen before
+      beaming from the canvas,&mdash;it was Ann Holyoake, the martyr to her
+      faith, the guardian spirit of Myrtle's visions, who seemed to breathe a
+      holier benediction than any words&mdash;even those of the good old Father
+      Pemberton himself&mdash;could convey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went back together to the camp. From that period until the end of the
+      war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and that of the
+      hospital. In the offices of mercy which she performed for the sick and the
+      wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature seemed to be burned away.
+      The conflict of mingled lives in her blood had ceased. No lawless impulses
+      usurped the place of that serene resolve which had grown strong by every
+      exercise of its high prerogative. If she had been called now to die for
+      any worthy cause, her race would have been ennobled by a second martyr,
+      true to the blood of her who died under the cruel Queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some months
+      at intervals,&mdash;one never to be forgotten. An officer was brought into
+      the ward where she was in attendance. &ldquo;Shot through the lungs,&mdash;pretty
+      nearly gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She went softly to his bedside. He was breathing with great difficulty;
+      his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she recognized him in a
+      moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,&mdash;Captain Bradshaw, as she knew by the
+      bars on his coat flung upon the bed where he had just been laid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother; she
+      saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would ever
+      hear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his glazing eyes upon her. &ldquo;Who are you?&rdquo; he said in a feeble
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An old friend,&rdquo; she answered; &ldquo;you knew me as Myrtle Hazard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He started. &ldquo;You by my bedside! You caring for me!&mdash;for me, that
+      burned the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes! You can't
+      forgive that,&mdash;I won't believe it! Don't you hate me, dying as I am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and
+      countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down. &ldquo;I have nothing to
+      forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw. You may have meant to do me wrong, but
+      Providence raised up a protector for me. The paper you burned was not the
+      original,&mdash;it was a copy substituted for it&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And did the old man outwit me after all?&rdquo; he cried out, rising suddenly
+      in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a few more
+      gasps of breath. &ldquo;I knew he was cunning, but I thought I was his match. It
+      must have been Byles Gridley,&mdash;nobody else. And so the old man beat
+      me after all, and saved you from ruin! Thank God that it came out so!
+      Thank God! I can die now. Give me your hand, Myrtle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and he
+      ceased to breathe. Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of trust and
+      love in it than of systematized articles of belief. She cherished the fond
+      hope that these last words of one who had erred so miserably were a token
+      of some blessed change which the influences of the better world might
+      carry onward until he should have outgrown the sins and the weaknesses of
+      his earthly career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp. From time to time
+      they received stray copies of the &ldquo;Banner and Oracle,&rdquo; which, to Myrtle
+      especially, were full of interest, even to the last advertisement. A few
+      paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate to persons who have figured
+      in this narrative.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    &ldquo;TEMPLE OF HYMEN.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only
+      daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth. The editor of this paper returns his
+      acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-cake. May their
+      shadows never be less!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Not many weeks after this appeared the following:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel Hurlbut, M.
+      D., at the great age of XCVI years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the tribute
+      of a sigh to his memory,&mdash;there was nothing in a death like his to
+      call for any aching regret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the village
+      paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and shocked by
+      receiving a number containing the following paragraph:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house was
+      struck by lightning about a month ago. The frame of the building was a
+      good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended from the
+      injury it had received. On Sunday last the congregation came together as
+      usual. The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit, the Rev. Doctor
+      Pemberton having been detained by slight indisposition. The sermon was
+      from the text, 'The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard
+      shall lie down with the kid.' (Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the
+      millennium as&mdash;the reign of love and peace, in eloquent and
+      impressive language. He was in the midst of the prayer which follows the
+      sermon, and had jest put up a petition that the spirit of affection and
+      faith and trust might grow up and prevail among the flock of which he was
+      the shepherd, more especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his
+      arm, and carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had hung
+      safely for nearly a century,&mdash;loosened, no doubt by the bolt which
+      had fallen on the church,&mdash;broke from its fastenings, and fell with a
+      loud crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its ruins.
+      The scene that followed beggars description. Cries and shrieks resounded
+      through the horse. Two or three young women fainted entirely away. Mr.
+      Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted Hopkins, Esq., and others, came forward
+      immediately, and after much effort succeeded in removing the wreck of the
+      sounding-board, and extricating their unfortunate pastor. He was not
+      fatally injured, it is hoped; but, sad to relate, he received such a
+      violent blow upon the spine of the back, that palsy of the lower
+      extremities is like to ensue. He is at present lying entirely helpless.
+      Every attention is paid to him by his affectionately devoted family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this unfortunate
+      occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the following
+      pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent number of the
+      village paper:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                    IMPOSING CEREMONY.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of baptism
+      upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman, Gifted Hopkins,
+      Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P. Hopkins, his amiable
+      and respected lady. The babe conducted himself with singular propriety on
+      this occasion. He received the Christian name of Byron Tennyson Browning.
+      May he prove worthy of his name and his parentage!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its
+      unharmed survivors. He returned with Myrtle to her native village, and
+      they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence Withers, in
+      the old family mansion. Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle made a generous
+      allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles distant, where she
+      had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at The Poplars. This was a
+      convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe was invited to stay with them
+      for a month or two; and one nurse and two single women under the same roof
+      keep each other in a stew all the time, as the old dame somewhat sharply
+      remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector, and,
+      with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property she
+      inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that, when
+      Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt that at
+      least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give himself to
+      sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing by him to pinch
+      the features of all his ideals, and give them something of her own
+      likeness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her
+      responsibility. She embellished her spare person a little more than in
+      former years. These young people looked so happy! Love was not so
+      unendurable, perhaps, after all. No woman need despair,&mdash;especially
+      if she has a house over her, and a snug little property. A worthy man, a
+      former missionary, of the best principles, but of a slightly jocose and
+      good-humored habit, thought that he could piece his widowed years with the
+      not insignificant, fraction of life left to Miss Silence, to their mutual
+      advantage. He came to the village, therefore, where Father Pemberton was
+      very glad to have him supply the pulpit in the place of his unfortunate
+      disabled colleague. The courtship soon began, and was brisk enough; for
+      the good man knew there was no time to lose at his period of life,&mdash;or
+      hers either, for that matter. It was a rather odd specimen of love-making;
+      for he was constantly trying to subdue his features to a gravity which
+      they were not used to, and she was as constantly endeavoring to be as
+      lively as possible, with the innocent desire of pleasing her light-hearted
+      suitor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vieille fille fait jeune mariee.&rdquo; Silence was ten years younger as a
+      bride than she had seemed as a lone woman. One would have said she had got
+      out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some half a dozen
+      behind it,&mdash;where there is often good and reasonably cheerful
+      conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the probable
+      amount of his property, or the little slips he may have committed, and
+      where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense sets the four
+      waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-hour ago in the
+      house of mourning. But Miss Silence, that was, thought that two families,
+      with all the possible complications which time might bring, would be
+      better in separate establishments. She therefore proposed selling The
+      Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and removing to a house in the village,
+      which would be large enough for them, at least for the present. So the
+      young folks bought the old house, and paid a mighty good price for it; and
+      enlarged it, and beautified and glorified it, and one fine morning went
+      together down to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence seemed in danger of
+      being a little crowded,&mdash;for Gifted lived there with his Susan,&mdash;and
+      what had happened might happen again,&mdash;and gave Master Byles Gridley
+      a formal and most persuasively worded invitation to come up and make his
+      home with them at The Poplars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised
+      weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are looking
+      upon him almost for the last time before they part from him, and see his
+      face no more. Let us not inquire too curiously, then, how he received this
+      kind proposition. It is enough, that, when he found that a new study had
+      been built on purpose for him, and a sleeping-room attached to it so that
+      he could live there without disturbing anybody if he chose, he consented
+      to remove there for a while, and that he was there established amidst
+      great rejoicing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health. She found at last that
+      she was going; and as she had a little property of her own,&mdash;as
+      almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of it,&mdash;she
+      was much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements to be made
+      respecting its disposition. The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was one day surprised
+      by a message, that she wished to have an interview with him. He rode over
+      to the town in which she was residing, and there had a long conversation
+      with her upon this matter. When this was settled, her mind seemed too be
+      more at ease. She died with a comfortable assurance that she was going to
+      a better world, and with a bitter conviction that it would be hard to find
+      one that would offer her a worse lot than being a poor relation in this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob
+      Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes as
+      they should elect, educational or other. Father Pemberton preached an
+      admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her virtues, known to this
+      people among whom she had long lived, and especially that crowning act by
+      which she devoted all she had to purposes of charity-and benevolence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the misfortune of
+      his colleague had incapacitated him from labor. He generally preached in
+      the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance of the people,&mdash;for the
+      truth was that the honest minister who had married Miss Silence was not
+      young enough or good-looking enough to be an object of personal attentions
+      like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, and the old minister appeared to
+      great advantage contrasted with him in the pulpit. Poor Mr. Stoker was now
+      helpless, faithfully and tenderly waited upon by his own wife, who had
+      regained her health and strength,&mdash;in no small measure, perhaps, from
+      the great need of sympathy and active aid which her unfortunate husband
+      now experienced. It was an astonishment to herself when she found that she
+      who had so long been served was able to serve another. Some who knew his
+      errors thought his accident was a judgment; but others believed that it
+      was only a mercy in disguise,&mdash;it snatched him roughly from his sin,
+      but it opened his heart to gratitude towards her whom his neglect could
+      not alienate, and through gratitude to repentance and better thoughts.
+      Bathsheba had long ago promised herself to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was
+      about to become the rector of a parish in the next town, the marriage was
+      soon to take place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing! Clement
+      loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength and fine
+      humanity blended in them. He was so fascinated by their noble expression
+      that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and looked at him more like an
+      artist taking his portrait than like an admiring friend. He maintained
+      that Master Gridley had a bigger bump of benevolence and as large a one of
+      cautiousness as the two people most famous for the size of these organs on
+      the phrenological chart he showed him, and proved it, or nearly proved it,
+      by careful measurements of his head. Master Gridley laughed, and read him
+      a passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the village.
+      Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the foundations of a public
+      library. Others thought it should be applied for the relief of the
+      families of soldiers who had fallen in the war. Still another set would
+      take it to build a monument to the memory of those heroes. The trustees
+      listened with the greatest candor to all these gratuitous hints. It was,
+      however, suggested, in a well-written anonymous article which appeared in
+      the village paper, that it was desirable to follow the general lead of the
+      testator's apparent preference. The trustees were at liberty to do as they
+      saw fit; but, other things being equal, same educational object should be
+      selected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be very
+      proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them. The
+      trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion. Why not apply it to
+      the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and promising
+      children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs. Hopkins had cared
+      for so long without any recompense, and at a cost which would soon become
+      beyond her means? The good people of the neighborhood accepted this as the
+      best solution of the difficulty. It was agreed upon at length by the
+      trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam Fund for Educational Purposes should be
+      applied for the benefit of the two foundlings, known as Isosceles and
+      Helminthia Hopkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two &ldquo;preposterous
+      names,&rdquo; as he called them, which in a moment of eccentric impulse he had
+      given to these children of nature. He ventured to hint as much to Mrs.
+      Hopkins. The good dame was vastly surprised. She thought they was about as
+      pooty names as anybody had had given 'em in the village. And they was so
+      handy, spoke short, Sossy and Minthy,&mdash;she never should know how to
+      call 'em anything else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But my dear Mrs. Hopkins,&rdquo; Master Gridley urged, &ldquo;if you knew the meaning
+      they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did very wrong to
+      apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures, and that I am bound
+      to rectify my error. More than that, my dear madam, I mean to consult you
+      as to the new names; and if we can fix upon proper and pleasing ones, it
+      is my intention to leave a pretty legacy in my will to these interesting
+      children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Gridley,&rdquo; said Mrs. Hopkins, &ldquo;you're the best man I ever see, or ever
+      shall see, ... except my poor dear Ammi.... I 'll do jest as you say about
+      that, or about anything else in all this livin' world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Byles Gridley Hopkins!&rdquo; she answered instantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord!&rdquo; said Mr. Gridley, &ldquo;think a minute, my dear madam. I will not
+      say one word,&mdash;only think a minute, and mention some name that will
+      not suggest quite so many winks and whispers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud, &ldquo;Abraham
+      Lincoln Hopkins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past year,
+      on a moderate computation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything that
+      you like. To think of those dear babes having a fund&mdash;if that's the
+      right name&mdash;on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope
+      they won't get that till they're a hundred year old!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins? That means the
+      gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather than a
+      burden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes. She was weeping.
+      &ldquo;Theodore!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;Theodore! My little brother's name, that I buried
+      when I was only eleven year old. Drownded. The dearest little child that
+      ever you see. I have got his little mug with Theodore on it now. Kep' o'
+      purpose. Our little Sossy shall have it. Theodore P. Hopkins,&mdash;sha'n't
+      it be, Mr. Gridley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins? Theodore Parker, is
+      it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doesn't P. stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best man
+      in the world&mdash;next to you, Mr. Gridley?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am. Now
+      about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to call
+      her,&mdash;surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in naming one
+      of the objects of her charity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins,&rdquo; said the good woman triumphantly,&mdash;&ldquo;is
+      that what you mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose we leave out one of the names,&mdash;four are too many. I think
+      the general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of her
+      two benefactresses,&mdash;Cynthia Badlam Hopkins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, law! Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?&mdash;Minthy and Cynthy,&mdash;there
+      ain't but one letter of difference! Poor Cynthy would be pleased if she
+      could know that one of our babes was to be called after her. She was
+      dreadful fond of children.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely, the
+      Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pemberton was summoned to officiate at three most
+      interesting ceremonies,&mdash;a wedding and two christenings, one of the
+      latter a double one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between the
+      Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named clergyman.
+      He could not be present on account of his great infirmity, but the door of
+      his chamber was left open that he might hear the marriage service
+      performed. The old, white-haired minister, assisted, as the papers said,
+      by the bridegroom's father, conducted the ceremony according to the
+      Episcopal form. When he came to those solemn words in which the husband
+      promises fidelity to the wife so long as they both shall live, the nurse,
+      who was watching, near the poor father, saw him bury his face in his
+      pillow, and heard him murmur the words, &ldquo;God be merciful to me a sinner!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the old
+      meeting-house. Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came in, and
+      stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms. A slip of paper
+      was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words were written:&mdash;&ldquo;The
+      name is Charles Hazard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe
+      disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of its
+      consecration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the broad aisle&mdash;marshalled
+      by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted Hopkins bringing up the rear&mdash;the
+      two children hitherto known as Isosceles and Helminthia. They had been
+      well schooled, and, as the mysterious and to them incomprehensible
+      ceremony was enacted, maintained the most stoical aspect of tranquillity.
+      In Mrs. Hopkins's words, &ldquo;They looked like picters, and behaved like
+      angels.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of some
+      few friends at The Poplars. It was such a great occasion that the
+      Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,&mdash;which was,
+      strictly speaking, secular time,&mdash;were relaxed. Father Pemberton was
+      there, and Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth,
+      with his son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her mother, now in
+      comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband, Doctor Hurlbut and his
+      wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob Penhallow, Esq., Mrs. Hopkins, her
+      son and his wife (Susan Posey that was), the senior deacon of the old
+      church (the admirer of the great Scott), the Editor-in-chief of the
+      &ldquo;Banner and Oracle,&rdquo; and in the background Nurse Byloe and the privileged
+      servant, Mistress Kitty Fagan, with a few others whose names we need not
+      mention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of two
+      long services repaired by such simple refections as would not turn the
+      holy day into a day of labor. A large paper copy of the new edition of
+      Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table. He never looked so
+      happy,&mdash;could anything fill his cup fuller? In the course of the
+      evening Clement spoke of the many trials through which they had passed in
+      common with vast numbers of their countrymen, and some of those peculiar
+      dangers which Myrtle had had to encounter in the course of a life more
+      eventful, and attended with more risks, perhaps, than most of them
+      imagined. But Myrtle, he said, had always been specially cared for. He
+      wished them to look upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who had
+      been faithful to her in her gravest hours of trial and danger. If they
+      would follow him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they would
+      have an opportunity to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest. They all ascended to
+      the little projecting chamber, through the window of which her scarlet
+      jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about on the river in those
+      early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the name of the Fire-hang-bird's
+      Nest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from which
+      looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose continued
+      presence with her descendants was the old family legend. But underneath it
+      Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some closely covered object
+      upon it. It was a mysterious arrangement, made without any knowledge on
+      her part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, then, Kitty!&rdquo; Mr. Lindsay said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward, and
+      removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object. It was a lifelike
+      marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this is what you have been working at so long,&mdash;is it, Clement?&rdquo;
+       Myrtle said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?&rdquo;, he answered, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble
+      forehead, saying, &ldquo;This is the face of my Guardian Angel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
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+Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
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+Title:  The Guardian Angel
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+Author:  Oliver Wendell Holmes
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+
+
+THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+by OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+
+
+TO MY READERS.
+
+"A new Preface" is, I find, promised with my story.  If there are any
+among my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the
+Moral appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and
+learn what I have to say here.
+
+This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
+remember, entitled "Elsie Venner."  Like that,--it is intended for
+two classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers
+of the "Morals" in Aesop and of this Preface.
+
+The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which
+some thought cruel, even on paper.  It imagined an alien element
+introduced into the blood of a human being before that being saw the
+light.  It showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with
+the ophidian characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during
+the pre-natal period.  Whether anything like this ever happened, or
+was possible, mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest
+the limitations of human responsibility in a simple and effective
+way.
+
+The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
+experience.  The successive development of inherited bodily aspects
+and habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see
+families grow up under their own eyes.  The same thing happens, but
+less obviously to common observation, in the mental and moral nature.
+There is something frightful in the way in which not only
+characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are
+repeated from generation to generation.  Jonathan Edwards the younger
+tells the story of a brutal wretch in New Haven who was abusing his
+father, when the old man cried out, "Don't drag me any further, for I
+did n't drag my father beyond this tree." [ The original version of
+this often-repeated story may be found in Aristotle's Ethics, Book
+7th, Chapter 7th.]  I have attempted to show the successive evolution
+of some inherited qualities in the character of Myrtle Hazard, not so
+obtrusively as to disturb the narrative, but plainly enough to be
+kept in sight by the small class of preface-readers.
+
+If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
+higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
+learned ladies.  If I should proclaim that they were protests against
+the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all
+human action from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the
+jealousy of the cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums.  By saying
+nothing about it, the large majority of those whom my book reaches,
+not being preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them
+beyond the simple facts of the narrative.
+
+Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
+limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
+self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
+intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in
+our new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown
+of scholarship.  If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of
+nature into the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as
+much as in the bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all
+that we are evil in to a divine thrusting on," we had better return
+at once to our old demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower
+House in his time-honored prerogatives.
+
+As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may be
+needed here to make some of my characters and statements appear
+probable.  The long-pending question involving a property which had
+become in the mean time of immense value finds its parallel in the
+great De Haro land-case, decided in the Supreme Court while this
+story was in progress (May 14th, 1867).  The experiment of breaking
+the child's will by imprisonment and fasting is borrowed from a
+famous incident, happening long before the case lately before one of
+the courts of a neighboring Commonwealth, where a little girl was
+beaten to death because she would not say her prayers.  The mental
+state involving utter confusion of different generations in a person
+yet capable of forming a correct judgment on other matters, is almost
+a direct transcript from nature.  I should not have ventured to
+repeat the questions of the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle
+Hazard about her family conditions, and their comments, had not a
+lady of fortune and position mentioned to me a similar circumstance
+in the school history of one of her own children.  Perhaps I should
+have hesitated in reproducing Myrtle Hazard's "Vision," but for a
+singular experience of his own related to me by the late Mr.
+Forceythe Willson.
+
+Gifted Hopkins (under various alliasis) has been a frequent
+correspondent of mine.  I have also received a good many
+communications, signed with various names, which must have been from
+near female relatives of that young gentleman.  I once sent a kind of
+encyclical letter to the whole family connection; but as the delusion
+under which they labor is still common, and often leads to the
+wasting of time, the contempt of honest study or humble labor, and
+the misapplication of intelligence not so far below mediocrity as to
+be incapable of affording a respectable return when employed in the
+proper direction, I thought this picture from life might also be of
+service.  When I say that no genuine young poet will apply it to
+himself, I think I have so far removed the sting that few or none
+will complain of being wounded.
+
+It is lamentable to be forced to add that the Reverend Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker is only a softened copy of too many originals to whom, as a
+regular attendant upon divine worship from my childhood to the
+present time, I have respectfully listened, while they dealt with me
+and mine and the bulk of their fellow-creatures after the manner of
+their sect.  If, in the interval between his first showing himself in
+my story and its publication in a separate volume, anything had
+occurred to make me question the justice or expediency of drawing and
+exhibiting such a portrait, I should have reconsidered it, with the
+view of retouching its sharper features.  But its essential
+truthfulness has been illustrated every month or two, since my story
+has been in the course of publication, by a fresh example from real
+life, stamped in darker colors than any with which I should have
+thought of staining my pages.
+
+There are a great many good clergymen to one bad one, but a writer
+finds it hard to keep to the true proportion of good and bad persons
+in telling a story.  The three or four good ministers I have
+introduced in this narrative must stand for many whom I have known
+and loved, and some of whom I count to-day among my most valued
+friends.  I hope the best and wisest of them will like this story and
+approve it.  If they cannot all do this, I know they will recognize
+it as having been written with a right and honest purpose.
+
+BOSTON, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+
+It is a quarter of a century since the foregoing Preface was written,
+and that is long enough to allow a story to be forgotten by the
+public, and very possibly by the writer of it also.  I will not
+pretend that I have forgotten all about "The Guardian Angel," but it
+is long since I have read it, and many of its characters and
+incidents are far from being distinct in my memory.  There are,
+however, a few points which hold their place among my recollections.
+The revolt of Myrtle Hazard from the tyranny of that dogmatic dynasty
+now breaking up in all directions has found new illustrations since
+this tale was written.  I need only refer to two instances of many.
+The first is from real life.  Mr. Robert C. Adams's work, "Travels in
+Faith from Tradition to Reason," is the outcome of the teachings of
+one of the most intransigeant of our New England Calvinists, the late
+Reverend Nehemiah Adams.  For an example in fiction,--fiction which
+bears all the marks of being copied from real life,--I will refer to
+"The Story of an African Farm."  The boy's honest, but terrible
+outburst, "I hate God," was, I doubt not, more acceptable in the view
+of his Maker than the lying praise of many a hypocrite who, having
+enthroned a demon as Lord of the Universe, thinks to conciliate his
+favor by using the phrases which the slaves of Eastern despots are in
+the habit of addressing to their masters.  I have had many private
+letters showing the same revolt of reasoning natures against
+doctrines which shock the more highly civilized part of mankind in
+this nineteenth century and are leading to those dissensions which
+have long shown as cracks, and are fast becoming lines of cleavage in
+some of the largest communions of Protestantism.
+
+The principle of heredity has been largely studied since this story
+was written.  This tale, like "Elsie Venner," depends for its deeper
+significance on the ante-natal history of its subject.  But the story
+was meant to be readable for those who did not care for its
+underlying philosophy.  If it fails to interest the reader who
+ventures upon it, it may find a place on an unfrequented bookshelf in
+common with other "medicated novels."
+
+Perhaps I have been too hard with Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of
+rhymesters to which he belongs.  I ought not to forget that I too
+introduced myself to the reading world in a thin volume of verses;
+many of which had better not have been written, and would not be
+reprinted now, but for the fact that they have established a right to
+a place among my poems in virtue of long occupancy.  Besides,
+although the writing of verses is often a mark of mental weakness, I
+cannot forget that Joseph Story and George Bancroft each published
+his little book, of rhymes, and that John Quincy Adams has left many
+poems on record, the writing of which did not interfere with the vast
+and important labors of his illustrious career.
+
+BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 7, 1891.
+
+O.  W.  H.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                    THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AN ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+
+On Saturday, the 18th day of June, 1859, the "State Banner and
+Delphian Oracle," published weekly at Oxbow Village, one of the
+principal centres in a thriving river-town of New England, contained
+an advertisement which involved the story of a young life, and
+stained the emotions of a small community.  Such faces of dismay,
+such shaking of heads, such gatherings at corners, such halts of
+complaining, rheumatic wagons, and dried-up, chirruping chaises, for
+colloquy of their still-faced tenants, had not been known since the
+rainy November Friday, when old Malachi Withers was found hanging in
+his garret up there at the lonely house behind the poplars.
+
+The number of the " Banner and Oracle" which contained this
+advertisement was a fair specimen enough of the kind of newspaper to
+which it belonged.  Some extracts from a stray copy of the issue of
+the date referred to will show the reader what kind of entertainment
+the paper was accustomed to furnish its patrons, and also serve some
+incidental purposes of the writer in bringing into notice a few
+personages who are to figure in this narrative.
+
+The copy in question was addressed to one of its regular
+subscribers,--"B. Gridley, Esq."  The sarcastic annotations at
+various points, enclosed in brackets and italicised that they may be
+distinguished from any other comments, were taken from the pencilled
+remarks of that gentleman, intended for the improvement of a member
+of the family in which he resided, and are by no means to be
+attributed to the harmless pen which reproduces them.
+
+Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons
+acquainted with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a
+schoolmaster, a college tutor, and afterwards for many years
+professor,--a man of learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets,
+such as are hardly to be found, except in old, unmarried students,
+--the double flowers of college culture, their stamina all turned to
+petals, their stock in the life of the race all funded in the
+individual.  Being a man of letters, Byles Gridley naturally rather
+undervalued the literary acquirements of the good people of the rural
+district where he resided, and, having known much of college and
+something of city life, was apt to smile at the importance they
+attached to their little local concerns.  He was, of course, quite as
+much an object of rough satire to the natural observers and
+humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,--perhaps
+not in any village where a score or two of families are brought
+together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
+characters of a real-life stock company.
+
+The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
+worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire,
+whose handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored
+lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely
+groomed willow--hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were,
+monumental parlor.  Her household consisted of herself, her son,
+nineteen years of age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small
+children, twins, left upon her doorstep when little more than mere
+marsupial possibilities, taken in for the night, kept for a week, and
+always thereafter cherished by the good soul as her own; also of Miss
+Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the "Academy" in another
+part of the same town, a distant relative, boarding with her.
+
+What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to
+guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly
+to hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of
+the old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not
+believe a word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as
+to growl to himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the
+way about it.
+
+The leading article of the "Banner and Oracle" for June 18th must
+have been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked,
+several of the "metropolitan" journals of the date of June 15th and
+thereabout had evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some
+of his ideas before he gave them to the public.  The Foreign News by
+the Europa at Halifax, 15th, was spread out in the amplest dimensions
+the type of the office could supply.  More battles!  The Allies
+victorious!  The King and General Cialdini beat the Austrians at
+Palestro!  400 Austrians drowned in a canal!  Anti-French feeling in
+Germany!  Allgermine Zeiturg talks of conquest of Allsatia and
+Loraine and the occupation of Paris! [Vicious digs with a pencil
+through the above proper names.] Race for the Derby won by Sir Joseph
+Hawley's Musjid!  [That's what England cares for!  Hooray for the
+Darby!  Italy be deedeed!]  Visit of Prince Alfred to the Holy Land.
+Letter from our, own Correspondent.  [Oh!  Oh!  A West Minkville ?]
+Cotton advanced.  Breadstuffs declining. --Deacon Rumrill's barn
+burned down on Saturday night.  A pig missing; supposed to have ��
+fallen a prey to the devouring element."  [Got roasted.]  A yellow
+mineral had been discovered on the Doolittle farm, which, by the
+report of those who had seen it, bore a strong resemblance to
+California gold ore.  Much excitement in the neighborhood in
+consequence [Idiots!  Iron pyrites!] A hen at Four Corners had just
+laid an egg measuring 7 by 8 inches.  Fetch on your biddies!
+[Editorial wit!]  A man had shot an eagle measuring six feet and a
+half from tip to tip of his wings. --Crops suffering for want of rain
+[Always just so.  "Dry times, Father Noah!"]  The editors had
+received a liberal portion of cake from the happy couple whose
+matrimonial union was recorded in the column dedicated to Hymen.
+Also a superior article of [article of!  bah!] steel pen from the
+enterprising merchant [shopkeeper] whose advertisement was to be
+found on the third page of this paper. --An interesting Surprise
+Party [cheap theatricals] had transpired [bah!] on Thursday evening
+last at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.  The parishioners had
+donated [donated! GIVE is a good word enough for the Lord's Prayer.
+DONATE our daily bread!] a bag of meal, a bushel of beans, a keg of
+pickles, and a quintal of salt-fish.  The worthy pastor was much
+affected, etc., etc.  [Of course.  Call'em.  SENSATION parties and
+done with it!] The Rev. Dr. Pemberton and the venerable Dr. Hurlbut
+honored the occasion with their presence. --We learn that the Rev.
+Ambrose Eveleth, rector of St. Bartholomew's Chapel, has returned
+from his journey, and will officiate to-morrow.
+
+Then came strings of advertisements, with a luxuriant vegetation of
+capitals and notes of admiration.  More of those PRIME GOODS!  Full
+Assortments of every Article in our line!  [Except the one thing you
+want!] Auction Sale.  Old furniture, feather-beds, bed-spreads
+[spreads!  ugh!], setts [setts!] crockery-ware, odd vols., ullage
+bbls. of this and that, with other household goods, etc., etc.,
+etc.,--the etceteras meaning all sorts of insane movables, such as
+come out of their bedlam-holes when an antiquated domestic
+establishment disintegrates itself at a country "vandoo." --Several
+announcements of "Feed," whatever that may be,--not restaurant
+dinners, anyhow,--also of "Shorts,"--terms mysterious to city ears as
+jute and cudbear and gunnybags to such as drive oxen in the remote
+interior districts. --Then the marriage column above alluded to, by
+the fortunate recipients of the cake.  Right opposite, as if for
+matrimonial ground-bait, a Notice that Whereas my wife, Lucretia
+Babb, has left my bed and board, I will not be responsible, etc.,
+etc., from this date. --Jacob Penhallow (of the late firm Wibird and
+Penhallow) had taken Mr. William Murray Bradshaw into partnership,
+and the business of the office would be carried on as usual under the
+title Penhallow and Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law.  Then came the
+standing professional card of Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, the medical patriarch of the town and his son.  Following
+this, hideous quack advertisements, some of them with the
+certificates of Honorables, Esquires, and Clergymen. --Then a cow,
+strayed or stolen from the subscriber. --Then the advertisement
+referred to in our first paragraph:
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD has been missing from her home in this place
+since Thursday morning, June 16th.  She is fifteen years old, tall
+and womanly for her age, has dark hair and eyes, fresh complexion,
+regular features, pleasant smile and voice, but shy with strangers.
+Her common dress was a black and white gingham check, straw hat,
+trimmed with green ribbon.  It is feared she may have come to harm in
+some way, or be wandering at large in a state of temporary mental
+alienation.  Any information relating to the missing child will be
+gratefully received and properly rewarded by her afflicted aunt,
+
+MISS SILENCE WITHERS,
+Residing at the Withers Homestead, otherwise known as "The Poplars,"
+in this village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GREAT EXCITEMENT
+
+The publication of the advertisement in the paper brought the village
+fever of the last two days to its height.  Myrtle Hazard's
+disappearance had been pretty well talked round through the immediate
+neighborhood, but now that forty-eight hours of search and inquiry
+had not found her, and the alarm was so great that the young girl's
+friends were willing to advertise her in a public journal, it was
+clear that the gravest apprehensions were felt and justified.  The
+paper carried the tidings to many who had not heard it.  Some of the
+farmers who had been busy all the week with their fields came into
+the village in their wagons on Saturday, and there first learned the
+news, and saw the paper, and the placards which were posted up, and
+listened, open-mouthed, to the whole story.
+
+Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and
+some stir in the neighboring settlements.  Of course there was a
+great variety of comment, its character depending very much on the
+sense, knowledge, and disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young
+people who talked over the painful and mysterious occurrence.
+
+The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest.
+Nurse Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl
+when she was a little bright-eyed child, handed over "the baby" she
+was holding to another attendant, and got on her things to go
+straight up to The Poplars.  She had been holding "the baby" these
+forty years and more, but somehow it never got to be more than a
+month or six weeks old.  She reached The Poplars after much toil and
+travail.  Mistress Fagan, Irish, house-servant, opened the door, at
+which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as she was in the habit of doing at
+the doors of those who sent for her.
+
+"Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?" asked Nurse Byloe.
+
+"Niver a blissed word," said she.  "Miss Withers is upstairs with
+Miss Bathsheby, a cryin' and a lamentin'.  Miss Badlam's in the
+parlor.  The men has been draggin' the pond.  They have n't found not
+one thing, but only jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the
+gray cat,--it's them nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied
+round her neck and then drownded her."  [P. Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had
+a snarl of similar string in his pocket.]
+
+Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor.  A woman was
+sitting there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself
+with the blackest of black fans.
+
+"Nuss Byloe, is that you?  Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you,
+though we 're all in trouble.  Set right down, Nuss, do.  Oh, it's
+dreadful times!"
+
+A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was
+here called on for its function.
+
+Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of
+those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so
+fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as
+they flatten under the subsiding person.
+
+The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin
+of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion
+at intervals for some years.  She appeared to be thirty-five years
+old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth,
+though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often
+the case with women.  She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent
+headaches had thinned her locks somewhat of late years.  Features a
+little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a quick and restless glance,
+which rather avoided being met, gave the impression that she was a
+wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very possibly, crafty person.
+
+"I could n't help comin'," said Nurse Byloe, "we do so love our
+babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?"
+
+The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the
+possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing
+such a speech.
+
+"I never tended children as you have, Nuss," she said.  "But I 've
+known Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think
+she should have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above
+all things and desperately wicked,'"--and she wept.
+
+"Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?" said Nurse Byloe.  "Y' don't
+think anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?"
+
+"Child!" said Cynthia Badlam,--"child enough to wear this very gown I
+have got on and not find it too big for her neither."  [It would have
+pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]
+
+The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange
+of intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its
+specialty.  Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it
+is all the conversation of the lower animals.  Only the dull senses
+of men are dead to it as to the music of the spheres.
+
+Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together,
+through whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb
+growths of thought ripened in both their souls into articulate
+speech, consentingly, as the movement comes after the long stillness
+of a Quaker meeting.
+
+Their lips opened at the same moment.  "You don't mean"--began Nurse
+Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.
+
+"They need n't drag the pond," she said.  "They need n't go beating
+the woods as if they were hunting a patridge,--though for that matter
+Myrtle Hazard was always more like a patridge than she was like a
+pullet.  Nothing ever took hold of that girl,--not catechising, nor
+advising, nor punishing.  It's that dreadful will of hers never was
+broke.  I've always been afraid that she would turn out a child of
+wrath.  Did y' ever watch her at meetin' playing with posies and
+looking round all the time of the long prayer?  That's what I've seen
+her do many and many a time.  I'm afraid--Oh dear!  Miss Byloe, I'm
+afraid to say--what I'm afraid of.  Men are so wicked, and young
+girls are full of deceit and so ready to listen to all sorts of
+artful creturs that take advantage of their ignorance and tender
+years."  She wept once more, this time with sobs that seemed
+irrepressible.
+
+"Dear suz!" said the nurse, "I won't believe no sech thing as
+wickedness about Myrtle Hazard.  You mean she's gone an' run off with
+some good-for-nothin' man or other?  If that ain't what y' mean, what
+do y' mean?  It can't be so, Miss Badlam: she's one o' my babies.  At
+any rate, I handled her when she fust come to this village,--and none
+o' my babies never did sech a thing.  Fifteen year old, and be
+bringin' a whole family into disgrace!  If she was thirty year old,
+or five-an'-thirty or more, and never'd had a chance to be married,
+and if one o' them artful creturs you was talkin' of got hold of her,
+then, to be sure,--why, dear me!--law!  I never thought, Miss
+Badlam!--but then of course you could have had your pickin' and
+choosin' in the time of it; and I don't mean to say it's too late now
+if you felt called that way, for you're better lookin' now than some
+that's younger, and there's no accountin' for tastes."
+
+A sort of hysteric twitching that went through the frame of Cynthia
+Badlam dimly suggested to the old nurse that she was not making her
+slightly indiscreet personality much better by her explanations.  She
+stopped short, and surveyed the not uncomely person of the maiden
+lady sitting before her with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes,
+and one hand clenching the arm of the reeking-chair, as if some spasm
+had clamped it there.  The nurse looked at her with a certain growing
+interest she had never felt before.  It was the first time for some
+years that she had had such a chance, partly because Miss Cynthia had
+often been away for long periods,--partly because she herself had
+been busy professionally.  There was no occasion for her services, of
+course, in the family at The Poplars; and she was always following
+round from place to place after that everlasting migratory six-weeks
+or less old baby.
+
+There was not a more knowing pair of eyes, in their way, in a circle
+of fifty miles, than those kindly tranquil orbs that Nurse Byloe
+fixed on Cynthia Badlam.  The silver threads in the side fold of
+hair, the delicate lines at the corner of the eye, the slight drawing
+down at the angle of the mouth,--almost imperceptible, but the nurse
+dwelt upon it,--a certain moulding of the features as of an artist's
+clay model worked by delicate touches with the fingers, showing that
+time or pain or grief had had a hand in shaping them, the contours,
+the adjustment of every fold of the dress, the attitude, the very way
+of breathing, were all passed through the searching inspection of the
+ancient expert, trained to know all the changes wrought by time and
+circumstance.  It took not so long as it takes to describe it, but it
+was an analysis of imponderables, equal to any of Bunsen's with the
+spectroscope.
+
+Miss Badlam removed her handkerchief and looked in a furtive,
+questioning way, in her turn, upon the nurse.
+
+"It's dreadful close here,--I'm 'most smothered," Nurse Byloe said;
+and, putting her hand to her throat, unclasped the catch of the
+necklace of gold beads she had worn since she was a baby,--a bead
+having been added from time to time as she thickened.  It lay in a
+deep groove of her large neck, and had not troubled her in breathing
+before, since the day when her husband was run over by an ox-team.
+
+At this moment Miss Silence Withers entered, followed by Bathsheba
+Stoker, daughter of Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+She was the friend of Myrtle, and had come to comfort Miss Silence,
+and consult with her as to what further search they should institute.
+The two, Myrtle's aunt and her friend, were as unlike as they could
+well be.  Silence Withers was something more than forty years old, a
+shadowy, pinched, sallow, dispirited, bloodless woman, with the
+habitual look of the people in the funeral carriage which follows
+next to the hearse, and the tone in speaking that may be noticed in a
+household where one of its members is lying white and still in a
+cool, darkened chamber overhead.  Bathsheba Stoker was not called
+handsome; but she had her mother's youthful smile, which was so fresh
+and full of sweetness that she seemed like a beauty while she was
+speaking or listening; and she could never be plain so long as any
+expression gave life to her features.  In perfect repose, her face, a
+little prematurely touched by sad experiences,--for she was but
+seventeen years old,--had the character and decision stamped in its
+outlines which any young man who wanted a companion to warn, to
+comfort, and command him, might have depended on as warranting the
+courage, the sympathy, and the sense demanded for such a
+responsibility.  She had been trying her powers of consolation on
+Miss Silence.  It was a sudden freak of Myrtle's.  She had gone off
+on some foolish but innocent excursion.  Besides, she was a girl that
+would take care of herself; for she was afraid of nothing, and
+nimbler than any boy of her age, and almost as strong as any.  As for
+thinking any bad thoughts about her, that was a shame; she cared for
+none of the young fellows that were round her.  Cyprian Eveleth was
+the one she thought most of; but Cyprian was as true as his sister
+Olive, and who else was there?
+
+To all this Miss Silence answered only by sighing and moaning, For
+two whole days she had been kept in constant fear and worry, afraid
+every minute of some tragical message, perplexed by the conflicting
+advice of all manner of officious friends, sleepless of course
+through the two nights, and now utterly broken down and collapsed.
+
+Bathsheba had said all she could in the way of consolation, and
+hastened back to her mother's bedside, which she hardly left, except
+for the briefest of visits.
+
+"It's a great trial, Miss Withers, that's laid on you," said Nurse
+Byloe.
+
+"If I only knew that she was dead, and had died in the Lord," Miss
+Silence answered,--"if I only knew that but if she is living in sin,
+or dead in wrong--doing, what is to become of me? --Oh, what is to
+become of me when 'He maketh inquisition far blood'?"
+
+"Cousin Silence," said Miss Cynthia, "it is n't your fault, if that
+young girl has taken to evil ways.  If going to meeting three times
+every Sabbath day, and knowing the catechism by heart, and reading of
+good books, and the best of daily advice, and all needful discipline,
+could have corrected her sinful nature, she would never have run away
+from a home where she enjoyed all these privileges.  It's that Indian
+blood, Cousin Silence.  It's a great mercy you and I have n't got any
+of it in our veins!  What can you expect of children that come from
+heathens and savages?  You can't lay it to yourself, Cousin Silence,
+if Myrtle Hazard goes wrong"---
+
+"The Lord will lay it to me,--the Lord will lay it to me," she
+moaned.  "Did n't he say to Cain, 'Where is Abel, thy brother?'"
+
+Nurse Byloe was getting very red in the face.  She had had about
+enough of this talk between the two women.  "I hope the Lard 'll take
+care of Myrtle Hazard fust, if she's in trouble, 'n' wants help," she
+said; "'n' then look out for them that comes next.  Y' 're too
+suspicious, Miss Badlam; y' 're too easy to believe stories.  Myrtle
+Hazard was as pretty a child and as good a child as ever I see, if
+you did n't rile her; 'n' d' d y' ever see one o' them hearty lively
+children, that had n't a sperrit of its own?  For my part, I'd rather
+handle one of 'em than a dozen o' them little waxy, weak-eyed, slim-
+necked creturs that always do what they tell 'em to, and die afore
+they're a dozen year old; and never was the time when I've seen
+Myrtle Hazard, sence she was my baby, but what it's always been,
+'Good mornin', Miss Byloe,' and 'How do you do, Miss Byloe?  I'm so
+glad to see you.'  The handsomest young woman, too, as all the old
+folks will agree in tellin' you, s'ence the time o' Judith Pride that
+was,--the Pride of the County they used to call her, for her beauty.
+Her great-grandma, y' know, Miss Cynthy, married old King David
+Withers.  What I want to know is, whether anything has been heerd,
+and jest what's been done about findin' the poor thing.  How d' ye
+know she has n't fell into the river?  Have they fired cannon?  They
+say that busts the gall of drownded folks, and makes the corpse rise.
+Have they looked in the woods everywhere?  Don't believe no wrong of
+nobody, not till y' must,--least of all of them that come o' the same
+folks, partly, and has lived with yo all their days.  I tell y',
+Myrtle Hazard's jest as innocent of all what y' 've been thinkin'
+about,--bless the poor child; she's got a soul that's as clean and
+sweet-well, as a pond-lily when it fust opens of a mornin', without a
+speck on it no more than on the fust pond-lily God Almighty ever
+made!"
+
+That gave a turn to the two women's thoughts, and their handkerchiefs
+went up to their faces.  Nurse Byloe turned her eyes quickly on
+Cynthia Badlam, and repeated her close inspection of every outline
+and every light and shadow in her figure.  She did not announce any
+opinion as to the age or good looks or general aspect or special
+points of Miss Cynthia; but she made a sound which the books write
+humph! but which real folks make with closed lips, thus: m'!--a sort
+of half-suppressed labio-palato-nasal utterance, implying that there
+is a good deal which might be said, and all the vocal organs want to
+have a chance at it, if there is to be any talking.
+
+Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person
+that came was the old minister, of whom, and of his colleague, the
+Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.
+
+The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers
+called him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country
+people--would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the
+village had not been so much older.  A man over ninety is a great
+comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the
+extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that
+the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.  Dr.
+Hurlbut, at ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively
+little advanced; but the college catalogue showed that he must be
+seventy-five years old, if, as we may suppose, he was twenty at the
+time of his graduation.
+
+He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of
+his flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging
+his serene and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the
+measured dignity of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff,
+he was an imposing personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the
+occasion demanded it.  His creed was of the sternest: he was looked
+up to as a bulwark against all the laxities which threatened New
+England theology.  But it was a creed rather of the study and of the
+pulpit than of every-day application among his neighbors.  He dealt
+too much in the lofty abstractions which had always such fascinations
+for the higher class of New England divines, to busy himself as much
+as he might have done with the spiritual condition of individuals.
+He had also a good deal in him of what he used to call the Old Man,
+which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in putting off,
+--meaning thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as much as
+the natural gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and tending
+to make a man beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.
+
+In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish,
+monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all
+that made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house
+bell.  But Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of
+novelty than its forefathers.  It wants change, and it loves young
+blood.  Polyandry is getting to be the normal condition of the
+Church; and about the time a man is becoming a little overripe for
+the livelier human sentiments, he may be pretty sure the women are
+looking round to find him a colleague.  In this way it was that the
+Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the colleague of the Rev. Eliphalet
+Pemberton.
+
+If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces--the
+charity, the sweetness of disposition, the humility--of Father
+Pemberton, he would have found a small remnant of the "Old Man," as
+the good clergyman would have called it, which was never in harmony
+with the Rev. Mr. Stoker.  The younger divine felt his importance,
+and made his venerable colleague feel that he felt it.  Father
+Pemberton had a fair chance at rainy Sundays and hot summer-afternoon
+services; but the junior pushed him aside without ceremony whenever
+he thought there was like to be a good show in the pews.  As for
+those courtesies which the old need, to soften the sense of declining
+faculties and failing attractions, the younger pastor bestowed them
+in public, but was negligent of them, to say the least, when not on
+exhibition.
+
+Good old Father Pemberton could not love this man, but he would not
+hate him, and he never complained to him or of him.  It would have
+been of no use if he had: the women of the parish had taken up the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker; and when the women run after a minister or a doctor,
+what do the men signify?
+
+Why the women ran after him, some thought it was not hard to guess.
+He was not ill-looking, according to the village standard, parted his
+hair smoothly, tied his white cravat carefully, was fluent,
+plausible, had a gift in prayer, was considered eloquent, was fond of
+listening to their spiritual experiences, and had a sickly wife.
+This is what Byles Gridley said; but he was apt to be caustic at
+times.
+
+Father Pemberton visited his people but rarely.  Like Jonathan
+Edwards, like David Osgood, he felt his call to be to study-work, and
+was impatient of the egotisms and spiritual megrims, in listening to
+which, especially from the younger females of his flock, his
+colleague had won the hearts of so many of his parishioners.  His
+presence had a wonderful effect in restoring the despondent Miss
+Silence to her equanimity; for not all the hard divinity he had
+preached for half a century had spoiled his kindly nature; and not
+the gentle Melanchthon himself, ready to welcome death as a refuge
+from the rage and bitterness of theologians, was more in contrast
+with the disputants with whom he mingled, than the old minister, in
+the hour of trial, with the stern dogmatist in his study, forging
+thunderbolts to smite down sinners.
+
+It was well that there were no tithing-men about on that next day,
+Sunday; for it shone no Sabbath day for the young men within half a
+dozen miles of the village.  They were out on Bear Hill the whole
+day, beating up the bushes as if for game, scaring old crows out of
+their ragged nests, and in one dark glen startling a fierce-eyed,
+growling, bobtailed catamount, who sat spitting and looking all ready
+to spring at them, on the tall tree where he clung with his claws
+unsheathed, until a young fellow came up with a gun and shot him
+dead.  They went through and through the swamp at Musquash Hollow;
+but found nothing better than a wicked old snapping-turtle, evil to
+behold, with his snaky head and alligator tail, but worse to meddle
+with, if his horny jaws were near enough to spring their man-trap on
+the curious experimenter.  At Wood-End there were some Indians, ill-
+conditioned savages in a dirty tent, making baskets, the miracle of
+which was that they were so clean.  They had seen a young lady
+answering the description, about a week ago.  She had bought a
+basket.  Asked them if they had a canoe they wanted to sell. --Eyes
+like hers (pointing to a squaw with a man's hat on).
+
+At Pocasset the young men explored all the thick woods,--some who
+ought to have known better taking their guns, which made a talk, as
+one might well suppose it would.  Hunting on a Sabbath day!  They did
+n't mean to shoot Myrtle Hazard, did they? it was keenly asked.  A
+good many said it was all nonsense, and a mere excuse to get away
+from meeting and have a sort of frolic on pretence that it was a work
+of necessity and mercy, one or both.
+
+While they were scattering themselves about in this way, some in
+earnest, some rejoicing in the unwonted license, lifting off for a
+little while that enormous Sabbath-day pressure which weighs like
+forty atmospheres on every true-born Puritan, two young men had been
+since Friday in search of the lost girl, each following a clue of his
+own, and determined to find her if she was among the living.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth made for the village of Mapleton, where his sister
+Olive was staying, trusting that, with her aid, he might get a clue
+to the mystery of Myrtle's disappearance.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw struck for a railroad train going to the
+great seaport, at a station where it stops for wood and water.
+
+In the mean time, a third young man, Gifted Hopkins by name, son of
+the good woman already mentioned, sat down, with tears in his eyes,
+and wrote those touching stanzas, "The Lost Myrtle," which were
+printed in the next "Banner and Oracle," and much admired by many who
+read them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ANTECEDENTS.
+
+The Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town.  It was built
+on the east bank of the river, a little above the curve which gave
+the name to Oxbow Village.  It stood on an elevation, its west gable
+close to the river's edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the
+foot of the slope behind it, woods at the east, open to the south,
+with a great row of Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the
+house.  The Hon. Selah Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the
+first colonists, built it for his own residence, in the early part of
+the last century.  Deeply impressed with his importance in the order
+of things, he had chosen to place it a little removed from the
+cluster of smaller dwellings about the Oxbow; and with some vague
+fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook the Rhine and the
+Danube, he had selected this eminence on which to place his
+substantial gambrel roofed dwelling-house.  Long afterwards a bay-
+window, almost a little room of itself, had been thrown out of the
+second story on the west side, so that it looked directly down on the
+river running beneath it.  The chamber, thus half suspended in the
+air, had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard; and
+as the boys paddling about on the river would often catch glimpses,
+through the window, of the little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket
+she fancied in those days, one of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it
+a name which became current among the young people, and indeed
+furnished to Gifted Hopkins the subject of one of his earliest poems,
+to wit, "The Fire-hang-bird's Nest."
+
+If we would know anything about the persons now living at the Withers
+Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late
+years, we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital
+antecedents.  It is by no means certain that our individual
+personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames.
+Nay, there is recorded an experience of one of the living persons
+mentioned in this narrative,--to be given in full in its proper
+place, which, so far as it is received in evidence, tends to show
+that some, at least, who have long been dead, may enjoy a kind of
+secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in these bodily
+tenements which we are in the habit of considering exclusively our
+own.  There are many circumstances, familiar to common observers,
+which favor this belief to a certain extent.  Thus, at one moment we
+detect the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some
+characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or
+others.  There are times when our friends do not act like themselves,
+but apparently in obedience to some other law than that of their own
+proper nature.  We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise
+us.  Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.  No less
+than eight distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a
+single female mentioned by an ancient physician of unimpeachable
+authority.  In this light we may perhaps see the meaning of a
+sentence, from a work which will be repeatedly referred to in this
+narrative, viz.: "This body in which we journey across the isthmus
+between the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an omnibus."
+
+The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr to their
+faith before they were known as Puritans.  The record was obscure in
+some points; but the portrait, marked "Ann Holyoake, burned by ye
+bloudy Papists, ano 15.."  (figures illegible), was still hanging
+against the panel over the fireplace in the west parlor at The
+Poplars.  The following words were yet legible on the canvas:
+"Thou hast made a covenant O Lord with mee and my Children forever."
+
+The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a
+prayer she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled.
+There had always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of
+her descendants could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this
+solemn "covenant."
+
+There had been also a legend in the family, that the martyred woman's
+spirit exercised a kind of supervision over her descendants; that she
+either manifested herself to them, or in some way impressed them,
+from time to time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast
+his lot with the emigrants,--of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant in the
+third generation, when the Indians were about to attack the
+settlement where she lived,--and of another, just before he was
+killed at Quebec.
+
+There was a remarkable resemblance between the features of Ann
+Holyoake, as shown in the portrait, and the miniature likeness of
+Myrtle's mother.  Myrtle adopted the nearly obsolete superstition
+more readily on this account, and loved to cherish the fancy that the
+guardian spirit which had watched over her ancestors was often near
+her, and would be with her in her time of need.
+
+The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of
+that delusion.  A careless expression in one of her letters, that "ye
+Parson was as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em,"
+had got abroad, and given great offence to godly people.  There was
+no doubt that some odd "manifestations," as they would be called
+nowadays, had taken place in the household when she was a girl, and
+that she presented many of the conditions belonging to what are at
+the present day called mediums.
+
+Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty,
+loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings,
+and to hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic
+sentiments at town-meetings and in the General Court.  He loved to
+wear a crimson sash and a military cap with a large red feather, in
+which the village folk used to say he looked as "hahnsome as a
+piny,"--meaning a favorite flower of his, which is better spelt
+peony, and to which it was not unnatural that his admirers should
+compare him.
+
+If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough
+have sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who
+would have dropped into their places like posts into their holes,
+asking no questions of life, contented, like so many other honest
+folks, with the part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their
+wardrobe of flesh and bones being furnished them gratis, and nothing
+to do but to walk across the stage wearing it.  But Major Gideon
+Withers, for some reason or other, married a slender, sensitive,
+nervous, romantic woman, which accounted for the fact that his son
+David, "King David," as he was called in his time, had a very
+different set of tastes from his father, showing a turn for
+literature and sentiment in his youth, reading Young's "Night
+Thoughts," and Thomson's "Seasons," and sometimes in those early days
+writing verses himself to Celia or to Chloe, which sounded just as
+fine to him as Effie and Minnie sound to young people now, as
+Musidora, as Saccharissa, as Lesbia, as Helena, as Adah and Zillah,
+have all sounded to young people in their time,--ashes of roses as
+they are to us now, and as our endearing Scotch diminutives will be
+to others by and by.
+
+King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly because he was
+rich, and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew
+too old to write love-poems, married the famous beauty before
+mentioned, Miss Judith Pride, and the race came up again in vigor.
+Their son, Jeremy, took for his first wife a delicate, melancholic
+girl, who matured into a sad-eyed woman, and bore him two children,
+Malachi and Silence.
+
+When she died, he mourned for her bitterly almost a year, and then
+put on a ruffled shirt and went across the river to tell his grief to
+Miss Virginia Wild, there residing.  This lady was said to have a few
+drops of genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain
+that her cheek had a little of the russet tinge which a Seckel pear
+shows on its warmest cheek when it blushes. --Love shuts itself up in
+sympathy like a knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily.  All
+the rest followed in due order according to Nature's kindly
+programme.
+
+Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell desperately in
+love with the daughter of this second wife, married her, and carried
+her to India, where their first and only child was born, and received
+the name of Myrtle, as fitting her cradle in the tropics.  So her
+earliest impressions,--it would not be exact to call them
+recollections,--besides the smiles of her father and mother, were of
+dusky faces, of loose white raiment, of waving fans, of breezes
+perfumed with the sweet exhalations of sandal-wood, of gorgeous
+flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas, of gliding palanquins,
+and all the languid luxury of the South.  The pestilence which has
+its natural home in India, but has journeyed so far from its birth
+place in these later years, took her father and mother away,
+suddenly, in the very freshness of their early maturity.  A relation
+of Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was returning to America
+on a visit, and the child was sent back, under her care, while still
+a mere infant, to her relatives at the old homestead.  During the
+long voyage, the strange mystery of the ocean was wrought into her
+consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to have become a part of her
+being.  The waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother; and,
+looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with
+tender care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the
+rhythm of their movement became a part of her, almost as much as her
+own pulse and breath.
+
+The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral traits which
+predominated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this child in
+embryo, waiting to come to maturity.  It was as when several grafts,
+bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the
+same stock.  Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from
+her father and mother, but all the ancestors who have been mentioned,
+and more or less obscurely many others, came uppermost in their time,
+before the absolute and total result of their several forces had
+found its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known
+as an individual.  These inherited impulses were therefore many,
+conflicting, some of them dangerous.  The World, the Flesh, and the
+Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her
+hands; but sweet and gracious influences were also born with her; and
+the battle of life was to be fought between them, God helping her in
+her need, and her own free choice siding with one or the other.  The
+formal statement of this succession of ripening characteristics need
+not be repeated, but the fact must be borne in mind.
+
+This was the child who was delivered into the hands of Miss Silence
+Withers, her mother's half--sister, keeping house with her brother
+Malachi, a bachelor, already called Old Malachi, though hardly
+entitled by his years to such a venerable prefix.  Both these persons
+had inherited the predominant traits of their sad-eyed mother.
+Malachi, the chief heir of the family property, was rich, but felt
+very poor.  He owned this fine old estate of some hundreds of acres.
+He had moneys in the bank, shares in various companies, wood-lots in
+the town; and a large tract of Western land, the subject of a lawsuit
+which seemed as if it would never be settled, and kept him always
+uneasy.
+
+Some said he hoarded gold somewhere about the old house, but nobody
+knew this for a certainty.  In spite of his abundant means, he talked
+much of poverty, and kept the household on the narrowest footing of
+economy.  One Irishwoman, with a little aid from her husband now and
+then, did all their work; and the only company they saw was Miss
+Cynthia Badlam, who, as a relative, claimed a home with them whenever
+she was so disposed.
+
+The "little Indian," as Malachi called her, was an awkward accession
+to the family.  Silence Withers knew no more about children and their
+ways and wants than if she had been a female ostrich.  Thus it was
+that she found it necessary to send for a woman well known in the
+place as the first friend whose acquaintance many of the little
+people of the town had made in this vale of tears.
+
+Thirty years of practice had taught Nurse Byloe the art of handling
+the young of her species with the soft firmness which one may notice
+in cats with their kittens,--more grandly in a tawny lioness mouthing
+her cubs.  Myrtle did not know she was held; she only felt she was
+lifted, and borne up, as a cherub may feel upon a white-woolly cloud,
+and smiled accordingly at the nurse, as if quite at home in her arms.
+
+"As fine a child as ever breathed the breath of life.  But where did
+them black eyes come from?  Born in Injy,--that 's it, ain't it?  No,
+it's her poor mother's eyes to be sure.  Does n't it seem as if there
+was a kind of Injin look to 'em?  She'll be a lively one to manage,
+if I know anything about childun.  See her clinchin' them little
+fists!"
+
+This was when Miss Silence came near her and brought her rather
+severe countenance close to the child for inspection of its features.
+The ungracious aspect of the woman and the defiant attitude of the
+child prefigured in one brief instant the history of many long coming
+years.
+
+It was not a great while before the two parties in that wearing
+conflict of alien lives, which is often called education, began to
+measure their strength against each other.  The child was bright,
+observing, of restless activity, inquisitively curious, very hard to
+frighten, and with a will which seemed made for mastery, not
+submission.
+
+The stern spinster to whose care this vigorous life was committed was
+disposed to discharge her duty to the girl faithfully and
+conscientiously; but there were two points in her character and
+belief which had a most important bearing on the manner in which she
+carried out her laudable intentions.  First, she was one of that
+class of human beings whose one single engrossing thought is their
+own welfare,--in the next world, it is true, but still their own
+personal welfare.  The Roman Church recognizes this class, and
+provides every form of specific to meet their spiritual condition.
+But in so far as Protestantism has thrown out works as a means of
+insuring future safety, these unfortunates are as badly off as
+nervous patients who have no drops, pills, potions, no doctors'
+rules, to follow.  Only tell a poor creature what to do, and he or
+she will do it, and be made easy, were it a pilgrimage of a thousand
+miles, with shoes full of split peas instead of boiled ones; but if
+once assured that doing does no good, the drooping Little-faiths are
+left at leisure to worry about their souls, as the other class of
+weaklings worry about their bodies.  The effect on character does not
+seem to be very different in the two classes.  Metaphysicians may
+discuss the nature of selfishness at their leisure; if to have all
+her thoughts centring on the one point of her own well-being by and
+by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely selfish; and
+if we are offended with that form of egotism, it is no more than ten
+of the twelve Apostles were, as the reader may see by turning to the
+Gospel of St.  Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the twenty-fourth
+verse.
+
+The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to carry out a
+theory which, whatever might be its success in other cases, did not
+work kindly in the case of Myrtle Hazard, but, on the contrary,
+developed a mighty spirit of antagonism in her nature, which
+threatened to end in utter lawlessness.  Miss Silence started from
+the approved doctrine, that all children are radically and utterly
+wrong in all their motives, feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as
+they remain subject to their natural instincts.  It was by the
+eradication, and not the education, of these instincts, that the
+character of the human being she was moulding was to be determined.
+The first great preliminary process, so soon as the child manifested
+any evidence of intelligent and persistent self-determination, was to
+break her will.
+
+There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion from the
+teaching of Priest Pemberton, but it required a colder and harder
+nature than his own to carry out many of his dogmas to their
+practical application.  He wrought in the pure mathematics, so to
+speak, of theology, and left the working rules to the good sense and
+good feeling of his people.
+
+Miss Silence had been waiting for her opportunity to apply the great
+doctrine, and it came at last in a very trivial way.
+
+"Myrtle does n't want brown bread.  Myrtle won't have brown bread.
+Myrtle will have white bread."
+
+"Myrtle is a wicked child.  She will have what Aunt Silence says she
+shall have.  She won't have anything but brown bread."
+
+Thereupon the bright red lip protruded, the hot blood mounted to her
+face, the child untied her little "tire," got down from the table,
+took up her one forlorn, featureless doll, and went to bed without
+her supper.  The next morning the worthy woman thought that hunger
+and reflection would have subdued the rebellious spirit.  So there
+stood yesterday's untouched supper waiting for her breakfast.  She
+would not taste it, and it became necessary to enforce that extreme
+penalty of the law which had been threatened, but never yet put in
+execution.  Miss Silence, in obedience to what she felt to be a
+painful duty, without any passion, but filled with high, inexorable
+purpose, carried the child up to the garret, and, fastening her so
+that she could not wander about and hurt herself, left her to her
+repentant thoughts, awaiting the moment when a plaintive entreaty for
+liberty and food should announce that the evil nature had yielded and
+the obdurate will was broken.
+
+The garret was an awful place.  All the skeleton-like ribs of the
+roof showed in the dim light, naked overhead, and the only floor to
+be trusted consisted of the few boards which bridged the lath and
+plaster.  A great, mysterious brick tower climbed up through it,--it
+was the chimney, but it looked like a horrible cell to put criminals
+into.  The whole place was festooned with cobwebs,--not light films,
+such as the housewife's broom sweeps away before they have become a
+permanent residence, but vast gray draperies, loaded with dust,
+sprinkled with yellow powder from the beams where the worms were
+gnawing day and night, the home of old, hairy spiders who had, lived
+there since they were eggs and would leave it for unborn spiders who
+would grow old and huge like themselves in it, long after the human
+tenants had left the mansion for a narrower home.  Here this little
+criminal was imprisoned, six, twelve,--tell it not to mothers,
+--eighteen dreadful hours, hungry until she was ready to gnaw her
+hands, a prey to all childish imaginations; and here at her stern
+guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled, almost fainting, but
+sullen and unsubdued.  The Irishwoman, poor stupid Kitty Fagan, who
+had no theory of human nature, saw her over the lean shoulders of the
+spinster, and, forgetting all differences of condition and questions
+of authority, rushed to her with a cry of maternal tenderness, and,
+with a tempest of passionate tears and kisses, bore her off to her
+own humble realm, where the little victorious martyr was fed from the
+best stores of the house, until there was as much danger from
+repletion as there had been from famine.  How the experiment might
+have ended but for this empirical and most unphilosophical
+interference, there is no saying; but it settled the point that the
+rebellious nature was not to be subjugated in a brief conflict.
+
+The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities as
+she grew older.  At the age of four years she was detected in making
+a cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time, and, on being
+reprimanded for so doing, laughed out loud, so as to be heard by
+Father Pemberton, who thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows
+upon the child, and, to his shame be it spoken, had such a sudden
+uprising of weak, foolish, grandfatherly feelings, that a mist came
+over his eyes, and he left out his "ninthly" altogether, thereby
+spoiling the logical sequence of propositions which had kept his
+large forehead knotty for a week.
+
+At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored picture of
+Major Gideon Withers in the crimson sash and the red feather of his
+exalted military office.  It was then for the first time that her
+aunt Silence remarked a shade of resemblance between the child and
+the portrait.  She had always, up to this time, been dressed in sad
+colors, as was fitting, doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but
+happening one day to see a small negro girl peacocking round in a
+flaming scarlet petticoat, she struck for bright colors in her own
+apparel, and carried her point at last.  It was as if a ground-
+sparrow had changed her gray feathers for the burning plumage of some
+tropical wanderer; and it was natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth
+should have called her the fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the
+fire-hang-bird's nest,--using the country boy's synonyme for the
+Baltimore oriole.
+
+At ten years old she had one of those great experiences which give
+new meaning to the life of a child.
+
+Her uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking for her at one
+time, but of late years his delusions had gained upon him, and under
+their influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an
+extravagance.  He was growing more and more solitary in his habits,
+more and more negligent of his appearance.  He was up late at night,
+wandering about the house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his
+light being seen flitting from window to window, the story got about
+that the old house was haunted.
+
+One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the
+house.  Her uncle had been gone since the day before.  The two women
+were both away at the village.  At such times the child took a
+strange delight in exploring all the hiding-places of the old
+mansion.  She had the mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the
+dead and the living all to herself.  What a fearful kind of pleasure
+in its silence and loneliness!  The old clock that Marmaduke Storr
+made in London more than a hundred years ago was clicking the steady
+pulse-beats of its second century.  The featured moon on its dial had
+lifted one eye, as if to watch the child, as it had watched so many
+generations of children, while the swinging pendulum ticked them
+along into youth, maturity, gray hairs, deathbeds,--ticking through
+the prayer at the funeral, ticking without grief through all the
+still or noisy woe of mourning,--ticking without joy when the smiles
+and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.  She looked at
+herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.  She pulled
+aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads of the
+house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it, and
+the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline,
+like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by
+the chisel.
+
+She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
+punishment.  A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little
+higher than a man's head.  Something was hanging from it,--an old
+garment, was it?  She went bravely up and touched--a cold hand.  She
+did what most children of that age would do,--uttered a cry and ran
+downstairs with all her might.  She rushed out of the door and called
+to the man Patrick, who was doing some work about the place.  What
+could be done was done, but it was too late.
+
+Uncle Malachi had made away with himself.  That was plain on the face
+of thing.  In due time the coroner's verdict settled it.  It was not
+so strange as it seemed; but it made a great talk in the village and
+all the country round about.  Everybody knew he had money enough, and
+yet he had hanged himself for fear of starving to death.
+
+For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some years
+before, leaving his property to his sister Silence, with the
+exception of a certain moderate legacy to be paid in money to Myrtle
+Hazard when she should arrive at the age of twenty years.
+
+The household seemed more chilly than ever after this tragical event.
+Its depressing influence followed the child to school, where she
+learned the common branches of knowledge.  It followed her to the
+Sabbath-day catechisings, where she repeated the answers about the
+federal headship of Adam, and her consequent personal
+responsibilities, and other technicalities which are hardly milk for
+babes, perhaps as well as other children, but without any very
+profound remorse for what she could not help, so far as she
+understood the matter, any more than her sex or stature, and with no
+very clear comprehension of the phrases which the New England
+followers of the Westminster divines made a part of the elementary
+instruction of young people.
+
+At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly enough to attract
+the eyes of the youth and older boys, several of whom made advances
+towards her acquaintance.  But the dreary discipline of the household
+had sunk into her soul, and she had been shaping an internal life for
+herself, which it was hard for friendship to penetrate.  Bathsheba
+Stoker was chained to the bedside of an invalid mother.  Olive
+Eveleth, a kind, true-hearted girl, belonged to another religious
+communion; and this tended to render their meetings less frequent,
+though Olive was still her nearest friend.  Cyprian was himself a
+little shy, and rather held to Myrtle through his sister than by any
+true intimacy directly with herself.  Of the other young men of the
+village Gifted Hopkins was perhaps the most fervent of her admirers,
+as he had repeatedly shown by effusions in verse, of which, under the
+thinnest of disguises, she was the object.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw, ten years older than herself, a young man of
+striking aspect and claims to exceptional ability, had kept his eye
+on her of late; but it was generally supposed that he would find a
+wife in the city, where he was in the habit of going to visit a
+fashionable relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.
+She, at any rate, understood very well that he meant, to use his own
+phrase, "to go in for a corner lot,"--understanding thereby a young
+lady with possessions and without encumbrances.  If the old man had
+only given his money to Myrtle, William Murray Bradshaw would have
+made sure of her; but she was not likely ever to get much of it.
+Miss Silence Withers, it was understood, would probably leave her
+money as the Rev. Mr. Stoker, her spiritual director, should
+indicate, and it seemed likely that most of it would go to a rising
+educational institution where certain given doctrines were to be
+taught through all time, whether disproved or not, and whether those
+who taught them believed them or not, provided only they would say
+they believed them.
+
+Nobody had promised to say masses for her soul if she made this
+disposition of her property, or pledged the word of the Church that
+she should have plenary absolution.  But she felt that she would be
+making friends in Influential Quarters by thus laying up her
+treasure, and that she would be safe if she had the good-will of the
+ministers of her sect.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had nearly reached the age of fourteen, and, though not
+like to inherit much of the family property, was fast growing into a
+large dower of hereditary beauty.  Always handsome, her features
+shaped themselves in a finer symmetry, her color grew richer, her
+figure promised a perfect womanly development, and her movements had
+the grace which high-breeding gives the daughter of a queen, and
+which Nature now and then teaches the humblest of village maidens.
+She could not long escape the notice of the lovers and flatterers of
+beauty, and the time of danger was drawing near.
+
+At this period of her life she made two discoveries which changed the
+whole course of her thoughts, and opened for her a new world of ideas
+and possibilities.
+
+Ever since the dreadful event of November, 1854, the garret had been
+a fearful place to think of, and still more to visit.  The stories
+that the house was haunted gained in frequency of repetition and
+detail of circumstance.  But Myrtle was bold and inquisitive, and
+explored its recesses at such times as she could creep among them
+undisturbed.  Hid away close under the eaves she found an old trunk
+covered with dust and cobwebs.  The mice had gnawed through its
+leather hinges, and, as it had been hastily stuffed full, the cover
+had risen, and two or three volumes had fallen to the floor.  This
+trunk held the papers and books which her great-grandmother, the
+famous beauty, had left behind her, records of the romantic days when
+she was the belle of the county,--storybooks, memoirs, novels, and
+poems, and not a few love-letters,--a strange collection, which, as
+so often happens with such deposits in old families, nobody had cared
+to meddle with, and nobody had been willing to destroy, until at last
+they had passed out of mind, and waited for a new generation to bring
+them into light again.
+
+The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin.  Under one of the
+boards which formed the imperfect flooring of the garret was hidden
+an old leather mitten.  Instead of a hand, it had a fat fist of
+silver dollars, and a thumb of gold half-eagles.
+
+Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple and secluded
+maiden.  The books were hers to read as much as any other's; the gold
+and silver were only a part of that small provision which would be
+hers by and by, and if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself.
+The tree of the knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into
+her lap, and, without any serpent to tempt her, she took thereof and
+did eat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M.
+
+The old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his outside
+presentment as one will find among five hundred college alumni as
+they file in procession.  His strong, squared features, his
+formidable scowl, his solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his
+positive and as it were categorical stride, his slow, precise way of
+putting a statement, the strange union of trampling radicalism in
+some directions and high-stepping conservatism in others, which made
+it impossible to calculate on his unexpressed opinions, his testy
+ways and his generous impulses, his hard judgments and kindly
+actions, were characteristics that gave him a very decided
+individuality.
+
+He had all the aspects of a man of books.  His study, which was the
+best room in Mrs. Hopkins's house, was filled with a miscellaneous-
+looking collection of volumes, which his curious literary taste had
+got together from the shelves of all the libraries that had been
+broken up during his long life as a scholar.  Classics, theology,
+especially of the controversial sort, statistics, politics, law,
+medicine, science, occult and overt, general literature,--almost
+every branch of knowledge was represented.  His learning was very
+various, and of course mixed up, useful and useless, new and ancient,
+dogmatic and rational,--like his library, in short; for a library
+gathered like his is a looking-glass in which the owner's mind is
+reflected.
+
+The common people about the village did not know what to make of such
+a phenomenon.  He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the
+ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry
+cases into court for quarrelsome neighbors.  What was he good for?
+Not a great deal, some of the wiseacres thought,--had "all sorts of
+sense but common sense,"--"smart mahn, but not prahctical."  There
+were others who read him more shrewdly.  He knowed more, they said,
+than all the ministers put together, and if he'd stan' for
+Ripresentative they 'd like to vote for him,--they hed n't hed a
+smart mahn in the Gineral Court sence Squire Wibird was thar.
+
+They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with
+that of all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real
+scholar in his special line of study,--as all D. D.'s are supposed to
+be, or they would not have been honored with that distinguished
+title.  But Mr. Byles Gridley not only had more learning than the
+deep-sea line of the bucolic intelligence could fathom; he had more
+wisdom also than they gave him credit for, even those among them who
+thought most of his abilities.
+
+In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against
+those of the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a
+reputation as "Master" Gridley, that he kept that title even after he
+had become a college tutor and professor.  As a tutor he had to deal
+with many of these same boys, and others like them, in the still more
+vivacious period of their early college life.  He got rid of his
+police duties when he became a professor, but he still studied the
+pupils as carefully as he used once to watch them, and learned to
+read character with a skill which might have fitted him for governing
+men instead of adolescents.  But he loved quiet and he dreaded
+mingling with the brawlers of the market-place, whose stock in trade
+is a voice and a vocabulary.  So it was that he had passed his life
+in the patient mechanical labor of instruction, leaving too many of
+his instincts and faculties in abeyance.
+
+The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to
+worldly wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed,
+than it does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as
+their blood grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with
+anything more practical than a gerund or a cosine.  Master Gridley
+not only knew a good deal of human nature, but he knew how to keep
+his knowledge to himself upon occasion.  He understood singularly
+well the ways and tendencies of young people.  He was shrewd in the
+detection of trickery, and very confident in those who had once
+passed the ordeal of his well-schooled observing powers.  He had no
+particular tendency to meddle with the personal relations of those
+about him; but if they were forced upon him in any way, he was like
+to see into them at least as quickly as any of his neighbors who
+thought themselves most endowed with practical skill.
+
+In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said
+a little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out
+to pasture.  He felt that he had separated himself from human
+interests, and was henceforth to live in his books with the dead,
+until he should be numbered with them himself.  He had chosen this
+quiet village as a place where he might pass his days undisturbed,
+and find a peaceful resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel
+was dry, and the sun lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would
+spread their many-colored counterpane over the bed where he would be
+taking his rest.  It sometimes came over him painfully that he was
+never more to be of any importance to his fellow-creatures.  There
+was nobody living to whom he was connected by any very near ties.  He
+felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose house he lived; he
+sometimes gave a few words of counsel to her son; he was not
+unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed with great
+consideration to the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with no small
+interest the physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose
+sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a nostril
+dilating with ominous intensity of meaning.  But he said sadly to
+himself, that his life had been a failure,--that he had nothing to
+show for it, and his one talent was ready in its napkin to give back
+to his Lord.
+
+He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many
+would hold of small significance.  Though he had mourned for no lost
+love, at least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the
+pang of parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those
+joys and griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his
+private urn filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes.  He was the
+father of a dead book.
+
+Why "Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.," had not met
+with an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating
+public, it would take us too long to inquire in detail.  Indeed; he
+himself was never able to account satisfactorily for the state of
+things which his bookseller's account made evident to him.  He had
+read and re-read his work; and the more familiar he became with it,
+the less was he able to understand the singular want of popular
+appreciation of what he could not help recognizing as its
+excellences.  He had a special copy of his work, printed on large
+paper and sumptuously bound.  He loved to read in this, as people
+read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and it
+might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the
+ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have been
+heard.  "That's a thought, now, for you!--See Mr. Thomas Babington
+Macaulay's Essay printed six years after thus book."  "A felicitous
+image! and so everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle
+had hit upon it."  "If this is not genuine pathos, where will you
+find it, I should like to know?  And nobody to open the book where it
+stands written but one poor old man--in this generation, at least--in
+this generation!"  It may be doubted whether he would ever have loved
+his book with such jealous fondness if it had gone through a dozen
+editions, and everybody was quoting it to his face.  But now it lived
+only for him; and to him it was wife and child, parent, friend, all
+in one, as Hector was all in all to his spouse.  He never tired of
+it, and in his more sanguine moods he looked forward to the time when
+the world would acknowledge its merits, and his genius would find
+full recognition.  Perhaps he was right: more than one book which
+seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers has had a
+resurrection when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only in the
+tombstone memory of antiquaries.  Comfort for some of us, dear
+fellow-writer
+
+It followed from the way in which he lived that he must have some
+means of support upon which he could depend.  He was economical, if
+not over frugal in some of his habits; but he bought books, and took
+newspapers and reviews, and had money when money was needed; the fact
+being, though it was not generally known, that a distant relative had
+not long before died, leaving him a very comfortable property.
+
+His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings with the
+late legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow, which had naturally passed
+into the hands of the new partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw.  He
+had entire confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the
+young man who had been recently associated in the business.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, commonly called by his last two names,
+was the son of a lawyer of some note for his acuteness, who marked
+out his calling for him in having him named after the great Lord
+Mansfield.  Murray Bradshaw was about twenty-five years old, by
+common consent good-looking, with a finely formed head, a searching
+eye, and a sharp-cut mouth, which smiled at his bidding without the
+slightest reference to the real condition of his feeling at the
+moment.  This was a great convenience; for it gave him an appearance
+of good-nature at the small expense of a slight muscular movement
+which was as easy as winking, and deceived everybody but those who
+had studied him long and carefully enough to find that this play of
+his features was what a watch maker would call a detached movement.
+
+He had been a good scholar in college, not so much by hard study as
+by skilful veneering, and had taken great pains to stand well with
+the Faculty, at least one of whom, Byles Gridley, A. M., had watched
+him with no little interest as a man with a promising future,
+provided he were not so astute as to outwit and overreach himself in
+his excess of contrivance.  His classmates could not help liking him;
+as to loving him, none of them would have thought of that.  He was so
+shrewd, so keen, so full of practical sense, and so good-humored as
+long as things went on to his liking, that few could resist his
+fascination.  He had a way of talking with people about what they
+were interested in, as if it were the one matter in the world nearest
+to his heart.  But he was commonly trying to find out something, or
+to produce some impression, as a juggler is working at his miracle
+while he keeps people's attention by his voluble discourse and make-
+believe movements.  In his lightest talk he was almost always edging
+towards a practical object, and it was an interesting and instructive
+amusement to watch for the moment at which he would ship the belt of
+his colloquial machinery on to the tight pulley.  It was done so
+easily and naturally that there was hardly a sign of it.  Master
+Gridley could usually detect the shifting action, but the young man's
+features and voice never betrayed him.
+
+He was a favorite with the other sex, who love poetry and romance, as
+he well knew, for which reason he often used the phrases of both, and
+in such a way as to answer his purpose with most of those whom he
+wished to please.  He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of
+life: he was not handicapped with any burdensome ideals.  He took
+everything at its marked value.  He accepted the standard of the
+street as a final fact for to-day, like the broker's list of prices.
+
+His whole plan of life was laid out.  He knew that law was the best
+introduction to political life, and he meant to use it for this end.
+He chose to begin his career in the country, so as to feel his way
+more surely and gradually to its ultimate aim; but he had no
+intention of burning his shining talents in a grazing district,
+however tall its grass might grow.  His business was not with these
+stiff-jointed, slow-witted graziers, but with the supple, dangerous,
+far-seeing men who sit scheming by the gas-light in the great cities,
+after all the lamps and candles are out from the Merrimac to the
+Housatonic.  Every strong and every weak point of those who might
+probably be his rivals were laid down on his charts, as winds and
+currents and rocks are marked on those of a navigator.  All the young
+girls in the country, and not a few in the city, with which, as
+mentioned, he had frequent relations, were on his list of possible
+availabilities in the matrimonial line of speculation, provided
+always that their position and prospects were such as would make them
+proper matches for so considerable a person as the future Hon.
+William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Master Gridley had made a careful study of his old pupil since they
+had resided in the same village.  The old professor could not help
+admiring him, notwithstanding certain suspicious elements in his
+character; for after muddy village talk, a clear stream of
+intelligent conversation was a great luxury to the hard-headed
+scholar.  The more he saw of him, the more he learned to watch his
+movements, and to be on his guard in talking with him.  The old man
+could be crafty, with all his simplicity, and he had found out that
+under his good-natured manner there often lurked some design more or
+less worth noting, and which might involve other interests deserving
+protection.
+
+For some reason or other the old Master of Arts had of late
+experienced a certain degree of relenting with regard to himself,
+probably brought about by the expressions of gratitude from worthy
+Mrs. Hopkins for acts of kindness to which he himself attached no
+great value.  He had been kind to her son Gifted; he had been
+fatherly with Susan Posey, her relative and boarder; and he had shown
+himself singularly and unexpectedly amiable with the little twins who
+had been adopted by the good woman into her household.  In fact, ever
+since these little creatures had begun to toddle about and explode
+their first consonants, he had looked through his great round
+spectacles upon them with a decided interest; and from that time it
+seemed as if some of the human and social sentiments which had never
+leafed or flowered in him, for want of their natural sunshine, had
+begun growing up from roots which had never lost their life.  His
+liking for the twins may have been an illustration of that singular
+law which old Dr. Hurlbut used to lay down, namely, that at a certain
+period of life, say from fifty to sixty and upward, the grand-
+paternal instinct awakens in bachelors, the rhythms of Nature
+reaching them in spite of her defeated intentions; so that when men
+marry late they love their autumn child with a twofold affection,
+--father's and grandfather's both in one.
+
+However this may be, there is no doubt that Mr. Byles Gridley was
+beginning to take a part in his neighbors' welfare and misfortunes,
+such as could hardly have been expected of a man so long lost in his
+books and his scholastic duties.  And among others, Myrtle Hazard had
+come in for a share of his interest.  He had met her now and then in
+her walks to and from school and meeting, and had been taken with her
+beauty and her apparent unconsciousness of it, which he attributed to
+the forlorn kind of household in which she had grown up.  He had got
+so far as to talk with her now and then, and found himself puzzled,
+as well he might be, in talking with a girl who had been growing into
+her early maturity in antagonism with every influence that surrounded
+her.
+
+"Love will reach her by and by," he said, "in spite of the dragons up
+at the den yonder.
+
+    'Centum fronte oculos, centum cervice gerebat
+     Argus, et hos unus saepe fefellit amor.'"
+
+But there was something about Myrtle,--he hardly knew whether to call
+it dignity, or pride, or reserve, or the mere habit of holding back
+brought about by the system of repression under which she had been
+educated,--which kept even the old Master of Arts at his distance.
+Yet he was strongly drawn to her, and had a sort of presentiment that
+he might be able to help her some day, and that very probably she
+would want his help; for she was alone in the world, except for the
+dragons, and sure to be assailed by foes from without and from
+within.
+
+He noticed that her name was apt to come up in his conversations with
+Murray Bradshaw; and, as he himself never introduced it, of course
+the young man must have forced it, as conjurers force a card, and
+with some special object.  This set him thinking hard; and, as a
+result of it, he determined the next time Mr. Bradshaw brought her
+name up to set him talking.
+
+So he talked, not suspecting how carefully the old man listened.
+
+"It was a demonish hard case," he said, "that old Malachi had left
+his money as he did.  Myrtle Hazard was going to be the handsomest
+girl about, when she came to her beauty, and she was coming to it
+mighty fast.  If they could only break that will, but it was no use
+trying.  The doctors said he was of sound mind for at least two years
+after making it.  If Silence Withers got the land claim, there'd be a
+pile, sure enough.  Myrtle Hazard ought to have it.  If the girl had
+only inherited that property--whew?  She'd have been a match for any
+fellow.  That old Silence Withers would do just as her minister told
+her,--even chance whether she gives it to the Parson-factory, or
+marries Bellamy Stoker, and gives it to him after his wife's dead.
+He'd take it if he had to take her with it.  Earn his money, hey,
+Master Gridley?"
+
+"Why, you don't seem to think very well of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker?" said Mr. Gridley, smiling.
+
+"Think well of him?  Too fond of using the Devil's pitchfork for my
+fancy!  Forks over pretty much all the world but himself and his lot
+into--the bad place, you know; and toasts his own cheese with it with
+very much the same kind of comfort that other folks seem to take in
+that business.  Besides, he has a weakness for pretty saints--and
+sinners.  That's an odd name he has.  More belle amie than Joseph
+about him, I rather guess!"
+
+The old professor smiled again.  "So you don't think he believes all
+the mediaeval doctrines he is in the habit of preaching, Mr.
+Bradshaw?"
+
+"No, sir; I think he belongs to the class I have seen described
+somewhere.  'There are those who hold the opinion that truth is only
+safe when diluted,--about one fifth to four fifths lies,--as the
+oxygen of the air is with its nitrogen.  Else it would burn us all
+up.'"
+
+Byles Gridley colored and started a little.  This was one of his own
+sayings in "Thoughts on the Universe."  But the young man quoted it
+without seeming to suspect its authorship.
+
+"Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+"I don't remember.  Some paper, I rather think.  It's one of those
+good things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em.
+Sounds like Coleridge."
+
+"That's what I call a compliment worth having," said Byles Gridley to
+himself, when he got home.  "Let me look at that passage."
+
+He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and got so much interested,
+reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell,
+and Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down
+to tea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE TWINS.
+
+Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that
+tea was waiting.  He rather liked Susan Posey.  She was a pretty
+creature, slight, blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the
+second or third grade, effective at picnics and by moonlight,--the
+kind of girl that very young men are apt to remember as their first
+love.  She had a taste for poetry, and an admiration of poets; but,
+what was better, she was modest and simple, and a perfect sister and
+mother and grandmother to the two little forlorn twins who had been
+stranded on the Widow Hopkins's doorstep.
+
+These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three
+years old.  A few words will make us acquainted with them.  Nothing
+had ever been known of their origin.  The sharp eyes of all the
+spinsters had been through every household in the village and
+neighborhood, and not a suspicion fixed itself on any one.  It was a
+dark night when they were left; and it was probable that they had
+been brought from another town, as the sound of wheels had been heard
+close to the door where they were found, had stopped for a moment,
+then been heard again, and lost in the distance.
+
+How the good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been
+briefly mentioned.  At first nobody thought they would live a day,
+such little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem.  But the young
+doctor came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in
+cotton-wool, and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-
+teaspoonfuls of milk given them, and after being kept alive in this
+way, like the young of opossums and kangaroos, they came to a
+conclusion about which they did not seem to have made up their
+thinking-pulps for some weeks, namely, to go on trying to cross the
+sea of life by tugging at the four-and-twenty oars which must be
+pulled day and night until the unknown shore is reached, and the oars
+lie at rest under the folded hands.
+
+As it was not very likely that the parents who left their offspring
+round on doorsteps were of saintly life, they were not presented for
+baptism like the children of church-members.  Still, they must have
+names to be known by, and Mrs. Hopkins was much exercised in the
+matter.  Like many New England parents, she had a decided taste for
+names that were significant and sonorous.  That which she had chosen
+for her oldest child, the young poet, was either a remarkable
+prophecy, or it had brought with it the endowments it promised.  She
+had lost, or, in her own more pictorial language, she had buried, a
+daughter to whom she had given the names, at once of cheerful omen
+and melodious effect, Wealthy Amadora.
+
+As for them poor little creturs, she said, she believed they was
+rained down out o' the skies, jest as they say toads and tadpoles
+come.  She meant to be a mother to 'em for all that, and give 'em
+jest as good names as if they was the governor's children, or the
+minister's.  If Mr. Gridley would be so good as to find her some kind
+of a real handsome Chris'n name for 'em, she'd provide 'em with the
+other one.  Hopkinses they shall be bred and taught, and Hopkinses
+they shall be called.  Ef their father and mother was ashamed to own
+'em, she was n't.  Couldn't Mr. Gridley pick out some pooty sounding
+names from some of them great books of his.  It's jest as well to
+have 'em pooty as long as they don't cost any more than if they was
+Tom and Sally.
+
+A grim smile passed over the rugged features of Byles Gridley.
+"Nothing is easier than that, Mrs. Hopkins," he said.  "I will give
+you two very pretty names that I think will please you and other
+folks.  They're new names, too.  If they shouldn't like to keep them,
+they can change them before they're christened, if they ever are.
+Isosceles will be just the name for the boy, and I'm sure you won't
+find a prettier name for the girl in a hurry than Helminthia."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was delighted with the dignity and novelty of these two
+names, which were forthwith adopted.  As they were rather long for
+common use in the family, they were shortened into the easier forms
+of Sossy and Minthy, under which designation the babes began very
+soon to thrive mightily, turning bread and milk into the substance of
+little sinners at a great rate, and growing as if they were put out
+at compound interest.
+
+This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles
+Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by
+Miss Susan Posey.
+
+"I am coming, my dear," he said,--which expression quite touched Miss
+Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from
+the delicious page he was reading.  It was not the living child that
+was kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a
+trivial use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.
+
+Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his
+eye was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of
+papers.  Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him.
+Could that be a copy of "Thoughts on the Universe"?  He watched his
+opportunity, and got a hurried sight of the volume.  His own
+treatise, sure enough!  Leaves Uncut.  Opened of itself to the one
+hundred and twentieth page.  The axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted--he
+did not remember from what,--"sounded like Coleridge"--was staring
+him in the face from that very page.  When he remembered how he had
+pleased himself with that compliment the other day, he blushed like a
+school-girl; and then, thinking out the whole trick,--to hunt up his
+forgotten book, pick out a phrase or two from it, and play on his
+weakness with it, to win his good opinion,--for what purpose he did
+not know, but doubtless to use him in some way,--he grinned with a
+contempt about equally divided between himself and the young schemer.
+
+"Ah ha!" he muttered scornfully.  "Sounds like Coleridge, hey?
+Niccolo Macchiavelli Bradshaw!"
+
+>From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with
+even more suspicion than before.  Yet he would not forego his company
+and conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and
+this trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way
+of flattering his brother plenipotentiary.  Who could say?  Some time
+or other he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty
+with just such a trick.  Shallower men than he had gone out as
+ministers of the great Republic.  At any rate, the fellow was worth
+watching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE USE OF SPECTACLES.
+
+The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he
+lived for knowing everything that was going on.  He rather enjoyed
+it; and sometimes amused himself with surprising his simple-hearted
+landlady and her boarders with the unaccountable results of his
+sagacity.  One thing was quite beyond her comprehension.  She was
+perfectly sure that Mr. Gridley could see out of the back of his
+head, just as other people see with their natural organs.  Time and
+again he had told her what she was doing when his back was turned to
+her, just as if he had been sitting squarely in front of her.  Some
+laughed at this foolish notion; but others, who knew more of the
+nebulous sciences, told her it was like's not jes' so.  Folks had
+read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their stomachs, 'n' why should
+n't they see out o' the backs o' their heads?
+
+Now there was a certain fact at the bottom of this belief of Mrs.
+Hopkins; and as it world be a very small thing to make a mystery of
+so simple a matter, the reader shall have the whole benefit of
+knowing all there is in it,--not quite yet, however, of knowing all
+that came of it.  It was not the mirror trick, of course, which Mrs.
+Felix Lorraine and other dangerous historical personages have so long
+made use of.  It was nothing but this: Mr. Byles Gridley wore a pair
+of formidable spectacles with large round glasses.  He had often
+noticed the reflection of objects behind him when they caught their
+images at certain angles, and had got the habit of very often looking
+at the reflecting surface of one or the other of the glasses, when he
+seemed to be looking through them.  It put a singular power into his
+possession, which might possibly hereafter lead to something more
+significant than the mystification of the Widow Hopkins.
+
+A short time before Myrtle Hazard's disappearance, Mr. Byles Gridley
+had occasion to call again at the office of Penhallow and Bradshaw on
+some small matter of business of his own.  There were papers to look
+over, and he put on his great round-glassed spectacles.  He and Mr.
+Penhallow sat down at the table, and Mr. Bradshaw was at a desk
+behind them.  After sitting for a while, Mr. Penhallow seemed to
+remember something he had meant to attend to, for he said all at
+once: "Excuse me, Mr. Gridley.  Mr. Bradshaw, if you are not busy, I
+wish you would look over this bundle of papers.  They look like old
+receipted bills and memoranda of no particular use; but they came
+from the garret of the Withers place, and might possibly have
+something that would be of value.  Look them over, will you, and see
+whether there is anything there worth saving."
+
+The young man took the papers, and Mr. Penhallow sat down again at
+the table with Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+This last-named gentleman felt just then a strong impulse to observe
+the operations of Murray Bradshaw.  He could not have given any very
+good reason for it, any more than any of us can for half of what we
+do.
+
+"I should like to examine that conveyance we were speaking of once
+more," said he.  "Please to look at this one in the mean time, will
+you, Mr. Penhallow?"
+
+Master Gridley held the document up before him.  He did not seem to
+find it quite legible, and adjusted his spectacles carefully, until
+they were just as he wanted them.  When he had got them to suit
+himself, sitting there with his back to Murray Bradshaw, he could see
+him and all his movements, the desk at which he was standing, and the
+books in the shelves before him,--all this time appearing as if he
+were intent upon his own reading.
+
+The young man began in a rather indifferent way to look over the
+papers.  He loosened the band round them, and took them up one by
+one, gave a careless glance at them, and laid them together to tie up
+again when he had gone through them.  Master Gridley saw all this
+process, thinking what a fool he was all the time to be watching such
+a simple proceeding.  Presently he noticed a more sudden movement:
+the young man had found something which arrested his attention, and
+turned his head to see if he was observed.  The senior partner and
+his client were both apparently deep in their own affairs.  In his
+hand Mr. Bradshaw held a paper folded like the others, the back of
+which he read, holding it in such a way that Master Gridley saw very
+distinctly three large spots of ink upon it, and noticed their
+position.  Murray Bradshaw took another hurried glance at the two
+gentlemen, and then quickly opened the paper.  He ran it over with a
+flash of his eye, folded it again, and laid it by itself.  With
+another quick turn of his head, as if to see whether he were observed
+or like to be, he reached his hand out and took a volume down from
+the shelves.  In this volume he shut the document, whatever it was,
+which he had just taken out of the bundle, and placed the book in a
+very silent and as it were stealthy way back in its place.  He then
+gave a look at each of the other papers, and said to his partner:
+"Old bills, old leases, and insurance policies that have run out.
+Malachi seems to have kept every scrap of paper that had a signature
+to it."
+
+"That 's the way with the old misers, always," said Mr. Penhallow.
+
+Byles Gridley had got through reading the document he held,--or
+pretending to read it.  He took off his spectacles.
+
+"We all grow timid and cautious as we get old, Mr. Penhallow."  Then
+turning round to the young man, he slowly repeated the lines,
+
+   "'Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
+     Quaerit et inventis miser abstinet, ac timet uti;
+     Vel quod res omnes timide, gelideque ministrat '
+
+You remember the passage, Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+While he was reciting these words from Horace, which he spoke slowly
+as if he relished every syllable, he kept his eyes on the young man
+steadily, but with out betraying any suspicion.  His old habits as a
+teacher made that easy.
+
+Murray Bradshaw's face was calm as usual, but there was a flush on
+his cheek, and Master Gridley saw the slight but unequivocal signs of
+excitement.
+
+"Something is going on inside there," the old man said to himself.
+He waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw
+got up and left the office.  As soon as he and the senior partner
+were alone, Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in
+his library.  There stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus
+Juris Civilis,--the fine Elzevir edition of 1664.  It was bound in
+parchment, and thus readily distinguishable at a glance from all the
+books round it.  Now Mr. Penhallow was not much of a Latin scholar,
+and knew and cared very little about the civil law.  He had fallen in
+with this book at an auction, and bought it to place in his shelves
+with the other "properties" of the office, because it would look
+respectable.  Anything shut up in one of those two octavos might stay
+there a lifetime without Mr. Penhallow's disturbing it; that Master
+Gridley knew, and of course the young man knew it too.
+
+We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in
+the lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the
+knight's zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to
+ourselves we are not after the thing coveted.  Put a lump of sugar in
+a canary-bird's cage, and the small creature will illustrate the
+instinct for the benefit of inquirers or sceptics.  Byles Gridley
+went to the other side of the room and took a volume of Reports from
+the shelves.  He put it back and took a copy of "Fearne on Contingent
+Remainders," and looked at that for a moment in an idling way, as if
+from a sense of having nothing to do.  Then he drew the back of his
+forefinger along the books on the shelf, as if nothing interested him
+in them, and strolled to the shelf in front of the desk at which
+Murray Bradshaw had stood.  He took down the second volume of the
+Corpus Juris Civilis, turned the leaves over mechanically, as if in
+search of some title, and replaced it.
+
+He looked round for a moment.  Mr. Penhallow was writing hard at his
+table, not thinking of him, it was plain enough.  He laid his hand on
+the FIRST volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis.  There was a document
+shut up in it.  His hand was on the book, whether taking it out or
+putting it back was not evident, when the door opened and Mr. William
+Murray Bradshaw entered.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Gridley," he said, "you are not studying the civil law, are
+you?"  He strode towards him as he spoke, his face white, his eyes
+fixed fiercely on him.
+
+"It always interests me, Mr. Bradshaw," he answered, "and this is a
+fine edition of it.  One may find a great many valuable things in the
+Corpus Juris Civilis."
+
+He looked impenetrable, and whether or not he had seen more than Mr.
+Bradshaw wished him to see, that gentleman could not tell.  But there
+stood the two books in their place, and when, after Master Gridley
+had gone, he looked in the first volume, there was the document he
+had shut up in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MYRTLE'S LETTER--THE YOUNG MEN'S PURSUIT.
+
+"You know all about it, Olive?" Cyprian Eveleth said to his sister,
+after a brief word of greeting.
+
+"Know of what, Cyprian?"
+
+"Why, sister, don't you know that Myrtle Hazard is missing,--gone!
+--gone nobody knows where, and that we are looking in all directions
+to find her?"
+
+Olive turned very pale and was silent for a moment.  At the end of
+that moment the story seemed almost old to her.  It was a natural
+ending of the prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her
+earliest years.  When she got large and strong enough, she broke out
+of jail,--that was all.  The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or
+later, whether it is a wooden or an iron one.  Olive felt as if she
+had dimly foreseen just such a finishing to the tragedy of the poor
+girl's home bringing-up.  Why could not she have done something to
+prevent it?  Well,--what shall we do now, and as it is?--that is the
+question.
+
+"Has she left no letter,--no explanation of her leaving in this way?"
+
+"Not a word, so far as anybody in the village knows."
+
+"Come over to the post-office with me; perhaps we may find a letter.
+I think we shall."
+
+Olive's sagacity and knowledge of her friend's character had not
+misled her.  She found a letter from Myrtle to herself, which she
+opened and read as here follows:
+
+MY DEAREST OLIVE:--Think no evil of me for what I have done.  The
+fire-hang-bird's nest, as Cyprian called it, is empty, and the poor
+bird is flown.
+
+I can live as I have lived no longer.  This place is chilling all the
+life out of me, and I must find another home.  It is far, far away,
+and you will not hear from me again until I am there.  Then I will
+write to you.
+
+You know where I was born,--under a hot sun and in the midst of
+strange, lovely scenes that I seem still to remember.  I must visit
+them again: my heart always yearns for them.  And I must cross the
+sea to get there,--the beautiful great sea that I have always longed
+for and that my river has been whispering about to me ever so many
+years.  My life is pinched and starved here.  I feel as old as aunt
+Silence, and I am only fifteen,--a child she has called me within a
+few days.  If this is to be a child, what is it to be a woman?
+
+I love you dearly,--and your brother is almost to me as if he were
+mine.  I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,--yes, and the old man
+that has spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to
+give you pain,--to leave you all,--but my way of life is killing me,
+and I am too young to die.  I cannot take the comfort with you, my
+dear friends, that I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of
+ice in my heart, and all the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.
+
+I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive.  Do you
+remember how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to
+flee into Egypt?  I have had a dream like that, Olive.  There is an
+old belief in our family that the spirit of one who died many
+generations ago watches over some of her descendants.  They say it
+led our first ancestor to come over here when it was a wilderness.  I
+believe it has appeared to others of the family in times of trouble.
+I have had a strange dream at any rate, and the one I saw, or thought
+I saw, told me to leave this place.  Perhaps I should have stayed if
+it had not been for that, but it seemed like an angel's warning.
+
+Nobody will know how I have gone, or which way I have taken.  On
+Monday, you may show this letter to my friends, not before.  I do not
+think they will be in danger of breaking their hearts for me at our
+house.  Aunt Silence cares for nothing but her own soul, and the
+other woman hates me, I always thought.  Kitty Fagan will cry hard.
+Tell her perhaps I shall come back by and by.  There is a little box
+in my room, with some keepsakes marked,--one is for poor Kitty.  You
+can give them to the right ones.  Yours is with them.
+
+Good-by, dearest.  Keep my secret, as I told you, till Monday.  And
+if you never see me again, remember how much I loved you.  Never
+think hardly of me, for you have grown up in a happy home, and do not
+know how much misery can be crowded into fifteen years of a young
+girl's life.  God be with you!
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+Olive could not restrain her tears, as she handed the letter to
+Cyprian.  "Her secret is as safe with you as with me," she said.
+"But this is madness, Cyprian, and we must keep her from doing
+herself a wrong.
+
+What she means to do, is to get to Boston, in some way or other, and
+sail for India.  It is strange that they have not tracked her.  There
+is no time to be lost.  She shall not go out into the world in this
+way, child that she is.  No; she shall come back, and make her home
+with us, if she cannot be happy with these people.  Ours is a happy
+and a cheerful home, and she shall be to me as a younger sister, and
+your sister too, Cyprian.  But you must see her; you must leave this
+very hour; and you may find her.  Go to your cousin Edward, in
+Boston, at once; tell him your errand, and get him to help you find
+our poor dear sister.  Then give her the note I will write, and say I
+know your heart, Cyprian, and I can trust that to tell you what to
+say."
+
+In a very short time Cyprian Eveleth was on his way to Boston.  But
+another, keener even in pursuit than he, was there before him.
+
+Ever since the day when Master Gridley had made that over-curious
+observation of the young lawyer's proceedings at the office, Murray
+Bradshaw had shown a far livelier interest than before in the
+conditions and feelings of Myrtle Hazard.  He had called frequently
+at The Poplars to talk over business matters, which seemed of late to
+require a deal of talking.  He had been very deferential to Miss
+Silence, and had wound himself into the confidence of Miss Badlam.
+He found it harder to establish any very near relations with Myrtle,
+who had never seemed to care much for any young man but Cyprian
+Eveleth, and to care for him quite as much as Olive's brother as for
+any personal reason.  But he carefully studied Myrtle's tastes and
+ways of thinking and of life, so that, by and by, when she should
+look upon herself as a young woman, and not as a girl, he would have
+a great advantage in making her more intimate acquaintance.
+
+Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother's in India.  She
+talked at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes
+which might well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions.  She made
+herself a rude hammock,--such as are often used in hot climates,--and
+swung it between two elms.  Here she would lie in the hot summer
+days, and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India
+had sent her,--the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw
+her into day-dreams, which were almost like trances.
+
+These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
+presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned
+for himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue
+and cry, and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away
+if he could help it.
+
+The first fact was this.  He found among the copies of the city
+newspaper they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a
+square had been cut out.  He procured another copy of this paper of
+the same date, and found that the piece cut out was an advertisement
+to the effect that the A 1 Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to
+sail from Boston for Calcutta, on the 20th of June.
+
+The second fact was the following.  On the window-sill of her little
+hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found
+some threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the
+wood.  They were Myrtle's of course.  A simpleton might have
+constructed a tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had
+cast herself from the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had
+been thrust out after a struggle, of which this shred from her
+tresses was the dreadful witness,--and so on.  Murray Bradshaw did
+not stop to guess and wonder.  He said nothing about it, but wound
+the shining threads on his finger, and, as soon as he got home,
+examined them with a magnifier.  They had been cut off smoothly, as
+with a pair of scissors.  This was part of a mass of hair, then,
+which had been shorn and thrown from the window.  Nobody would do
+that but she herself.  What would she do it for?  To disguise her
+sex, of course.  The other inferences were plain enough.
+
+The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, and
+concluded that be would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river,
+and scour the woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport
+town from which she would without doubt sail if she had formed the
+project he thought on the whole most probable.
+
+Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to
+catch the train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of
+the missing girl nearer home.  In the cars he made the most
+suggestive inquiries he could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly
+conductor's memory.  Had any young fellow been on the train within a
+day or two, who had attracted his notice?  Smooth, handsome face,
+black eyes, short black hair, new clothes, not fitting very well,
+looked away when he paid his fare, had a soft voice like a woman's,--
+had he seen anybody answering to some such description as this?  The
+gentlemanly conductor had not noticed,--was always taking up and
+setting down way-passengers,--might have had such a young man
+aboard,--there was two or three students one day in the car singing
+college songs,--he did n't care how folks looked if they had their
+tickets ready,--and minded their own business,--and, so saying, he
+poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was reclining
+with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
+provoke in lovely woman,--"Fare!"
+
+It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel,
+where they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby,
+with nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and
+anything but clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable
+and mean, and to undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in
+the office, who, while he shoves the book round to you for your name,
+is making a hasty calculation as to how high up he can venture to
+doom you.  But Murray Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more
+than made up for by the air and tone which imply the habit of being
+attended to.  The clerk saw that in a glance, and, as he looked at
+the name and address in the book, spoke sharply in the explosive
+dialect of his tribe,--
+
+"Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!"
+
+When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he
+appeared in his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable
+countenance and gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two
+stories higher, where he found himself in a room not much better than
+a garret, feeling lonely enough, for he did not know he had an
+acquaintance in the same house.  The two young men were in and out so
+irregularly that it was not very strange that they did not happen to
+meet each other.
+
+The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in
+the city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward.  He
+was not only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and
+its ways, and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian's motives,
+his own were of such intensity that he thought of nothing else by
+day, and dreamed of nothing else by night.  He went to work,
+therefore, in the most systematic manner.  He first visited the ship
+Swordfish, lying at her wharf, saw her captain, and satisfied himself
+that as yet nobody at all corresponding to the description of Myrtle
+Hazard had been seen by any person on board.  He visited all the
+wharves, inquiring on every vessel where it seemed possible she might
+have been looking about.  Hotels, thoroughfares, every place where he
+might hear of her or meet her, were all searched.  He took some of
+the police into his confidence, and had half a dozen pairs of eyes
+besides his own opened pretty widely, to discover the lost girl.
+
+On Sunday, the 19th, he got the first hint which encouraged him to
+think he was on the trail of his fugitive.  He had gone down again to
+the wharf where the Swordfish, advertised to sail the next day, was
+lying.  The captain was not on board, but one of the mates was there,
+and he addressed his questions to him, not with any great hope of
+hearing anything important, but determined to lose no chance, however
+small.  He was startled with a piece of information which gave him
+such an exquisite pang of delight that he could hardly keep the usual
+quiet of his demeanor.  A youth corresponding to his description of
+Myrtle Hazard in her probable disguise had been that morning on board
+the Swordfish, making many inquires as to the hour at which she was
+to sail, and who were to be the passengers, and remained some time on
+board, going all over the vessel, examining her cabin accommodations,
+and saying he should return to-morrow before she sailed,--doubtless
+intending to take passage in her, as there was plenty of room on
+board.  There could be little question, from the description, who
+this young person was.  It was a rather delicate--looking, dark--
+haired youth, smooth-faced, somewhat shy and bashful in his ways, and
+evidently excited and nervous.  He had apparently been to look about
+him, and would come back at the last moment, just as the vessel was
+ready to sail, and in an hour or two be beyond the reach of inquiry.
+
+Murray Bradshaw returned to his hotel, and, going to his chamber,
+summoned all his faculties in state council to determine what course
+he should follow, now that he had the object of his search certainly
+within reaching distance.  There was no danger now of her eluding
+him; but the grave question arose, what was he to do when he stood
+face to face with her.  She must not go,--that was fixed.  If she
+once got off in that ship, she might be safe enough; but what would
+become of certain projects in which he was interested,--that was the
+question.  But again, she was no child, to be turned away from her
+adventure by cajolery, or by any such threats as common truants would
+find sufficient to scare them back to their duty.  He could tell the
+facts of her disguise and the manner of her leaving home to the
+captain of the vessel, and induce him to send her ashore as a stray
+girl, to be returned to her relatives.  But this would only make her
+furious with him; and he must not alienate her from himself, at any
+rate.  He might plead with her in the name of duty, for the sake of
+her friends, for the good name of the family.  She had thought all
+these things over before she ran away.  What if he should address her
+as a lover, throw himself at her feet, implore her to pity him and
+give up her rash scheme, and, if things came to the very worst, offer
+to follow her wherever she went, if she would accept him in the only
+relation that would render it possible.  Fifteen years old,--he
+nearly ten years older,--but such things had happened before, and
+this was no time to stand on trifles.
+
+He worked out the hypothesis of the matrimonial offer as he would
+have reasoned out the probabilities in a law case he was undertaking.
+
+1.  He would rather risk that than lose all hold upon her.  The girl
+was handsome enough for his ambitious future, wherever it might carry
+him.  She came of an honorable family, and had the great advantage of
+being free from a tribe of disagreeable relatives, which is such a
+drawback on many otherwise eligible parties.  To these considerations
+were to be joined other circumstances which we need not here mention,
+of a nature to add greatly to their force, and which would go far of
+themselves to determine his action.
+
+2.  How was it likely she would look on such an extraordinary
+proposition?  At first, no doubt, as Lady Anne looked upon the
+advances of Richard.  She would be startled, perhaps shocked.  What
+then?  She could not help feeling flattered at such an offer from
+him,--him, William Murray Bradshaw, the rising young man of his
+county, at her feet, his eyes melting with the love he would throw
+into them, his tones subdued to their most sympathetic quality, and
+all those phrases on his lips which every day beguile women older and
+more discreet than this romantic, long-imprisoned girl, whose rash
+and adventurous enterprise was an assertion of her womanhood and her
+right to dispose of herself as she chose.  He had not lived to be
+twenty-five years old without knowing his power with women.  He
+believed in himself so thoroughly, that his very confidence was a
+strong promise of success.
+
+3.  In case all his entreaties, arguments, and offers made no
+impression, should he make use of that supreme resource, not to be
+employed save in extreme need, but which was of a nature, in his
+opinion, to shake a resolution stronger than this young girl was like
+to oppose to it?  That would be like Christian's coming to his weapon
+called All-prayer, he said to himself, with a smile that his early
+readings of Bunyan should have furnished him an image for so
+different an occasion.  The question was one he could not settle till
+the time came,--he must leave it to the instinct of the moment.
+
+The next morning found him early waking after a night of feverish
+dreams.  He dressed himself with more than usual care, and walked
+down to the wharf where the Swordfish was moored.  The ship had left
+the wharf, and was lying out in the stream: A small boat had just
+reached her, and a slender youth, as he appeared at that distance,
+climbed, not over-adroitly, up the vessel's side.
+
+Murray Bradshaw called to a boatman near by and ordered the man to
+row him over as fast as he could to the vessel lying in the stream.
+He had no sooner reached the deck of the Swordfish than he asked for
+the young person who had just been put on board.
+
+"He is in the cabin, sir, just gone down with the captain," was the
+reply.
+
+His heart beat, in spite of his cool temperament, as he went down the
+steps leading to the cabin.  The young person was talking earnestly
+with the captain, and, on his turning round, Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw had the pleasure of recognizing his young friend, Mr.
+Cyprian Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+Look at the flower of a morning-glory the evening before the dawn
+which is to see it unfold.  The delicate petals are twisted into a
+spiral, which at the appointed hour, when the sunlight touches the
+hidden springs of its life, will uncoil itself and let the day into
+the chamber of its virgin heart.  But the spiral must unwind by its
+own law, and the hand that shall try to hasten the process will only
+spoil the blossom which would have expanded in symmetrical beauty
+under the rosy fingers of morning.
+
+We may take a hint from Nature's handling of the flower in dealing
+with young souls, and especially with the souls of young girls,
+which, from their organization and conditions, require more careful
+treatment than those of their tougher-fibred brothers.  Many parents
+reproach themselves for not having enforced their own convictions on
+their children in the face of every inborn antagonism they
+encountered.  Let them not be too severe in their self-condemnation.
+A want of judgment in this matter has sent many a young person to
+Bedlam, whose nature would have opened kindly enough if it had only
+been trusted to the sweet influences of morning sunshine.  In such
+cases it may be that the state we call insanity is not always an
+unalloyed evil.  It may take the place of something worse, the
+wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the
+perpetual interferences of another mind governed by laws alien and
+hostile to its own.  Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left
+to Nature in this extremity.  But before she comes to that, she has
+many expedients.  The mind does not know what diet it can feed on
+until it has been brought to the starvation point.  Its experience is
+like that of those who have been long drifting about on rafts or in
+long-boats.  There is nothing out of which it will not contrive to
+get some sustenance.  A person of note, long held captive for a
+political offence, is said to have owed the preservation of his
+reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to get exercise and
+excitement by throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor of his
+dungeon, and then hunting for it in a series of systematic
+explorations until he had found it.
+
+Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would
+have been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if
+Providence, which in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected
+agencies, had not made a special provision for her mental welfare.
+She was in that arid household as the prophet in the land where there
+was no dew nor rain for these long years.  But as he had the brook
+Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the morning and the bread and
+flesh in the evening which the ravens brought him, so she had the
+river and her secret store of books.
+
+The river was light and life and music and companionship to her.  She
+learned to row herself about upon it, to swim boldly in it, for it
+had sheltered nooks but a little way above The Poplars.  But there
+was more than that in it,--it was infinitely sympathetic.  A river is
+strangely like a human soul.  It has its dark and bright days, its
+troubles from within, and its disturbances from without.  It often
+runs over ragged rocks with a smooth surface, and is vexed with
+ripples as it slides over sands that are level as a floor.  It
+betrays its various moods by aspects which are the commonplaces of
+poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles and frowns.  Its face is
+full of winking eyes, when the scattering rain-drops first fall upon
+it, and it scowls back at the storm-cloud, as with knitted brows,
+when the winds are let loose.  It talks, too, in its own simple
+dialect, murmuring, as it were, with busy lips all the way to the
+ocean, as children seeking the mother's breast and impatient of
+delay.  Prisoners who know what a flower or an insect has been to
+them in their solitary cell, invalids who have employed their vacant
+minds in studying the patterns of paper-hangings on the walls of
+their sick-chambers, can tell what the river was to the lonely,
+imaginative creature who used to sit looking into its depths, hour
+after hour, from the airy height of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+
+Of late a thought had mingled with her fancies which had given to the
+river the aspect of something more than a friend and a companion.  It
+appeared all at once as a Deliverer.  Did not its waters lead, after
+long wanderings, to the great highway of the world, and open to her
+the gates of those cities from which she could take her departure
+unchallenged towards the lands of the morning or of the sunset?
+Often, after a freshet, she had seen a child's miniature boat
+floating down on its side past her window, and traced it in
+imagination back to some crystal brook flowing by the door of a
+cottage far up a blue mountain in the distance.  So she now began to
+follow down the stream the airy shallop that held her bright fancies.
+These dreams of hers were colored by the rainbows of an enchanted
+fountain,--the books of adventure, the romances, the stories which
+fortune had placed in her hands,--the same over which the heart of
+the Pride of the County had throbbed in the last century, and on the
+pages of some of which the traces of her tears might still be seen.
+
+The literature which was furnished for Myrtle's improvement was
+chiefly of a religious character, and, however interesting and
+valuable to those to whom it was adapted, had not been chosen with
+any wise regard to its fitness for her special conditions.  Of what
+use was it to offer books like the "Saint's Rest" to a child whose
+idea of happiness was in perpetual activity?  She read "Pilgrim's
+Progress," it is true, with great delight.  She liked the idea of
+travelling with a pack on one's back, the odd shows at the House of
+the interpreter, the fighting, the adventures, the pleasing young
+ladies at the palace the name of which was Beautiful, and their very
+interesting museum of curiosities.  As for the allegorical meaning,
+it went through her consciousness like a peck of wheat through a
+bushel measure with the bottom out, without touching.
+
+But the very first book she got hold of out of the hidden treasury
+threw the "Pilgrim's Progress" quite into the shade.  It was the
+story of a youth who ran away and lived on an island,--one Crusoe,
+--a homely narrative, but evidently true, though full of remarkable
+adventures.  There too was the history, coming much nearer home, of
+Deborah Sampson, the young woman who served as a soldier in the
+Revolutionary War, with a portrait of her in man's attire, looking
+intrepid rather than lovely.  A virtuous young female she was, and
+married well, as she deserved to, and raised a family with as good a
+name as wife and mother as the best of them.  But perhaps not one of
+these books and stories took such hold of her imagination as the tale
+of Rasselas, which most young persons find less entertaining than the
+"Vicar of Wakefield," with which it is nowadays so commonly bound up.
+It was the prince's discontent in the Happy Valley, the iron gate
+opening to the sound of music, and closing forever on those it
+admitted, the rocky boundaries of the imprisoning valley, the visions
+of the world beyond, the projects of escape, and the long toil which
+ended in their accomplishment, which haunted her sleeping and waking.
+She too was a prisoner, but it was not in the Happy Valley.  Of the
+romances and the love-letters we must take it for granted that she
+selected wisely, and read discreetly; at least we know nothing to the
+contrary.
+
+There were mysterious reminiscences and hints of her past coming over
+her constantly.  It was in the course of the long, weary spring
+before her disappearance, that a dangerous chord was struck which
+added to her growing restlessness.  In an old closet were some
+seashells and coral-fans, and dried star-fishes and sea, horses, and
+a natural mummy of a rough-skinned dogfish.  She had not thought of
+them for years, but now she felt impelled to look after them.  The
+dim sea odors which still clung to them penetrated to the very inmost
+haunts of memory, and called up that longing for the ocean breeze
+which those who have once breathed and salted their blood with it
+never get over, and which makes the sweetest inland airs seem to them
+at last tame and tasteless.  She held a tigershell to her ear, and
+listened to that low, sleepy murmur, whether in the sense or in the
+soul we hardly know, like that which had so often been her lullaby,
+--a memory of the sea, as Landor and Wordsworth have sung.
+
+"You are getting to look like your father," Aunt Silence said one
+day; "I never saw it before.  I always thought you took after old
+Major Gideon Withers.  Well, I hope you won't come to an early grave
+like poor Charles,--or at any rate, that you may be prepared."
+
+It did not seem very likely that the girl was going out of the world
+at present, but she looked Miss Silence in the face very seriously,
+and said, "Why not an early grave, Aunt, if this world is such a bad
+place as you say it is?"
+
+"I'm afraid you are not fit for a better."
+
+She wondered if Silence Withers and Cynthia Badlam were just ripe for
+heaven.
+
+For some months Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as was said, had been an
+habitual visitor at The Poplars, had lived there as a permanent
+resident.  Between her and Silence Withers, Myrtle Hazard found no
+rest for her soul.  Each of them was for untwisting the morning-glory
+without waiting for the sunshine to do it.  Each had her own wrenches
+and pincers to use for that purpose.  All this promised little for
+the nurture and admonition of the young girl, who, if her will could
+not be broken by imprisonment and starvation at three years old, was
+not likely to be over-tractable to any but gentle and reasonable
+treatment at fifteen.
+
+Aunt Silence's engine was responsibility,--her own responsibility,
+and the dreadful consequences which would follow to her, Silence, if
+Myrtle should in any way go wrong.  Ever since her failure in that
+moral coup d'etat by which the sinful dynasty of the natural self-
+determining power was to be dethroned, her attempts in the way of
+education had been a series of feeble efforts followed by plaintive
+wails over their utter want of success.  The face she turned upon the
+young girl in her solemn expostulations looked as if it were
+inscribed with the epitaphs of hope and virtue.  Her utterances were
+pitched in such a forlorn tone, that the little bird in his cage, who
+always began twittering at the sound of Myrtle's voice, would stop in
+his song, and cock his head with a look of inquiry full of pathos, as
+if he wanted to know what was the matter, and whether he could do
+anything to help.
+
+The specialty of Cynthia Badlam was to point out all the dangerous
+and unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and
+this young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up
+examples of those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil
+end, to present the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the
+lively girl's apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion
+that a bright example of excellence stood before her in the
+irreproachable relative who addressed her.  Especially with regard to
+the allurements which the world offers to the young and inexperienced
+female, Miss Cynthia Badlam was severe and eloquent.  Sometimes poor
+Myrtle would stare, not seeing the meaning of her wise caution,
+sometimes look at Miss Cynthia with a feeling that there was
+something about her that was false and forced, that she had nothing
+in common with young people, that she had no pity for them, only
+hatred of their sins, whatever these might be,--a hatred which seemed
+to extend to those sources of frequent temptation, youth and beauty,
+as if they were in themselves objectionable.
+
+Both the lone women at The Poplars were gifted with a thin vein of
+music.  They gave it expression in psalmody, of course, in which
+Myrtle, who was a natural singer, was expected to bear her part.
+This would have been pleasantry if the airs most frequently selected
+had been cheerful or soothing, and if the favorite hymns had been of
+a sort to inspire a love for what was lovely in this life, and to
+give some faint foretaste of the harmonies of a better world to come.
+But there is a fondness for minor keys and wailing cadences common to
+the monotonous chants of cannibals and savages generally, to such
+war-songs as the wild, implacable "Marseillaise," and to the favorite
+tunes of low--spirited Christian pessimists.  That mournful "China,"
+which one of our most agreeable story-tellers has justly singled out
+as the cry of despair itself, was often sung at The Poplars, sending
+such a sense of utter misery through the house, that poor Kitty Fagan
+would cross herself, and wring her hands, and think of funerals, and
+wonder who was going to die,--for she fancied she heard the Banshee's
+warning in those most dismal ululations.
+
+On the first Saturday of June, a fortnight before her disappearance,
+Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and
+came dome with her hands full of leaves and blossoms.  Silence
+Withers looked at them as if they were a kind of melancholy
+manifestation of frivolity on the part of the wicked old earth.  Not
+that she did not inhale their faint fragrance with a certain
+pleasure, and feel their beauty as none whose souls are not wholly
+shriveled and hardened can help doing, but the world was, in her
+estimate, a vale of tears, and it was only by a momentary
+forgetfulness that she could be moved to smile at anything.
+
+Miss Cynthia, a sharper-edged woman, had formed the habit of crushing
+everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost
+odious, as flower-de-luces do when handled roughly.  "There's a worm
+in that leaf, Myrtle.  He has rolled it all round him, and hidden
+himself from sight; but there is a horrid worm in it, for all it is
+so young and fresh.  There is a worm in every young soul, Myrtle."
+
+"But there is not a worm in every leaf, Miss Cynthia.  Look," she
+said," all these are open, and you can see all over and under them,
+and there is nothing there.  Are there never any worms in the leaves
+after they get old and yellow, Miss Cynthia?"
+
+That was a pretty fair hit for a simple creature of fifteen, but
+perhaps she was not so absolutely simple as one might have thought.
+
+It was on the evening of this same day that they were sitting
+together.  The sweet season was opening, and it seemed as if the
+whispering of the leaves, the voices of the birds, the softness of
+the air, the young life stirring in everything, called on all
+creatures to join the universal chorus of praise that was going up
+around them.
+
+"What shall we sing this evening?" said Miss Silence.
+
+"Give me one of the books, if you please, Cousin Silence," said Miss
+Cynthia."  It is Saturday evening.  Holy time has begun.  Let us
+prepare our minds for the solemnities of the Sabbath."
+
+She took the book, one well known to the schools and churches of this
+nineteenth century.
+
+"Book Second.  Hymn 44.  Long metre.  I guess 'Putney' will be as
+good a tune as any to sing it to."
+
+The trio began,--
+
+         "With holy fear, and humble song,"
+
+and got through the first verse together pretty well.  Then came the
+second verse:
+
+         "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+          The land of horror and despair,
+          Justice has built a dismal hell,
+          And laid her stores of vengeance there."
+
+Myrtle's voice trembled a little in singing this verse, and she
+hardly kept up her part with proper spirit.
+
+"Sing out, Myrtle," said Miss Cynthia, and she struck up the third
+verse:
+
+         "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+          Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+          And darts t' inflict immortal pains,
+          Dyed in the blood of damned souls."
+
+This last verse was a duet, and not a trio.  Myrtle closed her lips
+while it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a
+look of anger and disgust.  The hunted soul was at bay.
+
+"I won't sing such words," she said, "and I won't stay here to hear
+them sung.  The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and
+I am not going to sing them.  You can't scare me into being good with
+your cruel hymn-book!"
+
+She could not swear: she was not a boy.  She would not cry: she felt
+proud, obdurate, scornful, outraged.  All these images, borrowed from
+the holy Inquisition, were meant to frighten her--and had simply
+irritated her.  The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but
+not penetrating, only enrages.  It was a moment of fearful danger to
+her character, to her life itself.
+
+Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to
+her hanging chamber.  She threw open the window and looked down into
+the stream.  For one moment her head swam with the sudden,
+overwhelming, almost maddening thought that came over her,--the
+impulse to fling herself headlong into those running waters and dare
+the worst these dreadful women had threatened her with.  Something
+she often thought afterwards it was an invisible hand held her back
+during that brief moment, and the paroxysm--just such a paroxysm as
+throws many a young girl into the Thames or the Seine--passed away.
+She remained looking, in a misty dream, into the water far below.
+Its murmur recalled the whisper of the ocean waves.  And through the
+depths it seemed as if she saw into that strange, half--remembered
+world of palm-trees and white robes and dusky faces, and amidst them,
+looking upon her with ineffable love and tenderness, until all else
+faded from her sight, the face of a fair woman,--was it hers, so
+long, long dead, or that dear young mother's who was to her less a
+recollection than a dream?
+
+Could it have been this vision that soothed her, so that she
+unclasped her hands and lifted her bowed head as if she had heard a
+voice whispering to her from that unknown world where she felt there
+was a spirit watching over her?  At any rate, her face was never more
+serene than when she went to meeting with the two maiden ladies on
+the following day, Sunday, and heard the Rev. Mr. Stoker preach a
+sermon from Luke vii. 48, which made both the women shed tears, but
+especially so excited Miss Cynthia that she was in a kind of half-
+hysteric condition all the rest of the day.
+
+After that Myrtle was quieter and more docile than ever before.
+Could it be, Miss Silence thought, that the Rev. Mr. Stoker's sermon
+had touched her hard heart?  However that was, she did not once wear
+the stormy look with which she had often met the complaining
+remonstrances Miss Silence constantly directed against all the
+spontaneous movements of the youthful and naturally vivacious subject
+of her discipline.
+
+June is an uncertain month, as everybody knows, and there were frosts
+in many parts of New England in the June of 1859.  But there were
+also beautiful days and nights, and the sun was warm enough to be
+fast ripening the strawberries,--also certain plans which had been in
+flower some little time.  Some preparations had been going on in a
+quiet way, so that at the right moment a decisive movement could be
+made.  Myrtle knew how to use her needle, and always had a dexterous
+way of shaping any article of dress or ornament,--a natural gift not
+very rare, but sometimes very needful, as it was now.
+
+On the morning of the 15th of June she was wandering by the shores of
+the river, some distance above The Poplars, when a boat came drifting
+along by her, evidently broken loose from its fastenings farther up
+the stream.  It was common for such waifs to show themselves after
+heavy rains had swollen the river.  They might have run the gauntlet
+of nobody could tell how many farms, and perhaps passed by half a
+dozen towns and villages in the night, so that, if of common, cheap
+make, they were retained without scruple, by any who might find them,
+until the owner called for them, if he cared to take the trouble.
+
+Myrtle took a knife from her pocket, cut down a long, slender
+sapling, and coaxed the boat to the side of the bank.  A pair of old
+oars lay in the bottom of the boat; she took one of these and paddled
+it into a little cove, where it could lie hid among the thick alders.
+Then she went home and busied herself about various little matters
+more interesting to her than to us.
+
+She was never more amiable and gracious than on this day.  But she
+looked often at the clock, as they remembered afterwards, and studied
+over a copy of the Farmer's Almanac which was lying in the kitchen,
+with a somewhat singular interest.  The days were nearly at their
+longest, the weather was mild, the night promised to be clear and
+bright.
+
+The household was, to all appearance, asleep at the usual early hour.
+When all seemed quiet, Myrtle lighted her lamp, stood before her
+mirror, and untied the string that bound her long and beautiful.
+dark hair, which fell in its abundance over her shoulders and below
+her girdle.
+
+She lifted its heavy masses with one hand, and severed it with a
+strong pair of scissors, with remorseless exaction of every wandering
+curl, until she stood so changed by the loss of that outward glory of
+her womanhood, that she felt as if she had lost herself and found a
+brother she had never seen before.
+
+"Good-by, Myrtle!" she said, and, opening her window very gently, she
+flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them
+for a few moments as they floated down the stream.  Then she dressed
+herself in the character of her imaginary brother, took up the
+carpet-bag in which she had placed what she chose to carry with her,
+stole softly down-stairs, and let herself out of a window on the
+lower floor, shutting it very carefully so as to be sure that nobody
+should be disturbed.
+
+She glided along, looking all about her, fearing she might be seen by
+some curious wanderer, and reached the cove where the boat she had
+concealed was lying.  She got into it, and, taking the rude oars,
+pulled herself into the middle of the swollen stream.  Her heart beat
+so that it seemed to her as if she could hear it between the strokes
+of the oar.  The lights were not all out in the village, and she
+trembled lest she should see the figure of some watcher looking from
+the windows in sight of which she would have to pass, and that a
+glimpse of this boat stealing along at so late an hour might give the
+clue to the secret of her disappearance, with which the whole region
+was to be busied in the course of the next day.
+
+Presently she came abreast of The Poplars.  The house lay so still,
+so peaceful,--it would wake to such dismay!  The boat slid along
+beneath her own overhanging chamber.
+
+"No song to-morrow from the Fire-hang-bird's Nest!" she said.  So she
+floated by the slumbering village, the flow of the river carrying her
+steadily on, and the careful strokes of the oars adding swiftness to
+her flight.
+
+At last she came to the "Broad Meadows," and knew that she was alone,
+and felt confident that she had got away unseen.  There was nothing,
+absolutely nothing, to point out which way she had gone.  Her boat
+came from nobody knew where, her disguise had been got together at
+different times in such a manner as to lead to no suspicion, and not
+a human being ever had the slightest hint that she had planned and
+meant to carry out the enterprise which she had now so fortunately
+begun.
+
+Not till the last straggling house had been long past, not till the
+meadows were stretched out behind her as well as before her,
+spreading far off into the distance on each side, did she give way to
+the sense of wild exultation which was coming fast over her.  But
+then, at last, she drew a long, long breath, and, standing up in the
+boat, looked all around her.  The stars were shining over her head
+and deep down beneath her.  The cool wind came fresh upon her cheek
+over the long grassy reaches.  No living thing moved in all the wide
+level circle which lay about her.  She had passed the Red Sea, and
+was alone in the Desert.
+
+She threw down her oars, lifted her hands like a priestess, and her
+strong, sweet voice burst into song,--the song of the Jewish maiden
+when she went out before the chorus of, women and sang that grand
+solo, which we all remember in its ancient words, and in their modern
+paraphrase,
+
+    "Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea!
+     Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free!"
+
+The poor child's repertory was limited to songs of the religious sort
+mainly, but there was a choice among these.  Her aunt's favorites,
+beside "China," already mentioned, were "Bangor," which the worthy
+old New England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-
+east city called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn."  But
+Myrtle was in no mood for these.  She let off her ecstasy in
+"Balerma," and "Arlington," and "Silver Street," and at last in that
+most riotous of devotional hymns, which sounds as if it had been
+composed by a saint who had a cellar under his chapel,--"Jordan."  So
+she let her wild spirits run loose; and then a tenderer feeling stole
+over her, and she sang herself into a more tranquil mood with the
+gentle music of "Dundee."  And again she pulled quietly and steadily
+at her oars, until she reached the wooded region through which the
+river winds after leaving the "Broad Meadows."
+
+The tumult in her blood was calmed, yet every sense and faculty was
+awake to the manifold delicious, mysterious impressions of that
+wonderful June night, The stars were shining between the tall trees,
+as if all the jewels of heaven had been set in one belt of midnight
+sky.  The voices of the wind, as they sighed through the pines,
+seemed like the breath of a sleeping child, and then, as they lisped
+from the soft, tender leaves of beeches and maples, like the half-
+articulate whisper of the mother hushing all the intrusive sounds
+that might awaken it.  Then came the pulsating monotone of the frogs
+from a far-off pool, the harsh cry of an owl from an old tree that
+overhung it, the splash of a mink or musquash, and nearer by, the
+light step of a woodchuck, as he cantered off in his quiet way to his
+hole in the nearest bank.  The laurels were just coming into bloom,--
+the yellow lilies, earlier than their fairer sisters, pushing their
+golden cups through the water, not content, like those, to float on
+the surface of the stream that fed them, emblems of showy wealth,
+and, like that, drawing all manner of insects to feed upon them.  The
+miniature forests of ferns came down to the edge of the stream, their
+tall, bending plumes swaying in the night breeze.  Sweet odors from
+oozing pines, from dewy flowers, from spicy leaves, stole out of the
+tangled thickets, and made the whole scene more dream-like with their
+faint, mingled suggestions.
+
+By and by the banks of the river grew lower and marshy, and in place
+of the larger forest-trees which had covered them stood slender
+tamaracks, sickly, mossy, looking as if they had been moon-struck and
+were out of their wits, their tufts of leaves staring off every way
+from their spindling branches.  The winds came cool and damp out of
+the hiding-places among their dark recesses.  The country people
+about here called this region the "Witches' Hollow," and had many
+stories about the strange things that happened there.  The Indians
+used to hold their "powwows,"  or magical incantations, upon a broad
+mound which rose out of the common level, and where some old hemlocks
+and beeches formed a dark grove, which served them as a temple for
+their demon-worship.  There were many legends of more recent date
+connected with this spot, some of them hard to account for, and no
+superstitious or highly imaginative person would have cared to pass
+through it alone in the dead of the night, as this young girl was
+doing.
+
+She knew nothing of all these fables and fancies.  Her own singular
+experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by
+anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious
+by those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to
+them.  We are at liberty to report many things without attempting to
+explain them, or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact
+that so they were told us.  The reader will find Myrtle's "Vision,"
+as written out at a later period from her recollections, at the end
+of this chapter.
+
+The night was passing, and she meant to be as far away as possible
+from the village she had left, before morning.  But the boat, like
+all craft on country rivers, was leaky, and she had to work until
+tired, bailing it out, before she was ready for another long effort.
+The old tin measure, which was all she had to bail with, leaked as
+badly as the boat, and her task was a tedious one.  At last she got
+it in good trim, and sat down to her oars with the determination to
+pull steadily as long as her strength would hold out.
+
+Hour after hour she kept at her work, sweeping round the long bends
+where the river was hollowing out one bank and building new shore on
+the opposite one, so as gradually to shift its channel; by clipper-
+shaped islands, sharp at the bows looking up stream, sharp too at the
+stern, looking down,--their shape solving the navigator's problem of
+least resistance, as a certain young artist had pointed out; by
+slumbering villages; by outlying farm-houses; between cornfields
+where the young plants were springing up in little thready fountains;
+in the midst of stumps where the forest had just been felled; through
+patches, where the fire of the last great autumnal drought had turned
+all the green beauty of the woods into brown desolation; and again
+amidst broad expanses of open meadow stretching as far as the eye
+could reach in the uncertain light.  A faint yellow tinge was
+beginning to stain the eastern horizon.  Her boat was floating
+quietly along, for she had at last taken in her oars, and she was now
+almost tired out with toil and excitement.  She rested her head upon
+her hands, and felt her eyelids closing in spite of herself.  And now
+there stole upon her ear a low, gentle, distant murmur, so soft that
+it seemed almost to mingle with the sound of her own breathing, but
+so steady, so uniform, that it soothed her to sleep, as if it were
+the old cradle-song the ocean used to sing to her, or the lullaby of
+her fair young mother.
+
+So she glided along, slowly, slowly, down the course of the winding
+river, and the flushing dawn kindled around her as she slumbered, and
+the low, gentle murmur grew louder and louder, but still she slept,
+dreaming of the murmuring ocean.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.
+
+"A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of
+June 15, 1859.  Written out at the request of a friend from my
+recollections.
+
+"The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told
+since, Witches' Hollow.  I had never been there before, and did not
+know that it was called so, or anything about it.
+
+"The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of
+hill or mound that rose out of the low meadows.  I saw a burning
+cross lying on the slope of that mound.  It burned with a pale
+greenish light, and did not waste, though I watched it for a long
+time, as the boat I was in moved slowly with the current and I had
+stopped rowing.
+
+"I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking
+at this cross.  I think my eyes were open when I saw these other
+appearances, but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.
+
+"I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures
+moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were
+outside of myself.
+
+"The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement,
+as if without any effort.  They made many gestures, and seemed to
+speak, but I cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its
+meaning in some other way.
+
+"I knew the faces of some of these figures.  They were the same I
+have seen in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house
+where I was brought up, called The Poplars.  I saw my father and my
+mother as they look in the two small pictures; also my grandmother,
+and her father and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who
+lived a great while ago.  All of these have been long dead, and the
+longer they had been dead the less like substance they looked and the
+more like shadows, so that the oldest was like one's breath of a
+frosty morning, but shaped like the living figure.
+
+"There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be
+moving as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath!  I thought
+they wanted to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which
+I seemed to see as it were empty of myself and of these other selves,
+like a sponge that has water pressed out of it.
+
+"Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
+others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost
+in my own life.
+
+"My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than
+any of the rest.  Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have
+become a part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over
+the life they had led, on the sea and in strange countries.
+
+"Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a
+very strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard
+sometimes, though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I
+used to read in the graveyard.  It seemed to me that there was
+something about his life that I did not want to make a part of mine,
+but that there was some right he had in me through my being of his
+blood, and so his health and his strength went all through me, and I
+was always to have what was left of his life in that shadow-like
+shape, forming a portion of mine.
+
+"So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that
+famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to
+be called the Pride of the County.
+
+"And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait
+marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors,
+and was before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the
+witchcraft trials.
+
+"There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-
+dress of feathers.  She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw
+something of my own features in her face.
+
+"It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our
+blood who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me,
+and was in some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence
+with me since, as if she lived again in me; but not always,--only at
+times,--and then I feel borne up as if I could do anything in the
+world.  I had a feeling as if she were my guardian and protector.
+
+"It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not mentioned, do
+really live over some part of their past lives in my life.  I do not
+understand it all, and perhaps it can be accounted for in some way I
+have not thought of.  I write it down as nearly as I can give it from
+memory, by request, and if it is printed at this time had rather have
+all the real names withheld.
+
+"MYRTLE HAZARD."
+
+
+NOTE BY THE FRIEND.
+
+"This statement must be accounted for in some way, or pass into the
+category of the supernatural.  Probably it was one of those
+intuitions, with objective projection, which sometimes come to
+imaginative young persons, especially girls, in certain exalted
+nervous conditions.  The study of the portraits, with the knowledge
+of some parts of the history of the persons they represented, and the
+consciousness of instincts inherited in all probability from these
+same ancestors, formed the basis of Myrtle's 'Vision.'  The lives of
+our progenitors are, as we know, reproduced in different proportions
+in ourselves.  Whether they as individuals have any consciousness of
+it, is another matter.  It is possible that they do get a second as
+it were fractional life in us.  It might seem that many of those
+whose blood flows in our veins struggle for the mastery, and by and
+by one or more get the predominance, so that we grow to be like
+father, or mother, or remoter ancestor, or two or more are blended in
+us, not to the exclusion, however, it must be understood, of a
+special personality of our own, about which these others are grouped.
+Independently of any possible scientific value, this 'Vision' serves
+to illustrate the above-mentioned fact of common experience, which is
+not sufficiently weighed by most moralists.
+
+"How much it may be granted to certain young persons to see, not in
+virtue of their intellectual gifts, but through those direct channels
+which worldly wisdom may possibly close to the luminous influx, each
+reader must determine for himself by his own standards of faith and
+evidence.
+
+"One statement of the narrative admits of a simple natural
+explanation, which does not allow the lovers of the marvellous to
+class it with the quasi-miraculous appearance seen by Colonel
+Gardiner, and given in full by Dr. Doddridge in his Life of that
+remarkable Christian soldier.  Decaying wood is often phosphorescent,
+as many readers must have seen for themselves.  The country people
+are familiar with the sight of it in wild timber-land, and have given
+it the name of 'Fox-fire.'  Two trunks of trees in this state, lying
+across each other, will account for the fact observed, and vindicate
+the truth of the young girl's story without requiring us to suppose
+any exceptional occurrence outside of natural laws."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND BEGINS HIS ANSWER.
+
+It was already morning when a young man living in the town of
+Alderbank, after lying awake for an hour thinking the unutterable
+thoughts that nineteen years of life bring to the sleeping and waking
+dreams of young people, rose from his bed, and, half dressing
+himself, sat down at his desk, from which he took a letter, which he
+opened and read.  It was written in a delicate, though hardly formed
+female hand, and crossed like a checker-board, as is usual with these
+redundant manuscripts.  The letter was as follows:
+
+
+OXBOW VILLAGE, June 13, 1859.
+
+MY DEAREST CLEMENT,--You was so good to write me such a sweet little
+bit of a letter,--only, dear, you never seem to be in quite so good
+spirits as you used to be.  I wish your Susie was with you to cheer
+you up; but no, she must be patient, and you must be patient too, for
+you are so ambitious!  I have heard you say so many times that nobody
+could be a great artist without passing years and years at work, and
+growing pale and lean with thinking so hard.  You won't grow pale and
+lean, I hope; for I do so love to see that pretty color in your
+cheeks you have always had ever since I have known you; and besides,
+I do not believe you will have to work so very hard to do something
+great,--you have so much genius, and people of genius do such
+beautiful things with so little trouble.  You remember those
+beautiful lines out of our newspaper I sent you?  Well, Mr. Hopkins
+told me he wrote those lines in one evening without stopping!  I wish
+you could see Mr. Hopkins,--he is a very talented person.  I cut out
+this little piece about him from the paper on purpose to show you,
+--for genius loves genius,--and you would like to hear him read his
+own poetry,--he reads it beautifully.  Please send this piece from
+the paper back, as I want to put it in my scrapbook, under his
+autograph:--
+
+"Our young townsman, Mr. Gifted Hopkins, has proved himself worthy of
+the name he bears.  His poetical effusions are equally creditable to
+his head and his heart, displaying the highest order of genius and
+powers of imagination and fancy hardly second to any writer of the
+age.  He is destined to make a great sensation in the world of
+letters."
+
+
+Mrs. Hopkins is the same good soul she always was.  She is very proud
+of her son, as is natural, and keeps a copy of everything he writes.
+I believe she cries over them every time she reads them.  You don't
+know how I take to little Sossy and Minthy, those two twins I have
+written to you about before.  Poor little creatures,--what a cruel
+thing it was in their father and mother not to take care of them!
+What do you think?  Old bachelor Gridley lets them come up into his
+room, and builds forts and castles for them with his big books!  "The
+world's coming to an end," Mrs. Hopkins said the first time he did
+so.  He looks so savage with that scowl of his, and talks so gruff
+when he is scolding at things in general, that nobody would have
+believed he would have let such little things come anywhere near him.
+But he seems to be growing kind to all of us and everybody.  I saw
+him talking to the Fire-hang-bird the other day.  You know who the
+Fire-hang-bird is, don't you?  Myrtle Hazard her name is.  I wish you
+could see her.  I don't know as I do, though.  You would want to make
+a statue of her, or a painting, I know.  She is so handsome that all
+the young men stand round to see her come out of meeting.  Some say
+that Lawyer Bradshaw is after her; but my! he is ten years older than
+she is.  She is nothing but a girl, though she looks as if she was
+eighteen.  She lives up at a place called The Poplars, with an old
+woman that is her aunt or something, and nobody seems to be much
+acquainted with her except Olive Eveleth, who is the minister's
+daughter at Saint Bartholomew's Church.  She never has beauxs round
+her, as some young girls do--they say that she is not happy with her
+aunt and another woman that stays with her, and that is the reason
+she keeps so much to herself.  The minister came to see me the other
+day,--Mr. Stoker his name is.  I was all alone, and it frightened me,
+for he looks, oh, so solemn on Sundays!  But he called me "My dear,"
+and did n't say anything horrid, you know, about my being such a
+dreadful, dreadful sinner, as I have heard of his saying to some
+people,--but he looked very kindly at me, and took my hand, and laid
+his hand on my shoulder like a brother, and hoped I would come and
+see him in his study.  I suppose I must go, but I don't want to.  I
+don't seem to like him exactly.
+
+I hope you love me as well as ever you did.  I can't help feeling
+sometimes as if you was growing away from me,--you know what I mean,
+--getting to be too great a person for such a small person as I am.
+
+I know I can't always understand you when you talk about art, and
+that you know a great deal too much for such a simple girl as I am.
+Oh, if I thought I could never make you happy!...  There, now!  I am
+almost ashamed to send this paper so spotted.  Gifted Hopkins wrote
+some beautiful verses one day on "A Maiden Weeping."  He compared the
+tears falling from her eyes to the drops of dew which one often sees
+upon the flowers in the morning.  Is n't it a pretty thought?
+
+I wish I loved art as well as I do poetry; but I am afraid I have not
+so much taste as some girls have.  You remember how I liked that
+picture in the illustrated magazine, and you said it was horrid.  I
+have been afraid since to like almost anything, for fear you should
+tell me some time or other it was horrid.  Don't you think I shall
+ever learn to know what is nice from what is n't?
+
+Oh, dear Clement, I wish you would do one thing to please me.  Don't
+say no, for you can do everything you try to,--I am sure you can.  I
+want you to write me some poetry,--just three or four little verses
+TO SUZIE.  Oh, I should feel so proud to have some lines written all
+on purpose for me.  Mr. Hopkins wrote some the other day, and printed
+them in the paper, "To M ---e."  I believe he meant them for Myrtle,
+--the first and last letter of her name, you see, "M "and "e."
+
+Your letter was a dear one, only so short!  I wish yon would tell me
+all about what you are doing at Alderbank.  Have you made that model
+of Innocence that is to have my forehead, and hair parted like mine!
+Make it pretty, do, that is a darling.
+
+Now don't make a face at my letter.  It is n't a very good one, I
+know; but your poor little Susie does the best she can, and she loves
+you so much!
+
+Now do be nice and write me one little bit of a mite of a poem,--it
+will make me just as happy!
+
+I am very well, and as happy as I can be when you are away.
+
+Your affectionate        SUSIE.
+
+(Directed to Mr. Clement Lindsay, Alderbank.)
+
+
+The envelope of this letter was unbroken, as was before said, when
+the young man took it from his desk.  He did not tear it with the hot
+impatience of some lovers, but cut it open neatly, slowly, one would
+say sadly.  He read it with an air of singular effort, and yet with a
+certain tenderness.  When he had finished it, the drops were thick on
+his forehead; he groaned and put his hands to his face, which was
+burning red.
+
+This was what the impulse of boyhood, years ago, had brought him to!
+He was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of
+fastidious taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue
+eyes, his commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every
+change of thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not
+improbably claim that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter
+had spoken,--the strange, divine, dread gift of genius.
+
+This poor, simple, innocent, trusting creature, so utterly incapable
+of coming into any true relation with his aspiring mind, his large
+and strong emotions,--this mere child, all simplicity and goodness,
+but trivial and shallow as the little babbling brooklet that ran by
+his window to the river, to lose its insignificant being in the swift
+torrent he heard rushing over the rocks,--this pretty idol for a weak
+and kindly and easily satisfied worshipper, was to be enthroned as
+the queen of his affections, to be adopted as the companion of his
+labors!  The boy, led by the commonest instinct, the mere attraction
+of biped to its female, which accident had favored, had thrown away
+the dearest possession of manhood,--liberty,--and this bauble was to
+be his lifelong reward!  And yet not a bauble either, for a pleasing
+person and a gentle and sweet nature, which had once made her seem to
+him the very paragon of loveliness, were still hers.  Alas!  her
+simple words were true,--he had grown away from her.  Her only fault
+was that she had not grown with him, and surely he could not reproach
+her with that.
+
+"No," he said to himself, "I will never leave her so long as her
+heart clings to me.  I have been rash, but she shall not pay the
+forfeit.  And if I may think of myself, my life need not be wretched
+because she cannot share all my being with me.  The common human
+qualities are more than all exceptional gifts.  She has a woman's
+heart; and what talent of mine is to be named by the love a true
+woman can offer in exchange for these divided and cold affections?
+If it had pleased God to mate me with one more equal in other ways,
+who could share my thoughts, who could kindle my inspiration, who had
+wings to rise into the air with me as well as feet to creep by my
+side upon the earth,--what cannot such a woman do for a man!
+
+"What!  cast away the flower I took in the bud because it does not
+show as I hoped it would when it opened?  I will stand by my word; I
+will be all as a man that I promised as a boy.  Thank God, she is
+true and pure and sweet.  My nest will be a peaceful one; but I must
+take wing alone,--alone."
+
+He drew one long sigh, and the cloud passed from his countenance.  He
+must answer that letter now, at once.  There were reasons, he
+thought, which made it important.  And so, with the cheerfulness
+which it was kind and becoming to show, so far as possible, and yet
+with a little excitement on one particular point, which was the cause
+of his writing so promptly, he began his answer.
+
+
+ALDERBANK, Thursday morning, June 16, 1859.
+
+MY DEAR SUSIE,--I have just been reading your pleasant letter; and if
+I do not send you the poem you ask for so eloquently, I will give you
+a little bit of advice, which will do just as well,--won't it, my
+dear?  I was interested in your account of various things going on at
+Oxbow Village.  I am very glad you find young Mr. Hopkins so
+agreeable a friend.  His poetry is better than some which I see
+printed in the village papers, and seems generally unexceptionable in
+its subjects and tone.  I do not believe he is a dangerous companion,
+though the habit of writing verse does not always improve the
+character.  I think I have seen it make more than one of my
+acquaintances idle, conceited, sentimental, and frivolous,--perhaps
+it found them so already.  Don't make too much of his talent, and
+particularly don't let him think that because he can write verses he
+has nothing else to do in this world.  That is for his benefit, dear,
+and you must skilfully apply it.
+
+Now about yourself.  My dear Susie, there was something in your
+letter that did not please me.  You speak of a visit from the Rev.
+Mr. Stoker, and of his kind, brotherly treatment, his cordiality of
+behavior, and his asking you to visit him in his study.  I am very
+glad to hear you say that you "don't seem to like him."  He is very
+familiar, it seems to me, for so new an acquaintance.  What business
+had he to be laying his hand on your shoulder?  I should like to see
+him try these free-and-easy ways in my presence!  He would not have
+taken that liberty, my dear!  No, he was alone with you, and thought
+it safe to be disrespectfully familiar.  I want you to maintain your
+dignity always with such persons, and I beg you not to go to the
+study of this clergyman, unless some older friend goes with you on
+every occasion, and sits through the visit.  I must speak plainly to
+you, my dear, as I have a right to.  If the minister has anything of
+importance to say, let it come through the lips of some mature
+person.  It may lose something of the fervor with which it would have
+been delivered at first hand, but the great rules of Christian life
+are not so dependent on the particular individual who speaks them,
+that you must go to this or that young man to find out what they are.
+If to any man, I should.  prefer the old gentleman whom you have
+mentioned in your letters, Father Pemberton.  You understand me, my
+dear girl, and the subject is not grateful.  You know how truly I am
+interested in all that relates to you,--that I regard you with an
+affection which
+
+     HELP!  HELP!  HELP!
+
+A cry as of a young person's voice was heard faintly, coming from the
+direction of the river.  Something in the tone of it struck to his
+heart, and he sprang as if he had been stabbed.  He flung open his
+chamber window and leaped from it to the ground.  He ran straight to
+the bank of the river by the side of which the village of Alderbank
+was built, a little farther down the stream than the house in which
+he was living.
+
+Everybody that travels in that region knows the beautiful falls which
+break the course of the river just above the village; narrow and
+swift, and surrounded by rocks of such picturesque forms that they
+are sought and admired by tourists.  The stream was now swollen, and
+rushed in a deep and rapid current over the ledges, through the rocky
+straits, plunging at last in tumult and foam, with loud, continuous
+roar, into the depths below the cliff from which it tumbled.
+
+A short distance above the fall there projected from the water a rock
+which had, by parsimonious saving during a long course of years,
+hoarded a little soil, out of which a small tuft of bushes struggled.
+to support a decent vegetable existence.  The high waters had nearly
+submerged it, but a few slender twigs were seen above their surface.
+
+A skiff was lying close to this rock, between it and the brink of the
+fall, which was but a few rods farther down.  In the skiff was a
+youth of fourteen or fifteen years, holding by the slender twigs, the
+boat dragging at them all the time, and threatening to tear them away
+and go over the fall.  It was not likely that the boy would come to
+shore alive if it did.  There were stories, it is true, that the
+Indians used to shoot the fall in their canoes with safety; but
+everybody knew that at least three persons had been lost by going
+over it since the town was settled; and more than one dead body had
+been found floating far down the river, with bruises and fractured
+bones, as if it had taken the same fatal plunge.
+
+There was no time to lose.  Clement ran a little way up the river-
+bank, flung off his shoes, and sprang from the bank as far as he
+could leap into the water.  The current swept him toward the fall,
+but he worked nearer and nearer the middle of the stream.  He was
+making for the rock, thinking he could plant his feet upon it and at
+the worst hold the boat until he could summon other help by shouting.
+He had barely got his feet upon the rock, when the twigs by which the
+boy was holding gave way.  He seized the boat, but it dragged him
+from his uncertain footing, and with a desperate effort he clambered
+over its side and found himself its second doomed passenger.
+
+There was but an instant for thought.
+
+"Sit still," he said, "and, just as we go over, put your arms round
+me under mine, and don't let go for your life!"
+
+He caught up the single oar, and with a few sharp paddle-strokes
+brought the skiff into the blackest centre of the current, where it
+was deepest, and would plunge them into the deepest pool.
+
+"Hold your breath!  God save us!  Now!"
+
+They rose, as if with one will, and stood for an instant, the arms of
+the younger closely embracing the other as he had directed.
+
+A sliding away from beneath them of the floor on which they stood, as
+the drop fails under the feet of a felon.  A great rush of air, and a
+mighty, awful, stunning roar,--an involuntary gasp, a choking flood
+of water that came bellowing after them, and hammered them down into
+the black depths so far that the young man, though used to diving and
+swimming long distances underwater, had well-nigh yielded to the
+fearful need of air, and sucked in his death in so doing.
+
+The boat came up to the surface, broken in twain, splintered, a load
+of firewood for those who raked the river lower down.  It had turned
+crosswise, and struck the rocks.  A cap rose to the surface, such a
+one as boys wear,--the same that boy had on.  And then--after how
+many seconds by the watch cannot be known, but after a time long
+enough, as the young man remembered it, to live his whole life over
+in memory--Clement Lindsay felt the blessed air against his face,
+and, taking a great breath, came to his full consciousness.  The arms
+of the boy were still locked around him as in the embrace of death.
+A few strokes brought him to the shore, dragging his senseless burden
+with him.
+
+He unclasped the arms that held him so closely encircled, and laid
+the slender form of the youth he had almost died to save gently upon
+the grass.  It was as if dead.  He loosed the ribbon that was round
+the neck, he tore open the checked shirt
+
+The story of Myrtle Hazard's sex was told; but she was deaf to his
+cry of surprise, and no blush came to her cold cheek.  Not too late,
+perhaps, to save her,--not too late to try to save her, at least!
+
+He placed his lips to hers, and filled her breast with the air from
+his own panting chest.  Again and again he renewed these efforts,
+hoping, doubting, despairing,--once more hoping, and at last, when he
+had almost ceased to hope, she gasped, she breathed, she moaned, and
+rolled her eyes wildly round her, she was born again into this mortal
+life.
+
+He caught her up in his arms, bore her to the house, laid her on a
+sofa, and, having spent his strength in this last effort, reeled and
+fell, and lay as one over whom have just been whispered the words,
+
+"He is gone."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS LETTER--WHAT CAME OF IT.
+
+The first thing Clement Lindsay did, when he was fairly himself
+again, was to finish his letter to Susan Posey.  He took it up where
+it left off, "with an affection which " and drew a long dash, as
+above.  It was with great effort he wrote the lines which follow, for
+he had got an ugly blow on the forehead, and his eyes were "in
+mourning," as the gentlemen of the ring say, with unbecoming levity.
+
+"An adventure!  Just as I was writing these last words, I heard the
+cry of a young person, as it sounded, for help.  I ran to the river
+and jumped in, and had the pleasure of saving a life.  I got some
+bruises which have laid me up for a day or two; but I am getting over
+them very well now, and you need not worry about me at all.  I will
+write again soon; so pray do not fret yourself, for I have had no
+hurt that will trouble me for any time."
+
+Of course, poor Susan Posey burst out crying, and cried as if her
+heart would break.  Oh dear!  Oh dear! what should she do!  He was
+almost killed, she knew he was, or he had broken some of his bones.
+Oh dear!  Oh dear!  She would go and see him, there!--she must and
+would.  He would die, she knew he would,--and so on.
+
+It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human
+element in Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme
+trouble, should think of him as a counsellor.  But the wonderful
+relenting kind of look on his grave features as he watched the little
+twins tumbling about his great books, and certain marks of real
+sympathy he had sometimes shown for her in her lesser woes,
+encouraged her, and she went straight to his study, letter in hand.
+She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful sanctuary.
+
+"Come in, Susan Posey," was its answer, in a pleasant tone.  The old
+master knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand
+on the panel.
+
+What a sight!  'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a
+Sebastopol which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and
+the terrible Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile
+manifestations of the most singular character.  He was actually
+discharging a large sugar-plum at the postern gate, which having been
+left unclosed, the missile would certainly have reached one of the
+garrison, when he paused as the door opened, and the great round
+spectacles and four wide, staring infants' eyes were levelled at Miss
+Susan Posey.
+
+She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at
+this manifestation.  The old man had emptied his shelves of half
+their folios to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had
+seated the two delighted and uproarious babes.  There was his Cave's
+"Historia Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the
+World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and
+Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the
+Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot,
+supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and
+Monuments" on the other,--an odd collection, as folios from lower
+shelves are apt to be.
+
+The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that
+it fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the
+garrison had been on short rations for some time.
+
+He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble.  "What now,
+Susan Posey, my dear?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble!  What shall I do?  What shall I
+do?"
+
+She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way
+that Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their
+adventure.
+
+"So Mr. Clement Lindsay has been saving a life, has he, and got some
+hard knocks doing it, hey, Susan Posey?  Well, well, Clement Lindsay
+is a brave fellow, and there is no need of hiding his name, my child.
+Let me take the letter again a moment, Susan Posey.  What is the date
+of it?  June 16th.  Yes,--yes,--yes!"
+
+He read the paragraph over again, and the signature too, if he wanted
+to; for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to
+those round spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not
+unbecoming blush, opened the fold of the letter before she handed it
+back.
+
+"No, no, Susan Posey.  He will come all right.  His writing is
+steady, and if he had broken any bones he would have mentioned it.
+It's a thing his wife will be proud of, if he is ever married, Susan
+Posey," (blushes,) "and his children too," (more blushes running up
+to her back hair,) "and there 's nothing to be worried about.  But
+I'll tell you what, my dear, I've got a little business that calls me
+down the river tomorrow, and I shouldn't mind stopping an hour at
+Alderbank and seeing how our young friend Clement Lindsay is; and
+then, if he was going to have a long time of it, why we could manage
+it somehow that any friend who had any special interest in him could
+visit him, just to while away the tiresomeness of being sick.  That's
+it, exactly.  I'll stop at Alderbank, Susan Posey.  Just clear up
+these two children for me, will you, my dear?  Isosceles, come now,--
+that 's a good child.  Helminthia, carry these sugar-plums down--
+stairs for me, and take good care of them, mind!"
+
+It was a case of gross bribery and corruption, for the fortress was
+immediately, evacuated on the receipt of a large paper of red and
+white comfits, and the garrison marched down--stairs much like
+conquerors, under the lead of the young lady, who was greatly eased
+in mind by the kind words and the promise of Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+But he, in the mean time, was busy with thoughts she did not suspect.
+"A young person," he said to himself,--"why a young person?  Why not
+say a boy, if it was a boy?  What if this should be our handsome
+truant?--'June 16th, Thursday morning!'--About time to get to
+Alderbank by the river, I should think.  None of the boats missing?
+What then?  She may have made a raft, or picked up some stray skiff.
+Who knows?  And then got shipwrecked, very likely.  There are rapids
+and falls farther along the river.  It will do no harm to go down
+there and look about, at any rate."
+
+On Saturday morning, therefore, Mr. Byles Gridley set forth to
+procure a conveyance to make a visit, as he said, dawn the river, and
+perhaps be gone a day or two.  He went to a stable in the village,
+and asked if they could let him have a horse.
+
+The man looked at him with that air of native superiority which the
+companionship of the generous steed confers on all his associates,
+down to the lightest weight among the jockeys.
+
+"Wal, I hain't got nothin' in the shape of a h'oss, Mr. Gridley.
+I've got a mare I s'pose I could let y' have."
+
+"Oh, very well," said the old master, with a twinkle in his eye as
+sly as the other's wink,--he had parried a few jokes in his time,--"
+they charge half-price for mares always, I believe."
+
+That was a new view of the subject.  It rather took the wind out of
+the stable-keeper, and set a most ammoniacal fellow, who stood
+playing with a currycomb, grinning at his expense.  But he rallied
+presently.
+
+"Wal, I b'lieve they do for some mares, when they let 'em to some
+folks; but this here ain't one o' them mares, and you ain't one o'
+them folks.  All my cattle's out but this critter, 'n' I don't jestly
+want to have nobody drive her that ain't pretty car'ful,--she's
+faast, I tell ye,--don't want no whip. --How fur d' d y' want t' go?"
+
+Mr. Gridley was quite serious now, and let the man know that he
+wanted the mare and a light covered wagon, at once, to be gone for
+one or two days, and would waive the question of sex in the matter of
+payment.
+
+Alderbank was about twenty miles down the river by the road.  On
+arriving there, he inquired for the house where a Mr. Lindsay lived.
+There was only one Lindsay family in town,--he must mean Dr. William
+Lindsay.  His house was up there a little way above the village,
+lying a few rods back from the river.
+
+He found the house without difficulty, and knocked at the door.  A
+motherly-looking woman opened it immediately, and held her hand up as
+if to ask him to speak and move softly.
+
+"Does Mr. Clement Lindsay live here?"
+
+"He is staying here for the present.  He is a nephew of ours.  He is
+in his bed from an injury."
+
+"Nothing very serious, I hope?"
+
+"A bruise on his head,--not very bad, but the doctor was afraid of
+erysipelas.  Seems to be doing well enough now."
+
+"Is there a young person here, a stranger?"
+
+"There is such a young person here.  Do you come with any authority
+to make inquiries?"
+
+"I do.  A young friend of mine is missing, arid I thought it possible
+I might learn something here about it.  Can I see this young person?"
+
+The matron came nearer to Byles Gridley, and said: "This person is a
+young woman disguised as a boy.  She was rescued by my nephew at the
+risk of his life, and she has been delirious ever since she has
+recovered her consciousness.  She was almost too far gone to be
+resuscitated, but Clement put his mouth to hers and kept her
+breathing until her own breath returned and she gradually came to."
+
+"Is she violent in her delirium?"
+
+"Not now.  No; she is quiet enough, but wandering,--wants to know
+where she is, and whose the strange faces are,--mine and my
+husband's,--that 's Dr. Lindsay,--and one of my daughters, who has
+watched with her."
+
+"If that is so, I think I had better see her.  If she is the person I
+suspect her to be, she will know me; and a familiar face may bring
+back her recollections and put a stop to her wanderings.  If she does
+not know me, I will not stay talking with her.  I think she will, if
+she is the one I am seeking after.  There is no harm in trying."
+
+Mrs. Lindsay took a good long look at the old man.  There was no
+mistaking his grave, honest, sturdy, wrinkled, scholarly face.  His
+voice was assured and sincere in its tones.  His decent black coat
+was just what a scholar's should be,--old, not untidy, a little shiny
+at the elbows with much leaning on his study-table, but neatly bound
+at the cuffs, where worthy Mrs. Hopkins had detected signs of fatigue
+and come to the rescue.  His very hat looked honest as it lay on the
+table.  It had moulded itself to a broad, noble head, that held
+nothing but what was true and fair, with a few harmless crotchets
+just to fill in with, and it seemed to know it.
+
+The good woman gave him her confidence at once.  "Is the person you
+are seeking a niece or other relative of yours?"
+
+(Why did not she ask if the girl was his daughter?  What is that look
+of paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers
+and old nurses know so well in men and in women?)
+
+"No, she is not a relative.  But I am acting for those who are."
+
+"Wait a moment and I will go and see that the room is all right."
+
+She returned presently.  "Follow me softly, if you please.  She is
+asleep,--so beautiful,--so innocent!"
+
+Byles Gridley, Master of Arts, retired professor, more than sixty
+years old, childless, loveless, stranded in a lonely study strewed
+with wrecks of the world's thought, his work in life finished, his
+one literary venture gone down with all it held, with nobody to care
+for him but accidental acquaintances, moved gently to the side of the
+bed and looked upon the pallid, still features of Myrtle Hazard.  He
+strove hard against a strange feeling that was taking hold of him,
+that was making his face act rebelliously, and troubling his eyes
+with sudden films.  He made a brief stand against this invasion.
+"A weakness,--a weakness!" he said to himself.  "What does all this
+mean?  Never such a thing for these twenty years!  Poor child!  poor
+child! --Excuse me, madam," he said, after a little interval, but for
+what offence he did not mention.  A great deal might be forgiven,
+even to a man as old as Byles Gridley, looking upon such a face,--so
+lovely, yet so marked with the traces of recent suffering, and even
+now showing by its changes that she was struggling in some fearful
+dream.  Her forehead contracted, she started with a slight convulsive
+movement, and then her lips parted, and the cry escaped from them,--
+how heart-breaking when there is none to answer it,--"Mother!"
+
+Gone back again through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood
+to that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she
+uttered was answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of
+clinging lips, the embrace of caressing arms!
+
+"It is better to wake her," Mrs. Lindsay said; "she is having a
+troubled dream.  Wake up, my child, here is a friend waiting to see
+you."
+
+She laid her hand very gently on Myrtle's forehead.  Myrtle opened
+her eyes, but they were vacant as yet.
+
+"Are we dead?" she said.  "Where am I?  This is n't heaven--there are
+no angels--Oh, no, no, no! don't send me to the other place--fifteen
+years,--only fifteen years old--no father, no mother--nobody loved
+me.  Was it wicked in me to live?  "Her whole theological training
+was condensed in that last brief question.
+
+The, old man took her hand and looked her in the face, with a
+wonderful tenderness in his squared features.  "Wicked to live, my
+dear?  No indeed!  Here!  look at me, my child; don't you know your
+old friend Byles Gridley?"
+
+She was awake now.  The sight of a familiar countenance brought back
+a natural train of thought.  But her recollection passed over
+everything that had happened since Thursday morning.
+
+"Where is the boat I was in?" she said.  "I have just been in the
+water, and I was dreaming that I was drowned.  Oh!  Mr. Gridley, is
+that you?  Did you pull me out of the water?"
+
+"No, my dear, but you are out of it, and safe and sound: that is the
+main point.  How do you feel now you are awake?"
+
+She yawned, and stretched her arms and looked round, but did not
+answer at first.  This was all natural, and a sign that she was
+coming right.  She looked down at her dress.  It was not
+inappropriate to her sex, being a loose gown that belonged to one of
+the girls in the house.
+
+"I feel pretty well," she answered, "but a little confused.  My boat
+will be gone, if you don't run and stop it now.  How did you get me
+into dry clothes so quick?"
+
+Master Byles Gridley found himself suddenly possessed by a large and
+luminous idea of the state of things, and made up his mind in a
+moment as to what he must do.  There was no time to be lost.  Every
+day, every hour, of Myrtle's absence was not only a source of anxiety
+and a cause of useless searching but it gave room for inventive
+fancies to imagine evil.  It was better to run some risk of injury to
+health, than to have her absence prolonged another day.
+
+"Has this adventure been told about in the village, Mrs. Lindsay?"
+
+"No, we thought it best to wait until she could tell her own story,
+expecting her return to consciousness every hour, and thinking there
+might be some reason for her disguise which it would be kinder to
+keep quiet about."
+
+"You know nothing about her, then?"
+
+"Not a word.  It was a great question whether to tell the story and
+make inquiries; but she was safe, and could hardly bear disturbance,
+and, my dear sir, it seemed too probable that there was some sad
+story behind this escape in disguise, and that the poor child might
+need shelter and retirement.  We meant to do as well as we could for
+her."
+
+"All right, Mrs. Lindsay.  You do not know who she is, then?"
+
+"No, sir, and perhaps it is as well that I should not know.  Then I
+shall not have to answer any questions about it."
+
+"Very good, madam,--just as it should be.  And your family, are they
+as discreet as yourself?"
+
+"Not one word of the whole story has been or will be told by any one
+of us.  That was agreed upon among us."
+
+Now then, madam.  My name, as you heard me say, is Byles Gridley.
+Your husband will know it, perhaps; at any rate I will wait until he
+comes back.  This child is of good family and of good name.  I know
+her well, and mean, with your kind help, to save her from the
+consequences which her foolish adventure might have brought upon her.
+Before the bells ring for meeting to-morrow morning this girl must be
+in her bed at her home, at Oxbow Village, and we must keep her story
+to ourselves as far as may be.  It will all blow over, if we do.  The
+gossips will only know that she was upset in the river and cared for
+by some good people,--good people and sensible people too, Mrs.
+Lindsay.  And now I want to see the young man that rescued my friend
+here,--Clement Lindsay, I have heard his name before."
+
+Clement was not a beauty for the moment, but Master Gridley saw well
+enough that he was a young man of the right kind.  He knew them at
+sight, fellows with lime enough in their bones and iron enough in
+their blood to begin with,--shapely, large-nerved, firm-fibred and
+fine-fibred, with well-spread bases to their heads for the ground-
+floor of the faculties, and well-vaulted arches for the upper range
+of apprehensions and combinations.  "Plenty of basements," he used to
+say, "without attics and skylights.  Plenty of skylights without
+rooms enough and space enough below."  But here was "a three-story
+brain," he said to himself as he looked at it, and this was the youth
+who was to find his complement in our pretty little Susan Posey!  His
+judgment may seem to have been hasty, but he took the measure of
+young men of twenty at sight from long and sagacious observation, as
+Nurse Byloe knew the "heft" of a baby the moment she fixed her old
+eyes on it.
+
+Clement was well acquainted with Byles Gridley, though he had never
+seen him, for Susan's letters had had a good deal to say about him of
+late.  It was agreed between them that the story should be kept as
+quiet as possible, and that the young girl should not know the name
+of her deliverer,--it might save awkward complications.  It was not
+likely that she would be disposed to talk of her adventure, which had
+ended so disastrously, and thus the whole story would soon die out.
+
+The effect of the violent shock she had experienced was to change the
+whole nature of Myrtle for the time.  Her mind was unsettled: she
+could hardly recall anything except the plunge over the fall.  She
+was perfectly docile and plastic,--was ready to go anywhere Mr.
+Gridley wanted her to go, without any sign of reluctance.  And so it
+was agreed that he should carry her back in his covered wagon that
+very night.  All possible arrangements were made to render her
+journey comfortable.  The fast mare had to trot very gently, and the
+old master would stop and adjust the pillows from time to time, and
+administer the restoratives which the physician had got ready, all as
+naturally and easily as if he had been bred a nurse, vastly to his
+own surprise, and with not a little gain to his self-appreciation.
+He was a serviceable kind of body on occasion, after all, was he not,
+hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to himself.
+
+At half past four o'clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the
+stray lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the
+slumbering household to receive back the wanderer.
+
+It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such
+amorphous guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a
+tempest of petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented
+herself at the door.
+
+But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking
+bundle of clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or
+break in silence.  When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave
+face of the old master, she thought it was all over with the poor
+girl she loved, and that this was the undertaker's wagon bringing
+back only what had once been Myrtle Hazard.  She screamed aloud,--so
+wildly that Myrtle lifted her head from the pillow against which she
+had rested it, and started forward.
+
+The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it
+was the girl she loved, and not her ghost.  Then it all came over
+her,--she had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by
+night, and been rescued by the brave old man who had brought her
+back.  What crying and kisses and prayers and blessings were poured
+forth, in a confusion of which her bodily costume was a fitting type,
+those who know the vocabulary and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race
+may imagine better than we could describe it.
+
+The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative.  There
+were awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she
+was to have could be settled.  What they were, it is needless to
+suggest; but while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her
+"responsibility" was removed, then with a fair share of pity and
+kindness, and other lukewarm emotions,--while Miss Badlam waited for
+an explanation before giving way to her feelings,--Mr. Gridley put
+the essential facts before them in a few words.  She had gone down
+the river some miles in her boat, which was upset by a rush of the
+current, and she had come very near being drowned.  She was got out,
+however, by a person living near by, and cared for by some kind women
+in a house near the river, where he had been fortunate enough to
+discover her. --Who cut her hair off?  Perhaps those good people,
+--she had been out of her head.  She was alive and unharmed, at any
+rate, wanting only a few days' rest.  They might be very thankful to
+get her back, and leave her to tell the rest of her story when she
+had got her strength and memory, for she was not quite herself yet,
+and might not be for some days.
+
+And so there she was at last laid in her own bed, listening again to
+the ripple of the waters beneath her, Miss Silence sitting on one
+side looking as sympathetic as her insufficient nature allowed her to
+look; the Irishwoman uncertain between delight at Myrtle's return and
+sorrow for her condition; and Miss Cynthia Badlaxn occupying herself
+about house-matters, not unwilling to avoid the necessity of
+displaying her conflicting emotions.
+
+Before he left the house, Mr. Gridley repeated the statement is the
+most precise manner,--some miles down the river--upset and nearly
+drowned--rescued almost dead--brought to and cared for by kind women
+in the house where he, Byles Gridley, found her.  These were the
+facts, and nothing more than this was to be told at present.  They
+had better be made known at once, and the shortest and best way would
+be to have it announced by the minister at meeting that forenoon.
+With their permission, he would himself write the note for Mr. Stoker
+to read, and tell the other ministers that they might announce it to
+their people.
+
+The bells rang for meeting, but the little household at The Poplars
+did not add to the congregation that day.  In the mean time Kitty
+Fagan had gone down with Mr. Byles Gridley's note, to carry it to the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker.  But, on her way, she stopped at the house of one
+Mrs. Finnegan, a particular friend of hers; and the great event of
+the morning furnishing matter for large discourse, and various social
+allurements adding to the fascination of having a story to tell,
+Kitty Fagan forgot her note until meeting had begun and the minister
+had read the text of his sermon.  "Bless my soul! and sure I 've
+forgot ahl about the letter!" she cried all at once, and away she
+tramped for the meeting-house.  The sexton took the note, which was
+folded, and said he would hand it up to the pulpit after the sermon,
+--it would not do to interrupt the preacher.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, as was said, a somewhat remarkable gift in
+prayer,--an endowment by no means confined to profoundly spiritual
+persons,--in fact, not rarely owing much of its force to a strong
+animal nature underlying the higher attributes.  The sweet singer of
+Israel would never have written such petitions and such hymns if his
+manhood had been less complete; the flavor of remembered frailties
+could not help giving a character to his most devout exercises, or
+they would not have come quite home to our common humanity.  But
+there is no gift more dangerous to the humility and sincerity of a
+minister.  While his spirit ought to be on its knees before the
+throne of grace, it is too apt to be on tiptoe, following with
+admiring look the flight of its own rhetoric.  The essentially
+intellectual character of an extemporaneous composition spoken to the
+Creator with the consciousness that many of his creatures are
+listening to criticise or to admire, is the great argument for set
+forms of prayer.
+
+The congregation on this particular Sunday was made up chiefly of
+women and old men.  The young men were hunting after Myrtle Hazard.
+Mr. Byles Gridley was in his place, wondering why the minister did
+not read his notice before the prayer.  This prayer, was never
+reported, as is the questionable custom with regard to some of these
+performances, but it was wrought up with a good deal of rasping force
+and broad pathos.  When he came to pray for "our youthful sister,
+missing from her pious home, perhaps nevermore to return to her
+afflicted relatives," and the women and old men began crying, Byles
+Gridley was on the very point of getting up and cutting short the
+whole matter by stating the simple fact that she had got back, all
+right, and suggesting that he had better pray for some of the older
+and tougher sinners before him.  But on the whole it would be more
+decorous to wait, and perhaps he was willing to hear what the object
+of his favorite antipathy had to say about it.  So he waited through
+the prayer.  He waited through the hymn, "Life is the time"--He
+waited to hear the sermon.
+
+The minister gave out his text from the Book of Esther, second
+chapter, seventh verse: "For she had neither father nor mother, and
+the maid was fair and beautiful."  It was to be expected that the
+reverend gentleman, who loved to produce a sensation, would avail
+himself of the excitable state of his audience to sweep the key-board
+of their emotions, while, as we may, say, all the stops were drawn
+out.  His sermon was from notes; for, though absolutely
+extemporaneous composition may be acceptable to one's Maker, it is
+not considered quite the thing in speaking to one's fellow-mortals.
+He discoursed for a time on the loss of parents, and on the dangers
+to which the unfortunate orphan is exposed.  Then he spoke of the
+peculiar risks of the tender female child, left without its natural
+guardians.  Warming with his subject, he dilated with wonderful
+unction on the temptations springing from personal attractions.  He
+pictured the "fair and beautiful" women of Holy Writ, lingering over
+their names with lover-like devotion.  He brought Esther before his
+audience, bathed and perfumed for the royal presence of Ahasuerus.
+He showed them the sweet young Ruth, lying down in her innocence at
+the feet of the lord of the manor.  He dwelt with special luxury on
+the charms which seduced the royal psalmist,--the soldier's wife for
+whom he broke the commands of the decalogue, and the maiden for whose
+attentions, in his cooler years, he violated the dictates of prudence
+and propriety.  All this time Byles Gridley had his stern eyes on
+him.  And while he kindled into passionate eloquence on these
+inspiring themes, poor Bathsheba, whom her mother had sent to church
+that she might get a little respite from her home duties, felt her
+blood growing cold in her veins, as the pallid image of the invalid
+wife, lying on her bed of suffering, rose in the midst of the glowing
+pictures which borrowed such warmth from her husband's imagination.
+
+The sermon, with its hinted application to the event of the past
+week, was over at last.  The shoulders of the nervous women were
+twitching with sobs.  The old men were crying in their vacant way.
+But all the while the face of Byles Gridley, firm as a rock in the
+midst of this lachrymal inundation, was kept steadily on the
+preacher, who had often felt the look that came through the two round
+glasses searching into the very marrow of his bones.
+
+As the sermon was finished, the sexton marched up through the broad
+aisle and handed the note over the door of the pulpit to the
+clergyman, who was wiping his face after the exertion of delivering
+his discourse.  Mr. Stoker looked at it, started, changed color,--his
+vision of "The Dangers of Beauty, a Sermon printed by Request," had
+vanished,--and passed the note to Father Pemberton, who sat by him in
+the pulpit.  With much pains he deciphered its contents, for his eyes
+were dim with years, and, having read it, bowed his head upon his
+hands in silent thanksgiving.  Then he rose in the beauty of his
+tranquil and noble old age, so touched with the message he had to
+proclaim to his people, that the three deep furrows on his forehead,
+which some said he owed to the three dogmas of original sin,
+predestination, and endless torment, seemed smoothed for the moment,
+and his face was as that of an angel while lie spoke.
+
+"Sisters and Brethren,--Rejoice with us, for we have found our lamb
+which had strayed from the fold.  This our daughter was dead and is
+alive again; she was lost and is found.  Myrtle Hazard, rescued from
+great peril of the waters, and cared for by good Samaritans, is now
+in her home.  Thou, O Lord, who didst let the water-flood overflow
+her, didst not let the deep swallow her up, nor the pit shut its
+mouth upon her.  Let us return our thanks to the God of Abraham, the
+God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, who is our God and Father, and who
+hath wrought this great deliverance."
+
+After his prayer, which it tried him sorely to utter in unbroken
+tones, he gave out the hymn,
+
+    "Lord, thou hast heard thy servant cry,
+     And rescued from the grave ";
+
+but it was hardly begun when the leading female voice trembled and
+stopped,--and another,--and then a third,--and Father Pemberton,
+seeing that they were all overcome, arose and stretched out his arms,
+and breathed over them his holy benediction.
+
+The village was soon alive with the news.  The sexton forgot the
+solemnity of the Sabbath, and the bell acted as if it was crazy,
+tumbling heels over head at such a rate, and with such a clamor, that
+a good many thought there was a fire, and, rushing out from every
+quarter, instantly caught the great news with which the air was
+ablaze.
+
+A few of the young men who had come back went even further in their
+demonstrations.  They got a small cannon in readiness, and without
+waiting for the going down of the sun, began firing rapidly, upon
+which the Rev. Mr. Stoker sallied forth to put a stop to this
+violation of the Sabbath.  But in the mean time it was heard on all
+the hills, far and near.  Some said they were firing in the hope of
+raising the corpse; but many who heard the bells ringing their crazy
+peals guessed what had happened.  Before night the parties were all
+in, one detachment bearing the body of the bob-tailed catamount swung
+over a pole, like the mighty cluster of grapes from Eshcol, and
+another conveying with wise precaution that monstrous snapping-turtle
+which those of our friends who wish to see will find among the
+specimens marked Chelydra, Serpentine in the great collection at
+Cantabridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+VEXED WITH A DEVIL.
+
+It was necessary at once to summon a physician to advise as to the
+treatment of Myrtle, who had received a shock, bodily and mental, not
+lightly to be got rid of, and very probably to be followed by serious
+and varied disturbances.  Her very tranquillity was suspicious, for
+there must be something of exhaustion in it, and the reaction must
+come sooner or later.
+
+Old Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut, at the age of ninety-two, very deaf, very
+nearly blind, very feeble, liable to odd lapses of memory, was yet a
+wise counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases, and on rare
+occasions was still called upon to exercise his ancient skill.  Here
+was a case in which a few words from him might soothe the patient and
+give confidence to all who were interested in her.  Miss Silence
+Withers went herself to see him.
+
+"Miss Withers, father, wants to talk with you about her niece, Miss
+Hazard," said Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut.
+
+"Miss Withers, Miss Withers?--Oh, Silence Withers,--lives up at The
+Poplars.  How's the Deacon, Miss Withers?" [Ob.  1810.]
+
+"My grandfather is not living, Dr. Hurlbut," she screamed into his
+ear.
+
+"Dead, is he?  Well, it isn't long since he was with us; and they
+come and go,--they come and go.  I remember his father, Major Gideon
+Withers.  He had a great red feather on training-days,--that was what
+made me remember him.  Who did you say was sick and wanted to see me,
+Fordyce?"
+
+"Myrtle Hazard, father,--she has had a narrow escape from drowning,
+and it has left her in a rather nervous state.  They would like to
+have you go up to The Poplars and take a look at her.  You remember
+Myrtle Hazard?  She is the great-granddaughter of your old friend the
+Deacon."
+
+He had to wait a minute before his thoughts would come to order; with
+a little time, the proper answer would be evolved by the slow
+automatic movement of the rusted mental machinery.
+
+After the silent moment: "Myrtle Hazard, Myrtle Hazard,--yes, yes, to
+be sure!  The old Withers stock,--good constitutions,--a little apt
+to be nervous, one or two of 'em.  I've given 'em a good deal of
+valerian and assafoetida,--not quite so much since the new blood came
+in.  There is n't the change in folks people think,--same thing over
+and over again.  I've seen six fingers on a child that had a six-
+fingered great-uncle, and I've seen that child's grandchild born with
+six fingers.  Does this girl like to have her own way pretty well,
+like the rest of the family?"
+
+"A little too well, I suspect, father.  You will remember all about
+her when you come to see her and talk with her.  She would like to
+talk with you, and her aunt wants to see you too; they think there's
+nobody like the 'old Doctor'."
+
+He was not too old to be pleased with this preference, and said he
+was willing to go when they were ready.  With no small labor of
+preparation he was at last got to the house, and crept with his son's
+aid up to the little room over the water, where his patient was still
+lying.
+
+There was a little too much color in Myrtle's cheeks and a glistening
+lustre in her eyes that told of unnatural excitement.  It gave a
+strange brilliancy to her beauty, and might have deceived an
+unpractised observer.  The old man looked at her long and curiously,
+his imperfect sight excusing the closeness of his scrutiny.
+
+He laid his trembling hand upon her forehead, and then felt her pulse
+with his shriveled fingers.  He asked her various questions about
+herself, which she answered with a tone not quite so calm as natural,
+but willingly and intelligently.  They thought she seemed to the old
+Doctor to be doing very well, for he spoke cheerfully to her, and
+treated her in such a way that neither she nor any of those around
+her could be alarmed.  The younger physician was disposed to think
+she was only suffering from temporary excitement, and that it would
+soon pass off.
+
+They left the room to talk it over.
+
+"It does not amount to much, I suppose, father," said Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut.  "You made the pulse about ninety,--a little hard,--did n't
+you; as I did?  Rest, and low diet for a day or two, and all will be
+right, won't it?"
+
+Was it the feeling of sympathy, or was it the pride of superior
+sagacity, that changed the look of the old man's wrinkled features?
+"Not so fast,--not so fast, Fordyce," he said.  "I've seen that look
+on another face of the same blood,--it 's a great many years ago, and
+she was dead before you were born, my boy,--but I've seen that look,
+and it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now.  I
+see some danger of a brain fever.  And if she doesn't have that, then
+look out for some hysteric fits that will make mischief.  Take that
+handkerchief off of her head, and cut her hair close, and keep her
+temples cool, and put some drawing plasters to the soles of her feet,
+and give her some of my pilulae compositae, and follow them with some
+doses of sal polychrest.  I've been through it all before--in that
+same house.  Live folks are only dead folks warmed over.  I can see
+'em all in that girl's face, Handsome Judith, to begin with.  And
+that queer woman, the Deacon's mother,--there 's where she gets that
+hystericky look.  Yes, and the black-eyed woman with the Indian blood
+in her,--look out for that,--look out for that.  And--and--my son, do
+you remember Major Gideon Withers?" [Ob. 1780.]
+
+"Why no, father, I can't say that I remember the Major; but I know
+the picture very well.  Does she remind you of him?"
+
+He paused again, until the thoughts came slowly straggling, up to the
+point where the question left him.  He shook his head solemnly, and
+turned his dim eyes on his son's face.
+
+Four generations--four generations; man and wife,--yes, five
+generations, for old Selah Withers took me in his arms when I was a
+child, and called me 'little gal,' for I was in girl's clothes,--five
+generations before this Hazard child I 've looked on with these old
+eyes.  And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every
+one of 'em in this child's face, it's the forehead of this one, and
+it's the eyes of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look
+that I remember in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that
+same voice before--yes, yes as long ago as when I was first married;
+for I remember Rachel used to think I praised Handsome Judith's voice
+more than it deserved,--and her face too, for that matter.  You
+remember Rachel, my first wife,--don't you, Fordyce?"
+
+"No, father, I don't remember her, but I know her portrait."  (As he
+was the son of the old Doctor's second wife, he could hardly be
+expected to remember her predecessor.)
+
+The old Doctor's sagacity was not in fault about the somewhat
+threatening aspect of Myrtle's condition.  His directions were
+followed implicitly; for with the exception of the fact of
+sluggishness rather than loss of memory, and of that confusion of
+dates which in slighter degrees is often felt as early as middle-
+life, and increases in most persons from year to year, his mind was
+still penetrating, and his advice almost as trustworthy, as in his
+best days.
+
+It was very fortunate that the old Doctor ordered Myrtle's hair to be
+cut, and Miss Silence took the scissors and trimmed it at once.  So,
+whenever she got well and was seen about, there would be no mystery
+about the loss of her locks,--the Doctor had been afraid of brain
+fever, and ordered them to cut her hair.
+
+Many things are uncertain in this world, and among them the effect of
+a large proportion of the remedies prescribed by physicians.  Whether
+it was by the use of the means ordered by the old Doctor, or by the
+efforts of nature, or by both together, at any rate the first danger
+was averted, and the immediate risk from brain fever soon passed
+over.  But the impression upon her mind and body had been too
+profound to be dissipated by a few days' rest.  The hysteric stage
+which the wise old man had apprehended began to manifest itself by
+its usual signs, if anything can be called usual in a condition the
+natural order of which is disorder and anomaly.
+
+And now the reader, if such there be, who believes in the absolute
+independence and self-determination of the will, and the consequent
+total responsibility of every human being for every irregular nervous
+action and ill-governed muscular contraction, may as well lay down
+this narrative, or he may lose all faith in poor Myrtle Hazard, and
+all patience with the writer who tells her story.
+
+The mental excitement so long sustained, followed by a violent shock
+to the system, coming just at the period of rapid development, gave
+rise to that morbid condition, accompanied with a series of mental
+and moral perversions, which in ignorant ages and communities is
+attributed to the influence of evil spirits, but for the better-
+instructed is the malady which they call hysteria.  Few households
+have ripened a growth of womanhood without witnessing some of its
+manifestations, and its phenomena are largely traded in by scientific
+pretenders and religious fanatics.  Into this cloud, with all its
+risks and all its humiliations, Myrtle Hazard is about to enter.
+Will she pass through it unharmed, or wander from her path, and fall
+over one of those fearful precipices which lie before her?
+
+After the ancient physician had settled the general plan of
+treatment, its details and practical application were left to the
+care of his son.  Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut was a widower, not yet forty
+years old, a man of a fine masculine aspect and a vigorous nature.
+He was a favorite with his female patients,--perhaps many of them
+would have said because he was good-looking and pleasant in his
+manners, but some thought in virtue of a special magnetic power to
+which certain temperaments were impressible, though there was no
+explaining it.  But he himself never claimed any such personal gift,
+and never attempted any of the exploits which some thought were in
+his power if he chose to exercise his faculty in that direction.
+This girl was, as it were, a child to him, for he had seen her grow
+up from infancy, and had often held her on his knee in her early
+years.  The first thing he did was to get her a nurse, for he saw
+that neither of the two women about her exercised a quieting
+influence upon her nerves.  So he got her old friend, Nurse Byloe, to
+come and take care of her.
+
+The old nurse looked calm enough at one or two of his first visits,
+but the next morning her face showed that something had been going
+wrong.  "Well, what has been the trouble, Nurse?" the Doctor said, as
+soon as he could get her out of the room.
+
+"She's been attackted, Doctor, sence you been here, dreadful.  It's
+them high stirricks, Doctor, 'n' I never see 'em higher, nor more of
+'em.  Laughin' as ef she would bust.  Cryin' as ef she'd lost all her
+friends, 'n' was a follerin' their corpse to their graves.  And
+spassums,--sech spassums!  And ketchin' at her throat, 'n' sayin'
+there was a great ball a risin' into it from her stommick.  One time
+she had a kind o' lockjaw like.  And one time she stretched herself
+out 'n' laid jest as stiff as ef she was dead.  And she says now that
+her head feels as ef a nail had been driv' into it,--into the left
+temple, she says, and that's what makes her look so distressed now."
+
+The Doctor came once more to her bedside.  He saw that her forehead
+was contracted, and that she was evidently suffering from severe pain
+somewhere.
+
+"Where is your uneasiness, Myrtle?  " he asked.
+
+She moved her hand very slowly, and pressed it on her left temple.
+He laid his hand upon the same spot, kept it there a moment, and then
+removed it.  She took it gently with her own, and placed it on her
+temple again.  As he sat watching her, he saw that her features were
+growing easier, and in a short time her deep, even breathing showed
+that she was asleep.
+
+"It beats all," the old nurse said.  "Why, she's been a complainin'
+ever sence daylight, and she hain't slep' not a wink afore, sence
+twelve o'clock las' night!  It's j es' like them magnetizers,--I
+never heerd you was one o' them kind, Dr. Hurlbut."
+
+"I can't say how it is, Nurse,--I have heard people say my hand was
+magnetic, but I never thought of its quieting her so quickly.  No
+sleep since twelve o'clock last night, you say?"
+
+"Not a wink, 'n' actin' as ef she was possessed a good deal o' the
+time.  You read your Bible, Doctor, don't you?  You're pious?  Do you
+remember about that woman in Scriptur' out of whom the Lord cast
+seven devils?  Well, I should ha' thought there was seventy devils in
+that gal last night, from the way she carr'd on.  And now she lays
+there jest as peaceful as a new-born babe,--that is, accordin' to the
+sayin' about 'em; for as to peaceful new-born babes, I never see one
+that come t' anything, that did n't screech as ef the haouse was
+afire 'n' it wanted to call all the fire-ingines within ten mild."
+
+The Doctor smiled, but he became thoughtful in a moment.  Did he
+possess a hitherto unexercised personal power, which put the key of
+this young girl's nervous system into his hands?  The remarkable
+tranquillizing effect of the contact of his hand with her forehead
+looked like an immediate physical action.
+
+It might have been a mere coincidence, however.  He would not form an
+opinion until his next visit.
+
+At that next visit it did seem as if some of Nurse Byloe's seventy
+devils had possession of the girl.  All the strange spasmodic
+movements, the chokings, the odd sounds, the wild talk, the laughing
+and crying, were in full blast.  All the remedies which had been
+ordered seemed to have been of no avail.  The Doctor could hardly
+refuse trying his quasi magnetic influence, and placed the tips of
+his fingers on her forehead.  The result was the same that had
+followed the similar proceeding the day before,--the storm was soon
+calmed, and after a little time she fell into a quiet sleep, as in
+the first instance.
+
+Here was an awkward affair for the physician, to be sure!  He held
+this power in his hands, which no remedy and no other person seemed
+to possess.  How long would he be chained to her; and she to him, and
+what would be the consequence of the mysterious relation which must
+necessarily spring up between a man like him, in the plenitude of
+vital force, of strongly attractive personality, and a young girl
+organized for victory over the calmest blood and the steadiest
+resistance?
+
+Every day after this made matters worse.  There was something almost
+partaking of the miraculous in the influence he was acquiring over
+her.  His "Peace, be still!" was obeyed by the stormy elements of
+this young soul, as if it had been a supernatural command.  How could
+he resist the dictate of humanity which called him to make his visits
+more frequent, that her intervals of rest might be more numerous?
+How could he refuse to sit at her bedside for a while in the evening,
+that she might be quieted, instead of beginning the night sleepless
+and agitated?
+
+The Doctor was a man of refined feeling as well as of principle, and
+he had besides a sacred memory in the deepest heart of his
+affections.  It was the common belief in the village that he would
+never marry again, but that his first and only love was buried in the
+grave of the wife of his youth.  It did not easily occur to him to
+suspect himself of any weakness with regard to this patient of his,
+little more than a child in years.  It did not at once suggest itself
+to him that she, in her strange, excited condition, might fasten her
+wandering thoughts upon him, too far removed by his age, as it
+seemed, to strike the fancy of a young girl under almost any
+conceivable conditions.
+
+Thus it was that many of those beautiful summer evenings found him
+sitting by his patient, the river rippling and singing beneath them,
+the moon shining over them, sweet odors from the thickets on the
+banks of the stream stealing in on the soft air that came through the
+open window, and every time they were thus together, the subtile
+influence which bound them to each other bringing them more and more
+into inexplicable harmonies and almost spiritual identity.
+
+But all this did not hinder the development of new and strange
+conditions in Myrtle Hazard.  Her will was losing its power.  "I
+cannot help it"--the hysteric motto--was her constant reply.  It is
+not pleasant to confess the truth, but she was rapidly undergoing a
+singular change of her moral nature.  She had been a truthful child.
+If she had kept her secret about what she had found in the garret,
+she thought she was exercising her rights, and she had never been
+obliged to tell any lies about it.
+
+But now she seemed to have lost the healthy instincts for veracity
+and honesty.  She feigned all sorts of odd symptoms, and showed a
+wonderful degree of cunning in giving an appearance of truth to them.
+It became next to impossible to tell what was real and what was
+simulated.  At one time she could not be touched ever so lightly
+without shrinking and crying out.  At another time she would squint,
+and again she would be half paralyzed for a time.  She would pretend
+to fast for days, living on food she had concealed and took secretly
+in the night.
+
+The nurse was getting worn out.  Kitty Fagan would have had the
+priest come to the house and sprinkle it with holy water.  The two
+women were beginning to get nervous themselves.  The Rev. Mr. Stoker
+said in confidence to Miss Silence, that there was reason to fear she
+might have been given over for a time to the buffetings of Satan, and
+that perhaps his (Mr. Stoker's) personal attentions might be useful
+in that case.  And so it appeared that the "young doctor" was the
+only being left with whom she had any complete relations and absolute
+sympathy.  She had become so passive in his hands that it seemed as
+if her only healthy life was, as it were, transmitted through him,
+and that she depended on the transfer of his nervous power, as the
+plant upon the light for its essential living processes.
+
+The two young men who had met in so unexpected a manner on board the
+ship Swordfish had been reasonably discreet in relating their
+adventures.  Myrtle Hazard may or may not have had the plan they
+attributed to her; however that was, they had looked rather foolish
+when they met, and had not thought it worth while to be very
+communicative about the matter when they returned.  It had at least
+given them a chance to become a little better acquainted with each
+other, and it was an opportunity which the elder and more artful of
+the two meant to turn to advantage.
+
+Of all Myrtle's few friends only one was in the habit of seeing her
+often during this period, namely, Olive Eveleth, a girl so quiet and
+sensible that she, if anybody, could be trusted with her.  But
+Myrtle's whole character seemed to have changed, and Olive soon found
+that she was in some mystic way absorbed into another nature.  Except
+when the physician's will was exerted upon her, she was drifting
+without any self-directing power, and then any one of those manifold
+impulses which would in some former ages have been counted as
+separate manifestations on the part of distinct demoniacal beings
+might take possession of her.  Olive did little, therefore, but visit
+Myrtle from time to time to learn if any change had occurred in her
+condition.  All this she reported to Cyprian, and all this was got
+out of him by Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+That gentleman was far from being pleased with the look of things as
+they were represented.  What if the Doctor, who was after all in the
+prime of life and younger-looking than some who were born half a
+dozen years after him, should get a hold on this young woman,--girl
+now, if you will, but in a very few years certain to come within
+possible, nay, not very improbable, matrimonial range of him?  That
+would be pleasant, wouldn't it?  It had happened sometimes, as he
+knew, that these magnetizing tricks had led to infatuation on the
+part of the subjects of the wonderful influence.  So he concluded to
+be ill and consult the younger Dr. Hurlbut, and incidentally find out
+how the land lay.
+
+The next question was, what to be ill with.  Some not ungentlemanly
+malady, not hereditary, not incurable, not requiring any obvious
+change in habits of life.  Dyspepsia would answer the purpose well
+enough: so Mr. Murray Bradshaw picked up a medical book and read ten
+minutes or more for that complaint.  At the end of this time he was
+an accomplished dyspeptic; for lawyers half learn a thing quicker
+than the members of any other profession.
+
+He presented himself with a somewhat forlorn countenance to Dr.
+Fordyce Hurlbut, as suffering from some of the less formidable
+symptoms of that affection.  He got into a very interesting
+conversation with him, especially about some nervous feelings which
+had accompanied his attack of indigestion.  Thence to nervous
+complaints in general.  Thence to the case of the young lady at The
+Poplars whom he was attending.  The Doctor talked with a certain
+reserve, as became his professional relations with his patient; but
+it was plain enough that, if this kind of intercourse went on much
+longer, it would be liable to end in some emotional explosion or
+other, and there was no saying how it would at last turn out.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was afraid to meddle directly.  He knew something
+more about the history of Myrtle's adventure than any of his
+neighbors, and, among other things, that it had given Mr. Byles
+Gridley a peculiar interest in her, of which he could take advantage.
+He therefore artfully hinted his fears to the old man, and left his
+hint to work itself out.
+
+However suspicious Master Gridley was of him and his motives, he
+thought it worth while to call up at The Poplars and inquire for
+himself of the nurse what was this new relation growing up between
+the physician and his young patient.
+
+She imparted her opinion to him in a private conversation with great
+freedom.  "Sech doin's!  sech doin's!  The gal's jest as much
+bewitched as ever any gal was sence them that was possessed in
+Scriptur'.  And every day it 's wus and wus.  Ef that Doctor don't
+stop comin', she won't breathe without his helpin' her to before
+long.  And, Mr. Gridley, I don't like to say so,--but I can't help
+thinkin' he's gettin' a little bewitched too.  I don't believe he
+means to take no kind of advantage of her; but, Mr. Gridley, you've
+seen them millers fly round and round a candle, and you know how it
+ginerally comes out.  Men is men and gals is gals.  I would n't trust
+no man, not ef he was much under a hundred year old,--and as for a
+gal--!"
+
+"Mulieri ne mortuae quidem credendum est," said Mr. Gridley.  "You
+wouldn't trust a woman even if she was dead, hey, Nurse?"
+
+"Not till she was buried, 'n' the grass growin' a foot high over
+her," said Nurse Byloe, "unless I'd know'd her sence she was a baby.
+I've know'd this one sence she was two or three year old; but this
+gal ain't Myrtle Hazard no longer,--she's bewitched into somethin'
+different.  I'll tell ye what, Mr. Gridley; you get old Dr. Hurlbut
+to come and see her once a day for a week, and get the young doctor
+to stay away.  I'll resk it.  She 'll have some dreadful tantrums at
+fust, but she'll come to it in two or three, days."
+
+Master Byles Gridley groaned in spirit.  He had come to this village
+to end his days in peace, and here he was just going to make a martyr
+of himself for the sake of a young person to whom he was under no
+obligation, except that he had saved her from the consequences of her
+own foolish act, at the expense of a great overturn of all his
+domestic habits.  There was no help for it.  The nurse was right, and
+he must perform the disagreeable duty of letting the Doctor know that
+he was getting into a track which might very probably lead to
+mischief, and that he must back out as fast as he could.
+
+At 2 P. M.  Gifted Hopkins presented the following note at the
+Doctor's door:
+
+"Mr. Byles Gridley would be much obliged to Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut if he
+would call at his study this evening."
+
+"Odd, is n't it, father, the old man's asking me to come and see him?
+Those old stub-twist constitutions never want patching."
+
+"Old man!  old man!  Who's that you call old,--not Byles Gridley,
+hey?  Old!  old!  Sixty year, more or less!  How old was Floyer when
+he died, Fordyce?  Ninety-odd, was n't it?  Had the asthma though, or
+he'd have lived to be as old as Dr. Holyoke,--a hundred year and
+over.  That's old.  But men live to be a good deal more than that
+sometimes.  What does Byles Gridley want of you, did you say?"
+
+"I'm sure I can't tell, father; I'll go and find out."  So he went
+over to Mrs. Hopkins's in the evening, and was shown up into the
+study.
+
+Master Gridley treated the Doctor to a cup of such tea as bachelors
+sometimes keep hid away in mysterious caddies.  He presently began
+asking certain questions about the grand climacteric, which eventful
+period of life he was fast approaching.  Then he discoursed of
+medicine, ancient and modern, tasking the Doctor's knowledge not a
+little, and evincing a good deal of acquaintance with old doctrines
+and authors.
+
+He had a few curious old medical books in his library, which he said
+he should like to show Dr. Hurlbut.
+
+There, now!  What do you say to this copy of Joannes de Ketam,
+Venice, 1522?  Look at these woodcuts,--the first anatomical pictures
+ever printed, Doctor, unless these others of Jacobus Berengarius are
+older!  See this scene of the plague-patient, the doctor smelling at
+his pouncet-box, the old nurse standing square at the bedside, the
+young nurse with the bowl, holding back and turning her head away,
+and the old burial-hag behind her, shoving her forward, a very
+curious book, Doctor, and has the first phrenological picture in it
+ever made.  Take a look, too, at my Vesalius,--not the Leyden
+edition, Doctor, but the one with the grand old original figures,--so
+good that they laid them to Titian.  And look here, Doctor, I could
+n't help getting this great folio Albinus, 1747,--and the nineteenth
+century can't touch it, Doctor,--can't touch it for completeness and
+magnificence, so all the learned professors tell me!  Brave old
+fellows, Doctor, and put their lives into their books as you
+gentlemen don't pretend to do nowadays.  And good old fellows,
+Doctor,--high-minded, scrupulous, conscientious, punctilious,--
+remembered their duties to man and to woman, and felt all the
+responsibilities of their confidential relation to families.  Did you
+ever read the oldest of medical documents,--the Oath of Hippocrates?"
+
+The Doctor thought he had read it, but did not remember much about
+it.
+
+"It 's worth reading, Doctor,--it's worth remembering; and, old as it
+is, it is just as good to-day as it was when it was laid down as a
+rule of conduct four hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was
+delivered.  Let me read it to you, Dr. Hurlbut."
+
+There was something in Master Gridley's look that made the Doctor
+feel a little nervous; he did not know just what was coming.
+
+Master Gridley took out his great Hippocrates, the edition of
+Foesius, and opened to the place.  He turned so as to face the
+Doctor, and read the famous Oath aloud, Englishing it as he went
+along.  When he came to these words which follow, he pronounced them
+very slowly and with special emphasis.
+
+"My life shall be pure and holy."
+
+"Into whatever house I enter, I will go for the good of the patient:
+
+"I will abstain from inflicting any voluntary injury, and from
+leading away any, whether man or woman, bond or free."
+
+The Doctor changed color as he listened, and the moisture broke out
+on his forehead.
+
+Master Gridley saw it, and followed up his advantage.  "Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, are you not in danger of violating the sanctities of your
+honorable calling, and leading astray a young person committed to
+your sacred keeping?"
+
+While saying these words, Master Gridley looked full upon him, with a
+face so charged with grave meaning, so impressed with the gravity of
+his warning accents, that the Doctor felt as if he were before some
+dread tribunal, and remained silent.  He was a member of the Rev. Mr.
+Stoker's church, and the words he had just listened to were those of
+a sinful old heathen who had never heard a sermon in his life; but
+they stung him, for all that, as the parable of the prophet stung the
+royal transgressor.
+
+He spoke at length, for the plain honest words had touched the right
+spring of consciousness at the right moment; not too early, for he
+now saw whither he was tending,--not too late, for he was not yet in
+the inner spirals of the passion which whirls men and women to their
+doom in ever-narrowing coils, that will not unwind at the command of
+God or man.
+
+He spoke as one who is humbled by self-accusation, yet in a manly
+way, as became his honorable and truthful character.
+
+"Master Gridley," he said, "I stand convicted before you.  I know too
+well what you are thinking of.  It is true, I cannot continue my
+attendance on Myrtle--on Miss Hazard, for you mean her--without peril
+to both of us.  She is not herself.  God forbid that I should cease
+to be myself!  I have been thinking of a summer tour, and I will at
+once set out upon it, and leave this patient in my father's hands.  I
+think he will find strength to visit her under the circmnstances."
+
+The Doctor went off the next morning without saying a word to Myrtle
+Hazard, and his father made the customary visit in his place.
+
+That night the spirit tare her, as may well be supposed, and so the
+second night.  But there was no help for it : her doctor was gone,
+and the old physician, with great effort, came instead, sat by her,
+spoke kindly to her, left wise directions to her attendants, and
+above all assured them that, if they would have a little patience,
+they would see all this storm blow over.
+
+On the third night after his visit, the spirit rent her sore, and
+came out of her, or, in the phrase of to-day, she had a fierce
+paroxysm, after which the violence of the conflict ceased, and she
+might be called convalescent so far as that was concerned.
+
+But all this series of nervous disturbances left her in a very
+impressible and excitable condition.  This was just the state to
+invite the spiritual manipulations of one of those theological
+practitioners who consider that the treatment of all morbid states of
+mind short of raving madness belongs to them and not to the doctors.
+This same condition was equally favorable for the operations of any
+professional experimenter who would use the flame of religious
+excitement to light the torch of an earthly passion.  So many fingers
+that begin on the black keys stray to the white ones before the tune
+is played out!
+
+If Myrtle Hazard was in charge of any angelic guardian, the time was
+at hand when she would need all celestial influences; for the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker was about to take a deep interest in her
+spiritual welfare.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SKIRMISHING.
+
+"So the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has called upon you, Susan Posey,
+has he?  And wants you to come and talk religion with him in his
+study, Susan Posey, does he?  Religion is a good thing, my dear, the
+best thing in the world, and never better than when we are young, and
+no young people need it more than young girls.  There are temptations
+to all, and to them as often as to any, Susan Posey.  And temptations
+come to them in places where they don't look for them, and from
+persons they never thought of as tempters.  So I am very glad to have
+your thoughts called to the subject of religion.  'Remember thy
+Creator in the days of thy youth.'
+
+"But Susan Posey, my dear, I think you hard better not break in upon
+the pious meditations of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker in his
+private study.  A monk's cell and a minister's library are hardly the
+places for young ladies.  They distract the attention of these good
+men from their devotions and their sermons.  If you think you must
+go, you had better take Mrs. Hopkins with you.  She likes religious
+conversation, and it will do her good too, and save a great deal of
+time for the minister, conversing with two at once.  She is of
+discreet age, and will tell you when it is time to come away,--you
+might stay too long, you know.  I've known young persons stay a good
+deal too long at these interviews,--a great deal too long, Susan
+Posey!"
+
+Such was the fatherly counsel of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+Susan was not very quick of apprehension, but she could not help
+seeing the justice of Master Gridley's remark, that for a young
+person to go and break in on the hours that a minister requires for
+his studies, without being accompanied by a mature friend who would
+remind her when it was time to go, would be taking an unfair
+advantage of his kindness in asking her to call upon him.  She
+promised, therefore, that she would never go without having Mrs.
+Hopkins as her companion, and with this assurance her old friend
+rested satisfied.
+
+It is altogether likely that he had some deeper reason for his advice
+than those with which he satisfied the simple nature of Susan Posey.
+Of that it will be easier to judge after a glance at the conditions
+and character of the minister and his household.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, in addition to the personal advantages
+already alluded to, some other qualities which might prove attractive
+to many women.  He had, in particular, that art of sliding into easy
+intimacy with them which implies some knowledge of the female nature,
+and, above all, confidence in one's powers.  There was little doubt,
+the gossips maintained, that many of the younger women of his parish
+would have been willing, in certain contingencies, to lift for him
+that other end of his yoke under which poor Mrs. Stoker was fainting,
+unequal to the burden.
+
+That lady must have been some years older than her husband,--how many
+we need not inquire too curiously,--but in vitality she had long
+passed the prime in which he was still flourishing.  She had borne
+him five children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three
+of them.  Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of
+village life wearied her; the parishioners expected too much of her
+as the minister's wife; she had wanted more fresh air and more
+cheerful companionship; and her thoughts had fed too much on death
+and sin,--good bitter tonics to increase the appetite for virtue, but
+not good as food and drink for the spirit.
+
+But there was another grief which lay hidden far beneath these
+obvious depressing influences.  She felt that she was no longer to
+her husband what she had been to him, and felt it with something of
+self-reproach,--which was a wrong to herself, for she had been a true
+and tender wife.  Deeper than all the rest was still another feeling,
+which had hardly risen into the region of inwardly articulated
+thought, but lay unshaped beneath all the syllabled trains of
+sleeping or waking consciousness.
+
+The minister was often consulted by his parishioners upon spiritual
+matters, and was in the habit of receiving in his study visitors who
+came with such intent.  Sometimes it was old weak-eyed Deacon
+Rumrill, in great iron-bowed spectacles, with hanging nether lip and
+tremulous voice, who had got his brain onto a muddle about the beast
+with two horns, or the woman that fled into the wilderness, or other
+points not settled to his mind in Scott's Commentary.  The minister
+was always very busy at such times, and made short work of his
+deacon's doubts.  Or it might be that an ancient woman, a mother or a
+grandmother in Israel, came with her questions and her perplexities
+to her pastor; and it was pretty certain that just at that moment he
+was very deep in his next sermon, or had a pressing visit to make.
+
+But it would also happen occasionally that one of the tenderer ewe-
+lambs of the flock needed comfort from the presence of the shepherd.
+Poor Mrs. Stoker noticed, or thought she noticed, that the good man
+had more leisure for the youthful and blooming sister than for the
+more discreet and venerable matron or spinster.  The sitting was apt
+to be longer; and the worthy pastor would often linger awhile about
+the door, to speed the parting guest, perhaps, but a little too much
+after the fashion of young people who are not displeased with each
+other, and who often find it as hard to cross a threshold single as a
+witch finds it to get over a running stream.  More than once, the
+pallid, faded wife had made an errand to the study, and, after a keen
+look at the bright young cheeks, flushed with the excitement of
+intimate spiritual communion, had gone back to her chamber with her
+hand pressed against her heart, and the bitterness of death in her
+soul.
+
+The end of all these bodily and mental trials was, that the
+minister's wife had fallen into a state of habitual invalidism, such
+as only women, who feel all the nerves which in men are as insensible
+as telegraph-wires, can experience.
+
+The doctor did not know what to make of her case,--whether she would
+live or die,--whether she would languish for years, or, all at once,
+roused by some strong impression, or in obedience to some unexplained
+movement of the vital forces, take up her bed and walk.  For her bed
+had become her home, where she lived as if it belonged to her
+organism.  There she lay, a not unpleasing invalid to contemplate,
+always looking resigned, patient, serene, except when the one deeper
+grief was stirred, always arrayed with simple neatness, and
+surrounded with little tokens that showed the constant presence with
+her of tasteful and thoughtful affection.  She did not know, nobody
+could know, how steadily, how silently all this artificial life was
+draining the veins and blanching the cheek of her daughter Bathsheba,
+one of the everyday, air-breathing angels without nimbus or aureole
+who belong to every story which lets us into a few households, as
+much as the stars and the flowers belong to everybody's verses.
+
+Bathsheba's devotion to her mother brought its own reward, but it was
+not in the shape of outward commendation.  Some of the more
+censorious members of her father's congregation were severe in their
+remarks upon her absorption in the supreme object of her care.  It
+seems that this had prevented her from attending to other duties
+which they considered more imperative.  They did n't see why she
+shouldn't keep a Sabbath-school as well as the rest, and as to her
+not comin' to meetin' three times on Sabbath day like other folks,
+they couldn't account for it, except because she calculated that she
+could get along without the means of grace, bein' a minister's
+daughter.  Some went so far as to doubt if she had ever experienced
+religion, for all she was a professor.  There was a good many
+indulged a false hope.  To this, others objected her life of utter
+self-denial and entire surrender to her duties towards her mother as
+some evidence of Christian character.  But old Deacon Rumrill put
+down that heresy by showing conclusively from Scott's Commentary on
+Romans xi. 1-6, that this was altogether against her chance of being
+called, and that the better her disposition to perform good works,
+the more unlikely she was to be the subject of saving grace.  Some of
+these severe critics were good people enough themselves, but they
+loved active work and stirring companionship, and would have found
+their real cross if they had been called to sit at an invalid's
+bedside.
+
+As for the Rev. Mr. Stoker, his duties did not allow him to give so
+much time to his suffering wife as his feelings would undoubtedly
+have prompted.  He therefore relinquished the care of her (with great
+reluctance we may naturally suppose) to Bathsheba, who had inherited
+not only her mother's youthful smile, but that self-forgetfulness
+which, born with some of God's creatures, is, if not "grace," at
+least a manifestation of native depravity which might well be
+mistaken for it.
+
+The intimacy of mother and daughter was complete, except on a single
+point.  There was one subject on which no word ever passed between
+them.  The excuse of duties to others was by a tacit understanding a
+mantle to cover all short-comings in the way of attention from the
+husband and father, and no word ever passed between them implying a
+suspicion of the loyalty of his affections.  Bathsheba came at last
+so to fill with her tenderness the space left empty in the neglected
+heart, that her mother only spoke her habitual feeling when she said,
+"I should think you were in love with me, my darling, if you were not
+my daughter."
+
+This was a dangerous state of things for the minister.  Strange
+suggestions and unsafe speculations began to mingle with his dreams
+and reveries.  The thought once admitted that another's life is
+becoming superfluous and a burden, feeds like a ravenous vulture on
+the soul.  Woe to the man or woman whose days are passed in watching
+the hour-glass through which the sands run too slowly for longings
+that are like a skulking procession of bloodless murders!  Without
+affirming such horrors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, it would not be
+libellous to say that his fancy was tampering with future
+possibilities, as it constantly happens with those who are getting
+themselves into training for some act of folly, or some crime, it may
+be, which will in its own time evolve itself as an idea in the
+consciousness, and by and by ripen into fact.
+
+It must not be taken for granted that he was actually on the road to
+some fearful deed, or that he was an utterly lost soul.  He was ready
+to yield to temptation if it came in his way; he would even court it,
+but he did not shape out any plan very definitely in his mind, as a
+more desperate sinner would have done.  He liked the pleasurable
+excitement of emotional relations with his pretty lambs, and enjoyed
+it under the name of religious communion.  There is a border land
+where one can stand on the territory of legitimate instincts and
+affections, and yet be so near, the pleasant garden of the Adversary,
+that his dangerous fruits and flowers are within easy reach.  Once
+tasted, the next step is like to be the scaling of the wall.  The
+Rev. Mr. Stoker was very fond of this border land.  His imagination
+was wandering over it too often when his pen was travelling almost of
+itself along the weary parallels of the page before him.  All at once
+a blinding flash would come over him the lines of his sermon would
+run together, the fresh manuscript would shrivel like a dead leaf,
+and the rows of hard-hearted theology on the shelves before him, and
+the broken-backed Concordance, and the Holy Book itself, would fade
+away as he gave himself up to the enchantment of his delirious dream.
+
+The reader will probably consider it a discreet arrangement that
+pretty Susan Posey should seek her pastor in grave company.  Mrs.
+Hopkins willingly consented to the arrangement which had been
+proposed, and agreed to go with the young lady on her visit to the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker's study.  They were both arrayed in their field-day
+splendors on this occasion.  Susan was lovely in her light curls and
+blue ribbons, and the becoming dress which could not help betraying
+the modestly emphasized crescendos and gently graded diminuendos of
+her figure.  She was as round as if she had been turned in a lathe,
+and as delicately finished as if she had been modelled for a Flora.
+She had naturally an airy toss of the head and a springy movement of
+the joints, such as some girls study in the glass (and make dreadful
+work of it), so that she danced all over without knowing it, like a
+little lively bobolink on a bulrush.  In short, she looked fit to
+spoil a homily for Saint Anthony himself.
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was not less perfect in her somewhat different style.
+She might be called impressive and imposing in her grand-costume,
+which she wore for this visit.  It was a black silk dress, with a
+crape shawl, a firmly defensive bonnet, and an alpaca umbrella with
+a stern-looking and decided knob presiding as its handle.  The dried-
+leaf rustle of her silk dress was suggestive of the ripe autumn of
+life, bringing with it those golden fruits of wisdom and experience
+which the grave teachers of mankind so justly prefer to the idle
+blossoms of adolescence.
+
+It is needless to say that the visit was conducted with the most
+perfect propriety in all respects.  Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take
+upon herself a large share of the conversation.  The minister, on the
+other hand, would have devoted himself more particularly to Miss
+Susan, but, with a very natural make-believe obtuseness, the good
+woman drew his fire so constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly
+any of his insinuating looks, reached the tender object at which they
+were aimed.  It is probable that his features or tones betrayed some
+impatience at having thus been foiled of his purpose, for Mrs.
+Hopkins thought he looked all the time as if he wanted to get rid of
+her.  The three parted, therefore, not in the best humor all round.
+Mrs. Hopkins declared she'd see the minister in Jericho before she'd
+fix herself up as if she was goin' to a weddin' to go and see him
+again.  Why, he did n't make any more of her than if she'd been a
+tabby-cat.  She believed some of these ministers thought women's
+souls dried up like peas in a pod by the time they was forty year
+old; anyhow, they did n't seem to care any great about 'em, except
+while they was green and tender.  It was all Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-
+usan, Miss Se-usan, my dear!  but as for her, she might jest as well
+have gone with her apron on, for any notice he took of her.  She did
+n't care, she was n't goin' to be left out when there was talkin'
+goin' on, anyhow.
+
+Susan Posey, on her part, said she did n't like him a bit.  He looked
+so sweet at her, and held his head on one side,--law! just as if he
+had been a young beau!  And,--don't tell,--but he whispered that he
+wished the next time I came I wouldn't bring that Hopkins woman!
+
+It would not be fair to repeat what the minister said to himself; but
+we may own as much as this, that, if worthy Mrs. Hopkins had heard
+it, she would have treated him to a string of adjectives which would
+have greatly enlarged his conceptions of the female vocabulary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+BATTLE.
+
+In tracing the history of a human soul through its commonplace
+nervous perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations,
+there is danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject
+of such weakness.  It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses of a
+young girl; but you who remember when_______ _________, only fifteen
+years old, untouched by passion, unsullied in name, was found in the
+shallow brook where she had sternly and surely sought her death,--
+(too true! too true!--ejus animae Jesu miserere!--but a generation
+has passed since then,)--will not smile so scornfully.
+
+Myrtle Hazard no longer required the physician's visits, but her mind
+was very far from being poised in the just balance of its faculties.
+She was of a good natural constitution and a fine temperament; but
+she had been overwrought by all that she had passed through, and,
+though happening to have been born in another land, she was of
+American descent.  Now, it has long been noticed that there is
+something in the influences, climatic or other, here prevailing,
+which predisposes to morbid religious excitement.  The graver reader
+will not object to seeing the exact statement of a competent witness
+belonging to a by-gone century, confirmed as it is by all that we see
+about us.
+
+"There is no Experienced Minister of the Gospel who hath not in the
+Cases of Tempted Souls often had this Experience, that the ill Cases
+of their distempered Bodies are the frequent Occasion and Original of
+their Temptations."  "The Vitiated Humours in many Persons, yield the
+Steams whereinto Satan does insinuate himself, till he has gained a
+sort of Possession in them, or at least an Opportunity to shoot into
+the Mind as many Fiery Darts as may cause a sad Life unto them; yea,
+'t is well if Self-Murder be not the sad end into which these hurred
+(?) People are thus precipitated.  New England, a country where
+Splenetic Maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any
+other, hath afforded Numberless Instances, of even pious People, who
+have contracted these Melancholy Indispositions which have unhinged
+them from all Service or Comfort; yea, not a few Persons have been
+hurried thereby to lay Violent Hands upon themselves at the last.
+These are among the unsearchable Judgments of God!"
+
+Such are the words of the Rev. Cotton Mather.
+
+The minister had hardly recovered from his vexatious defeat in the
+skirmish where the Widow Hopkins was his principal opponent, when he
+received a note from Miss Silence Withers, which promised another and
+more important field of conflict.  It contained a request that he
+would visit Myrtle Hazard, who seemed to be in a very excitable and
+impressible condition, and who might perhaps be easily brought under
+those influences which she had resisted from her early years, through
+inborn perversity of character.
+
+When the Rev. Mr. Stoker received this note, he turned very pale,--
+which was a bad sign.  Then he drew a long breath or two, and
+presently a flush tingled up to his cheek, where it remained a fixed
+burning glow.  This may have been from the deep interest he felt in
+Myrtle's spiritual welfare; but he had often been sent for by aged
+sinners in more immediate peril, apparently, without any such
+disturbance of the circulation.
+
+To know whether a minister, young or still in flower; is in safe or
+dangerous paths, there are two psychometers, a comparison between
+which will give as infallible a return as the dry and wet bulbs of
+the ingenious "Hygrodeik."  The first is the black broadcloth forming
+the knees of his pantaloons; the second, the patch of carpet before
+his mirror.  If the first is unworn and the second is frayed and
+threadbare, pray for him.  If the first is worn and shiny, while the
+second keeps its pattern and texture, get him to pray for you.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker should have gone down on his knees then and
+there, and sought fervently for the grace which he was like to need
+in the dangerous path just opening before him.  He did not do this;
+but he stood up before his looking-glass and parted his hair as
+carefully as if he had been separating the saints of his congregation
+from the sinners, to send the list to the statistical columns of a
+religious newspaper.  He selected a professional neckcloth, as
+spotlessly pure as if it had been washed in innocency, and adjusted
+it in a tie which was like the white rose of Sharon.  Myrtle Hazard
+was, he thought, on the whole, the handsomest girl he had ever seen;
+Susan Posey was to her as a buttercup from the meadow is to a tiger-
+lily.  He, knew the nature of the nervous disturbances through which
+she had been passing, and that she must be in a singularly
+impressible condition.  He felt sure that he could establish intimate
+spiritual relations with her by drawing out her repressed sympathies,
+by feeding the fires of her religious imagination, by exercising all
+those lesser arts of fascination which are so familiar to the Don
+Giovannis, and not always unknown to the San Giovannis.
+
+As for the hard doctrines which he used to produce sensations with in
+the pulpit, it would have been a great pity to worry so lovely a
+girl, in such a nervous state, with them.  He remembered a savory
+text about being made all things to all men, which would bear
+application particularly well to the case of this young woman.  He
+knew how to weaken his divinity, on occasion, as well as an old
+housewife to weaken her tea, lest it should keep people awake.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker was a man of emotions.  He loved to feel his
+heart beat; he loved all the forms of non-alcoholic drunkenness,
+which are so much better than the vinous, because they taste
+themselves so keenly, whereas the other (according to the statement
+of experts who are familiar with its curious phenomena) has a certain
+sense of unreality connected with it.  He delighted in the reflex
+stimulus of the excitement he produced in others by working on their
+feelings.  A powerful preacher is open to the same sense of
+enjoyment--an awful, tremulous, goose-flesh sort of state, but still
+enjoyment--that a great tragedian feels when he curdles the blood of
+his audience.
+
+Mr. Stoker was noted for the vividness of his descriptions of the
+future which was in store for the great bulk of his fellow-townsmen
+and fellow-worlds-men.  He had three sermons on this subject, known
+to all the country round as the sweating sermon, the fainting sermon,
+and the convulsion-fit sermon, from the various effects said to have
+been produced by them when delivered before large audiences.  It
+might be supposed that his reputation as a terrorist would have
+interfered with his attempts to ingratiate himself with his young
+favorites.  But the tragedian who is fearful as Richard or as Iago
+finds that no hindrance to his success in the part of Romeo.  Indeed,
+women rather take to terrible people; prize-fighters, pirates,
+highwaymen, rebel generals, Grand Turks, and Bluebeards generally
+have a fascination for the sex; your virgin has a natural instinct to
+saddle your lion.  The fact, therefore, that the young girl had sat
+under his tremendous pulpitings, through the sweating sermon, the
+fainting sermon, and the convulsion-fit sermon, did not secure her
+against the influence of his milder approaches.
+
+Myrtle was naturally surprised at receiving a visit from him; but she
+was in just that unbalanced state in which almost any impression is
+welcome.  He showed so much interest, first in her health, then in
+her thoughts and feelings, always following her lead in the
+conversation, that before he left her she felt as if she had made a
+great discovery; namely, that this man, so formidable behind the guns
+of his wooden bastion, was a most tenderhearted and sympathizing
+person when he came out of it unarmed.  How delightful he was as he
+sat talking in the twilight in low and tender tones, with respectful
+pauses of listening, in which he looked as if he too had just made a
+discovery,--of an angel, to wit, to whom he could not help unbosoming
+his tenderest emotions, as to a being from another sphere!
+
+It was a new experience to Myrtle.  She was all ready for the
+spiritual manipulations of an expert.  The excitability which had
+been showing itself in spasms and strange paroxysms had been
+transferred to those nervous centres, whatever they may be, cerebral
+or ganglionic, which are concerned in the emotional movements of the
+religious nature.  It was taking her at an unfair disadvantage, no
+doubt.  In the old communion, some priest might have wrought upon her
+while in this condition, and we might have had at this very moment
+among us another Saint Theresa or Jacqueline Pascal.  She found but a
+dangerous substitute in the spiritual companionship of a saint like
+the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+People think the confessional is unknown in our Protestant churches.
+It is a great mistake.  The principal change is, that there is no
+screen between the penitent and the father confessor.  The minister
+knew his rights, and very soon asserted them.  He gave aunt Silence
+to understand that he could talk more at ease if he and his young
+disciple were left alone together.  Cynthia Badlam did not like this
+arrangement.  She was afraid to speak about it; but she glared at
+them aslant, with the look of a biting horse when his eyes follow one
+sideways until they are all white but one little vicious spark of
+pupil.
+
+It was not very long before the Rev. Mr. Stoker had established
+pretty intimate relations with the household at The Poplars.  He had
+reason to think, he assured Miss Silence, that Myrtle was in a state
+of mind which promised a complete transformation of her character.
+He used the phrases of his sect, of course, in talking with the
+elderly lady; but the language which he employed with the young girl
+was free from those mechanical expressions which would have been like
+to offend or disgust her.
+
+As to his rougher formulae, he knew better than to apply them to a
+creature of her fine texture.  If he had been disposed to do so, her
+simple questions and answers to his inquiries would have made it
+difficult.  But it was in her bright and beautiful eyes, in her
+handsome features, and her winning voice, that he found his chief
+obstacle.  How could he look upon her face in its loveliness, and
+talk to her as if she must be under the wrath and curse of God for
+the mere fact of her existence?  It seemed more natural and it
+certainly was more entertaining, to question her in such a way as to
+find out what kind of theology had grown up in her mind as the result
+of her training in the complex scheme of his doctrinal school.  And
+as he knew that the merest child, so soon as it begins to think at
+all, works out for itself something like a theory of human nature, he
+pretty soon began sounding Myrtle's thoughts on this matter.
+
+What was her own idea; he would be pleased to know, about her natural
+condition as one born of a sinful race, and her inherited liabilities
+on that account?
+
+Myrtle smiled like a little heathen, as she was, according to the
+standard of her earlier teachings.  That kind of talk used to worry
+her when she was a child, sometimes.  Yes, she remembered its coming
+back to her in a dream she had, when--when--(She did not finish her
+sentence.)  Did he think she hated every kind of goodness and loved
+every kind of evil?  Did he think she was hateful to the Being who
+made her?
+
+The minister looked straight into the bright, brave, tender eyes, and
+answered, "Nothing in heaven or on earth could help loving you,
+Myrtle!"
+
+Pretty well for a beginning!
+
+Myrtle saw nothing but pious fervor in this florid sentiment.  But as
+she was honest and clear-sighted, she could not accept a statement
+which seemed so plainly in contradiction with his common teachings,
+without bringing his flattering assertion to the test of another
+question.
+
+Did he suppose, she asked, that any persons could be Christians, who
+could not tell the day or the year of their change from children of
+darkness to children of light.
+
+The shrewd clergyman, whose creed could be lax enough on occasion,
+had provided himself with authorities of all kinds to meet these
+awkward questions in casuistical divinity.  He had hunted up recipes
+for spiritual neuralgia, spasms, indigestion, psora, hypochondriasis,
+just as doctors do for their bodily counterparts.
+
+To be sure they could.  Why, what did the great Richard Baxter say in
+his book on Infant Baptism?  That at a meeting of many eminent
+Christians, some of them very famous ministers, when it was desired
+that every one should give an account of the time and manner of his
+conversion, there was but one of them all could do it.  And as for
+himself, Mr. Baxter said, he could not remember the day or the year
+when he began to be sincere, as he called it.  Why, did n't President
+Wheelock say to a young man who consulted him, that some persons
+might be true Christians without suspecting it?
+
+All this was so very different from the uncompromising way in which
+religious doctrines used to be presented to the young girl from the
+pulpit, that it naturally opened her heart and warmed her affections.
+Remember, if she needs excuse, that the defeated instincts of a
+strong nature were rushing in upon her, clamorous for their rights,
+and that she was not yet mature enough to understand and manage them.
+The paths of love and religion are at the fork of a road which every
+maiden travels.  If some young hand does not open the turnpike gate
+of the first, she is pretty sure to try the other, which has no toll-
+bar.  It is also very commonly noticed that these two paths, after
+diverging awhile, run into each other.  True love leads many
+wandering souls into the better way.  Nor is it rare to see those who
+started in company for the gates of pearl seated together on the
+banks that border the avenue to that other portal, gathering the
+roses for which it is so famous.
+
+It was with the most curious interest that the minister listened to
+the various heresies into which her reflections had led her.  Somehow
+or other they did not sound so dangerous coming from her lips as when
+they were uttered by the coarser people of the less rigorous
+denominations, or preached in the sermons of heretical clergymen.  He
+found it impossible to think of her in connection with those
+denunciations of sinners for which his discourses had been noted.
+Some of the sharp old church-members began to complain that his
+exhortations were losing their pungency.  The truth was, he was
+preaching for Myrtle Hazard.  He was getting bewitched and driven
+beside himself by the intoxication of his relations with her.
+
+All this time she was utterly unconscious of any charm that she was
+exercising, or of being herself subject to any personal fascination.
+She loved to read the books of ecstatic contemplation which he
+furnished her.  She loved to sing the languishing hymns which he
+selected for her.  She loved to listen to his devotional rhapsodies,
+hardly knowing sometimes whether she were in the body, or out of the
+body, while he lifted her upon the wings of his passion-kindled
+rhetoric.  The time came when she had learned to listen for his step,
+when her eyes glistened at meeting him, when the words he uttered
+were treasured as from something more than a common mortal, and the
+book he had touched was like a saintly relic.  It never suggested
+itself to her for an instant that this was anything more than such a
+friendship as Mercy might have cultivated with Great-Heart.  She gave
+her confidence simply because she was very young and innocent.  The
+green tendrils of the growing vine must wind round something.
+
+The seasons had been changing their scenery while the events we have
+told were occurring, and the loveliest days of autumn were now
+shining.  To those who know the "Indian summer" of our Northern
+States, it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the
+senses and the soul.  The stillness of the landscape in that
+beautiful time is as if the planet were sleeping, like a top, before
+it begins to rock with the storms of autumn.  All natures seem to
+find themselves more truly in its light; love grows more tender,
+religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the past,
+grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe thoughts
+which he will tie in sheaves of verses by his winter fireside.
+
+The minister had got into the way of taking frequent walks with
+Myrtle, whose health had seemed to require the open air, and who was
+fast regaining her natural look.  Under the canopy of the scarlet,
+orange, and crimson leaved maples, of the purple and violet clad
+oaks, of the birches in their robes of sunshine, and the beeches in
+their clinging drapery of sober brown, they walked together while he
+discoursed of the joys of heaven, the sweet communion of kindred
+souls, the ineffable bliss of a world where love would be immortal
+and beauty should never know decay.  And while she listened, the
+strange light of the leaves irradiated the youthful figure of Myrtle,
+as when the stained window let in its colors on Madeline, the rose-
+bloom and the amethyst and the glory.
+
+"Yes!  we shall be angels together," exclaimed the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+"Our souls were made for immortal union.  I know it; I feel it in
+every throb of my heart.  Even in this world you are as an angel to
+me, lifting me into the heaven where I shall meet you again, or it
+will not be heaven.  Oh, if on earth our communion could have been
+such as it must be hereafter!  O Myrtle, Myrtle!"
+
+He stretched out his hands as if to clasp hers between them in the
+rapture of his devotion.  Was it the light reflected from the glossy
+leaves of the poison sumach which overhung the path that made his
+cheek look so pale?  Was he going to kneel to her?
+
+Myrtle turned her dark eyes on him with a simple wonder that saw an
+excess of saintly ardor in these demonstrations, and drew back from
+it.
+
+"I think of heaven always as the place where I shall meet my mother,"
+she said calmly.
+
+These words recalled the man to himself for a moment and he was
+silent.  Presently he seated himself on a stone.  His lips were
+tremulous as he said, in a low tone, "Sit down by me, Myrtle."
+
+
+"No," she answered, with something which chilled him in her voice, "
+we will not stay here any longer; it is time to go home."
+
+"Full time!" muttered Cynthia Badlam, whose watchful eyes had been
+upon them, peering through a screen of yellow leaves, that turned her
+face pace as if with deadly passion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+FLANK MOVEMENT.
+
+Miss Cynthia Badlam was in the habit of occasionally visiting the
+Widow Hopkins.  Some said but then people will talk, especially in
+the country, where they have not much else to do, except in haying-
+time.  She had always known the widow, long before Mr. Gridley came
+there to board, or any other special event happened in her family.
+No matter what people said.
+
+Miss Badlam called to see Mrs. Hopkins, then, and the two had a long
+talk together, of which only a portion is on record.  Here are such
+fragments as have been preserved.
+
+"What would I do about it?  Why, I'd put a stop to such carry'n's on,
+mighty quick, if I had to tie the girl to the bedpost, and have a
+bulldog that world take the seat out of any pair of black pantaloons
+that come within forty rod of her,--that's what I'd do about it!  He
+undertook to be mighty sweet with our Susan one while, but ever sence
+he's been talkin' religion with Myrtle Hazard he's let us alone.  Do
+as I did when he asked our Susan to come to his study,--stick close
+to your girl and you 'll put a stop to all this business.  He won't
+make love to two at once, unless they 're both pretty young, I 'll
+warrant.  Follow her round, Miss Cynthy, and keep your eyes on her."
+
+"I have watched her like a cat, Mrs. Hopkins, but I can't follow her
+everywhere,--she won't stand what Susan Posey 'll stand.  There's no
+use our talking to her,--we 've done with that at our house.  You
+never know what that Indian blood of hers will make her do.  She's
+too high-strung for us to bit and bridle.  I don't want to see her
+name in the paper again, alongside of that" (She did not finish the
+sentence.) "I'd rather have her fished dead out of the river, or find
+her where she found her uncle Malachi!"
+
+"You don't think, Miss Cynthy, that the man means to inveigle the
+girl with the notion of marryin' her by and by, after poor Mrs.
+Stoker's dead and gone?"
+
+"The Lord in heaven forbid!" exclaimed Miss Cynthia, throwing up her
+hands.  "A child of fifteen years old, if she is a woman to look at!"
+
+"It's too bad,--it's too bad to think of, Miss Cynthy; and there's
+that poor woman dyin' by inches, and Miss Bathsheby settin' with her
+day and night, she has n't got a bit of her father in her, it's all
+her mother,--and that man, instead of bein' with her to comfort her
+as any man ought to be with his wife, in sickness and in health,
+that's what he promised.  I 'm sure when my poor husband was sick....
+To think of that man goin' about to talk religion to all the
+prettiest girls he can find in the parish, and his wife at home like
+to leave him so soon,--it's a shame,--so it is, come now!  Miss
+Cynthy, there's one of the best men and one of the learnedest men
+that ever lived that's a real friend of Myrtle Hazard, and a better
+friend to her than she knows of,--for ever sence he brought her home,
+he feels jest like a father to her,--and that man is Mr. Gridley,
+that lives in this house.  It's him I 'll speak to about the
+minister's carry'in's on.  He knows about his talking sweet to our
+Susan, and he'll put things to rights!  He's a master hand when he
+does once take hold of anything, I tell you that!  Jest get him to
+shet up them books of his, and take hold of anybody's troubles, and
+you'll see how he 'll straighten 'em out."
+
+There was a pattering of little feet on the stairs, and the two small
+twins, "Sossy" and "Minthy," in the home dialect, came hand in hand
+into the room, Miss Susan leaving them at the threshold, not wishing
+to interrupt the two ladies, and being much interested also in
+listening to Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who was reading some of his last
+poems to her, with great delight to both of them.
+
+The good woman rose to take them from Susan, and guide their
+uncertain steps.  "My babies, I call 'em, Miss Cynthy.  Ain't they
+nice children?  Come to go to bed, little dears?  Only a few minutes,
+Miss Cynthy."
+
+She took them into the bedroom on the same floor, where they slept,
+and, leaving the door open, began undressing them.  Cynthia turned
+her rocking-chair round so as to face the open door.  She looked on
+while the little creatures were being undressed; she heard the few
+words they lisped as their infant prayer, she saw them laid in their
+beds, and heard their pretty good-night.
+
+A lone woman to whom all the sweet cares of maternity have been
+denied cannot look upon a sight like this without feeling the void in
+her own heart where a mother's affection should have nestled.
+Cynthia sat perfectly still, without rocking, and watched kind Mrs.
+Hopkins at her quasi parental task.  A tear stole down her rigid face
+as she saw the rounded limbs of the children bared in their white
+beauty, and their little heads laid on the pillow.  They were
+sleeping quietly when Mrs. Hopkins left the room for a moment on some
+errand of her own.  Cynthia rose softly from her chair, stole swiftly
+to the bedside, and printed a long, burning kiss on each of their
+foreheads.
+
+When Mrs. Hopkins came back, she found the maiden lady sitting in her
+place just as she left her, but rocking in her chair and sobbing as
+one in sudden pangs of grief.
+
+"It is a great trouble, Miss Cynthy," she said,--"a great trouble to
+have such a child as Myrtle to think of and to care for.  If she was
+like our Susan Posey, now!--but we must do the best we can; and if
+Mr. Gridley once sets himself to it, you may depend upon it he 'll
+make it all come right.  I wouldn't take on about it if I was you.
+You let me speak to our Mr. Gridley.  We all have our troubles.  It
+is n't everybody that can ride to heaven in a C-spring shay, as my
+poor husband used to say; and life 's a road that 's got a good many
+thank-you-ma'ams to go bumpin' over, says he."
+
+Miss Badlam acquiesced in the philosophical reflections of the late
+Mr. Ammi Hopkins, and left it to his widow to carry out her own
+suggestion in reference to consulting Master Gridley.  The good woman
+took the first opportunity she had to introduce the matter, a little
+diffusely, as is often the way of widows who keep boarders.
+
+"There's something going on I don't like, Mr. Gridley.  They tell me
+that Minister Stoker is following round after Myrtle Hazard, talking
+religion at her jest about the same way he'd have liked to with our
+Susan, I calculate.  If he wants to talk religion to me or Silence
+Withers,--well, no, I don't feel sure about Silence,--she ain't as
+young as she used to be, but then ag'in she ain't so fur gone as
+some, and she's got money,--but if he wants to talk religion with me,
+he may come and welcome.  But as for Myrtle Hazard, she's been sick,
+and it's left her a little flighty by what they say, and to have a
+minister round her all the time ravin' about the next world as if he
+had a latch-key to the front door of it, is no way to make her come
+to herself again.  I 've seen more than one young girl sent off to
+the asylum by that sort of work, when, if I'd only had 'em, I'd have
+made 'em sweep the stairs, and mix the puddin's, and tend the babies,
+and milk the cow, and keep 'em too busy all day to be thinkin' about
+themselves, and have 'em dress up nice evenin's and see some young
+folks and have a good time, and go to meetin' Sundays, and then have
+done with the minister, unless it was old Father Pemberton.  He knows
+forty times as much about heaven as that Stoker man does, or ever 's
+like to,--why don't they run after him, I should like to know?
+Ministers are men, come now; and I don't want to say anything against
+women, Mr. Gridley, but women are women, that's the fact of it, and
+half of 'em are hystericky when they're young; and I've heard old Dr.
+Hurlbut say many a time that he had to lay in an extra stock of
+valerian and assafaetida whenever there was a young minister round,--
+for there's plenty of religious ravin', says he, that's nothin' but
+hysterics."
+
+[Mr. Fronde thinks that was the trouble with Bloody Queen Mary, but
+the old physician did not get the idea from him.]
+
+"Well, and what do you propose to do about the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker and his young proselyte, Miss Myrtle Hazard?" said Mr.
+Gridley, when Mrs. Hopkins at last gave him a chance to speak.
+
+"Mr. Gridley,"--Mrs. Hopkins looked full upon him as she spoke,--"
+people used to say that you was a good man and a great man and one of
+the learnedest men alive, but that you didn't know much nor care for
+much except books.  I know you used to live pretty much to yourself
+when you first came to board in this house.  But you've been very
+good to my son; ...and if Gifted lives till you ...till you are in
+...your grave, ...he will write a poem--I know he will--that will
+tell your goodness to babes unborn."
+
+[Here Master Gridley groaned, and repeated to himself silently,
+
+    "Scindentur vestes gemmae frangentur et aurum,
+     Carmina quam tribuent fama perennis erit."
+
+All this inwardly, and without interrupting the worthy woman's talk.]
+
+"And if ever Gifted makes a book,--don't say anything about it, Mr.
+Gridley, for goodness' sake, for he wouldn't have anybody know it,
+only I can't help thinking that some time or other he will print a
+book,--and if he does, I know whose name he'll put at the head of
+it,--'Dedicated to B. G., with the gratitude and respect--' There,
+now, I had n't any business to say a word about it, and it's only
+jest in case he does, you know.  I'm sure you deserve it all.  You've
+helped him with the best of advice.  And you've been kind to me when
+I was in trouble.  And you've been like a grandfather" [Master
+Gridley winced,--why could n't the woman have said father?--that
+grand struck his ear like a spade going into the gravel] "to those
+babes, poor little souls! left on my door-step like a couple of
+breakfast rolls,--only you know it's the baker left then.  I believe
+in you, Mr. Gridley, as I believe in my Maker and in Father
+Pemberton,--but, poor man, he's old, and you won't be old these
+twenty years yet."
+
+[Master Gridley shook his head as if to say that was n't so, but felt
+comforted and refreshed.]
+
+"You've got to help Myrtle Hazard again.  You brought her home when
+she come so nigh drowning.  You got the old doctor to go and see her
+when she come so nigh being bewitched with the magnetism and
+nonsense, whatever they call it, and the young doctor was so nigh
+bein' crazy, too.  I know, for Nurse Byloe told me all about it.  And
+now Myrtle's gettin' run away with by that pesky Minister Stoker.
+Cynthy Badlam was here yesterday crying and sobbing as if her heart
+would break about it.  For my part, I did n't think Cynthy cared so
+much for the girl as all that, but I saw her takin' on dreadfully
+with my own eyes.  That man's like a hen-hawk among the chickens,
+first he picks up one, and then he picks up another.  I should like
+to know if nobody but young folks has souls to be saved, and
+specially young women!"
+
+"Tell me all you know about Myrtle Hazard and Joseph Bellamy Stoker,"
+said Master Gridley.
+
+Thereupon that good lady related all that Miss Badlam had imparted to
+her, of which the reader knows the worst, being the interview of
+which the keen spinster had been a witness, having followed them for
+the express purpose of knowing, in her own phrase, what the minister
+was up to.
+
+It is not to be supposed that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet
+kindness of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best
+of her adventure.  He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to
+consider himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the
+thought that he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been
+in the way of considering himself, might perhaps do something even
+more important than his previous achievement to save this young girl
+from the dangers that surrounded her.  He loved his classics and his
+old books; he took an interest, too, in the newspapers and
+periodicals that brought the fermenting thought and the electric life
+of the great world into his lonely study; but these things just about
+him were getting strong hold on him, and most of all the fortunes of
+this beautiful young woman.  How strange!  For a whole generation he
+had lived in no nearer relation to his fellow-creatures than that of
+a half-fossilized teacher; and all at once he found himself face to
+face with the very most intense form of life, the counsellor of
+threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled loveliness.  What
+business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of which he had
+said in "Thoughts on the Universe,"--"Every man leads or is led by
+something that goes on four legs."
+
+Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes
+all human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of
+dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he
+were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an
+extra gallon of air at every breath, Then--you who have written a
+book that holds your heart-leaves between its pages will understand
+the movement--he took down "Thoughts on the Universe" for a
+refreshing draught from his own wellspring.  He opened as chance
+ordered it, and his eyes fell on the following passage:
+
+"The true American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch,
+the Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.'
+A homely utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and
+hierarchies.  These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that
+some things can NOT be done as well as others."
+
+"There, now!" he said, talking to himself in his usual way, "is n't
+that good?  It always seems to me that I find something to the point
+when I open that book.  'Some things can be done as well as others,'
+can they?  Suppose I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle
+Hazard?  I think I may say I am old and incombustible enough to be
+trusted.  She does not seem to be a safe neighbor to very inflammable
+bodies?"
+
+Myrtle was sitting in the room long known as the Study, or the
+Library, when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her.
+Miss Cynthia, who received him, led him to this apartment and left
+him alone with Myrtle.  She welcomed him very cordially, but colored
+as she did so,--his visit was a surprise.  She was at work on a piece
+of embroidery.  Her first instinctive movement was to thrust it out
+of sight with the thought of concealment; but she checked this, and
+before the blush of detection had reached her cheek, the blush of
+ingenuous shame for her weakness had caught and passed it, and was in
+full possession.  She sat with her worsted pattern held bravely in
+sight, and her cheek as bright as its liveliest crimson.
+
+"Miss Cynthia has let me in upon you," he said, "or I should not have
+ventured to disturb you in this way.  A work of art, is it, Miss
+Myrtle Hazard?"
+
+"Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridley,--for my pastor."
+
+"Oh!  oh!  That is well.  A good old man.  I have a great regard for
+the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.  I wish all ministers were as good and
+simple and pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.  And I wish
+all the young people thought as much about their elders as you do,
+Miss Myrtle Hazard.  We that are old love little acts of kindness.
+You gave me more pleasure than you knew of, my dear, when you worked
+that handsome cushion for me.  The old minister will be greatly
+pleased,--poor old man!"
+
+"But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father
+Pemberton.  They are for--Mr. Stoker."
+
+"The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker!  He is not an old man, the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker.  He may perhaps be a widower before a great
+while. --Does he know that you are working those slippers for him?"
+
+"Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley.  I meant them for a surprise to him.  He
+has been so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I
+thought anybody did.  He is so different from what I thought; he
+makes religion so perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would
+agree with him, if they could only hear him talk."
+
+"Greatly interested in the souls of his people, is n't he?"
+
+"Too much, almost, I am afraid.  He says he has been too hard in his
+sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his
+hearers enough."
+
+"Don't you think he worries himself about the souls of young women
+rather more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?"
+
+There was something in the tone of this question that helped its
+slightly sarcastic expression.  Myrtle's jealousy for her minister's
+sincerity was roused.
+
+"How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley?  I am sure I wish you or anybody
+could have heard him talk as I have.  There is no age in souls, he
+says; and I am sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or
+young."
+
+"No age in souls,--no age in souls.  Souls of forty as young as souls
+of fifteen; that 's it."  Master Gridley did not say this loud.  But
+he did speak as follows: "I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker's love of being useful to people of all ages.
+You have had comfort in his companionship, and there are others who
+might be very glad to profit by it.  I know a very excellent person
+who has had trials, and is greatly interested in religious
+conversation.  Do you think he would be willing to let this friend of
+mine share in the privileges of spiritual intercourse which you
+enjoy?"
+
+There was but one answer possible.  Of course he would.
+
+"I hope it is so, my dear young lady.  But listen to me one moment.
+I love you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your own--
+grandfather."  (There was moral heroism in that word.) "I love you as
+if you were of my own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer
+me, I mean to keep watch against all dangers that threaten you in
+mind, body, or estate.  You may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt
+me; but until you say you distrust me, when any trouble comes near
+you, you will find me there.  Now, my dear child, you ought to know
+that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has the reputation of being too
+fond of prosecuting religious inquiries with young and handsome
+women."
+
+Myrtle's eyes fell,--a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.
+
+"He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,--a
+very pretty girl, as you know."
+
+Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.
+
+"I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about
+with him.  He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death,
+and cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother's blood if nature did
+not tell her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first
+good-looking young woman he can get to listen to him."
+
+Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.
+
+"Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man
+alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?"
+
+"Of course I would," said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts,
+her shame, her pride, were all excited.  "Who is your friend, Mr.
+Gridley?"
+
+"An excellent woman,--Mrs. Hopkins.  You know her, Gifted Hopkins's
+mother, with whom I am residing.  Shall the minister be given to
+understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?"
+
+Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations.  "As
+you say," she answered.  "Is there nobody that I can trust, or is
+everybody hunting me like a bird?"  She hid her face in her hands.
+
+"You can trust me, my dear," said Byles Gridley.  "Take your needle,
+my child, and work at your pattern,--it will come out a rose by and
+by.  Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken
+patiently, and the pattern will come out all right like the
+embroidery.  You can trust me.  Good-by, my dear."
+
+"Let her finish the slippers," the old man said to himself as he
+trudged home, "and make 'em big enough for Father Pemberton.  He
+shall have his feet in 'em yet, or my name is n't Byles Gridley!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.
+
+Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had
+ceased to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long
+entry of the old mansion.  Then she went to her little chamber and
+sat down in a sort of revery.  She could not doubt his sincerity, and
+there was something in her own consciousness which responded to the
+suspicions he had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses
+of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other
+words which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest
+lessons and our sharpest rebukes.  The hint another gives us finds
+whole trains of thought which have been getting themselves ready to
+be shaped in inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch
+of a burning syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for
+a spark to become letters of fire.
+
+The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his
+"developing" room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of
+the truth just mentioned.  There is nothing to be seen on the glass
+just taken from the camera.  But there is a potential, though
+invisible, picture hid in the creamy film which covers it.  Watch him
+as he pours a wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought
+which is at once a surprise and a charm,--the sudden appearance of
+your own features where a moment before was a blank without a vestige
+of intelligence or beauty.
+
+In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had
+called up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in
+the consciousness of Myrtle Hazard.  It was not merely their
+significance, it was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting
+time.  If they had been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was
+taking the first stitch on the embroidered slippers, they would have
+been as useless as the artist's developing solution on a plate which
+had never been exposed in the camera.  But she had been of late in
+training for her lesson in ways that neither she nor anybody else
+dreamed of.  The reader who has shrugged his (or her) shoulders over
+the last illustration will perhaps hear this one which follows more
+cheerfully.  The physician in the Arabian Nights made his patient
+play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which contained drugs
+of marvellous efficacy.  Whether it was the drugs that made the sick
+man get well, or the exercise, is not of so much consequence as the
+fact that he did at any rate get well.
+
+These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had
+given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed
+just now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms.  And
+so it happened that, while he had been stimulating all those
+imaginative and emotional elements of her nature which responded to
+the keys he loved to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet
+autumnal air, the mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods
+and fields and sky, had been quietly doing their work.  The color was
+fast returning to her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her
+thoughts gradually resolving themselves into the harmonious and
+cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health.  It needed but the
+timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of
+her daily mode of being.  The word had been spoken.  She saw its
+truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast
+out an unworthy intimate!  How hard for any!--but for a girl so
+young, and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how
+cruelly hard!
+
+She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue.  Her eyes were
+fixed on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting.
+It was a very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been
+brought over by the first emigrant of her race.  The legs and arms
+were curiously turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half
+pleasing and half repulsive.  Instead of the claw-feet common in
+furniture of a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen
+reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were
+squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature.  Over this chair hung
+the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and arms, the
+specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left
+wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich
+crimson brocade.  Over Myrtle's bed hung that other portrait, which
+was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa to trustful
+souls of the Roman faith.  She had longed for these pictures while
+she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung up
+in her chamber.
+
+The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
+constellations which she bad seen shining brightly almost overhead in
+the early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in
+the very attitude in which she was sitting hours before.  Her lamp
+had burned out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber.
+She started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by
+long remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a
+great fear seized her, and she sprang for a match.  It broke with the
+quick movement she made to kindle it, and she snatched another as if
+a fiend were after her.  It flashed and went out.  Oh the terror, the
+terror!  The darkness seemed alive with fearful presences.  The lurid
+glare of her own eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain.  She
+tried one more match; it kindled as it should, and she lighted
+another lamp.  Her first impulse was to assure herself that nothing
+was changed in the familiar objects around her.  She held the lamp up
+to the picture of Judith Pride.  The beauty looked at her, it seemed
+as if with a kind of lofty recognition in her eyes; but there she
+was, as always.  She turned the light upon the pale face of the
+martyr-portrait.  It looked troubled and faded, as it seemed to
+Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
+childhood.  Then she threw the light on the old chair, and,
+shuddering, caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms
+and legs, and the flattened reptiles on which it stood.
+
+In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting
+there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange
+visitors.  Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed
+the breath of life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been
+what is called, in our poor language, dead.  One came in all the
+glory of her ripened beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by
+nature in that splendid animal equipment which in its day had
+captivated the eyes of all the lusty lovers of complete muliebrity.
+The other,--how delicate, how translucent, how aerial she seemed!
+yet real and true to the lineaments of her whom the young girl looked
+upon as her hereditary protector.
+
+The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of loathing and
+scorn, pointed to one of the reptiles beneath the feet of the chair.
+And while Myrtle's eyes followed hers, the flattened and half-crushed
+creature seemed to swell and spread like his relative in the old
+fable, like the black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size,
+and at last of colossal proportions.  And, fearful to relate, the
+batrachian features humanized themselves as the monster grew, and,
+shaping themselves more and more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle
+saw in them a hideous likeness of--No!  no! it was too horrible, was
+that the face which had been so close to hers but yesterday? were
+those the lips, the breath from which had stirred her growing curls
+as he leaned over her while they read together some passionate stanza
+from a hymn that was as much like a love-song as it dared to be in
+godly company?  A shadow of disgust--the natural repugnance of
+loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and she shrieked, as
+she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other figure.  She
+felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin hand seemed
+to take hers.  The warm life went out of her, and she was to herself
+as a dimly conscious shadow that glided with passive acquiescence
+wherever it was led.  Presently she found herself in a half-lighted
+apartment, where there were books on the shelves around, and a desk
+with loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little mirror with a worn
+bit of carpet before it.  And while she looked, a great serpent
+writhed in through the half-open door, and made the circuit of the
+room, laying one huge ring all round it, and then, going round again,
+laid another ring over the first, and so on until he was wound all
+round the room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow in
+the centre; and then the serpent seemed to arch his neck in the air,
+and bring his head close down to Myrtle's face; and the features were
+not those of a serpent, but of a man, and it hissed out the words she
+had read that very day in a little note which said, "Come to my study
+to-morrow, and we will read hymns together."
+
+Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and
+the two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in
+their own.  Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to
+their influence, and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for
+each would have led her her own way,--whither she knew not.  It was
+the strife of her "Vision," only in another form,--the contest of two
+lives her blood inherited for the mastery of her soul.  The might of
+beauty conquered.  Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the
+lovely phantom, which seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished
+fire of life, and so like herself as she would grow to be when noon
+should have ripened her into maturity.
+
+Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
+corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes,
+which seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness.
+Then came a confused sense of eager search for something that she
+knew was hidden, whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards
+of a floor, or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in
+a forgotten drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but
+somewhere there was something which she was to find, and which, once
+found, was to be her talisman.  She was in the midst of this eager
+search when she awoke.
+
+The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her
+fears she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what
+meaning there was in this frightfully real dream.  Her courage came
+back as her senses assured her that all around her was natural, as
+when she left it.  She determined to follow the lead of the strange
+hint her nightmare had given her.
+
+In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
+upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and
+large drawers below.  "That desk is yours, Myrtle," her uncle Malachi
+had once said to her; "and there is a trick or two about it that it
+will pay you to study."  Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about
+the mystery of the old desk.  All the little drawers, of which there
+were a considerable number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as
+she thought, she had carefully examined.  She determined to make one
+more trial.  It was the dead of the night, and this was a fearful old
+place to be wandering about; but she was possessed with an urgent
+feeling which would not let her wait until daylight.
+
+She stole like a ghost from her chamber.  She glided along the narrow
+entries as she had seemed to move in her dream.  She opened the
+folding doors of the great upright desk.  She had always before
+examined it by daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the
+little drawers out, she had never thoroughly explored the recesses
+which received them.  But in her new-born passion of search, she held
+her light so as to illuminate all these deeper spaces.  At once she
+thought she saw the marks of pressure with a finger.  She pressed her
+own finger on this place, and, as it yielded with a slight click, a
+small mahogany pilaster sprang forward, revealing its well-kept
+secret that it was the mask of a tall, deep, very narrow drawer.
+There was something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle turned it over, a
+golden bracelet fell into her hand.  She recognized it at once as
+that which had been long ago the ornament of the fair woman whose
+portrait hung in her chamber.  She clasped it upon her wrist, and
+from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of the lovely
+phantom who had been with her in her dream.
+
+"The old man walked last night, God save us!" said Kitty Fagan to
+Biddy Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious
+discovery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+VICTORY.
+
+It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was
+an unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her
+imagination tangled together into a kind of vital coherence.  The
+philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the
+elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while
+waking.  Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was
+the text, and the grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the
+"properties" with which her own mind had wrought up this scenic show.
+
+The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so
+easy to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the
+hour when she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist.
+She felt a sudden loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a
+saint.  A young girl's caprice?  Possibly.  A return of the natural
+instincts of girlhood with returning health?  Perhaps so.  An
+impression produced by her dream?  An effect of an influx from
+another sphere of being?  The working of Master Byles Gridley's
+emphatic warning?  The magic of her new talisman?
+
+We may safely leave these questions for the present.  As we have to
+tell, not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should
+have done it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it
+would be to lay bare all the springs of her action.  Until this
+period, she had hardly thought of herself as a born beauty.  The
+flatteries she had received from time to time were like the chips and
+splinters under the green wood, when the chill women pretended to
+make a fire in the best parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of
+burning themselves out, hardly warming, much less kindling, the fore-
+stick and the back-log.
+
+Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to
+look upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet.  Its
+suggestions betrayed themselves in one of her first movements.
+Nothing could be soberer than the cut of the dresses which the
+propriety of the severe household had established as the rule of her
+costume.  But the girl was no sooner out of bed than a passion came
+over her to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery
+which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting
+her most fittingly to the artist.  She rolled up the sleeves of her
+dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her
+glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass.  Myrtle
+was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught.
+She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," but she could
+mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions of feature and
+form which had made the original of the picture before her famous.
+The same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded neck,
+the same more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely shaped
+arms and hands, and something very like the same features startled
+her by their identity in the permanent image of the canvas and the
+fleeting one of tile mirror.
+
+The world was hers then,--for she had not read romances and love-
+letters without finding that beauty governs it in all times and
+places.  Who was this middle-aged minister that had been hanging
+round her and talking to her about heaven, when there was not a
+single joy of earth that she had as yet tasted?  A man that had been
+saying all his fine things to Miss Susan Posey, too, had he, before
+he had bestowed his attentions on her?  And to a dozen other girls,
+too, nobody knows who!
+
+The revulsion was a very sadden one.  Such changes of feeling are apt
+to be sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with,
+and Myrtle was not of a temperament or an age to act with much
+deliberation where a pique came in to the aid of a resolve.  Master
+Gridley guessed sagaciously what would be the effect of his
+revelation, when he told her of the particular attentions the
+minister had paid to pretty Susan Posey and various other young
+women.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully that morning, and
+made himself as captivating as his professional costume allowed.  He
+had drawn down the shades of his windows so as to let in that subdued
+light which is merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments,
+and wheeled up his sofa so that two could sit at the table and read
+from the same book.
+
+At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain feverish
+impatience, casting a glance now and then at the mirror as he passed
+it.  At last the bell rang, and he himself went to answer it, his
+heart throbbing with expectation of meeting his lovely visitor.
+
+Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the bearer of
+sealed despatches.  Mistress Kitty Fagan was the young lady's
+substitute, and she delivered into the hand of the astonished
+clergyman the following missive:
+
+TO THE REV. MR. STOKER.
+
+Reverend Sir,--I shall not come to your study this day.  I do not
+feel that I have any more need of religious counsel at this time, and
+I am told by a friend that there are others who will be glad to hear
+you talk on this subject.  I hear that Mrs. Hopkins is interested in
+religious subjects, and would have been glad to see you in my
+company.  As I cannot go with her, perhaps Miss Susan Posey will take
+my place.  I thank you for all the good things you have said to me,
+and that you have given me so much of your company.  I hope we shall
+sing hymns together in heaven some time, if we are good enough, but I
+want to wait for that awhile, for I do not feel quite ready.  I am
+not going to see you any more alone, reverend sir.  I think this is
+best, and I have good advice.  I want to see more of young people of
+my own age, and I have a friend, Mr. Gridley, who I think is older
+than you are, that takes an interest in me; and as you have many
+others that you must be interested in, he can take the place of a
+father better than you can do.  I return to you the hymn-book, I read
+one of those you marked, and do not care to read any more.
+
+Respectfully yours,
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this
+awkwardly written, but tolerably intelligible letter.  What could he
+do about it?  It would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot
+Byles Gridley, and strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which
+homicides he felt at the moment that he could have committed.  And
+here he was in a frantic paroxysm, and the next day was Sunday, and
+his morning's discourse was unwritten.  His savage mediaeval theology
+came to his relief, and he clutched out of a heap of yellow
+manuscripts his well-worn "convulsion-fit" sermon.  He preached it
+the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard did not
+hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+SAINT AND SINNER
+
+It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid wife
+improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
+beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the
+physician advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of
+her life by going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful
+companionship.  She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive
+Eveleth; and as Myrtle wanted to see young people, and had her own
+way now as never before, the three girls often met at the parsonage.
+Thus they became more and more intimate, and grew more and more into
+each other's affections.
+
+These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to
+be found in all our towns and villages.  Olive had been carefully
+trained, and at the proper age confirmed.  Bathsheba had been prayed
+for, and in due time startled and converted.  Myrtle was a simple
+daughter of Eve, with many impulses like those of the other two
+girls, and some that required more watching.  She was not so safe,
+perhaps, as either of the other girls, for this world or the next;
+but she was on some accounts more interesting, as being a more
+genuine representative of that inexperienced and too easily deluded,
+yet always cherished, mother of our race, whom we must after all
+accept as embodying the creative idea of woman, and who might have
+been alive and happy now (though at a great age) but for a single
+fatal error.
+
+The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's
+father, was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a
+cultivated man, with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader,
+a neat writer, a safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental
+pasturage, which his sermons kept cropped moderately close without
+any exhausting demand upon the soil.  Olive had grown insensibly into
+her religious maturity, as into her bodily and intellectual
+developments, which one might suppose was the natural order of things
+in a well-regulated Christian--household, where the children are
+brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
+
+Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with
+vague apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious
+phrases and graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age
+of fourteen years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very
+commonly considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the
+formation of religious character.  It began with a shivering sense of
+enormous guilt, inherited and practised from her earliest infancy.
+Just as every breath she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the
+air with carbonic acid, so her every thought and feeling had been
+tainting the universe with sin.  This spiritual chill or rigor had in
+due order been followed by the fever-flush of hope, and that in its
+turn had ushered in the last stage, the free opening of all the
+spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation of self-surrender.
+
+Good Christians are made by many very different processes.  Bathsheba
+had taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was
+genuine, in spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not
+understand that the spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was
+the same as that which poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the
+feet of her Lord, and led her forth at early dawn with the other Mary
+to visit his sepulchre.
+
+Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-
+worn formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity,
+hateful to the Father in Heaven who made her.  She had grown up in
+antagonism with all that surrounded her.  She had been talked to
+about her corrupt nature and her sinful heart, until the words had
+become an offence and an insult.  Bathsheba knew her father's
+fondness for young company too well to suppose that his intercourse
+with Myrtle had gone beyond the sentimental and poetical stage, and
+was not displeased when she found that there was some breach between
+them.  Myrtle herself did not profess to have passed through the
+technical stages of the customary spiritual paroxysm.  Still, the
+gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her and judged her
+kindly.  She was modest enough to think that perhaps the natural
+state of some girls might be at least as good as her own after the
+spiritual change of which she had been the subject.  A manifest
+heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.
+
+The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine
+of Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before
+grace in the election of a wife; because, saith he, "it will be a
+hard Task, where the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make
+an entire Conquest whilst Life lasteth."  An opinion apparently
+entertained by many modern ecclesiastics, and one which may be
+considered very encouraging to those young ladies of the politer
+circles who have a fancy for marrying bishops and other fashionable
+clergymen.  Not of course that "grace" is so rare a gift among the
+young ladies of the upper social sphere; but they are in the habit of
+using the word with a somewhat different meaning from that which the
+good Bishop attached to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+VILLAGE POET.
+
+It was impossible for Myrtle to be frequently at Olive's without
+often meeting Olive's brother, and her reappearance with the bloom on
+her cheek was a signal which her other admirers were not likely to
+overlook as a hint to recommence their flattering demonstrations; and
+so it was that she found herself all at once the centre of attraction
+to three young men with whom we have made some acquaintance, namely,
+Cyprian Eveleth, Gifted Hopkins, and Murray Bradshaw.
+
+When the three girls were together at the house of Olive, it gave
+Cyprian a chance to see something of Myrtle in the most natural way.
+Indeed, they all became used to meeting him in a brotherly sort of
+relation; only, as he was not the brother of two of them, it gave him
+the inside track, as the sporting men say, with reference to any
+rivals for the good-will of either of these.  Of course neither
+Bathsheba nor Myrtle thought of him in any other light than as
+Olive's brother, and would have been surprised with the manifestation
+on his part of any other feeling, if it existed.  So he became very
+nearly as intimate with them as Olive was, and hardly thought of his
+intimacy as anything more than friendship, until one day Myrtle sang
+some hymns so sweetly that Cyprian dreamed about her that night; and
+what young person does not know that the woman or the man once
+idealized and glorified in the exalted state of the imagination
+belonging to sleep becomes dangerous to the sensibilities in the
+waking hours that follow?  Yet something drew Cyprian to the gentler
+and more subdued nature of Bathsheba, so that he often thought, like
+a gayer personage than himself, whose divided affections are famous
+in song, that he could have been blessed to share her faithful heart,
+if Myrtle had not bewitched him with her unconscious and innocent
+sorceries.  As for poor, modest Bathsheba, she thought nothing of
+herself, but was almost as much fascinated by Myrtle as if she had
+been one of the sex she was born to make in love with her.
+
+The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
+Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins.  This young gentleman had the enormous
+advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical
+endowment.  No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist
+the youth or man who addresses her in verse.  The thought that she is
+the object of a poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition
+more completely than all that wealth or office or social eminence can
+offer.  Do the young millionnaires and the members of the General
+Court get letters from unknown ladies, every day, asking for their
+autographs and photographs?  Well, then!
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very
+depth of his soul.  Could he not confer that immortality so dear to
+the human heart?  Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the "Banner and
+Oracle" gave him already "an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame,"
+to quote its own words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius,
+of which these spring blossoms were the promise.  It was a most
+formidable battery, then, which Cyprian's first rival opened upon the
+fortress of Myrtle's affections.
+
+His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-
+playful bet with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he
+would bag a girl within twelve months of date who should unite three
+desirable qualities, specified in the bet, in a higher degree than
+any one of the five who were on the matrimonial programme which she
+had laid out for him,--and Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to
+win the bet.  When a young fellow like him, cool and clever, makes up
+his mind to bring down his bird, it is no joke, but a very serious
+and a tolerably certain piece of business.  Not being made a fool of
+by any boyish nonsense,--passion and all that,--he has a great
+advantage.  Many a woman rejects a man because he is in love with
+her, and accepts another because he is not.  The first is thinking
+too much of himself and his emotions,--the other makes a study of her
+and her friends, and learns what ropes to pull.  But then it must be
+remembered that Murray Bradshaw had a poet for his rival, to say
+nothing of the brother of a bosom friend.
+
+The qualities of a young poet are so exceptional, and such
+interesting objects of study, that a narrative like this can well
+afford to linger awhile in the delineation of this most envied of all
+the forms of genius.  And by contrasting the powers and limitations
+of two such young persons as Gifted Hopkins and Cyprian Eveleth, we
+may better appreciate the nature of that divine inspiration which
+gives to poetry the superiority it claims over every other form of
+human expression.
+
+Gifted Hopkins had shown an ear for rhythm, and for the simpler forms
+of music, from his earliest childhood.  He began beating with his
+heels the accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender
+age,--a habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself,
+as, though it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that
+which is beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and
+emphasize by vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the
+tune of Auld Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive when a
+large number of boots join in the performance.  He showed a
+remarkable talent for playing on one of the less complex musical
+instruments, too limited in compass to satisfy exacting ears, but
+affording excellent discipline to those who wish to write in the
+simpler metrical forms,--the same which summons the hero from his
+repose and stirs his blood in battle.
+
+By the time he was twelve years old he was struck with the pleasing
+resemblance of certain vocal sounds which, without being the same,
+yet had a curious relation which made them agree marvellously well in
+couples; as eyes with skies; as heart with art, also with part and
+smart; and so of numerous others, twenty or thirty pairs, perhaps,
+which number he considerably increased as he grew older, until he may
+have had fifty or more such pairs at his command.
+
+The union of so extensive a catalogue of words which matched each
+other, and of an ear so nice that it could tell if there were nine or
+eleven syllables in an heroic line, instead of the legitimate ten,
+constituted a rare combination of talents in the opinion of those
+upon whose judgment he relied.  He was naturally led to try his
+powers in the expression of some just thought or natural sentiment in
+the shape of verse, that wonderful medium of imparting thought and
+feeling to his fellow-creatures which a bountiful Providence had made
+his rare and inestimable endowment.
+
+It was at about this period of his life, that is to say, when he was
+of the age of thirteen, or we may perhaps say fourteen years, for we
+do not wish to overstate his precocity, that he experienced a
+sensation so entirely novel, that, to the best of his belief, it was
+such as no other young person had ever known, at least in anything
+like the same degree.  This extraordinary emotion was brought on by
+the sight of Myrtle Hazard, with whom he had never before had any
+near relations, as they had been at different schools, and Myrtle was
+too reserved to be very generally known among the young people of his
+age.
+
+Then it was that he broke forth in his virgin effort, "Lines to
+M----e," which were published in the village paper, and were claimed
+by all possible girls but the right one; namely, by two Mary Annes,
+one Minnie, one Mehitable, and one Marthie, as she saw fit to spell
+the name borrowed from her who was troubled about many things.
+
+The success of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to
+the hymn-books as "common metre," was such as to convince the youth
+that, whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time
+to obtain a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true
+destiny was the glorious career of a poet.  It was a most pleasing
+circumstance, that his mother, while she fully recognized the
+propriety of his being diligent in the prosaic line of business to
+which circumstances had called him, was yet as much convinced as he
+himself that he was destined to achieve literary fame.  She had read
+Watts and Select Hymns all through, she said, and she did n't see but
+what Gifted could make the verses come out jest as slick, and the
+sound of the rhymes jest as pooty, as Izik Watts or the Selectmen,
+whoever they was,--she was sure they couldn't be the selectmen of
+this town, wherever they belonged.  It is pleasant to say that the
+young man, though favored by nature with this rarest of talents, did
+not forget the humbler duties that Heaven, which dresses few singing-
+birds in the golden plumes of fortune, had laid upon him.  After
+having received a moderate amount of instruction at one of the less
+ambitious educational institutions of the town, supplemented, it is
+true, by the judicious and gratuitous hints of Master Gridley, the
+young poet, in obedience to a feeling which did him the highest
+credit, relinquished, at least for the time, the Groves of Academus,
+and offered his youth at the shrine of Plutus, that is, left off
+studying and took to business.  He became what they call a "clerk" in
+what they call a "store" up in the huckleberry districts, and kept
+such accounts as were required by the business of the establishment.
+His principal occupation was, however, to attend to the details of
+commerce as it was transacted over the counter.  This industry
+enabled him, to his great praise be it spoken, to assist his
+excellent parent, to clothe himself in a becoming manner, so that he
+made a really handsome figure on Sundays and was always of
+presentable aspect, likewise to purchase a book now and then, and to
+subscribe for that leading periodical which furnishes the best models
+to the youth of the country in the various modes of composition.
+
+Though Master Gridley was very kind to the young man, he was rather
+disposed to check the exuberance of his poetical aspirations.  The
+truth was, that the old classical scholar did not care a great deal
+for modern English poetry.  Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap
+from the Greek Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation
+of spirits; but he did not think very much of "your Keatses, and your
+Tennysons, and the whole Hasheesh crazy lot," as he called the
+dreamily sensuous idealists who belong to the same century that
+brought in ether and chloroform.  He rather shook his head at Gifted
+Hopkins for indulging so largely in metrical composition.
+
+"Better stick to your ciphering, my young friend," he said to him,
+one day.  "Figures of speech are all very well, in their way; but if
+you undertake to deal much in them, you'll figure down your prospects
+into a mighty small sum.  There's some danger that it will take all
+the sense out of you, if you keep writing verses at this rate.  You
+young scribblers think any kind of nonsense will do for the public,
+if it only has a string of rhymes tacked to it.  Cut off the bobs of
+your kite, Gifted Hopkins, and see if it does n't pitch, and stagger,
+and come down head-foremost.  Don't write any stuff with rhyming
+tails to it that won't make a decent show for itself after you've
+chopped all the rhyming tails off.  That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins.
+Is there any book you would like to have out of my library?  Have you
+ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?"
+
+He had tried, the young man answered, on the recommendation of
+Cyprian Eveleth, but had found it rather hard reading.
+
+Master Gridley lifted his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that
+some had called Spenser the poet's poet.  "What a pity," he said to
+himself, "that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that
+William Murray Bradshaw!  What's the reason, I wonder, that all the
+little earthen pots blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at
+such a great rate, while the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do
+all their simmering inside?"
+
+That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth
+and all their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone.  The smiles of
+woman, in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre.
+Fame beckoned him upward from her templed steep.  The rhymes which
+rose before him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on
+which he would climb to a heaven of-glory.
+
+Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
+anticipations of success.  "All up with the boy, if he's going to
+take to rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar
+and weighing out pounds of tea.  Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end
+in.  Poets, to be sure!  Sausage-makers !  Empty skins of old
+phrases,--stuff 'em with odds and ends of old thoughts that never
+were good for anything,--cut 'em up in lengths and sell'em to fools!
+
+And if they ain't big fools enough to buy 'em, give'em away; and if
+you can't do that, pay folks to take'em.  Bah! what a fine style of
+genius common-sense is!  There's a passage in the book that would fit
+half these addle-headed rhymesters.  What is that saying of mine
+about I squinting brains?"
+
+He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and read:--
+
+
+                    "Of Squinting Brains.
+
+"Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen
+who squint with their brains.  It is an infirmity in one of the eyes,
+making the two unequal in power, that makes men squint.  Just so it
+is an inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men
+idiots and others rascals.  I knows a fellow whose right half is a
+genius, but his other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a
+friend perfectly honest on one side, but who was sent to jail because
+the other had an inveterate tendency in the direction of picking
+pockets and appropriating aes alienum."
+
+All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.
+
+The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins
+had never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice
+might, to a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative
+nature.  Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover
+of lonely walks,--one who listened for the whispers of Nature and
+watched her shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over
+everything.  But Cyprian had never shown the talent or the
+inclination for writing in verse.
+
+He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being
+somewhat older, and having had the advantage of academic and college
+culture, often gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his
+powers, such as genius frequently requires at the hands of humbler
+intelligences.  Cyprian was incapable of jealousy; and although the
+name of Gifted Hopkins was getting to be known beyond the immediate
+neighborhood, and his autograph had been requested by more than one
+young lady living in another county, he never thought of envying the
+young poet's spreading popularity.
+
+That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor
+may be inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed
+himself in his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one
+which was held at the "store" where he officiated as "clerk."
+
+"I become more and more assured, Cyprian," he said, leaning over the
+counter, "that I was born to be a poet.  I feel it in my marrow.  I
+must succeed.  I must win the laurel of fame.  I must taste the
+sweets of"---
+
+" Molasses," said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that
+moment, bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, "ma wants three gills
+of molasses."
+
+Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure.  He
+served the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness,
+made an entry on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.
+
+"Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian.  The very last piece I wrote was
+copied in two papers.  It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and--don't
+think I am too vain--one young lady has told me that it reminded her
+of Pollok.  You never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?"
+
+"I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises,
+and a letter now and then.  Do you find it an easy and pleasant
+exercise to make rhymes?"
+
+Pleasant!  Poetry is to me a delight and a passion.  I never know
+what I am going to write when I sit down.  And presently the rhymes
+begin pounding in my brain,--it seems as if there were a hundred
+couples of them, paired like so many dancers,--and then these rhymes
+seem to take possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in
+all sorts of beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the
+verses run measuring themselves out like"---
+
+"Ribbins,--any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins?  Five eighths of a
+yard, if you please, Mr. Hopkins.  How's your folks?"  Then, in a
+lower tone, "Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were
+sweet pooty."
+
+Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid
+of certain brass nails on the counter.  He gave good measure, not
+prodigal, for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very
+moderate strain on the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with
+a contempt of infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its
+genial mood.
+
+The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those
+bewitching glances which the young poet--let us rather say the poet,
+without making odious distinctions--is in the confirmed habit of
+receiving from dear woman.
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: "I do not know where this talent, as my
+friends call it, of mine, comes from.  My father used to carry a
+chain for a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the
+house he used to measure land with.  I don't see why that should make
+me a poet.  My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so
+are other young men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical
+genius.  But wherever I got it, it comes as easy to me to write in
+verse as to write in prose, almost.  Don't you ever feel a longing to
+send your thoughts forth in verse, Cyprian?"
+
+"I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often," Cyprian
+answered; "but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have
+words that seem fitting to clothe them.  I have imagined a great many
+poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any
+kind.  Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'?  If you
+have ever heard her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and
+unversed poetry."
+
+"I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without
+rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures
+that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of
+nothing.  How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to
+know, if there is neither a regular line with just so many syllables,
+nor a rhyme?  Of course you can't.  I never have any thoughts too
+beautiful to put in verse: nothing can be too beautiful for it."
+
+Cyprian left the conversation at this point.  It was getting more
+suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the
+matter over better with Olive.  Just then a little boy came in, and
+bargained with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he
+placed against his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure
+almost equal to that of the young poet reciting his own verses.
+
+"A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry," Cyprian
+said, as he left the "store."  "All in one note, pretty much.  Not a
+great many tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' ' Yankee Doodle,' and one or two
+more like them.  But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt
+it is as exciting to Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius
+to express itself in a poem."
+
+Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting.  He loved too well the sweet
+intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies
+of Milton.  These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted
+Hopkins.
+
+Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his
+friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of
+modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences
+of rhyme.  He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of
+childhood, its simplicity, its reverence.  It seemed as if nothing of
+all that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for
+there was no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and
+all else he could not help idealizing into its own conception of
+itself, so to speak.  He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the
+flower, and the root as well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his
+capacity of affection or admiration on the blossom or bud upon which
+his friend the poet lavished the wealth of his verse.  Thus Nature
+took him into her confidence.  She loves the men of science well, and
+tells them all her family secrets,--who is the father of this or that
+member of the group, who is brother, sister, cousin, and so on,
+through all the circle of relationship.  But there are others to whom
+she tells her dreams; not what species or genus her lily belongs to,
+but what vague thought it has when it dresses in white, or what
+memory of its birthplace that is which we call its fragrance.
+Cyprian was one of these.  Yet he was not a complete nature.  He
+required another and a wholly different one to be the complement of
+his own.  Olive came as near it as a sister could, but--we must
+borrow an old image--moonlight is no more than a cold and vacant
+glimmer on the sun-dial, which only answers to the great flaming orb
+of day.  If Cyprian could but find some true, sweet-tempered, well-
+balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those special imaginative
+gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to him in the
+intense reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and adorn
+her existence,--how she could direct and chasten and elevate the
+character of all his thoughts and actions!
+
+"Bathsheba," said Olive, "it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more
+and more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard.  He has never got over the
+fancy he took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and
+called her the fire-hang-bird.  Wouldn't they suit each other by and
+by, after Myrtle has come to herself and grown into a beautiful and
+noble woman, as I feel sure she will in due time?"
+
+"Myrtle is very lovely," Bathsheba answered, "but is n't she a little
+too--flighty--for one like your brother?  Cyprian isn't more like
+other young men than Myrtle is like other young girls.  I have
+thought sometimes--I wondered whether out-of-the-way people and
+common ones do not get along best together.  Does n't Cyprian want
+some more every-day kind of girl to keep him straight?  Myrtle is
+beautiful, beautiful,--fascinates everybody.  Has Mr. Bradshaw been
+following after her lately?  He is taken with her too.  Didn't you
+ever think she would have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at last?  He
+looks to me like a man that would hold on desperately as a lover."
+
+If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl,
+hardly sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or
+nineteen, it would have been plain sailing enough for Murray
+Bradshaw.  But he knew what a distance their ages seemed just now to
+put between them,--a distance which would grow practically less and
+less with every year, and he did not wish to risk anything so long as
+there was no danger of interference.  He rather encouraged Gifted
+Hopkins to write poetry to Myrtle.  "Go in, Gifted," he said,
+"there's no telling what may come of it," and Gifted did go in at a
+great rate.
+
+Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with
+a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of
+Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of
+Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning
+that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know
+what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors of the Rev.
+Mr. Stoker.
+
+He spoke well of Cyprian Eveleth.  A good young man,--limited, but
+exemplary.  Would succeed well as rector of a small parish.  That
+required little talent, but a good deal of the humbler sort of
+virtue.  As for himself, he confessed to ambition,--yes, a great deal
+of ambition.  A failing, he supposed, but not the worst of failings.
+He felt the instinct to handle the larger interests of society.  The
+village would perhaps lose sight of him for a time; but he meant to
+emerge sooner or later in the higher spheres of government or
+diplomacy.  Myrtle must keep his secret.  Nobody else knew it.  He
+could not help making a confidant of her,--a thing he had never done
+before with any other person as to his plans in life.  Perhaps she
+might watch his career with more interest from her acquaintance with
+him.  He loved to think that there was one woman at least who would
+be pleased to hear of his success if he succeeded, as with life and
+health he would,--who would share his disappointment if fate should
+not favor him. --So he wound and wreathed himself into her thoughts.
+
+It was not very long before Myrtle began to accept the idea that she
+was the one person in the world whose peculiar duty it was to
+sympathize with the aspiring young man whose humble beginnings she
+had the honor of witnessing.  And it is not very far from being the
+solitary confidant, and the single source of inspiration, to the
+growth of a livelier interest, where a young man and a young woman
+are in question.
+
+Myrtle was at this time her own mistress as never before.  The three
+young men had access to her as she walked to and from meeting and in
+her frequent rambles, besides the opportunities Cyprian had of
+meeting her in his sister's company, and the convenient visits which,
+in connection with the great lawsuit, Murray Bradshaw could make,
+without question, at The Poplars.
+
+It was not long before Cyprian perceived that he could never pass a
+certain boundary of intimacy with Myrtle.  Very pleasant and sisterly
+always she was with him; but she never looked as if she might mean
+more than she said, and cherished a little spark of sensibility which
+might be fanned into the flame of love.  Cyprian felt this so
+certainly that he was on the point of telling his grief to Bathsheba,
+who looked to him as if she would sympathize as heartily with him as
+his own sister, and whose sympathy would have a certain flavor in
+it,--something which one cannot find in the heart of the dearest
+sister that ever lived.  But Bathsheba was herself sensitive, and
+changed color when Cyprian ventured a hint or two in the direction of
+his thought, so that he never got so fax as to unburden his heart to
+her about Myrtle, whom she admired so sincerely that she could not
+have helped feeling a great interest in his passion towards her.
+
+As for Gifted Hopkins, the roses that were beginning to bloom fresher
+and fresher every day in Myrtle's cheeks unfolded themselves more and
+more freely, to speak metaphorically, in his song.  Every week she
+would receive a delicately tinted note with lines to "Myrtle
+awaking," or to "Myrtle retiring," (one string of verses a little too
+Musidora-ish, and which soon found itself in the condition of a
+cinder, perhaps reduced to that state by spontaneous combustion,) or
+to "The Flower of the Tropics," or to the "Nymph of the River-side,"
+or other poetical alias, such as bards affect in their sieges of the
+female heart.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was of a sanguine temperament.  As he read and re-read
+his verses it certainly seemed to him that they must reach the heart
+of the angelic being to whom they were addressed.  That she was slow
+in confessing the impression they made upon her, was a favorable
+sign; so many girls called his poems "sweet pooty," that those
+charming words, though soothing, no longer stirred him deeply.
+Myrtle's silence showed that the impression his verses had made was
+deep.  Time would develop her sentiments; they were both young; his
+position was humble as yet; but when he had become famous through the
+land-oh blissful thought!--the bard of Oxbow Village would bear a
+name that any woman would be proud to assume, and the M. H.  which
+her delicate hands had wrought on the kerchiefs she wore would yet
+perhaps be read, not Myrtle Hazard, but Myrtle Hopkins.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+SUSAN'S YOUNG MAN.
+
+There seems no reasonable doubt that Myrtle Hazard  might have made a
+safe thing of it with Gifted Hopkins, (if so inclined,) provided that
+she had only been secured against interference.  But the constant
+habit of reading his verses to Susan Posey was not without its risk
+to so excitable a nature as that of the young poet.  Poets were
+always capable of divided affections, and Cowley's "Chronicle" is a
+confession that would fit the whole tribe of them.  It is true that
+Gifted had no right to regard Susan's heart as open to the wiles of
+any new-comer.  He knew that she considered herself, and was
+considered by another, as pledged and plighted.  Yet she was such a
+devoted listener, her sympathies were so easily roused, her blue eyes
+glistened so tenderly at the least poetical hint, such as "Never, oh
+never," "My aching heart," "Go, let me weep,"--any of those touching
+phrases out of the long catalogue which readily suggests itself, that
+her influence was getting to be such that Myrtle (if really anxious
+to secure him) might look upon it with apprehension, and the owner of
+Susan's heart (if of a jealous disposition) might have thought it
+worth while to make a visit to Oxbow Village to see after his
+property.
+
+It may seem not impossible that some friend had suggested as much as
+this to the young lady's lover.
+
+The caution would have been unnecessary, or at least premature.
+Susan was loyal as ever to her absent friend.  Gifted Hopkins had
+never yet presumed upon the familiar relations existing between them
+to attempt to shake her allegiance.  It is quite as likely, after
+all, that the young gentleman about to make his appearance in Oxbow
+Village visited the place of his own accord, without a hint from
+anybody.  But the fact concerns us more than the reason of it, just
+now.
+
+"Who do you think is coming, Mr. Gridley?  Who do you think is
+coming?" said Susan Posey, her face covered with a carnation such as
+the first season may see in a city belle, but not the second.
+
+"Well, Susan Posey, I suppose I must guess, though I am rather slow
+at that business.  Perhaps the Governor.  No, I don't think it can be
+the Governor, for you would n't look so happy if it was only his
+Excellency.  It must be the President, Susan Posey,--President James
+Buchanan.  Have n't I guessed right, now, tell me, my dear?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley, you are too bad,--what do I care for governors and
+presidents?  I know somebody that's worth fifty million thousand
+presidents,--and he 's coming,--my Clement is coming," said Susan,
+who had by this time learned to consider the awful Byles Gridley as
+her next friend and faithful counsellor.
+
+Susan could not stay long in the house after she got her note
+informing her that her friend was soon to be with her.  Everybody
+told everything to Olive Eveleth, and Susan must run over to the
+parsonage to tell her that there was a young gentleman coming to
+Oxbow Village; upon which Olive asked who it was, exactly as if she
+did not know; whereupon Susan dropped her eyes and said, "Clement,--I
+mean Mr. Lindsay."
+
+That was a fair piece of news now, and Olive had her bonnet on five
+minutes after Susan was gone, and was on her way to Bathsheba's,--it
+was too bad that the poor girl who lived so out of the world
+shouldn't know anything of what was going on in it.  Bathsheba had
+been in all the morning, and the Doctor had said she must take the
+air every day; so Bathsheba had on her bonnet a little after Olive
+had gone, and walked straight up to The Poplars to tell Myrtle Hazard
+that a certain young gentleman, Clement Lindsay, was coming to Oxbow
+Village.
+
+It was perhaps fortunate that there was no special significance to
+Myrtle in the name of Clement Lindsay.  Since the adventure which had
+brought these two young persons together, and, after coming so near a
+disaster, had ended in a mere humiliation and disappointment, and but
+for Master Gridley's discreet kindness might have led to foolish
+scandal, Myrtle had never referred to it in any way.  Nobody really
+knew what her plans had been except Olive and Cyprian, who had
+observed a very kind silence about the whole matter.  The common
+version of the story was harmless, and near enough to the truth,
+--down the river,--boat upset,--pulled out,--taken care of by some
+women in a house farther down,--sick, brain fever,--pretty near it,
+anyhow,--old Dr. Hurlbut called in,--had her hair cut,--hystericky,
+etc., etc.
+
+Myrtle was contented with this statement, and asked no questions, and
+it was a perfectly understood thing that nobody alluded to the
+subject in her presence.  It followed from all this that the name of
+Clement Lindsay had no peculiar meaning for her.  Nor was she like to
+recognize him as the youth in whose company she had gone through her
+mortal peril, for all her recollections were confused and dreamlike
+from the moment when she awoke and found herself in the foaming
+rapids just above the fall, until that when her senses returned, and
+she saw Master Byles Gridley standing over her with that look of
+tenderness in his square features which had lingered in her
+recollection, and made her feel towards him as if she were his
+daughter.
+
+Now this had its advantage; for as Clement was Susan's young man, and
+had been so for two or three years, it would have been a great pity
+to have any such curious relations established between him and Myrtle
+Hazard as a consciousness on both sides of what had happened would
+naturally suggest.
+
+"Who is this Clement Lindsay, Bathsheba?" Myrtle asked.
+
+Why, Myrtle, don't you remember about Susan Posey's is-to-be,--the
+young man that has been well, I don't know, but I suppose engaged to
+her ever since they were children almost?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I remember now.  Oh dear!  I have forgotten so many
+things, I should think I had been dead and was coming back to life
+again.  Do you know anything about him, Bathsheba?  Did n't somebody
+say he was very handsome?  I wonder if he is really in love with
+Susan Posey.  Such a simple thing?  I want to see him.  I have seen
+so few young men."
+
+As Myrtle said these words, she lifted the sleeve a little on her
+left arm, by a half-instinctive and half-voluntary movement.  The
+glimmering gold of Judith Pride's bracelet flashed out the yellow
+gleam which has been the reddening of so many hands and the
+blackening of so, many souls since that innocent sin-breeder was
+first picked up in the land of Havilah.  There came a sudden light
+into her eye, such as Bathsheba had never seen there before.  It
+looked to her as if Myrtle were saying unconsciously to herself that
+she had the power of beauty, and would like to try its influence on
+the handsome young man whom she was soon to meet, even at the risk of
+unseating poor little Susan in his affections.  This pained the
+gentle and humble-minded girl, who, without having tasted the world's
+pleasures, had meekly consecrated herself to the lowly duties which
+lay nearest to her.  For Bathsheba's phrasing of life was in the
+monosyllables of a rigid faith.  Her conceptions of the human soul
+were all simplicity and purity, but elementary.  She could not
+conceive the vast license the creative energy allows itself in
+mingling the instincts which, after long conflict, may come into
+harmonious adjustment.  The flash which Myrtle's eye had caught from
+the gleam of the golden bracelet filled Bathsheba with a sudden fear
+that she was like to be led away by the vanities of that world lying
+in wickedness of which the minister's daughter had heard so much and
+seen so little.
+
+Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself.  She
+only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love
+too often gives us,--such as a child's trivial gesture or movement
+makes a parent feel,--that impalpable something which in the
+slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone
+will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart.
+This was all.  But it was true that what she saw meant a great deal.
+It meant the dawning in Myrtle Hazard of one of her as yet unlived
+secondary lives.  Bathsheba's virgin perceptions had caught a faint
+early ray of its glimmering twilight.
+
+She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has
+made seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and
+that she did not know about Susan's sentiments.  Only, as they had
+kept so long to each other, she supposed there must be love between
+them.
+
+Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its
+perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to
+look upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds
+of Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty
+fancies.  She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her,
+her eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified
+ancestress, but on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to
+live in all the splendors of her full-blown womanhood.
+
+The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as
+the glance at him already given might have foreshadowed.  But his
+features had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and
+the sober tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had
+given him a maturity beyond his years.  The story was not an uncommon
+one.  At sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream.  At eighteen he
+had awoke, and found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to
+his so that its life was dependent on his own.  Whether it would have
+perished if its filaments had been gently disentangled from the
+object to which they had attached themselves, experienced judges of
+such matters may perhaps question.  To justify Clement in his
+estimate of the danger of such an experiment, we must remember that
+to young people in their teens a first passion is a portentous and
+unprecedented phenomenon.  The young man may have been mistaken in
+thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and may have done more
+than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it was the mistake
+of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another's feelings by
+his own.  He measured the depth of his own rather by what he felt
+they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.
+
+Clement was called a "genius" by those who knew him, and was
+consequently in danger of being spoiled early.  The risk is great
+enough anywhere, but greatest in a new country, where there is an
+almost universal want of fixed standards of excellence.
+
+He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a
+planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work
+of eye and hand.  It would not have been strange if he thought he
+could do everything, having gifts which were capable of various
+application,--and being an American citizen.  But though he was a
+good draughtsman, and had made some reliefs and modelled some
+figures, he called himself only an architect.  He had given him.
+self up to his art, not merely from a love of it and talent for it,
+but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he thought his country
+wanted a race of builders to clothe the new forms of religious,
+social, and national life afresh from the forest, the quarry, and the
+mine.  Some thought he would succeed, others that he would be a
+brilliant failure.
+
+"Grand notions,--grand notions," the master with whom he studied
+said.  "Large ground plan of life,--splendid elevation.  A little
+wild in some of his fancies, perhaps, but he's only a boy, and he's
+the kind of boy that sometimes grows to be a pretty big man.  Wait
+and see,--wait and see.  He works days, and we can let him dream
+nights.  There's a good deal of him, anyhow."  His fellow-students
+were puzzled.  Those who thought of their calling as a trade, and
+looked forward to the time when they should be embodying the ideals
+of municipal authorities in brick and stone, or making contracts with
+wealthy citizens, doubted whether Clement would have a sharp eye
+enough for business.  "Too many whims, you know.  All sorts of queer
+ideas in his head,--as if a boy like him were going to make things
+all over again!".
+
+No doubt there was something of youthful extravagance in his plans
+and expectations.  But it was the untamed enthusiasm which is the
+source of all great thoughts and deeds,--a beautiful delirium which
+age commonly tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath the world
+furnishes gratis proves a pretty certain cure.
+
+Creation is always preceded by chaos.  The youthful architect's mind
+was confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in
+upon it, and which he had not yet had time or developed mature
+strength sufficient to reduce to order.  The young American of any
+freshness of intellect is stimulated to dangerous excess by the
+conditions of life into which he is born.  There is a double
+proportion of oxygen in the New World air.  The chemists have not
+found it out yet, but human brains and breathing-organs have long
+since made the discovery.
+
+Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his
+possibilities of happiness in one direction, and he felt that there
+was a certain grandeur in the recompense of working out his defeated
+instincts through the ambitious medium of his noble art.  Had not
+Pharaohs chosen it to proclaim their longings for immortality,
+Caesars their passion for pomp and luxury, and priests to symbolize
+their conceptions of the heavenly mansions?  His dreams were on a
+grand scale; such, after all, are the best possessions of youth.  Had
+he but been free, or mated with a nature akin to his own, he would
+have felt himself as truly the heir of creation as any young man that
+lived.  But his lot was cast, and his youth had all the serious
+aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood.  In the region of his art
+alone he hoped always to find freedom and a companionship which his
+home life could never give him.
+
+Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank,
+but was called unexpectedly back to the city.  Happily Susan was not
+exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance
+between them to dare to question his actions.  Perhaps she found a
+partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried
+his new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing
+them to her.  "Would that you were with us at this delightful
+season," she wrote in the autumn; "but no, your Susan must not
+repine.  Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,
+
+"Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
+For absence makes thee doubly dear;
+Ah! what is life while thou 'rt away?
+'T is night without the orb of day!'"
+
+The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and
+promising friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself.  The
+letter, it is unnecessary to state, was voluminous,--for a woman can
+tell her love, or other matter of interest, over and over again in as
+many forms as another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing
+the musical changes of "In Memoriam."
+
+The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long.  They
+convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could
+come to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work
+he had to keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any
+rate.  But at last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was
+coming; yes, it was so nice, and, oh dear! should n't she be real
+happy to see him?
+
+To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for
+human nature's daily food.  Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could
+have told herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have
+confessed to certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of
+late, cast a shadow on her seemingly bright future.  With all the
+pleasure that the thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a
+little tremor, a certain degree of awe, in contemplating his visit.
+If she could have clothed her self-humiliation in the gold and purple
+of the "Portuguese Sonnets," it would have been another matter; but
+the trouble with the most common sources of disquiet is that they
+have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology to air themselves in; the
+inward burning goes on without the relief and gratifying display of
+the crater.
+
+"A friend of mine is coming to the village," she said to Mr. Gifted
+Hopkins.  "I want you to see him.  He is a genius,--as some other
+young men are."  (This was obviously personal, and the youthful poet
+blushed with ingenuous delight.)  "I have known him for ever so many
+years.  He and I are very good friends."  The poet knew that this
+meant an exclusive relation between them; and though the fact was no
+surprise to him, his countenance fell a little.  The truth was, that
+his admiration was divided between Myrtle, who seemed to him divine
+and adorable, but distant, and Susan, who listened to his frequent
+poems, whom he was in the habit of seeing in artless domestic
+costumes, and whose attractions had been gaining upon him of late in
+the enforced absence of his divinity.
+
+He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his
+desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the
+language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he
+began thus
+
+          "ANOTHER'S!
+
+"Another's!  Oh the pang, the smart!
+     Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge,--
+The barbed fang has rent a heart
+     Which--which
+
+"judge--judge,--no, not judge.  Budge, drudge, fudge--What a
+disgusting language English is!  Nothing fit to couple with such a
+word as grudge!  And the gush of an impassioned moment arrested in
+full flow, stopped short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme!
+Judge,--budge,--drudge,--nudge, oh!--smudge,--misery!--fudge.  In
+vain,--futile,--no use,--all up for to-night!"
+
+While the poet, headed off in this way by the poverty of his native
+tongue, sought inspiration by retiring into the world of dreams,--
+went to bed, in short, his more fortunate rival was just entering the
+village, where he was to make his brief residence at the house of
+Deacon Rumrill, who, having been a loser by the devouring element,
+was glad to receive a stray boarder when any such were looking about
+for quarters.
+
+For some reason or other he was restless that evening, and took out a
+volume he had brought with him to beguile the earlier hours of the
+night.  It was too late when he arrived to disturb the quiet of Mrs.
+Hopkins's household, and whatever may have been Clement's impatience,
+he held it in check, and sat tranquilly until midnight over the pages
+of the book with which he had prudently provided himself.
+
+"Hope you slept well last night," said the old Deacon, when Mr.
+Clement came down to breakfast the next morning.
+
+"Very well, thank you,--that ' is, after I got to bed.  But I sat up
+pretty late reading my favorite Scott.  I am apt to forget how the
+hours pass when I have one of his books in my hand."
+
+The worthy Deacon looked at Mr. Clement with a sudden accession of
+interest.
+
+"You couldn't find better reading, young man.  Scott is my favorite
+author.  A great man.  I have got his likeness in a gilt-frame
+hanging up in the other room.  I have read him all through three
+times."
+
+The young man's countenance brightened.  He had not expected to find
+so much taste for elegant literature in an old village deacon.
+
+"What are your favorites among his writings, Deacon?  I suppose you
+have your particular likings, as the rest of us have."
+
+The Deacon was flattered by the question.  "Well," he answered, "I
+can hardly tell you.  I like pretty much everything Scott ever wrote.
+Sometimes I think it is one thing, and sometimes another.  Great on
+Paul's Epistles,--don't you think so?"
+
+The honest fact was, that Clement remembered very little about
+"Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk,"--a book of Sir Walter's less famous
+than many of his others; but he signified his polite assent to the
+Deacon's statement, rather wondering at his choice of a favorite, and
+smiling at his queer way of talking about the Letters as Epistles.
+
+"I am afraid Scott is not so much read now-a-days as he once was, and
+as he ought to be," said Mr. Clement: "Such character, such nature
+and so much grace."
+
+"That's it,--that's it, young man," the Deacon broke in,--"Natur' and
+Grace,--Natur' and Grace.  Nobody ever knew better what those two
+words meant than Scott did, and I'm very glad to see--you've chosen
+such good wholesome reading.  You can't set up too late, young man,
+to read Scott.  If I had twenty children, they should all begin
+reading Scott as soon as they were old enough to spell sin,--and
+that's the first word my little ones learned, next to 'pa' and I
+'ma.' Nothing like beginning the lessons of life in good season."
+
+"What a grim old satirist!" Clement said to himself.  "I wonder if
+the old man reads other novelists. --Do tell me, Deacon, if you have
+read Thackeray's last story? "
+
+"Thackeray's story?  Published by the American Tract Society?"
+
+"Not exactly," Clement answered, smiling, and quite delighted to find
+such an unexpected vein of grave pleasantry about the demure-looking
+church-dignitary; for the Deacon asked his question without moving a
+muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and
+smile.  First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for
+the immovable solemnity of their features.  Clement promised himself
+not a little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the
+venerable Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had
+cultivated a literary taste which would make him a more agreeable
+companion than the common ecclesiastics of his grade in country
+villages.
+
+After breakfast, Mr. Clement walked forth in the direction of Mrs.
+Hopkins's house, thinking as he went of the pleasant surprise his
+visit would bring to his longing and doubtless pensive Susan; for
+though she knew he was coming, she did not know that he was at that
+moment in Oxbow Village.
+
+As he drew near the house, the first thing he saw was Susan Posey,
+almost running against her just as he turned a corner.  She looked
+wonderfully lively and rosy, for the weather was getting keen and the
+frosts had begun to bite.  A young gentleman was walking at her side,
+and reading to her from a paper he held in his hand.  Both looked
+deeply interested,--so much so that Clement felt half ashamed of
+himself for intruding upon them so abruptly.
+
+But lovers are lovers, and Clement could not help joining them.  The
+first thing, of course, was the utterance of two simultaneous
+exclamations, "Why, Clement!"  "Why, Susan!"  What might have come
+next in the programme, but for the presence of a third party, is
+matter of conjecture; but what did come next was a mighty awkward
+look on the part of Susan Posey, and the following short speech:
+"Mr. Lindsay, let me introduce Mr. Hopkins, my friend, the poet I 've
+written to you about.  He was just reading two of his poems to me.
+Some other time, Gifted--Mr. Hopkins."
+
+"Oh no, Mr. Hopkins,--pray go on," said Clement.  "I 'm very fond of
+poetry."
+
+The poet did not require much urging, and began at once reciting over
+again the stanzas which were afterwards so much admired in the
+"Banner and Oracle,"--the first verse being, as the readers of that
+paper will remember,
+
+    "She moves in splendor, like the ray
+     That flashes from unclouded skies,
+     And all the charms of night and day
+     Are mingled in her hair and eyes."
+
+Clement, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone
+with his beloved, commanded his feelings admirably.  He signified his
+approbation of the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the
+rhymes absolutely without blemish.  The stanzas reminded him forcibly
+of one of the greatest poets of the century.
+
+Gifted flushed hot with pleasure.  He had tasted the blood of his own
+rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the
+bag of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to
+drag his piece away from him.
+
+"Perhaps you will like these lines still better," he said; "the style
+is more modern:--
+
+     'O daughter of the spiced South,
+          Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine
+          That staineth with its hue divine
+     The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'"
+
+And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of
+two rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.
+
+Clement was cornered.  It was necessary to say something for the
+poet's sake,--perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense
+responsible for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had
+spoken so often and so enthusiastically.
+
+"Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should
+think, until of late years.  You modelled this piece on the style of
+a famous living English poet, did you not?"
+
+"Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,--I never imitate.  Originality is, if
+I may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte.  Why,
+the critics allow as much as that.  See here, Mr. Lindsay."
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom
+a cutting from a newspaper,--which dropped helplessly open of itself,
+as if tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or
+creases, by reason of having been often folded and unfolded read
+aloud as follows:
+
+"The bard of Oxbow Pillage--our valued correspondent who writes over
+the signature of G. H.--is, in our opinion, more remarkable for his
+originality than for any other of his numerous gifts."
+
+Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated
+with a sense of triumph.  Susan could not help sharing his feeling of
+satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without
+knowing it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a
+little bit--the merest infinitesimal atom--nearer to Gifted Hopkins,
+who was on one side of her, while Clement walked on the other.  Women
+love the conquering party,--it is the way of their sex.  And poets,
+as we have seen, are well-nigh irresistible when they exert their
+dangerous power of fascination upon the female heart.  But Clement
+was above jealousy; and, if be perceived anything of this movement,
+took no notice of it.
+
+He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day.  She was tender in
+her expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little
+something in her looks and language from time to time that Clement
+did not know exactly what to make of.  She colored once or twice when
+the young poet's name was mentioned.  She was not so full of her
+little plans for the future as she had sometimes been, "everything
+was so uncertain," she said.  Clement asked himself whether she felt
+quite as sure that her attachment would last as she once did.  But
+there were no reproaches, not even any explanations, which are about
+as bad between lovers.  There was nothing but an undefined feeling on
+his side that she did not cling quite so closely to him, perhaps, as
+he had once thought, and that, if he had happened to have been
+drowned that day when he went down with the beautiful young woman, it
+was just conceivable that Susan, who would have cried dreadfully, no
+doubt, would in time have listened to consolation from some other
+young man,--possibly from the young poet whose verses he had been
+admiring.  Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there is
+nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master Gridley used to
+say.  Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as Clement well
+knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up like the
+rose which had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned by
+Cowper.
+
+As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this
+visit of Clement's than he had ever before known.  He wandered about
+with a dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance.  He showed
+a falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and
+disturbed his mother, for she had filled the house with fragrant
+suggestions of good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was
+to be her guest at tea.  And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut
+called in the native dialect cymbal ( Qu. Symbol?  B. G.) which
+graced the board with its plastic forms, suggestive of the most
+pleasing objects,--the spiral ringlets pendent from the brow of
+beauty; the magic circlet, which is the pledge of plighted
+affection,--the indissoluble knot, which typifies the union of
+hearts, which organs were also largely represented; this exceptional
+delicacy would at any other time have claimed his special notice.
+But his mother remarked that he paid little attention to these, and
+his, "No, I thank you," when it came to the preserved "damsels," as
+some call them, carried a pang with it to the maternal bosom.  The
+most touching evidence of his unhappiness--whether intentional or the
+result of accident was not evident was a broken heart, which he left
+upon his plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the
+language of flowers.  His thoughts were gloomy during that day,
+running a good deal on the more picturesque and impressive methods of
+bidding a voluntary farewell to a world which had allured him with
+visions of beauty only to snatch them from his impassioned gaze.  His
+mother saw something of this, and got from him a few disjointed
+words, which led her to lock up the clothes-line and hide her late
+husband's razors,--an affectionate, yet perhaps unnecessary
+precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from this point of view
+by those who have the natural outlet of verse to relieve them is
+rarely followed by a casualty.  It may rather be considered as
+implying a more than average chance for longevity; as those who
+meditate an--imposing finish naturally save themselves for it, and
+are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and this
+is apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to
+write or a proof to be corrected.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+THE SECOND MEETING.
+
+Miss Eveleth requests the pleasure of Mr. Lindsay's company to meet a
+few friends on the evening of the Feast of St. Ambrose, December 7th,
+Wednesday.
+
+THE PARSONAGE, December 6th.
+
+
+It was the luckiest thing in the world.  They always made a little
+festival of that evening at the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth's, in honor of
+his canonized namesake, and because they liked to have a good time.
+It came this year just at the right moment, for here was a
+distinguished stranger visiting in the place.  Oxbow Village seemed
+to be running over with its one extra young man,--as may be seen
+sometimes in larger villages, and even in cities of moderate
+dimensions.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had called on Clement the day after his
+arrival.  He had already met the Deacon in the street, and asked some
+questions about his transient boarder.
+
+A very interesting young man, the Deacon said, much given to the
+reading of pious books.  Up late at night after he came, reading
+Scott's Commentary.  Appeared to be as fond of serious works as other
+young folks were of their novels and romances and other immoral
+publications.  He, the Deacon, thought of having a few religious
+friends to meet the young gentleman, if he felt so disposed; and
+should like to have him, Mr. Bradshaw, come in and take a part in the
+exercises. --Mr. Bradshaw was unfortunately engaged.  He thought the
+young gentleman could hardly find time for such a meeting during his
+brief visit.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw expected naturally to see a youth of imperfect
+constitution, and cachectic or dyspeptic tendencies, who was in
+training to furnish one of those biographies beginning with the
+statement that, from his infancy, the subject of it showed no
+inclination for boyish amusements, and so on, until he dies out, for
+the simple reason that there was not enough of him to live.  Very
+interesting, no doubt, Master Byles Gridley would have said, but had
+no more to do with good, hearty, sound life than the history of those
+very little people to be seen in museums preserved in jars of
+alcohol, like brandy peaches.
+
+When Mr. Clement Lindsay presented himself, Mr. Bradshaw was a good
+deal surprised to see a young fellow of such a mould.  He pleased
+himself with the idea that he knew a man of mark at sight, and he set
+down Clement in that category at his first glance.  The young man met
+his penetrating and questioning look with a frank, ingenuous, open
+aspect, before which he felt himself disarmed, as it were, and thrown
+upon other means of analysis.  He would try him a little in talk.
+
+"I hope you like these people you are with.  What sort of a man do
+you find my old friend the Deacon?"
+
+Clement laughed.  "A very queer old character.  Loves his joke as
+well, and is as sly in making it, as if he had studied Joe Miller
+instead of the Catechism."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked at the young man to know what he meant.  Mr.
+Lindsay talked in a very easy way for a serious young person.  He was
+puzzled.  He did not see to the bottom of this description of the
+Deacon.  With a lawyer's instinct, he kept his doubts to himself and
+tried his witness with a new question.
+
+"Did you talk about books at all with the old man?"
+
+"To be sure I did.  Would you believe it,--that aged saint is a great
+novel-reader.  So he tells me.  What is more, he brings up his
+children to that sort of reading, from the time when they first begin
+to spell.  If anybody else had told me such a story about an old
+country deacon, I wouldn't have believed it; but he said so himself,
+to me, at breakfast this morning."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw felt as if either he or Mr. Lindsay must certainly be in
+the first stage of mild insanity, and he did not think that he
+himself could be out of his wits.  He must try one more question.  He
+had become so mystified that he forgot himself, and began putting his
+interrogation in legal form.
+
+"Will you state, if you please--I beg your pardon--may I ask who is
+your own favorite author?"
+
+"I think just now I like to read Scott better than almost anybody."
+
+"Do you mean the Rev. Thomas Scott, author of the Commentary?"
+
+Clement stared at Mr. Bradshaw, and wondered whether he was trying to
+make a fool of him.  The young lawyer hardly looked as if he could be
+a fool himself.
+
+"I mean Sir Walter Scott," he said, dryly.
+
+"Oh!" said Mr. Bradshaw.  He saw that there had been a slight
+misunderstanding between the young man and his worthy host, but it
+was none of his business, and there were other subjects of interest
+to talk about.
+
+"You know one of our charming young ladies very well, I believe, Mr.
+Lindsay.  I think you are an old acquaintance of Miss Posey, whom we
+all consider so pretty."
+
+Poor Clement!  The question pierced to the very marrow of his soul,
+but it was put with the utmost suavity and courtesy, and honeyed with
+a compliment to the young lady, too, so that there was no avoiding a
+direct and pleasant answer to it.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I have known the young lady you speak of for a long
+time, and very well,--in fact, as you must have heard, we are
+something more than friends.  My visit here is principally on her
+account."
+
+"You must give the rest of us a chance to see something of you during
+your visit, Mr. Lindsay.  I hope you are invited to Miss Eveleth's
+to-morrow evening?"
+
+"Yes, I got a note this morning.  Tell me, Mr. Bradshaw, who is there
+that I shall meet if I go?  I have no doubt there are girls here in
+the village I should like to see, and perhaps some young fellows that
+I should like to talk with.  You know all that's prettiest and
+pleasantest, of course."
+
+"Oh, we're a little place, Mr. Lindsay.  A few nice people, the rest
+comme Va, you know.  High-bush blackberries and low-bush black-
+berries,--you understand,--just so everywhere,--high-bush here and
+there, low-bush plenty.  You must see the two parsons' daughters,
+--Saint Ambrose's and Saint Joseph's,--and another girl I want
+particularly to introduce you to.  You shall form your own opinion of
+her.  I call her handsome and stylish, but you have got spoiled, you
+know.  Our young poet, too, one we raised in this place, Mr. Lindsay,
+and a superior article of poet, as we think,--that is, some of us,
+for the rest of us are jealous of him, because the girls are all
+dying for him and want his autograph.  And Cyp,--yes, you must talk
+to Cyp,--he has ideas.  But don't forget to get hold of old Byles
+Master Gridley I mean--before you go.  Big head.  Brains enough for a
+cabinet minister, and fit out a college faculty with what was left
+over.  Be sure you see old Byles.  Set him talking about his book,
+'Thoughts on the Universe.'  Did n't sell much, but has got knowing
+things in it.  I'll show you a copy, and then you can tell him you
+know it, and he will take to you.  Come in and get your dinner with
+me to-morrow.  We will dine late, as the city folks do, and after
+that we will go over to the Rector's.  I should like to show you some
+of our village people."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw liked the thought of showing the young man to some of
+his friends there.  As Clement was already "done for," or "bowled
+out," as the young lawyer would have expressed the fact of his being
+pledged in the matrimonial direction, there was nothing to be
+apprehended on the score of rivalry.  And although Clement was
+particularly good-looking, and would have been called a
+distinguishable youth anywhere, Mr. Bradshaw considered himself far
+more than his match, in all probability, in social accomplishments.
+He expected, therefore, a certain amount of reflex credit for
+bringing such a fine young fellow in his company, and a second
+instalment of reputation from outshining him in conversation.  This
+was rather nice calculating, but Murray Bradshaw always calculated.
+With most men life is like backgammon, half skill, and half luck, but
+with him it was like chess.  He never pushed a pawn without reckoning
+the cost, and when his mind was least busy it was sure to be half a
+dozen moves ahead of the game as it was standing.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw gave Clement a pretty dinner enough for such a place as
+Oxbow Village.  He offered him some good wine, and would have made
+him talk so as to show his lining, to use one of his own expressions,
+but Clement had apparently been through that trifling experience, and
+could not be coaxed into saying more than he meant to say.  Murray
+Bradshaw was very curious to find out how it was that he had become
+the victim of such a rudimentary miss as Susan Posey.  Could she be
+an heiress in disguise?  Why no, of course not; had not he made all
+proper inquiries about that when Susan came to town?  A small
+inheritance from an aunt or uncle, or some such relative, enough to
+make her a desirable party in the eyes of certain villagers perhaps,
+but nothing to allure a man like this, whose face and figure as
+marketable possessions were worth say a hundred thousand in the
+girl's own right, as Mr. Bradshaw put it roughly, with another
+hundred thousand if his talent is what some say, and if his
+connection is a desirable one, a fancy price,--anything he would
+fetch.  Of course not.  Must have got caught when he was a child.
+Why the diavolo didn't he break it off, then?
+
+There was no fault to find with the modest entertainment at the
+Parsonage.  A splendid banquet in a great house is an admirable
+thing, provided always its getting up did not cost the entertainer an
+inward conflict, nor its recollection a twinge of economical regret,
+nor its bills a cramp of anxiety.  A simple evening party in the
+smallest village is just as admirable in its degree, when the parlor
+is cheerfully lighted, and the board prettily spread, and the guests
+are made to feel comfortable without being reminded that anybody is
+making a painful effort.
+
+We know several of the young people who were there, and need not
+trouble ourselves for the others.  Myrtle Hazard had promised to
+come.  She had her own way of late as never before; in fact, the
+women were afraid of her.  Miss Silence felt that she could not be
+responsible for her any longer.  She had hopes for a time that Myrtle
+would go through the customary spiritual paroxysm under the influence
+of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's assiduous exhortations; but since she had
+broken off with him, Miss Silence had looked upon her as little
+better than a backslider.  And now that the girl was beginning to
+show the tendencies which seemed to come straight down to her from
+the belle of the last century, (whose rich physical developments
+seemed to the under-vitalized spinster as in themselves a kind of
+offence against propriety,) the forlorn woman folded her thin hands
+and looked on hopelessly, hardly venturing a remonstrance for fear of
+some new explosion.  As for Cynthia, she was comparatively easy since
+she had, through Mr. Byles Gridley, upset the minister's questionable
+arrangement of religious intimacy.  She had, in fact, in a quiet way,
+given Mr. Bradshaw to understand that he would probably meet Myrtle
+at the Parsonage if he dropped in at their small gathering.  Clement
+walked over to Mrs. Hopkins's after his dinner with the young lawyer,
+and asked if Susan was ready to go with him.  At the sound of his
+voice, Gifted Hopkins smote his forehead, and called himself, in
+subdued tones, a miserable being.  His imagination wavered uncertain
+for a while between pictures of various modes of ridding himself of
+existence, and fearful deeds involving the life of others.  He had no
+fell purpose of actually doing either, but there was a gloomy
+pleasure in contemplating them as possibilities, and in mentally
+sketching the "Lines written in Despair" which would be found in what
+was but an hour before the pocket of the youthful bard, G. H., victim
+of a hopeless passion.  All this emotion was in the nature of  a
+surprise to the young man.  He had fully believed himself desperately
+in love with Myrtle Hazard; and it was not until Clement came into
+the family circle with the right of eminent domain over the realm of
+Susan's affections, that this unfortunate discovered that Susan's
+pretty ways and morning dress and love of poetry and liking for his
+company had been too much for him, and that he was henceforth to be
+wretched during the remainder of his natural life, except so far as
+he could unburden himself in song.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had asked the privilege of waiting upon
+Myrtle to the little party at the Eveleths.  Myrtle was not
+insensible to the attractions of the young lawyer, though she had
+never thought of herself except as a child in her relations with any
+of these older persons.  But she was not the same girl that she had
+been but a few months before.  She had achieved her independence by
+her audacious and most dangerous enterprise.  She had gone through
+strange nervous trials and spiritual experiences which had matured
+her more rapidly than years of common life would have done.  She had
+got back her health, bringing with it a riper wealth of womanhood.
+She had found her destiny in the consciousness that she inherited the
+beauty belonging to her blood, and which, after sleeping for a
+generation or two as if to rest from the glare of the pageant that
+follows beauty through its long career of triumph, had come to the
+light again in her life, and was to repeat the legends of the olden
+time in her own history.
+
+Myrtle's wardrobe had very little of ornament, such as the modistes
+of the town would have thought essential to render a young girl like
+her presentable.  There were a few heirlooms of old date, however,
+which she had kept as curiosities until now, and which she looked
+over until she found some lace and other convertible material, with
+which she enlivened her costume a little for the evening.  As she
+clasped the antique bracelet around her wrist, she felt as if it were
+an amulet that gave her the power of charming which had been so long
+obsolete in her lineage.  At the bottom of her heart she cherished a
+secret longing to try her fascinations on the young lawyer.  Who
+could blame her?  It was not an inwardly expressed intention,--it was
+the simple instinctive movement to subjugate the strongest of the
+other sex who had come in her way, which, as already said, is as
+natural to a woman as it is to a man to be captivated by the
+loveliest of those to whom he dares to aspire.
+
+Before William Murray Bradshaw and Myrtle Hazard had reached the
+Parsonage, the girl's cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes were
+flashing with a new excitement.  The young man had not made love to
+her directly, but he had interested her in herself by a delicate and
+tender flattery of manner, and so set her fancies working that she
+was taken with him as never before, and wishing that the Parsonage
+had been a mile farther from The Poplars.  It was impossible for a
+young girl like Myrtle to conceal the pleasure she received from
+listening to her seductive admirer, who was trying all his trained
+skill upon his artless companion.  Murray Bradshaw felt sure that the
+game was in his hands if he played it with only common prudence.
+There was no need of hurrying this child,--it might startle her to
+make downright love abruptly; and now that he had an ally in her own
+household, and was to have access to her with a freedom he had never
+before enjoyed, there was a refined pleasure in playing his fish,--
+this gamest of golden-scaled creatures,--which had risen to his fly,
+and which he wished to hook, but not to land, until he was sure it
+would be worth his while.
+
+They entered the little parlor at the Parsonage looking so beaming,
+that Olive and Bathsheba exchanged glances which implied so much that
+it would take a full page to tell it with all the potentialities
+involved.
+
+"How magnificent Myrtle is this evening, Bathsheba!" said Cyprian
+Eveleth, pensively.
+
+"What a handsome pair they are, Cyprian!" said Bathsheba cheerfully.
+
+Cyprian sighed.  "She always fascinates me whenever I look upon her.
+Is n't she the very picture of what a poet's love should be,--a poem
+herself,--a glorious lyric,--all light and music!  See what a smile
+the creature has!  And her voice!  When did you ever hear such tones?
+And when was it ever so full of life before."
+
+Bathsheba sighed.  "I do not know any poets but Gifted Hopkins.  Does
+not Myrtle look more in her place by the side of Murray Bradshaw than
+she would with Gifted hitched on her arm?"
+
+Just then the poet made his appearance.  He looked depressed, as if
+it had cost him an effort to come.  He was, however, charged with a
+message which he must deliver to the hostess of the evening.
+
+"They 're coming presently," he said.  "That young man and Susan.
+Wants you to introduce him, Mr. Bradshaw."
+
+The bell rang presently, and Murray Bradshaw slipped out into the
+entry to meet the two lovers.
+
+"How are you, my fortunate friend?" he said, as he met them at the
+door.  "Of course you're well and happy as mortal man can be in this
+vale of tears.  Charming, ravishing, quite delicious, that way of
+dressing your hair, Miss Posey!  Nice girls here this evening, Mr.
+Lindsay.  Looked lovely when I came out of the parlor.  Can't say how
+they will show after this young lady puts in an appearance."  In
+reply to which florid speeches Susan blushed, not knowing what else
+to do, and Clement smiled as naturally as if he had been sitting for
+his photograph.
+
+He felt, in a vague way, that he and Susan were being patronized,
+which is not a pleasant feeling to persons with a certain pride of
+character.  There was no expression of contempt about Mr. Bradshaw's
+manner or language at which he could take offence.  Only he had the
+air of a man who praises his neighbor without stint, with a calm
+consciousness that he himself is out of reach of comparison in the
+possessions or qualities which he is admiring in the other.  Clement
+was right in his obscure perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while
+he was making his phrases.  That gentleman was, in another moment, to
+have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature he had just
+begun to tame.  He was going to extinguish the pallid light of
+Susan's prettiness in the brightness of Myrtle's beauty.  He would
+bring this young man, neutralized and rendered entirely harmless by
+his irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face to face with a
+masterpiece of young womanhood, and say to him, not in words, but as
+plainly as speech could have told him, "Behold my captive!"
+
+It was a proud moment for Murray Bradshaw.  He had seen, or thought
+that he had seen, the assured evidence of a speedy triumph over all
+the obstacles of Myrtle's youth and his own present seeming slight
+excess of maturity.  Unless he were very greatly mistaken, he could
+now walk the course; the plate was his, no matter what might be the
+entries.  And this youth, this handsome, spirited-looking, noble-
+aired young fellow, whose artist-eye could not miss a line of
+Myrtle's proud and almost defiant beauty, was to be the witness of
+his power, and to look in admiration upon his prize!  He introduced
+him to the others, reserving her for the last.  She was at that
+moment talking with the worthy Rector, and turned when Mr. Bradshaw
+spoke to her.
+
+"Miss Hazard, will you allow me to present to you my friend, Mr.
+Clement Lindsay?"
+
+They looked full upon each other, and spoke the common words of
+salutation.  It was a strange meeting; but we who profess to tell the
+truth must tell strange things, or we shall be liars.
+
+In poor little Susan's letter there was some allusion to a bust of
+Innocence which the young artist had begun, but of which he had said
+nothing in his answer to her.  He had roughed out a block of marble
+for that impersonation; sculpture was a delight to him, though
+secondary to his main pursuit.  After his memorable adventure, the
+image of the girl he had rescued so haunted him that the pale ideal
+which was to work itself out in the bust faded away in its perpetual
+presence, and--alas, poor Susan!  in obedience to the impulse that he
+could not control, he left Innocence sleeping in the marble, and
+began modelling a figure of proud and noble and imperious beauty, to
+which he gave the name of Liberty.
+
+The original which had inspired his conception was before him.  These
+were the lips to which his own had clung when he brought her back
+from the land of shadows.  The hyacinthine curl of her lengthening
+locks had added something to her beauty; but it was the same face
+which had haunted him.  This was the form he had borne seemingly
+lifeless in his arms, and the bosom which heaved so visibly before
+him was that which his eyes they were the calm eyes of a sculptor,
+but of a sculptor hardly twenty years old.
+
+Yes,--her bosom was heaving.  She had an unexplained feeling of
+suffocation, and drew great breaths,--she could not have said why,
+--but she could not help it; and presently she became giddy, and had
+a great noise in her ears, and rolled her eyes about, and was on the
+point of going into an hysteric spasm.  They called Dr. Hurlbut, who
+was making himself agreeable to Olive just then, to come and see what
+was the matter with Myrtle.
+
+"A little nervous turn,--that is all," he said.
+
+Open the window.  Loose the ribbon round her neck.  Rub her hands.
+Sprinkle some water on her forehead.
+
+A few drops of cologne.  Room too warm for her,--that 's all, I
+think."
+
+Myrtle came to herself after a time without anything like a regular
+paroxysm.  But she was excitable, and whatever the cause of the
+disturbance may have been, it seemed prudent that she should go home
+early; and the excellent Rector insisted on caring for her, much to
+the discontent of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+"Demonish odd," said this gentleman, "was n't it, Mr. Lindsay, that
+Miss Hazard should go off in that way.  Did you ever see her before?"
+
+"I--I--have seen that young lady before," Clement answered.
+
+"Where did you meet her?" Mr. Bradshaw asked, with eager interest.
+
+"I met her in the Valley of the Shadow of Death," Clement answered,
+very solemnly. --"I leave this place to-morrow morning.  Have you any
+commands for the city?"
+
+"Knows how to shut a fellow up pretty well for a young one, doesn't
+he?" Mr. Bradshaw thought to himself.
+
+"Thank you, no," he answered, recovering himself.  "Rather a
+melancholy place to make acquaintance in, I should think, that Valley
+you spoke of.  I should like to know about it."
+
+Mr. Clement had the power of looking steadily into another person's
+eyes in a way that was by no means encouraging to curiosity or
+favorable to the process of cross-examination.  Mr. Bradshaw was not
+disposed to press his question in the face of the calm, repressive
+look the young man gave him.
+
+"If he was n't bagged, I shouldn't like the shape of things any too
+well," he said to himself.
+
+The conversation between Mr. Clement Lindsay and Miss Susan Posey, as
+they walked home together, was not very brilliant.  "I am going to-
+morrow morning," he said, "and I must bid you good-by tonight."
+Perhaps it is as well to leave two lovers to themselves, under these
+circumstances.
+
+Before he went he spoke to his worthy host, whose moderate demands he
+had to satisfy, and with whom he wished to exchange a few words.
+
+"And by the way, Deacon, I have no use for this book, and as it is in
+a good type, perhaps you would like it.  Your favorite, Scott, and
+one of his greatest works.  I have another edition of it at home, and
+don't care for this volume."
+
+Thank you, thank you, Mr. Lindsay, much obleeged.  I shall read that
+copy for your sake, the best of books next to the Bible itself."
+
+After Mr. Lindsay had gone, the Deacon looked at the back of the
+book.  "Scott's Works, Vol. IX."  He opened it at hazard, and
+happened to fall on a well-known page, from which he began reading
+aloud, slowly,
+
+    "When Izrul, of the Lord beloved,
+     Out of the land of bondage came."
+
+The whole hymn pleased the grave Deacon.  He had never seen this work
+of the author of the Commentary.  No matter; anything that such a
+good man wrote must be good reading, and he would save it up for
+Sunday.  The consequence of this was, that, when the Rev. Mr. Stoker
+stopped in on his way to meeting on the "Sabbath," he turned white
+with horror at the spectacle of the senior Deacon of his church
+sitting, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, absorbed in the pages of
+"Ivanhoe," which he found enormously interesting; but, so far as he
+had yet read, not occupied with religious matters so much as he had
+expected.
+
+Myrtle had no explanation to give of her nervous attack.  Mr.
+Bradshaw called the day after the party, but did not see her.  He met
+her walking, and thought she seemed a little more distant than
+common.  That would never do.  He called again at The Poplars a few
+days afterwards, and was met in the entry by Miss Cynthia, with whom
+he had a long conversation on matters involving Myrtle's interests
+and their own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+MADNESS?
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay returned to the city and his usual labors in a
+state of strange mental agitation.  He had received an impression for
+which he was unprepared.  He had seen for the second time a young
+girl whom, for the peace of his own mind, and for the happiness of
+others, he should never again have looked upon until Time had taught
+their young hearts the lesson which all hearts must learn, sooner or
+later.
+
+What shall the unfortunate person do who has met with one of those
+disappointments, or been betrayed into one of those positions, which
+do violence to all the tenderest feelings, blighting the happiness of
+youth, and the prospects of after years?
+
+If the person is a young man, he has various resources.  He can take
+to the philosophic meerschaum, and nicotine himself at brief
+intervals into a kind of buzzing and blurry insensibility, until he
+begins to "color" at last like the bowl of his own pipe, and even his
+mind gets the tobacco flavor.  Or he can have recourse to the more
+suggestive stimulants, which will dress his future up for him in
+shining possibilities that glitter like Masonic regalia, until the
+morning light and the waking headache reveal his illusion.  Some kind
+of spiritual anaesthetic he must have, if he holds his grief fast
+tied to his heartstrings.  But as grief must be fed with thought, or
+starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in
+other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of that
+ravening passion.  To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to end
+in putting all the mental machinery into disorder.
+
+Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already
+fought, and that he had conquered.  He believed that he had subdued
+himself completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow
+of disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had
+assigned him in his companion, and share with it all of his own
+larger being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of
+apprehending.
+
+He had deceived himself.  The battle was not fought and won.  There
+had been a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the enemy
+--intrenched in the very citadel of life--had rallied, and would make
+another desperate attempt to retrieve his defeat.
+
+The haste with which the young man had quitted the village was only a
+proof that he felt his danger.  He believed that, if he came into the
+presence of Myrtle Hazard for the third time, he should be no longer
+master of his feelings.  Some explanation must take place between
+them, and how was it possible that it should be without emotion? and
+in what do all emotions shared by a young man with such a young girl
+as this tend to find their last expression?
+
+Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work.  He would give
+himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams of what might have been.
+His plans were never so carefully finished, and his studies were
+never so continuous as now.  But the passion still wrought within
+him, and, if he drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep
+until he could endure it no longer, and must give it some
+manifestation.  He had covered up the bust of Liberty so closely,
+that not an outline betrayed itself through the heavy folds of
+drapery in which it was wrapped.  His thoughts recurred to his
+unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he could find a
+silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was torture to
+keep imprisoned in his soul.  The cold stone would tell them, but
+without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of
+himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered
+from a presence which, lovely as it was, stood between him and all
+that made him seem honorable and worthy to himself.
+
+He uncovered the bust which he had but half shaped, and struck the
+first flake from the glittering marble.  The toil, once begun,
+fascinated him strangely, and after the day's work was done, and at
+every interval he could snatch from his duties, he wrought at his
+secret task.
+
+"Clement is graver than ever," the young men said at the office.  ��
+What's the matter, do you suppose?  Turned off by the girl they say
+he means to marry by and by?  How pale he looks too!  Must have
+something worrying him: he used to look as fresh as a clove pink."
+
+The master with whom he studied saw that he was losing color, and
+looking very much worn; and determined to find out, if he could,
+whether he was not overworking himself.  He soon discovered that his
+light was seen burning late into the night, that he was neglecting
+his natural rest, and always busy with some unknown task, not called
+for in his routine of duty or legitimate study.
+
+"Something is wearing on you, Clement," he said.  "You are killing
+yourself with undertaking too much.  Will you let me know what keeps
+you so busy when you ought to be asleep, or taking your ease and
+comfort in some way or other?"
+
+Nobody but himself had ever seen his marble or its model.  He had now
+almost finished it, laboring at it with such sleepless devotion, and
+he was willing to let his master have a sight of his first effort of
+the kind,--for he was not a sculptor, it must be remembered, though
+he had modelled in clay, not without some success, from time to time.
+
+"Come with me," he said.
+
+The master climbed the stairs with him up to his modest chamber.  A
+closely shrouded bust stood on its pedestal in the light of the
+solitary window.
+
+"That is my ideal personage," Clement said.  "Wait one moment, and
+you shall see how far I have caught the character of our uncrowned
+queen."
+
+The master expected, very naturally, to see the conventional young
+woman with classical wreath or feather headdress, whom we have placed
+upon our smallest coin, so that our children may all grow up loving
+Liberty.
+
+As Clement withdrew the drapery that covered his work, the master
+stared at it in amazement.  He looked at it long and earnestly, and
+at length turned his eyes, a little moistened by some feeling which
+thus betrayed itself, upon his scholar.
+
+"This is no ideal, Clement.  It is the portrait of a very young but
+very beautiful woman.  No common feeling could have guided your hand
+in shaping such a portrait from memory.  This must be that friend of
+yours of whom I have often heard as an amiable young person.  Pardon
+me, for you know that nobody cares more for you than I do,--I hope
+that you are happy in all your relations with this young friend of
+yours.  How could one be otherwise?"
+
+It was hard to bear, very hard.  He forced a smile.  "You are partly
+right," he said.  "There is a resemblance, I trust, to a living
+person, for I had one in my mind."
+
+"Did n't you tell me once, Clement, that you were attempting a bust
+of Innocence?  I do not see any block in your room but this.  Is that
+done?"
+
+"Done with!" Clement answered; and, as he said it, the thought stung
+through him that this was the very stone which was to have worn the
+pleasant blandness of pretty Susan's guileless countenance.  How the
+new features had effaced the recollection of the others!
+
+In a few days more Clement had finished his bust.  His hours were
+again vacant to his thick-coming fancies.  While he had been busy
+with his marble, his hands had required his attention, and he must
+think closely of every detail upon which he was at work.  But at
+length his task was done, and he could contemplate what he had made
+of it.  It was a triumph for one so little exercised in sculpture.
+The master had told him so, and his own eye could not deceive him.
+He might never succeed in any repetition of his effort, but this once
+he most certainly had succeeded.  He could not disguise from himself
+the source of this extraordinary good fortune in so doubtful and
+difficult an attempt.  Nor could he resist the desire of
+contemplating the portrait bust, which--it was foolish to talk about
+ideals--was not Liberty, but Myrtle Hazard.
+
+It was too nearly like the story of the ancient sculptor; his own
+work was an over-match for its artist.  Clement had made a mistake in
+supposing that by giving his dream a material form he should drive it
+from the possession of his mind.  The image in which he had fixed his
+recollection of its original served only to keep her living presence
+before him.  He thought of her as she clasped her arms around him,
+and they were swallowed up in the rushing waters, coming so near to
+passing into the unknown world together.  He thought of her as he
+stretched her lifeless form upon the bank, and looked for one brief
+moment on her unsunned loveliness,--"a sight to dream of, not to
+tell."  He thought of her as his last fleeting glimpse had shown her,
+beautiful, not with the blossomy prettiness that passes away with the
+spring sunshine, but with a rich vitality of which noble outlines and
+winning expression were only the natural accidents.  And that
+singular impression which the sight of him had produced upon her,
+--how strange!  How could she but have listened to him,--to him, who
+was, as it were, a second creator to her, for he had bought her back
+from the gates of the unseen realm,--if he had recalled to her the
+dread moments they had passed in each other's arms, with death, not
+love, in all their thoughts.  And if then he had told her how her
+image had remained with him, how it had colored all his visions, and
+mingled with all his conceptions, would not those dark eyes have
+melted as they were turned upon him?  Nay, how could he keep the
+thought away, that she would not have been insensible to his passion,
+if he could have suffered its flame to kindle in his heart?  Did it
+not seem as if Death had spared them for Love, and that Love should
+lead them together through life's long journey to the gates of Death?
+
+Never!  never!  never!  Their fates were fixed.  For him, poor insect
+as he was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his
+wingless mate!  For her--he thought he saw her doom.
+
+Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless
+egotist, who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining
+net all around her?  Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly.  He
+could not perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we
+must do for him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to
+describe analytically what we know as soon as we see it; but he felt
+in his inner consciousness all that we must tell for him.
+Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing, capable of winning a woman
+infinitely above himself, incapable of understanding her,--oh, if he
+could but touch him with the angel's spear, and bid him take his true
+shape before her whom he was gradually enveloping in the silken
+meshes of his subtle web!  He would make a place for her in the
+world,--oh yes, doubtless.  He would be proud of her in company,
+would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best lights.  But
+from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly
+established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly
+pattern.  He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her
+in their place his table of market-values.  He would teach her to
+submit her sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to
+the fashion of the moment, no matter which world or half-world it
+came from.  "As the husband is, the wife is,"--he would subdue her to
+what he worked in.
+
+All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the
+wife of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he
+did, from the few times he had seen him.  He would be rich by and by,
+very probably.  He looked like one of those young men who are sharp,
+and hard enough to come to fortune.  Then she would have to take her
+place in the great social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily
+opened that the animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of
+stereotyped toilets and the sound of impoverished tattle.  O misery
+of semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end
+to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of
+keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it
+at least from being utterly vapid!  How many fashionable women at the
+end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a
+relief from the desperate monotony of dressing, dawdling, and
+driving!
+
+This could not go on so forever.  Clement had placed a red curtain so
+as to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which
+his fancy turned to the semblance of life.  He would sit and look at
+the features his own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed
+as if the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as
+if they were ready to speak to him.  His companions began to whisper
+strange things of him in the studio,--that his eye was getting an
+unnatural light,--that he talked as if to imaginary listeners,--in
+short, that there was a look as if something were going wrong with
+his brain, which it might be feared would spoil his fine
+intelligence.  It was the undecided battle, and the enemy, as in his
+noblest moments he had considered the growing passion, was getting
+the better of him.
+
+He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which had smiled
+and whispered away his peace, when the post-man brought him a letter.
+It was from the simple girl to whom he had given his promise.  We
+know how she used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent
+feelings, and the trifling matters that were going on in her little
+village world.  But now she wrote in sadness.  Something, she did not
+too clearly explain what, had grieved her, and she gave free
+expression to her feelings.  "I have no one that loves me but you,"
+she said; "and if you leave me I must droop and die.  Are you true to
+me, dearest Clement,--true as when we promised each other that we
+would love while life lasted?  Or have you forgotten one who will
+never cease to remember that she was once your own Susan?"
+
+Clement dropped the letter from his hand, and sat a long hour looking
+at the exquisitely wrought features of her who had come between him
+and honor and his plighted word.
+
+At length he arose, and, lifting the bust tenderly from its pedestal,
+laid it upon the cloth with which it had been covered.  He wrapped it
+closely, fold upon fold, as the mother whom man condemns and God
+pities wraps the child she loves before she lifts her hand against
+its life.  Then he took a heavy hammer and shattered his lovely idol
+into shapeless fragments.  The strife was over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw was in pretty intimate relations with
+Miss Cynthia Badlam.  It was well understood between them that it
+might be of very great advantage to both of them if he should in due
+time become the accepted lover of Myrtle Hazard.  So long as he could
+be reasonably secure against interference, he did not wish to hurry
+her in making her decision.  Two things he did wish to be sure of, if
+possible, before asking her the great question;--first, that she
+would answer it in the affirmative; and secondly, that certain
+contingencies, the turning of which was not as yet absolutely capable
+of being predicted, should happen as he expected.  Cynthia had the
+power of furthering his wishes in many direct and indirect ways, and
+he felt sure of her cooperation.  She had some reason to fear his
+enmity if she displeased him, and he had taken good care to make her
+understand that her interests would be greatly promoted by the
+success of the plan which he had formed, and which was confided to
+her alone.
+
+He kept the most careful eye on every possible source of disturbance
+to this quietly maturing plan.  He had no objection to have Gifted
+Hopkins about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him.  The
+youthful bard entertained her very innocently with his bursts of
+poetry, but she was in no danger from a young person so intimately
+associated with the yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-
+paper parcel.  There was Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any
+very particular solicitude.  Myrtle had evidently found out that she
+was handsome and stylish and all that, and it was not very likely she
+would take up with such a bashful, humble, country youth as this.  He
+could expect nothing beyond a possible rectorate in the remote
+distance, with one of those little pony chapels to preach in, which,
+if it were set up on a stout pole, would pass for a good-sized
+martin-house.  Cyprian might do to practise on, but there was no
+danger of her looking at him in a serious way.  As for that youth,
+Clement Lindsay, if he had not taken himself off as he did, Murray
+Bradshaw confessed to himself that he should have felt uneasy.  He
+was too good-looking, and too clever a young fellow to have knocking
+about among fragile susceptibilities.  But on reflection he saw there
+could be no danger.
+
+"All up with him,--poor diavolo!  Can't understand it--such a little
+sixpenny miss--pretty enough boiled parsnip blonde, if one likes that
+sort of thing--pleases some of the old boys, apparently.  Look out,
+Mr. L. remember Susanna and the Elders.  Good!
+
+"Safe enough if something new doesn't turn up.  Youngish.  Sixteen's
+a little early.  Seventeen will do.  Marry a girl while she's in the
+gristle, and you can shape her bones for her.  Splendid creature
+without her trimmings.  Wants training.  Must learn to dance, and
+sing something besides psalm-tunes."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw began humming the hymn, "When I can read my title
+clear," adding some variations of his own.  "That 's the solo for my
+prima donna!"
+
+In the mean time Myrtle seemed to be showing some new developments.
+One would have said that the instincts of the coquette, or at least
+of the city belle, were coming uppermost in her nature.  Her little
+nervous attack passed away, and she gained strength and beauty every
+day.  She was becoming conscious of her gifts of fascination, and
+seemed to please herself with the homage of her rustic admirers.  Why
+was it that no one of them had the look and bearing of that young man
+she had seen but a moment the other evening?  To think that he should
+have taken up with such a weakling as Susan Posey!  She sighed, and
+not so much thought as felt how kind it would have been in Heaven to
+have made her such a man.  But the image of the delicate blonde stood
+between her and all serious thought of Clement Lindsay.  She saw the
+wedding in the distance, and very foolishly thought to herself that
+she could not and would not go to it.
+
+But Clement Lindsay was gone, and she must content herself with such
+worshippers as the village afforded.  Murray Bradshaw was surprised
+and confounded at the easy way in which she received his compliments,
+and played with his advances, after the fashion of the trained ball-
+room belles, who know how to be almost caressing in manner, and yet
+are really as far off from the deluded victim of their suavities as
+the topmost statue of the Milan cathedral from the peasant that
+kneels on its floor.  He admired her all the more for this, and yet
+he saw that she would be a harder prize to win than he had once
+thought.  If he made up his mind that he would have her, he must go
+armed with all implements, from the red hackle to the harpoon.
+
+The change which surprised Murray Bradshaw could not fail to be
+noticed by all those about her.  Miss Silence had long ago come to
+pantomime, rolling up of eyes, clasping of hands, making of sad
+mouths, and the rest,--but left her to her own way, as already the
+property of that great firm of World & Co. which drives such sharp
+bargains for young souls with the better angels.  Cynthia studied her
+for her own purposes, but had never gained her confidence.  The Irish
+servant saw that some change had come over her, and thought of the
+great ladies she had sometimes looked upon in the old country.  They
+all had a kind of superstitious feeling about Myrtle's bracelet, of
+which she had told them the story, but which Kitty half believed was
+put in the drawer by the fairies, who brought her ribbons and
+partridge feathers, and other slight adornments with which she
+contrived to set off her simple costume, so as to produce those
+effects which an eye for color and cunning fingers can bring out of
+almost nothing.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the
+two great attractions to which he was exposed.  Myrtle looked so
+immensely handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to
+meeting, for she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton
+was going to be the preacher, that the young poet was on the point of
+going down on his knees to her, and telling her that his heart was
+hers and hers alone.  But he suddenly remembered that he had on his
+best trousers, and the idea of carrying the marks of his devotion in
+the shape of two dusty impressions on his most valued article of
+apparel turned the scale against the demonstration.  It happened the
+next morning, that Susan Posey wore the most becoming ribbon she had
+displayed for a long time, and Gifted was so taken with her pretty
+looks that he might very probably have made the same speech to her
+that he had been on the point of making to Myrtle the day before, but
+that he remembered her plighted affections, and thought what he
+should have to say for himself when Clement Lindsay, in a frenzy of
+rage and jealousy, stood before him, probably armed with as many
+deadly instruments as a lawyer mentions by name in an indictment for
+murder.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth looked very differently on the new manifestations
+Myrtle was making of her tastes and inclinations.  He had always felt
+dazzled, as well as attracted, by her; but now there was something in
+her expression and manner which made him feel still more strongly
+that they were intended for different spheres of life.  He could not
+but own that she was born for a brilliant destiny,--that no ball-
+room would throw a light from its chandeliers too strong for her,
+--that no circle would be too brilliant for her to illuminate by her
+presence.  Love does not thrive without hope, and Cyprian was
+beginning to see that it was idle in him to think of folding these
+wide wings of Myrtle's so that they would be shut up in any cage he
+could ever offer her.  He began to doubt whether, after all, he might
+not find a meeker and humbler nature better adapted to his own.  And
+so it happened that one evening after the three girls, Olive, Myrtle,
+and Bathsheba, had been together at the Parsonage, and Cyprian,
+availing himself of a brother's privilege, had joined them, he found
+he had been talking most of the evening with the gentle girl whose
+voice had grown so soft and sweet, during her long ministry in the
+sick-chamber, that it seemed to him more like music than speech.  It
+would not be fair to say that Myrtle was piqued to see that Cyprian
+was devoting himself to Bathsheba.  Her ambition was already reaching
+beyond her little village circle, and she had an inward sense that
+Cyprian found a form of sympathy in the minister's simple-minded
+daughter which he could not ask from a young woman of her own
+aspirations.
+
+Such was the state of affairs when Master Byles Gridley was one
+morning surprised by an early call from Myrtle.  He had a volume of
+Walton's Polyglot open before him, and was reading Job in the
+original, when she entered.
+
+"Why, bless me, is that my young friend Miss Myrtle Hazard?" he
+exclaimed.  "I might call you Keren-Happuch, which is Hebrew for
+Child of Beauty, and not be very far out of the way, Job's youngest
+daughter, my dear.  And what brings my young friend out in such good
+season this morning?  Nothing going wrong up at our ancient mansion,
+The Poplars, I trust?"
+
+"I want to talk with you, dear Master Gridley," she answered.  She
+looked as if she did not know just how to begin.
+
+"Anything that interests you, Myrtle, interests me.  I think you have
+some project in that young head of yours, my child.  Let us have it,
+in all its dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness.  I think I can
+guess, Myrtle, that we have a little plan of some kind or other.
+We don't visit Papa Job quite so early as this without some special
+cause,--do we, Miss Keren-Happuch?"
+
+"I want to go to the city--to school," Myrtle said, with the
+directness which belonged to her nature.
+
+"That is precisely what I want you to do myself, Miss Myrtle Hazard.
+I don't like to lose you from the village, but I think we must spare
+you for a while."
+
+"You're the best and dearest man that ever lived.  What could have
+made you think of such a thing for me, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Because you are ignorant, my child,--partly I want to see you fitted
+to take a look at the world without feeling like a little country
+miss.  Has your aunt Silence promised to bear your expenses while you
+are in the city?  It will cost a good deal of money."
+
+"I have not said a word to her about it.  I am sure I don't know what
+she would say.  But I have some money, Mr. Gridley."
+
+She showed him a purse with gold, telling him how she came by it.
+"There is some silver besides.  Will it be enough?"
+
+"No, no, my child, we must not meddle with that.  Your aunt will let
+me put it in the bank for you, I think, where it will be safe.  But
+that shall not make any difference.  I have got a little money lying
+idle, which you may just as well have the use of as not.  You can pay
+it back perhaps some time or other; if you did not, it would not make
+much difference.  I am pretty much alone in the world, and except a
+book now and then--Aut liberos aut libros, as our valiant heretic has
+it,--you ought to know a little Latin, Myrtle, but never mind--I have
+not much occasion for money.  You shall go to the best school that
+any of our cities can offer, Myrtle, and you shall stay there until
+we agree that you are fitted to come back to us an ornament to Oxbow
+Village, and to larger places than this if you are called there.  We
+have had some talk about it, your aunt Silence and I, and it is all
+settled.  Your aunt does not feel very rich just now, or perhaps she
+would do more for you.  She has many pious and poor friends, and it
+keeps her funds low.  Never mind, my child, we will have it all
+arranged for you, and you shall begin the year 1860 in Madam
+Delacoste's institution for young ladies.  Too many rich girls and
+fashionable ones there, I fear, but you must see some of all kinds,
+and there are very good instructors in the school,--I know one,--he
+was a college boy with me,--and you will find pleasant and good
+companions there, so he tells me; only don't be in a hurry to choose
+your friends, for the least desirable young persons are very apt to
+cluster about a new-comer."
+
+Myrtle was bewildered with the suddenness of the prospect thus held
+out to her.  It is a wonder that she did not bestow an embrace upon
+the worthy old master.  Perhaps she had too much tact.  It is a
+pretty way enough of telling one that he belongs to a past
+generation, but it does tell him that not over-pleasing fact.  Like
+the title of Emeritus Professor, it is a tribute to be accepted,
+hardly to be longed for.
+
+When the curtain rises again, it will show Miss Hazard in a new
+character, and surrounded by a new world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD AT THE CITY SCHOOL.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw was obliged to leave town for a week or two on business
+connected with the great land-claim.  On his return, feeling in
+pretty good spirits, as the prospects looked favorable, he went to
+make a call at The Poplars.  He asked first for Miss Hazard.
+
+"Bliss your soul, Mr. Bridshaw," answered Mistress Kitty Fagan,
+"she's been gahn nigh a wake.  It's to the city, to the big school,
+they've sint her."
+
+This announcement seemed to make a deep impression on Murray
+Bradshaw, for his feelings found utterance in one of the most
+energetic forms of language to which ears polite or impolite are
+accustomed.  He next asked for Miss Silence, who soon presented
+herself.  Mr. Bradshaw asked, in a rather excited way, "Is it
+possible, Miss Withers, that your niece has quitted you to go to a
+city school?"
+
+Miss Silence answered, with her chief--mourner expression, and her
+death-chamber tone: "Yes, she has left us for a season.  I trust it
+may not be her destruction.  I had hoped in former years that she
+would become a missionary, but I have given up all expectation of
+that now.  Two whole years, from the age of four to that of six, I
+had prevailed upon her to give up sugar,--the money so saved to go to
+a graduate of our institution--who was afterwards----he labored among
+the cannibal-islanders.  I thought she seemed to take pleasure in
+this small act of self-denial, but I have since suspected that Kitty
+gave her secret lumps.  It was by Mr. Gridley's advice that she went,
+and by his pecuniary assistance.  What could I do?  She was bent on
+going, and I was afraid she would have fits, or do something
+dreadful, if I did not let her have her way.  I am afraid she will
+come back to us spoiled.  She has seemed so fond of dress lately, and
+once she spoke of learning--yes, Mr. Bradshaw, of learning to--dance!
+I wept when I heard of it.  Yes, I wept."
+
+That was such a tremendous thing to think of, and especially to speak
+of in Mr. Bradshaw's presence, for the most pathetic image in the
+world to many women is that of themselves in tears,--that it brought
+a return of the same overflow, which served as a substitute for
+conversation until Miss Badlam entered the apartment.
+
+Miss Cynthia followed the same general course of remark.  They could
+not help Myrtle's going if they tried.  She had always maintained
+that, if they had only once broke her will when she was little, they
+would have kept the upper hand of her; but her will never was broke.
+They came pretty near it once, but the child would n't give in.
+
+Miss Cynthia went to the door with Mr. Bradshaw, and the conversation
+immediately became short and informal.
+
+"Demonish pretty business!  All up for a year or more,--hey?"
+
+Don't blame me,--I couldn't stop her."
+
+"Give me her address,--I 'll write to her.  Any young men teach in
+the school?"
+
+Can't tell you.  She'll write to Olive and Bathsheba, and I'll find
+out all about it."
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place, containing many interesting remarks and
+inquiries, some of the latter relating to Madam Delacoste's
+institution for the education of young ladies.
+
+While this was going on at Oxbow Village, Myrtle was establishing
+herself at the rather fashionable school to which Mr. Gridley had
+recommended her.  Mrs. or Madam Delacoste's boarding-school had a
+name which on the whole it deserved pretty well.  She had some very
+good instructors for girls who wished to get up useful knowledge in
+case they might marry professors or ministers.  They had a chance to
+learn music, dancing, drawing, and the way of behaving in company.
+There was a chance, too, to pick up available acquaintances, for many
+rich people sent their daughters to the school, and it was something
+to have been bred in their company.
+
+There was the usual division of the scholars into a first and second
+set, according to the social position, mainly depending upon the
+fortune, of the families to which they belonged.  The wholesale
+dealer's daughter very naturally considered herself as belonging to a
+different order from the retail dealer's daughter.  The keeper of a
+great hotel and the editor of a widely circulated newspaper were
+considered as ranking with the wholesale dealers, and their daughters
+belonged also to the untitled nobility which has the dollar for its
+armorial bearing.  The second set had most of the good scholars, and
+some of the prettiest girls; but nobody knew anything about their
+families, who lived off the great streets and avenues, or vegetated
+in country towns.
+
+Myrtle Hazard's advent made something like a sensation.  They did not
+know exactly what to make of her.  Hazard?  Hazard?  No great firm of
+that name.  No leading hotel kept by any Hazard, was there?  No
+newspaper of note edited by anybody called Hazard, was there?  Came
+from where?  Oxbow Village.  Oh, rural district.  Yes. --Still they
+could not help owning that she was handsome, a concession which of
+course had to be made with reservations.
+
+"Don't you think she's vuiry good-lookin'?" said a Boston girl to a
+New York girl.  "I think she's real pooty."
+
+"I dew, indeed.  I didn't think she was haaf so handsome the feeest
+time I saw her," answered the New York girl.
+
+"What a pity she had n't been bawn in Bawston!"
+
+"Yes, and moved very young to Ne Yock!"
+
+"And married a sarsaparilla man, and lived in Fiff Avenoo, and moved
+in the fust society."
+
+"Better dew that than be strong-mainded, and dew your own cook'n, and
+live in your own kitch'n."
+
+"Don't forgit to send your card when you are Mrs. Old Dr. Jacob!"
+
+"Indeed I shaan't.  What's the name of the alley, and which bell?"
+The New York girl took out a memorandum-book as if to put it down.
+
+"Had n't you better let me write it for you, dear?" said the Boston
+girl.  "It is as well to have it legible, you know."
+
+"Take it," said the New York girl.  "There 's tew York shill'ns in it
+when I hand it to you."
+
+"Your whole quarter's allowance, I bullieve,--ain't it?" said the
+Boston girl.
+
+Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will
+be strictly attended to in this institution.  The most correct
+standards of pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example.
+It will be the special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils
+out of all provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-
+bred English scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity."
+--Extract from the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste's Boarding-school.
+
+Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls.  Striking, they all
+agreed, but then the criticisms began.  Many of the girls chattered a
+little broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had
+been half educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which
+are to social operators what his cutting instruments are to the
+surgeon.  Her face she allowed was handsome; but her style, according
+to this oracle, was a little bourgeoise, and her air not exactly
+comme il faut.  More specifically, she was guilty of contours
+fortement prononces,--corsage de paysanne,--quelque chose de sauvage,
+etc., etc.  This girl prided herself on her figure.
+
+Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demiParisian girl had
+christened her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of
+Myrtle's face, but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy
+girl's.
+
+The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the (Greeks and
+Trojans over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live
+freshman.  She was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as
+they could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of
+a queen, and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or
+two would make her a belle of the first water.  She had that air of
+indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is
+surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community.  On
+the other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play;
+and the modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not
+sell by the cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some
+hundreds of people, considered her as rather in sympathy with them
+than with the daughters of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who
+were grappling and rolling over each other in the golden dust of the
+great city markets.
+
+She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets.  She
+came with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to
+supply them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over
+the heads of the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists.
+She learned, therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced
+instructors.  Her somewhat rude sketching soon began to show
+something of the artist's touch.  Her voice, which had only been
+taught to warble the simplest melodies, after a little training began
+to show its force and sweetness and flexibility in the airs that
+enchant drawing-room audiences.  She caught with great readiness the
+manner of the easiest girls, unconsciously, for she inherited old
+social instincts which became nature with the briefest exercise.  Not
+much license of dress was allowed in the educational establishment of
+Madam Delacoste, but every girl had an opportunity to show her taste
+within the conventional limits prescribed.  And Myrtle soon began to
+challenge remark by a certain air she contrived to give her dresses,
+and the skill with which she blended their colors.
+
+"Tell you what, girls," said Miss Berengaria Topping, female
+representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous
+Planet Hotel, "she's got style, lots of it.  I call her perfectly
+splendid, when she's got up in her swell clothes.  That oriole's wing
+she wears in her bonnet makes her look gorgeous, she'll be a stunning
+Pocahontas for the next tableau."
+
+Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only
+merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from,
+thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken
+in hand in good season.  So it came about that, before many weeks had
+passed over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment,
+she might be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the
+whole bevy of them.  The studious ones admired her for her facility
+of learning, and her extraordinary appetite for every form of
+instruction, and the showy girls, who were only enduring school as
+the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of society,
+recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be like to
+make a sensation sooner or later.
+
+There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered
+themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who
+submitted her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.
+
+"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe."
+We keep nine, and a pony for Edgar."
+
+Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not
+keep any horses.  Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to
+form an acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-
+bonnet-maker) that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--
+they were letting in persons one knew nothing about.
+
+Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate
+used in the household from which Myrtle came.  Her father had just
+bought a complete silver service.  Myrtle had to own that they used a
+good deal of china at her own home,--old china, which had been a
+hundred years in the family, some of it.
+
+"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clare Browne.  "What queer-
+looking stuff it must be!  Why, everything in our house is just as
+new and bright!  Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for
+us.  Have you got any handsome pictures in your house?"
+
+"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said,
+"some of them older than the china."
+
+"How very very odd!  What do the dear old things look like?"
+
+"One was a great beauty in her time."
+
+"How jolly!"
+
+"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,
+--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."
+
+"How very very wicked!  It was n't nice a bit, was it?  Ain't you
+telling me stories?  Was that a hundred years ago? --But you 've got
+some new pictures and things, have n't you?  Who furnished your
+parlors?"
+
+"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense.  I don't believe it.  What color are your
+carriage-horses?"
+
+"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse
+but a cow."
+
+" Not keep any horses!  Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."
+
+Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with
+a pair of number two.  What she would have been tempted to do with
+it, if she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess.  After all, the
+questions amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss
+Clara Browne.  Of that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction
+there is no need of discoursing.  Her "papaa" commonly said sir in
+talking with a gentleman, and her "mammaa" would once in a while
+forget, and go down the area steps instead of entering at the proper
+door; but they lived behind a brown stone front, which veneers
+everybody's antecedents with a facing of respectability.
+
+Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss
+Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful common, and
+they were letting in very queer folks.
+
+Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
+thousand would have been so unprepared to meet.  She knew absolutely
+nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young
+persons were quite familiar.
+
+There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens
+and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and
+occasionally, perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let
+alone.  One of the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle
+one day.
+
+"Oh, is n't 'Pickwick' nice?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."
+
+The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature.  "Tasted any!
+Why, I mean the 'Pickwick Papers,' Dickens's story.  Don't you think
+they're nice."
+
+Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n't
+know anything about them.
+
+"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.
+
+"Oh, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the
+great trunk and its contents.  "I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and
+'Evelina,' and 'Tristram Shandy'" (naughty girl!), "and the 'Castle
+of Otranto,' and the ' Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of
+Wakefield,' and 'Don Quixote'--"
+
+The young lady burst out laughing.  "Stop! stop! for mercy's sake,"
+she cried.  "You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and
+come back to life again.  Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat!
+You ought to powder your hair and wear patches."
+
+"We've got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home.  "She
+has n't read any book that is n't a thousand years old.  One of the
+girls says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old
+stone, I believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago.  Her name,
+she says, is Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."
+
+Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled
+to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a
+few young gentlemen were admitted.  One of these took place about a
+month after Myrtle had joined the school.  The girls were all in
+their best, and by and by they were to have a tableau.  Myrtle came
+out in all her force.  She dressed herself as nearly as she dared
+like the handsome woman of the past generation whom she resembled.
+The very spirit of the dead beauty seemed to animate every feature
+and every movement of the young girl whose position in the school was
+assured from that moment.  She had a good solid foundation to build
+upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading girls of the
+style of pretensions illustrated by some of their talk which has been
+given.  There is no possible success without some opposition as a
+fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other,
+if it does not hit or trample on it.
+
+The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston
+Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called
+the great "swell" among the privileged young gentlemen who were
+present at the gathering.
+
+"Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara?  By
+Jove, she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being
+a first-class beauty.  Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara.
+If a girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like
+that, I know a good many who had better begin their nap without
+waiting.  If I were Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,--eh,
+Clara?"
+
+Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by
+the depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her
+own.  A little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost
+precisely the same sensation, produced in a very economical way by
+Mr. Livingston Jenkins's repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments
+to her, only with a change in the arrangement of the proper names.
+The two young ladies were left feeling comparatively comfortable with
+regard to each other, each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston
+Jenkins's remark about her friend to such of her other friends as
+enjoyed clever sayings, but not at all comfortable with reference to
+Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently considered by the leading "swell" of
+their circle as the most noticeable personage of the assembly.  The
+individual exception in each case did very well as a matter of
+politeness, but they knew well enough what he meant.
+
+It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet
+on her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth.  It was as if
+it had just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red
+blood and tingling all over with swift nerve-currents.  Life had
+never looked to her as it did that evening.  It was the swan's first
+breasting the water,--bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of
+lake and river, and strange longings as the mirage came and
+dissolved, and at length afloat upon the sparkling wave.  She felt as
+if she had for the first time found her destiny.  It was to please,
+and so to command, to rule with gentle sway in virtue of the royal
+gift of beauty,--to enchant with the commonest exercise of speech,
+through the rare quality of a voice which could not help being always
+gracious and winning, of a manner which came to her as an inheritance
+of which she had just found the title.  She read in the eyes of all
+that she was more than any other the centre of admiration.  Blame her
+who may, the world was a very splendid vision as it opened before her
+eyes in its long vista of pleasures and of triumphs.  How different
+the light of these bright saloons from the glimmer of the dim chamber
+at The Poplars!  Silence Withers was at that very moment looking at
+the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith Pride.  "The old picture
+seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she was thinking.  But
+when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to her that the
+picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile upon its
+lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered it.  A
+reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the
+martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that
+the beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company
+with which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing
+herself with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her
+news from the Satanic province overhead, where she herself had so
+long indulged in the profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.
+
+The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux.
+The girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look "stunning" or
+"gorgeous" or "jolly," or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas,
+was not far out of the way, and it was so evident to the managing
+heads that she would make a fine appearance in that character, that
+the "Rescue of Captain John Smith" was specially got up to show her
+off.
+
+Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of
+Indian blood in her veins.  It was one of those family legends which
+some of the members are a little proud of, and others are willing to
+leave uninvestigated.  But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she
+felt perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals,
+and she had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague
+recollections which must have come from the old warriors and hunters
+and their dusky brides.  The Indians who visited the neighborhood
+recognized something of their own race in her dark eyes, as the
+reader may remember they told the persons who were searching after
+her.  It had almost frightened her sometimes to find how like a wild
+creature she felt when alone in the woods.  Her senses had much of
+that delicacy for which the red people are noted, and she often
+thought she could follow the trail of an enemy, if she wished to
+track one through the forest, as unerringly as if she were a Pequot
+or a Mohegan.
+
+It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle, as they dressed her
+for the part she was to take.  Had she never worn that painted robe
+before?  Was it the first time that these strings of wampum had ever
+rattled upon her neck and arms?  And could it be that the plume of
+eagle's feathers with which they crowned her dark, fast-lengthening
+locks had never shadowed her forehead until now?  She felt herself
+carried back into the dim ages when the wilderness was yet untrodden
+save by the feet of its native lords.  Think of her wild fancy as we
+may, she felt as if that dusky woman of her midnight vision on the
+river were breathing for one hour through her lips.  If this belief
+had lasted, it is plain enough where it would have carried her.  But
+it came into her imagination and vivifying consciousness with the
+putting on of her unwonted costume, and might well leave her when she
+put it off.  It is not for us, who tell only what happened, to solve
+these mysteries of the seeming admission of unhoused souls into the
+fleshly tenements belonging to air-breathing personalities.  A very
+little more, and from that evening forward the question would have
+been treated in full in all the works on medical jurisprudence
+published throughout the limits of Christendom.  The story must be
+told or we should not be honest with the reader.
+
+TABLEAU 1.  Captain John Smith (Miss Euphrosyne de Lacy) was to be
+represented prostrate and bound, ready for execution; Powhatan (Miss
+Florence Smythe) sitting upon a log; savages with clubs (Misses Clara
+Browne, A. Van Boodle, E. Van Boodle, Heister, Booster, etc., etc.)
+standing around; Pocahontas holding the knife in her hand, ready to
+cut the cords with which Captain John Smith is bound. --Curtain.
+
+TABLEAU 2.  Captain John Smith released and kneeling before
+Pocahontas, whose hand is extended in the act of raising him and
+presenting him to her father.  Savages in various attitudes of
+surprise.  Clubs fallen from their hands.  Strontian flame to be
+kindled. --Curtain.
+
+This was a portion of the programme for the evening, as arranged
+behind the scenes.  The first part went off with wonderful eclat, and
+at its close there were loud cries for Pocahontas.  She appeared for
+a moment.  Bouquets were flung to her; and a wreath, which one of the
+young ladies had expected for herself in another part, was tossed
+upon the stage, and laid at her feet.  The curtain fell.
+
+"Put the wreath on her for the next tableau," some of them whispered,
+just as the curtain was going to rise, and one of the girls hastened
+to place it upon her head.
+
+The disappointed young lady could not endure it, and, in a spasm of
+jealous passion, sprang at Myrtle, snatched it from her head, and
+trampled it under her feet at the very instant the curtain was
+rising.  With a cry which some said had the blood-chilling tone of an
+Indian's battle-shriek, Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her
+arm against the girl who had thus rudely assailed her.  The girl sank
+to the ground, covering her eyes in her terror.  Myrtle, with her arm
+still lifted, and the blade glistening in her hand, stood over her,
+rigid as if she had been suddenly changed to stone.  Many of those
+looking on thought all this was a part of the show, and were thrilled
+with the wonderful acting.  Before those immediately around her had
+had time to recover from the palsy of their fright Myrtle had flung
+the knife away from her, and was kneeling, her head bowed and her
+hands crossed upon her breast.  The audience went into a rapture of
+applause as the curtain came suddenly down; but Myrtle had forgotten
+all but the dread peril she had just passed, and was thanking God
+that his angel--her own protecting spirit, as it seemed to her had
+stayed the arm which a passion such as her nature had never known,
+such as she believed was alien to her truest self, had lifted with
+deadliest purpose.  She alone knew how extreme the danger had been.
+"She meant to scare her,--that 's all," they said.  But Myrtle tore
+the eagle's feathers from her hair, and stripped off her colored
+beads, and threw off her painted robe.  The metempsychosis was far
+too real for her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from
+whom, as she believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of
+which her soul recoiled in horror.
+
+"Pocahontas has got a horrid headache," the managing young ladies
+gave it out, "and can't come to time for the last tableau."  So this
+all passed over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with
+no small addition to her local fame,--for it must have been acting;
+"and was n't it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if
+she was going to stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?"
+
+As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with
+new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact
+with those who were least agreeable to meet.  The low-bred youth who
+amuse themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls
+who try to show off their gentility to those whom they think less
+important than themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but
+they make themselves odiously prominent before the quiet and modest
+young people have had time to gain the new scholar's confidence.
+Myrtle found friends in due time, some of them daughters of rich
+people, some poor girls, who came with the same sincerity of purpose
+as herself.  But not one was her match in the facility of acquiring
+knowledge.  Not one promised to make such a mark in society, if she
+found an opening into its loftier circles.  She was by no means
+ignorant of her natural gifts, and she cultivated them with the
+ambition which would not let her rest.
+
+During her stay at the great school, she made but one visit to Oxbow
+Village.  She did not try to startle the good people with her
+accomplishments, but they were surprised at the change which had
+taken place in her.  Her dress was hardly more showy, for she was but
+a school-girl, but it fitted her more gracefully.  She had gained a
+softness of expression, and an ease in conversation, which produced
+their effect on all with whom she came in contact.  Her aunt's voice
+lost something of its plaintiveness in talking with her.  Miss
+Cynthia listened with involuntary interest to her stories of school
+and school-mates.  Master Byles Gridley accepted her as the great
+success of his life, and determined to make her his chief heiress, if
+there was any occasion for so doing.  Cyprian told Bathsheba that
+Myrtle must come to be a great lady.  Gifted Hopkins confessed to
+Susan Posey that he was afraid of her, since she had been to the
+great city school.  She knew too much and looked too much like a
+queen, for a village boy to talk with.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw tried all his fascinations upon her, but
+she parried compliments so well, and put off all his nearer advances
+so dexterously, that he could not advance beyond the region of florid
+courtesy, and never got a chance, if so disposed, to risk a question
+which he would not ask rashly, believing that, if Myrtle once said
+No, there would be little chance of her ever saying Yes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+MUSTERING OF FORCES.
+
+Not long after the tableau performance had made Myrtle Hazard's name
+famous in the school and among the friends of the scholars, she
+received the very flattering attention of a call from Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.  This was in consequence of a suggestion
+from Mr. Livingston Jenkins, a particular friend of the family.
+
+"They've got a demonish splendid school-girl over there," he said to
+that lady, "made the stunningest looking Pocahontas at the show there
+the other day.  Demonish plucky looking filly as ever you saw. Had a
+row with another girl,--gave the war-whoop, and went at her with a
+knife.  Festive,--hey?  Say she only meant to scare her,--looked as
+if she meant to stick her, anyhow.  Splendid style.  Why can't you go
+over to the shop and make 'em trot her out?"
+
+The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would,
+just as soon as she could find a moment's leisure,--which, as she had
+nothing in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon.  Myrtle
+in the mean time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an
+extraordinary honor was awaiting her.
+
+That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a
+leisure morning, did at last occur.  An elegant carriage, with a
+coachman in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and
+wearing a hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal
+of Madam Delacoste's establishment.  A card was sent in bearing the.
+open sesame of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place.
+Miss Myrtle Hazard was summoned as a matter of course, and the
+fashionable woman and the young girl sat half an hour together in
+lively conversation.
+
+Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner
+which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply
+unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion.  Then it was so
+delightful to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,--one who was as
+artistically composed as a poem or an opera,--in whose costume a kind
+of various rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray
+that nodded on her bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her
+sandal.  As for the lady, she was captivated with Myrtle.  There is
+nothing that your fashionable woman, who has ground and polished her
+own spark of life into as many and as glittering social facets as it
+will bear, has a greater passion for than a large rough diamond,
+which knows nothing of the sea of light it imprisons, and which it
+will be her pride to have cut into a brilliant under her own eye, and
+to show the world for its admiration and her own reflected glory.
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire inventory of Myrtle's
+natural endowments before the interview was over.  She had no
+marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing bait
+Myrtle would be at one of her stylish parties.
+
+She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which
+explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,--all
+which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she had found out a good
+part of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.
+
+"I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school," he
+wrote.  "There is a young girl there I take an interest in.  She is
+handsome and interesting; and--though it is a shame to mention such a
+thing has possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued.
+Why can't you make her acquaintance and be civil to her?  A country
+girl, but fine old stock, and will make a figure some time or other,
+I tell you.  Myrtle Hazard,--that's her name.  A mere schoolgirl.
+Don't be malicious and badger me about her, but be polite to her.
+Some of these country girls have got 'blue blood' in them, let me
+tell you, and show it plain enough."
+
+("In huckleberry season!") said Mrs. Ciymer Ketchum, in a
+parenthesis,--and went on reading.
+
+"Don't think I'm one of your love-in-a-cottage sort, to have my head
+turned by a village beauty.  I've got a career before me, Mrs. K.,
+and I know it.  But this is one of my pets, and I want you to keep an
+eye on her.  Perhaps when she leaves school you wouldn't mind asking
+her to come and stay with you a little while.  Possibly I may come
+and see how she is getting on if you do,--won't that tempt you, Mrs.
+C. K.?"
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum wrote back to her relative how she had already
+made the young lady's acquaintance.
+
+"Livingston Jerkins (you remember him) picked her out of the whole
+lot of girls as the 'prettiest filly in the stable.'  That's his
+horrid way of talking.  But your young milkmaid is really charming,
+and will come into form like a Derby three-year-old.  There, now,
+I've caught that odious creature's horse-talk, myself.  You're dead
+in love with this girl, Murray, you know you are.
+
+"After all, I don't know but you're right.  You would make a good
+country lawyer enough, I don't doubt.  I used to think you had your
+ambitions, but never mind.  If you choose to risk yourself on
+'possibilities,' it is not my affair, and she's a beauty, there's no
+mistake about that.
+
+"There are some desirable partis at the school with your dulcinea.
+There 's Rose Bugbee.  That last name is a good one to be married
+from.  Rose is a nice girl,--there are only two of them.  The estate
+will cut up like one of the animals it was made out of, you know,--
+the sandwich-quadruped.  Then there 's Berengaria.  Old Topping owns
+the Planet Hotel among other things,--so big, they say, there's
+always a bell ringing from somebody's room day and night the year
+round.  Only child--unit and six ciphers carries diamonds loose in
+her pocket--that's the story--good-looking--lively--a little slangy
+called Livingston Jerkins 'Living Jingo' to his face one day.  I want
+you to see my lot before you do anything serious.  You owe something
+to the family, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw!  But you must suit
+yourself, after all: if you are contented with a humble position in
+life, it is nobody's business that I know of.  Only I know what life
+is, Murray B.  Getting married is jumping overboard, any way you look
+at it, and if you must save some woman from drowning an old maid, try
+to find one with a cork jacket, or she 'll carry you down with her."
+
+Murray Bradshaw was calculating enough, but he shook his head over
+this letter.  It was too demonish cold-blooded for him, he said to
+himself.  (Men cannot pardon women for saying aloud what they do not
+hesitate to think in silence themselves.)  Never mind,--he must have
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's house and influence for his own purposes.
+Myrtle Hazard must become her guest, and then if circumstances were
+favorable, he was certain obtaining her aid in his project.
+
+The opportunity to invite Myrtle to the great mansion presented
+itself unexpectedly.  Early in the spring of 1861 there were some
+cases of sickness in Madam Delacoste's establishment, which led to
+closing the school for a while.  Mrs. Clymer Ketchum took advantage
+of the dispersion of the scholars to ask Myrtle to come and spend
+some weeks with her.  There were reasons why this was more agreeable
+to the young girl than returning to Oxbow Village, and she very
+gladly accepted the invitation.
+
+It was very remarkable that a man living as Master Byles Gridley had
+lived for so long a time should all at once display such liberality
+as he showed to a young woman who had no claim upon him, except that
+he had rescued her from the consequences of her own imprudence and
+warned her against impending dangers.  Perhaps he cared more for her
+than if the obligation had been the other way,--students of human
+nature say it is commonly so.  At any rate, either he had ampler
+resources than it was commonly supposed, or he was imprudently giving
+way to his generous impulses, or he thought he was making advances
+which would in due time be returned to him.  Whatever the reason was,
+he furnished her with means, not only for her necessary expenses, but
+sufficient to afford her many of the elegances which she would be
+like to want in the fashionable society with which she was for a
+short time to mingle.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was so well pleased with the young lady she was
+entertaining, that she thought it worth while to give a party while
+Myrtle was staying with her.  She had her jealousies and rivalries,
+as women of the world will, sometimes, and these may have had their
+share in leading her to take the trouble a large party involved.  She
+was tired of the airs of Mrs. Pinnikle, who was of the great Apex
+family, and her terribly accomplished daughter Rhadamartha, and
+wanted to crush the young lady, and jaundice her mother, with a girl
+twice as brilliant and ten times handsomer.  She was very willing,
+also, to take the nonsense out of the Capsheaf girls, who thought
+themselves the most stylish personages of their city world, and would
+bite their lips well to see themselves distanced by a country miss.
+
+In the mean time circumstances were promising to bring into Myrtle's
+neighborhood several of her old friends and admirers.  Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum had written to Murray Bradshaw that she had asked his pretty
+milkmaid to come and stay awhile with her, but he had been away on
+business, and only arrived in the city a day or two before the party.
+But other young fellows had found out the attractions of the girl who
+was "hanging out at the Clymer Ketchum concern," and callers were
+plenty, reducing tete-a-tetes in a corresponding ratio.  He did get
+one opportunity, however, and used it well.  They had so many things
+to talk about in common, that she could not help finding him good
+company.  She might well be pleased, for he was an adept in the
+curious art of being agreeable, as other people are in chess or
+billiards, and had made a special study of her tastes, as a physician
+studies a patient's constitution.  What he wanted was to get her
+thoroughly interested in himself, and to maintain her in a receptive
+condition until such time as he should be ready for a final move.
+Any day might furnish the decisive motive; in the mean time he wished
+only to hold her as against all others.
+
+It was well for her, perhaps, that others had flattered her into a
+certain consciousness of her own value.  She felt her veins full of
+the same rich blood as that which had flushed the cheeks of handsome
+Judith in the long summer of her triumph.  Whether it was vanity, or
+pride, or only the instinctive sense of inherited force and
+attraction, it was the best of defences.  The golden bracelet on her
+wrist seemed to have brought as much protection with it as if it had
+been a shield over her heart.
+
+
+But far away in Oxbow Village other events were in preparation.  The
+"fugitive pieces" of Mr. Gifted Hopkins had now reached a number so
+considerable, that, if collected and printed in large type, with
+plenty of what the unpleasant printers call "fat,"--meaning thereby
+blank spaces,--upon a good, substantial, not to say thick paper, they
+might perhaps make a volume which would have substance enough to bear
+the title, printed lengthwise along the back, "Hopkins's Poems."
+Such a volume that author had in contemplation.  It was to be the
+literary event of the year 1861.
+
+He could not mature such a project, one which he had been for some
+time contemplating, without consulting Mr. Byles Gridley, who, though
+he had not unfrequently repressed the young poet's too ardent
+ambition, had yet always been kind and helpful.
+
+Mr. Gridley was seated in his large arm-chair, indulging himself in
+the perusal of a page or two of his own work before repeatedly
+referred to.  His eye was glistening, for it had dust rested on the
+following passage:
+
+"There is infinite pathos in unsuccessful authorship.  The book that
+perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature.  The great asylum of
+Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in
+leaky garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves."
+
+He shut the book, for the page grew a little dim as he finished this
+elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt
+its truth than when it was written,--than on that memorable morning
+when he saw the advertisement in all the papers, "This day published,
+'Thoughts on the Universe.' By Byles Gridley, A. M."
+
+At that moment he heard a knock at his door.  He closed his eyelids
+forcibly for ten seconds, opened them, and said cheerfully,
+"Come in!"
+
+Gifted Hopkins entered.  He had a collection of manuscripts in his
+hands which it seemed to him would fill a vast number of pages.  He
+did not know that manuscript is to type what fresh dandelions are to
+the dish of greens that comes to table, of which last Nurse Byloe,
+who considered them very wholesome spring grazing for her patients,
+used to say that they "biled down dreadful."
+
+"I have brought the autographs of my poems, Master Gridley, to
+consult you about making arrangements for publication.  They have
+been so well received by the public and the leading critics of this
+part of the State, that I think of having them printed in a volume.
+I am going to the city for that purpose.  My mother has given her
+consent.  I wish to ask you several business questions.  Shall I part
+with the copyright for a downright sum of money, which I understand
+some prefer doing, or publish on shares, or take a percentage on the
+sales?  These, I believe, are the different ways taken by authors."
+
+Mr. Gridley was altogether too considerate to reply with the words
+which would most naturally have come to his lips.  He waited as if he
+were gravely pondering the important questions just put to him, all
+the while looking at Gifted with a tenderness which no one who had
+not buried one of his soul's children could have felt for a young
+author trying to get clothing for his new-born intellectual
+offspring.
+
+"I think," he said presently, "you had better talk with an
+intelligent and liberal publisher, and be guided by his advice.  I
+can put you in correspondence with such a person, and you had better
+trust him than me a great deal.  Why don't you send your manuscript
+by mail?"
+
+"What, Mr. Gridley?  Trust my poems, some of which are unpublished,
+to the post-office?  No, sir, I could never make up my mind to such a
+risk.  I mean to go to the city myself, and read them to some of the
+leading publishers.  I don't want to pledge myself to any one of
+them.  I should like to set them bidding against each other for the
+copyright, if I sell it at all."
+
+Mr. Gridley gazed upon the innocent youth with a sweet wonder in his
+eyes that made him look like an angel, a little damaged in the
+features by time, but full of celestial feelings.
+
+"It will cost you something to make this trip, Gifted.  Have you the
+means to pay for your journey and your stay at a city hotel?"
+
+Gifted blushed.  "My mother has laid by a small sum for me," he said.
+"She knows some of my poems by heart, and she wants to see them all
+in print."
+
+Master Gridley closed his eyes very firmly again, as if thinking, and
+opened them as soon as the foolish film had left them.  He had read
+many a page of "Thoughts on the Universe" to his own old mother,
+long, long years ago, and she had often listened with tears of modest
+pride that Heaven had favored her with a son so full of genius.
+
+"I 'll tell you what, Gifted," he said.  "I have been thinking for a
+good while that I would make a visit to the city, and if you have
+made up your mind to try what you can do with the publishers, I will
+take you with me as a companion.  It will be a saving to you and your
+good mother, for I shall bear the expenses of the expedition."
+
+Gifted Hopkins came very near going down on his knees.  He was so
+overcome with gratitude that it seemed as if his very coattails
+wagged with his emotion.
+
+"Take it quietly," said Master Gridley.  "Don't make a fool of
+yourself.  Tell your mother to have some clean shirts and things
+ready for you, and we will be off day after to-morrow morning."
+
+Gifted hastened to impart the joyful news to his mother, and to break
+the fact to Susan Posey that he was about to leave them for a while,
+and rush into the deliriums and dangers of the great city.
+
+Susan smiled.  Gifted hardly knew whether to be pleased with her
+sympathy, or vexed that she did not take his leaving more to heart.
+The smile held out bravely for about a quarter of a minute.  Then
+there came on a little twitching at the corners of the mouth.  Then.
+the blue eyes began to shine with a kind of veiled glimmer.  Then the
+blood came up into her cheeks with a great rush, as if the heart had
+sent up a herald with a red flag from the citadel to know what was
+going on at the outworks.  The message that went back was of
+discomfiture and capitulation.  Poor Susan was overcome, and gave
+herself up to weeping and sobbing.
+
+The sight was too much for the young poet.  In a wild burst of
+passion he seized her hand, and pressed it to his lips, exclaiming,
+"Would that you could be mine forever!" and Susan forgot all that she
+ought to have remembered, and, looking half reproachfully but half
+tenderly through her tears, said, in tones of infinite sweetness, "O
+Gifted!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+THE POET AND THE PUBLISHER.
+
+It was settled that Master Byles Gridley and Mr. Gifted Hopkins
+should leave early in the morning of the day appointed, to take the
+nearest train to the city.  Mrs. Hopkins labored hard to get them
+ready, so that they might make a genteel appearance among the great
+people whom they would meet in society.  She brushed up Mr. Gridley's
+best black suit, and bound the cuffs of his dress-coat, which were
+getting a little worried.  She held his honest-looking hat to the
+fire, and smoothed it while it was warm, until one would have thought
+it had just been ironed by the hatter himself.  She had his boots and
+shoes brought into a more brilliant condition than they had ever
+known: if Gifted helped, it was to his credit as much as if he had
+shown his gratitude by polishing off a copy of verses in praise of
+his benefactor.
+
+When she had got Mr. Gridley's encumbrances in readiness for the
+journey, she devoted herself to fitting out her son Gifted.  First,
+she had down from the garret a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but
+covered with leather, and adorned with brass-headed nails, by the
+cunning disposition of which, also, the paternal initials stood out
+on the rounded lid, in the most conspicuous manner.  It was his
+father's trunk, and the first thing that went into it, as the widow
+lifted the cover, and the smothering shut-up smell struck an old
+chord of associations, was a single tear-drop.  How well she
+remembered the time when she first unpacked it for her young husband,
+and the white shirt bosoms showed their snowy plaits!  O dear, dear!
+
+But women decant their affection, sweet and sound, out of the old
+bottles into the new ones,--off from the lees of the past generation,
+clear and bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive
+it.  Gifted Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder.  She had
+not only the common attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring,
+but she felt that her race was to be rendered illustrious by his
+genius, and thought proudly of the time when some future biographer
+would mention her own humble name, to be held in lasting remembrance
+as that of the mother of Hopkins.
+
+So she took great pains to equip this brilliant but inexperienced
+young man with everything he could by any possibility need during his
+absence.  The great trunk filled itself until it bulged with its
+contents like a boa-constrictor who has swallowed his blanket.  Best
+clothes and common clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes, flannels
+and linens, socks and collars, with handkerchiefs enough to keep the
+pickpockets busy for a week, with a paper of gingerbread and some
+lozenges for gastralgia, and "hot drops," and ruled paper to write
+letters on, and a little Bible, and a phial with hiera picra, and
+another with paregoric, and another with "camphire" for sprains and
+bruises,
+
+--Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the
+pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster.  He carried
+also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large
+pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution,
+pinned into his breast-pocket.  He talked about having a pistol, in
+case he were attacked by any of the ruffians who are so numerous in
+the city, but Mr. Gridley told him, No! he would certainly shoot
+himself, and he shouldn't think of letting him take a pistol.
+
+They went forth, Mentor and Telemachus, at the appointed time, to
+dare the perils of the railroad and the snares of the city.  Mrs.
+Hopkins was firm up to near the last moment, when a little quiver in
+her voice set her eyes off, and her face broke up all at once, so
+that she had to hide it behind her handkerchief.  Susan Posey showed
+the truthfulness of her character in her words to Gifted at parting.
+"Farewell," she said, "and think of me sometimes while absent.  My
+heart is another's, but my friendship, Gifted--my friendship--"
+
+Both were deeply affected.  He took her hand and would have raised it
+to his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it,
+exclaiming, "O Gifted!" this time with a tone of tender reproach
+which made him feel like a profligate.  He tore himself away, and
+when at a safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with a
+tearful smile.
+
+Master Byles Gridley must have had some good dividends from some of
+his property of late.  There is no other way of accounting for the
+handsome style in which he did things on their arrival in the city.
+He went to a tailor's and ordered a new suit to be sent home as soon
+as possible, for he knew his wardrobe was a little rusty.  He looked
+Gifted over from head to foot, and suggested such improvements as
+would recommend him to the fastidious eyes of the selecter sort of
+people, and put him in his own tailor's hands, at the same time
+saying that all bills were to be sent to him, B. Gridley, Esq.,
+parlor No. 6, at the Planet Hotel.  Thus it came to pass that in
+three days from their arrival they were both in an eminently
+presentable condition.  In the mean time the prudent Mr. Gridley had
+been keeping the young man busy, and amusing himself by showing him
+such of the sights of the city and its suburbs as he thought would
+combine instruction with entertainment.
+
+When they were both properly equipped and ready for the best company,
+Mr. Gridley said to the young poet, who had found it very hard to
+contain his impatience, that they would now call together on the
+publisher to whom he wished to introduce him, and they set out
+accordingly.
+
+"My name is Gridley," he said with modest gravity, as he entered the
+publisher's private room.  "I have a note of introduction here from
+one of your authors, as I think he called himself, a very popular
+writer for whom you publish."
+
+The publisher rose and came forward in the most cordial and
+respectful manner.  "Mr. Gridley?  Professor Byles Gridley,--author
+of "Thoughts on the Universe'?"
+
+The brave-hearted old man colored as if he had been a young girl.
+His dead book rose before him like an apparition.  He groped in
+modest confusion for an answer.  "A child I buried long ago, my dear
+sir," he said.  "Its title-page was its tombstone.  I have brought
+this young friend with me,--this is Mr. Gifted Hopkins of Oxbow
+Village,--who wishes to converse with you about--"
+
+"I have come, sir--" the young poet began, interrupting him.
+
+"Let me look at your manuscript, if you please,
+
+Mr. Popkins," said the publisher, interrupting in his turn.
+
+"Hopkins, if you please, sir," Gifted suggested mildly, proceeding to
+extract the manuscript, which had got wedged into his pocket, and
+seemed to be holding on with all its might.  He was wondering all the
+time over the extraordinary clairvoyance of the publisher, who had
+looked through so many thick folds, broadcloth, lining, brown paper,
+and seen his poems lying hidden in his breast-pocket.  The idea that
+a young person coming on such an errand should have to explain his
+intentions would have seemed very odd to the publisher.  He knew the
+look which belongs to this class of enthusiasts just as a horse-
+dealer knows the look of a green purchaser with the equine fever
+raging in his veins.  If a young author had come to him with a scrap
+of manuscript hidden in his boots, like Major Andre's papers, the
+publisher would have taken one glance at him and said, "Out with it!"
+
+While he was battling for the refractory scroll with his pocket,
+which turned half wrong side out, and acted as things always do when
+people are nervous and in a hurry, the publisher directed his
+conversation again to Master Byles Gridley.
+
+"A remarkable book, that of yours, Mr. Gridley, would have a great
+run if it were well handled.  Came out twenty years too soon,--that
+was the trouble.  One of our leading scholars was speaking of it to
+me the other day.  'We must have a new edition,' he said; people are
+just ripe for that book.'  Did you ever think of that?  Change the
+form of it a little, and give it a new title, and it will be a
+popular book.  Five thousand or more, very likely."
+
+Mr. Gridley felt as if he had been rapidly struck on the forehead
+with a dozen distinct blows from a hammer not quite big enough to
+stun him.  He sat still without saying a word.  He had forgotten for
+the moment all about poor Gifted Hopkins, who had got out his
+manuscript at last, and was calming the disturbed corners of it.
+Coming to himself a little, he took a large and beautiful silk
+handkerchief, one of his new purchases, from his pocket, and applied
+it to his face, for the weather seemed to have grown very warm all at
+once.  Then he remembered the errand on which he had come, and
+thought of this youth, who had got to receive his first hard lesson
+in life, and whom he had brought to this kind man that it should be
+gently administered.
+
+"You surprise me," he said,--"you surprise me.  Dead and buried.
+Dead and buried.  I had sometimes thought that--at some future
+period, after I was gone, it might--but I hardly know what to say
+about your suggestions.  But here is my young friend, Mr. Hopkins,
+who would like to talk with you, and I will leave him in your hands.
+I am at the Planet Hotel, if you should care to call upon me.  Good
+morning.  Mr. Hopkins will explain everything to you more at his
+ease, without me, I am confident."
+
+Master Gridley could not quite make up his mind to stay through the
+interview between the young poet and the publisher.  The flush of
+hope was bright in Gifted's eye and cheek, and the good man knew that
+young hearts are apt to be over-sanguine, and that one who enters a
+shower-bath often feels very differently from the same person when he
+has pulled the string.
+
+"I have brought you my Poems in the original autographs, sir," said
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins.
+
+He laid the manuscript on the table, caressing the leaves still with
+one hand, as loath to let it go.
+
+"What disposition had you thought of making of them?" the publisher
+asked, in a pleasant tone.  He was as kind a man as lived, though he
+worked the chief engine in a chamber of torture.
+
+"I wish to read you a few specimens of the poems," he said, "with
+reference to their proposed publication in a volume."
+
+"By all means," said the kind publisher, who determined to be very
+patient with the protege of the hitherto little-known, but remarkable
+writer, Professor Gridley.  At the same time he extended his foot in
+an accidental sort of way, and pressed it on the right hand knob of
+three which were arranged in a line beneath the table.  A little bell
+in a distant apartment--the little bell marked C--gave one slight
+note; loud enough to start a small boy up, who looked at the clock,
+and knew that he was to go and call the publisher in just twenty-five
+minutes.  "A, five minutes; B, ten minutes; C, twenty-five minutes
+";--that was the youngster's working formula.  Mr. Hopkins was
+treated to the full allowance of time, as being introduced by
+Professor Gridley.
+
+The young man laid open the manuscript so that the title-page,
+written out very handsomely in his own hand, should win the eye of
+the publisher.
+
+
+               BLOSSOMS OF THE SOUL.
+           A WREATH OF VERSE; Original.
+
+               BY GIFTED HOPKINS.
+
+"a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown." --Gray.
+
+"Shall I read you some of the rhymed pieces first, or some of the
+blank-verse poems, sir?" Gifted asked.
+
+"Read what you think is best,--a specimen of your first-class style
+of composition."
+
+"I will read you the very last poem I have written," he said, and he
+began:
+
+     "THE TRIUMPH OF SONG.
+
+I met that gold-haired maiden, all too dear;
+And I to her: Lo!  thou art very fair,
+Fairer than all the ladies in the world
+That fan the sweetened air with scented fans,
+And I am scorched with exceeding love,
+Yea, crisped till my bones are dry as straw.
+Look not away with that high-arched brow,
+But turn its whiteness that I may behold,
+And lift thy great eyes till they blaze on mine,
+And lay thy finger on thy perfect mouth,
+And let thy lucent ears of careen pearl
+Drink in the murmured music of my soul,
+As the lush grass drinks in the globed dew;
+For I have many scrolls of sweetest rhyme
+I will unroll and make thee glad to hear.
+
+     "Then she: O shaper of the marvellous phrase
+That openeth woman's heart as Both a key,
+I dare not hear thee--lest the bolt should slide
+That locks another's heart within my own.
+Go, leave me,--and she let her eyelids fall,
+And the great tears rolled from her large blue eyes.
+
+     "Then I: If thou not hear me, I shall die,
+Yea, in my desperate mood may lift my hand
+And do myself a hurt no leach can mend;
+For poets ever were of dark resolve,
+And swift stern deed
+
+                    That maiden heard no more,
+But spike: Alas! my heart is very weak,
+And but for--Stay!  And if some dreadful morn,
+After great search and shouting thorough the wold,
+We found thee missing,--strangled,--drowned i' the mere,
+Then should I go distraught and be clean mad!
+
+O poet, read!  read all thy wondrous scrolls.
+Yea, read the verse that maketh glad to hear!
+Then I began and read two sweet, brief hours,
+And she forgot all love save only mine!"
+
+"Is all this from real life?" asked the publisher.
+
+"It--no, sir--not exactly from real life--that is, the leading female
+person is not wholly fictitious--and the incident is one which might
+have happened.  Shall I read you the poems referred to in the one you
+have just heard, sir?"
+
+"Allow me, one moment.  Two hours' reading, I think, you said.  I
+fear I shall hardly be able to spare quite time to hear them a11.
+Let me ask what you intend doing with these productions, Mr.--- rr
+Poplins."
+
+"Hopkins, if you please, sir, not Poplins," said Gifted, plaintively.
+He expressed his willingness to dispose of the copyright, to publish
+on shares, or perhaps to receive a certain percentage on the profits.
+
+"Suppose we take a glass of wine together, Mr.--Hopkins, before we
+talk business," the publisher said, opening a little cupboard and
+taking therefrom a decanter and two glasses.  He saw the young man
+was looking nervous.  He waited a few minutes, until the wine had
+comforted his epigastrium, and diffused its gentle glow through his
+unspoiled and consequently susceptible organisation.
+
+"Come with me," he said.
+
+Gifted followed him into a dingy apartment in the attic, where one
+sat at a great table heaped and piled with manuscripts.  By him was a
+huge basket, ha'f full of manuscripts also.  As they entered he
+dropped another manuscript into the basket and looked up.
+
+"Tell me," said Gifted, " what are these papers, and who is he that
+looks upon them and drops them into the basket?"
+
+"These are the manuscript poems that we receive, and the one sitting
+at the table is commonly spoken of among us as The Butcher.  The
+poems he drops into the basket are those rejected as of no account"
+
+"But does he not read the poems before he rejects them?"
+
+"He tastes them.  Do you eat a cheese before you buy it?"
+
+"And what becomes of all those that he drops into the basket?"
+
+"If they are not claimed by their author in proper season, they go to
+the devil."
+
+"What!" said Gifted, with his eyes stretched very round.
+
+"To the paper factory, where they have a horrid machine they call the
+devil, that tears everything to bits,--as the critics treat our
+authors, sometimes, sometimes, Mr. Hopkins."
+
+Gifted devoted a moment to silent reflection.
+
+After this instructive sight they returned together to the
+publisher's private room.  The wine had now warmed the youthful
+poet's praecordia, so that he began to feel a renewed confidence in
+his genius and his fortunes.
+
+"I should like to know what that critic of yours would say to my
+manuscript," he said boldly.
+
+"You can try it if you want to," the publisher replied, with an
+ominous dryness of manner which the sanguine youth did not perceive,
+or, perceiving, did not heed.
+
+"How can we manage to get an impartial judgment?"
+
+"Oh, I'll arrange that.  He always goes to his luncheon about this
+time.  Raw meat and vitriol punch,--that 's what the authors say.
+Wait till we hear him go, and then I will lay your manuscript so that
+he will come to it among the first after he gets back.  You shall see
+with your own eyes what treatment it gets.  I hope it may please him,
+but you shall see."
+
+They went back to the publisher's private room and talked awhile.
+Then the little office-boy came up with some vague message about a
+gentleman--business--wants to see you, sir, etc., according to the
+established programme; all in a vacant, mechanical sort of way, as if
+he were a talking-machine just running down.
+
+The publisher told the boy that he was engaged, and the gentleman
+must wait.  Very soon they heard The Butcher's heavy footstep as he
+went out to get his raw meat and vitriol punch.
+
+Now, then," said the publisher, and led forth the confiding literary
+lamb once more, to enter the fatal door of the critical shambles.
+
+"Hand me your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Hopkins.  I will lay it
+so that it shall be the third of these that are coming to hand.  Our
+friend here is a pretty good judge of verse, and knows a merchantable
+article about as quick as any man in his line of business.  If he
+forms a favorable opinion of your poems, we will talk over your
+propositions."
+
+Gifted was conscious of a very slight tremor as he saw his precious
+manuscript deposited on the table, under two others, and over a pile
+of similar productions.  Still he could not help feeling that the
+critic would be struck by his title.  The quotation from Gray must
+touch his feelings.  The very first piece in the collection could not
+fail to arrest him.  He looked a little excited, but he was in good
+spirits.
+
+"We will be looking about here when our friend comes back," the
+publisher said."  He is a very methodical person, and will sit down
+and go right to work just as if we were not here.  We can watch him,
+and if he should express any particular interest in your poems, I
+will, if you say so, carry you up to him and reveal the fact that you
+are the author of the works that please him."
+
+They waited patiently until The Butcher returned, apparently
+refreshed by his ferocious refection, and sat down at his table.  He
+looked comforted, and not in ill humor.  The publisher and the poet
+talked in low tones, as if on business of their own, and watched him
+as he returned to his labor.
+
+The Butcher took the first manuscript that came to hand, read a
+stanza here and there, turned over the leaves, turned back and tried
+again,--shook his head--held it for an instant over the basket, as if
+doubtful,--and let it softly drop.  He took up the second manuscript,
+opened it in several places, seemed rather pleased with what he read,
+and laid it aside for further examination.
+
+He took up the third.  "Blossoms of the Soul," etc.  He glared at it
+in a dreadfully ogreish way.  Both the lockers-on held their breath.
+Gifted Hopkins felt as if half a glass more of that warm sherry would
+not hurt him.  There was a sinking at the pit of his stomach, as if
+he was in a swing, as high as he could go, close up to the swallows'
+nests and spiders' webs.  The Butcher opened the manuscript at
+random, read ten seconds, and gave a short low grunt.  He opened
+again, read ten seconds, and gave another grunt, this time a little
+longer and louder.  He opened once more, read five seconds, and, with
+something that sounded like the snort of a dangerous animal, cast it
+impatiently into the basket, and took up the manuscript that came
+next in order.
+
+Gifted Hopkins stood as if paralyzed for a moment.
+
+"Safe, perfectly safe," the publisher said to him in a whisper."
+I'll get it for you presently.  Come in and take another glass of
+wine," he said, leading him back to his own office.
+
+"No, I thank you," he said faintly, "I can bear it.  But this is
+dreadful, sir.  Is this the way that genius is welcomed to the world
+of letters?"
+
+The publisher explained to him, in the kindest manner, that there was
+an enormous over-production of verse, and that it took a great part
+of one man's time simply to overhaul the cart-loads of it that were
+trying to get themselves into print with the imprimatur of his famous
+house.  "You are young, Mr. Hopkins.  I advise you not to try to
+force your article of poetry on the market.  The B---, our friend,
+there, that is, knows a thing that will sell as soon as he sees it.
+You are in independent circumstances, perhaps?  If so, you can print
+--at your own expense--whatever you choose.  May I take the liberty
+to ask your--profession?  "
+
+Gifted explained that he was "clerk" in a "store," where they sold
+dry goods and West India goods, and goods promiscuous.
+
+"Oh, well, then," the publisher said, "you will understand me.  Do
+you know a good article of brown sagas when you see it?"
+
+Gifted Hopkins rather thought he did.  He knew at sight whether it
+was a fair, salable article or not.
+
+"Just so.  Now our friend, there, knows verses that are salable and
+unsalable as well as you do brown sugar. --Keep quiet now, and I will
+go and get your manuscript for you.
+
+"There, Mr. Hopkins, take your poems,--they will give you a
+reputation in your village, I don't doubt, which, is pleasant, but it
+will cost you a good deal of money to print them in a volume.  You
+are very young: you can afford to wait.  Your genius is not ripe yet,
+I am confident, Mr. Hopkins.  These verses are very well for a
+beginning, but a man of promise like you, Mr. Hopkins, must n't throw
+away his chance by premature publication!  I should like to make you
+a present of a few of the books we publish.  By and by, perhaps, we
+can work you into our series of poets; but the best pears ripen
+slowly, and so with genius. --Where shall I send the volumes?"
+
+Gifted answered, to parlor No. 6, Planet Hotel, where he soon
+presented himself to Master Gridley, who could guess pretty well what
+was coming.  But he let him tell his story.
+
+"Shall I try the other publishers?" said the disconsolate youth.
+
+"I would n't, my young friend, I would n't.  You have seen the best
+one of them--all.  He is right about it, quite right: you are young,
+and had better wait.  Look here, Gifted, here is something to please
+you.  We are going to visit the gay world together.  See what has
+been left here this forenoon."
+
+He showed him two elegant notes of invitation requesting the pleasure
+of Professor Byles Gridley's and of Mr. Gifted Hopkins's company on
+Thursday evening, as the guests of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat
+Place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+MRS. CLYMER KETCHUM'S PARTY.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had flowered out as beyond question the handsomest girl
+of the season, There were hints from different quarters that she
+might possibly be an heiress.  Vague stories were about of some
+contingency which might possibly throw a fortune into her lap.  The
+young men about town talked of her at the clubs in their free-and-
+easy way, but all agreed that she was the girl of the new crop,--"
+best filly this grass," as Livingston Jenkins put it.  The general
+understanding seemed to be that the young lawyer who had followed her
+to the city was going to capture her.  She seemed to favor him
+certainly as much as anybody.  But Myrtle saw many young men now, and
+it was not so easy as it would once have been to make out who was an
+especial favorite.
+
+There had been times when Murray Bradshaw would have offered his
+heart and hand to Myrtle at once, if he had felt sure that she would
+accept him.  But he preferred playing the safe game now, and only
+wanted to feel sure of her.  He had done his best to be agreeable,
+and could hardly doubt that he had made an impression.  He dressed
+well when in the city,--even elegantly,--he had many of the lesser
+social accomplishments, was a good dancer, and compared favorably in
+all such matters with the more dashing young fellows in society.  He
+was a better talker than most of them, and he knew more about the
+girl he was dealing with than they could know.  "You have only got to
+say the word, Murray," Mrs. Clymer Ketchum said to her relative, "and
+you can have her.  But don't be rash.  I believe you can get
+Berengaria if you try; and there 's something better there than
+possibilities."  Murray Bradshaw laughed, and told Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum not to worry about him; he knew what he was doing.
+
+It so happened that Myrtle met Master Byles Gridley walking with Mr.
+Gifted Hopkins the day before the party.  She longed to have a talk
+with her old friend, and was glad to have a chance of pleasing her
+poetical admirer.  She therefore begged her hostess to invite them
+both to her party to please her, which she promised to do at once.
+Thus the two elegant notes were accounted for.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though her acquaintances were chiefly in the
+world of fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weakness for what
+she called clever people.  She therefore always variegated her
+parties with a streak of young artists and writers, and a literary
+lady or two; and, if she could lay hands on a first-class celebrity,
+was as happy as an Amazon who had captured a Centaur.
+
+"There's a demonish clever young fellow by the name of Lindsay,"
+Mr. Livingston Jenkins said to her a little before the day of the
+party.  "Better ask him.  They say he 's the rising talent in his
+line, architecture mainly, but has done some remarkable things in the
+way of sculpture.  There's some story about a bust he made that was
+quite wonderful.  I'll find his address for you."  So Mr. Clement
+Lindsay got his invitation, and thus Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party
+promised to bring together a number of persons with whom we are
+acquainted, and who were acquainted with each other.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum knew how to give a party.  Let her only have
+carte blanche for flowers, music, and champagne, she used to tell her
+lord, and she would see to the rest,--lighting the rooms, tables, and
+toilet.  He needn't be afraid: all he had to do was to keep out of
+the way.
+
+Subdivision of labor is one of the triumphs of modern civilization.
+Labor was beautifully subdivided in this lady's household.  It was
+old Ketchum's business to make money, and he understood it.  It was
+Mrs. K.'s business to spend money, and she knew how to do it.  The
+rooms blazed with light like a conflagration; the flowers burned like
+lamps of many-colored flame; the music throbbed into the hearts of
+the promenaders and tingled through all the muscles of the dancers.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was in her glory.  Her point d'Alenyon must have
+spoiled ever so many French girls' eyes.  Her bosom heaved beneath a
+kind of breastplate glittering with a heavy dew of diamonds.  She
+glistened and sparkled with every movement, so that the admirer
+forgot to question too closely whether the eyes matched the
+brilliants, or the cheeks glowed like the roses.  Not far from the
+great lady stood Myrtle Hazard.  She was dressed as the fashion of
+the day demanded, but she had added certain audacious touches of her
+own, reminiscences of the time when the dead beauty had flourished,
+and which first provoked the question and then the admiration of the
+young people who had a natural eye for effect.  Over the long white
+glove on her left arm was clasped a rich bracelet, of so quaint an
+antique pattern that nobody had seen anything like it, and as some
+one whispered that it was "the last thing out," it was greatly
+admired by the fashion-plate multitude, as well as by the few who had
+a taste of their own.  If the soul of Judith Pride, long divorced
+from its once beautifully moulded dust, ever lived in dim
+consciousness through any of those who inherited her blood, it was
+then and there that she breathed through the lips of Myrtle Hazard.
+The young girl almost trembled with the ecstasy of this new mode of
+being, soliciting every sense with light, with perfume, with melody,
+--all that could make her feel the wonderful complex music of a fresh
+life when all its chords first vibrate together in harmony.  Miss
+Rhadamantha Pinnikle, whose mother was an Apex (of whose race it was
+said that they always made an obeisance when the family name was
+mentioned, and had all their portraits painted with halos round their
+heads), found herself extinguished in this new radiance.  Miss
+Victoria Capsheaf stuck to the wall as if she had been a fresco on
+it.  The fifty-year-old dynasties were dismayed and dismounted.
+Myrtle fossilized them as suddenly as if she had been a Gorgon
+instead of a beauty.
+
+The guests in whom we may have some interest were in the mean time
+making ready for the party, which was expected to be a brilliant one;
+for 24 Carat Place was well known for the handsome style of its
+entertainments.
+
+Clement Lindsay was a little surprised by his invitation.  He had,
+however, been made a lion of several times of late, and was very
+willing to amuse himself once in a while with a peep into the great
+world.
+
+It was but an empty show to him at best, for his lot was cast, and he
+expected to lead a quiet domestic life after his student days were
+over.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had known what society was in his earlier time,
+and understood very well that all a gentleman of his age had to do
+was to dress himself in his usual plain way, only taking a little
+more care in his arrangements than was needed in the latitude of
+Oxbow Village.  But Gifted must be looked after, that he should not
+provoke the unamiable comments of the city youth by any defect or
+extravagance of costume.  The young gentleman had bought a light sky-
+blue neckerchief, and a very large breast-pin containing a gem which
+he was assured by the vender was a genuine stone.  He considered that
+both these would be eminently effective articles of dress, and Mr.
+Gridley had some trouble to convince him that a white tie and plain
+shirt-buttons would be more fitted to the occasion.
+
+On the morning of the day of the great party Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw received a brief telegram, which seemed to cause him great
+emotion, as he changed color, uttered a forcible exclamation, and
+began walking up and down his room in a very nervous kind of way.  It
+was a foreshadowing of a certain event now pretty sure to happen.
+Whatever bearing this telegram may have had upon his plans, he made
+up his mind that he would contrive an opportunity somehow that very
+evening to propose himself as a suitor to Myrtle Hazard.  He could
+not say that he felt as absolutely certain of getting the right
+answer as he had felt at some previous periods.  Myrtle knew her
+price, he said to himself, a great deal better than when she was a
+simple country girl.  The flatteries with which she had been
+surrounded, and the effect of all the new appliances of beauty, which
+had set her off so that she could not help seeing her own
+attractions, rendered her harder to please and to satisfy.  A little
+experience in society teaches a young girl the arts and the phrases
+which all the Lotharios have in common.  Murray Bradshaw was ready to
+land his fish now, but he was not quite sure that she was yet hooked,
+and he had a feeling that by this time she knew every fly in his
+book.  However, as he had made up his mind not to wait another day,
+he addressed himself to the trial before him with a determination to
+succeed, if any means at his command would insure success.  He
+arrayed himself with faultless elegance: nothing must be neglected on
+such an occasion.  He went forth firm and grave as a general going
+into a battle where all is to be lost or won.  He entered the blazing
+saloon with the unfailing smile upon his lips, to which he set them
+as he set his watch to a particular hour and minute.
+
+The rooms were pretty well filled when he arrived and made his bow
+before the blazing, rustling, glistening, waving, blushing appearance
+under which palpitated, with the pleasing excitement of the magic
+scene over which its owner presided, the heart of Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum.  He turned to Myrtle Hazard, and if he had ever doubted
+which way his inclinations led him, he could doubt no longer.  How
+much dress and how much light can a woman bear?  That is the way to
+measure her beauty.  A plain girl in a simple dress, if she has only
+a pleasant voice, may seem almost a beauty in the rosy twilight.  The
+nearer she comes to being handsome, the more ornament she will bear,
+and the more she may defy the sunshine or the chandelier.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was fairly dazzled with the brilliant effect of
+Myrtle in full dress.  He did not know before what handsome arms she
+had,--Judith Pride's famous arms--which the high-colored young men in
+top-boots used to swear were the handsomest pair in New England--
+right over again.  He did not know before with what defiant effect
+she would light up, standing as she did directly under a huge lustre,
+in full flower of flame, like a burning azalea.  He was not a man who
+intended to let his sentiments carry him away from the serious
+interests of his future, yet, as he looked upon Myrtle Hazard, his
+heart gave one throb which made him feel in every pulse that this way
+a woman who in her own right, simply as a woman, could challenge the
+homage of the proudest young man of her time.  He hardly knew till
+this moment how much of passion mingled with other and calmer motives
+of admiration.  He could say I love you as truly as such a man could
+ever speak these words, meaning that he admired her, that he was
+attracted to her, that he should be proud of her as his wife, that he
+should value himself always as the proprietor of so rare a person,
+that no appendage to his existence would take so high a place in his
+thoughts.  This implied also, what is of great consequence to a young
+woman's happiness in the married state, that she would be treated
+with uniform politeness, with satisfactory evidences of affection,
+and with a degree of confidence quite equal to what a reasonable
+woman should expect from a very superior man, her husband.
+
+If Myrtle could have looked through the window in the breast against
+which only authors are privileged to flatten their features, it is
+for the reader to judge how far the programme would have satisfied
+her.
+
+Less than this, a great deal less, does appear to satisfy many young
+women; and it may be that the interior just drawn, fairly judged,
+belongs to a model lover and husband.  Whether it does or not, Myrtle
+did not see this picture.  There was a beautifully embroidered shirt-
+bosom in front of that window through which we have just looked, that
+intercepted all sight of what was going on within.  She only saw a
+man, young, handsome, courtly, with a winning tongue, with an
+ambitious spirit, whose every look and tone implied his admiration of
+herself, and who was associated with her past life in such a way that
+they alone appeared like old friends in the midst of that cold alien
+throng.  It seemed as if he could not have chosen a more auspicious
+hour than this; for she never looked so captivating, and her presence
+must inspire his lips with the eloquence of love.  And she--was not
+this delirious atmosphere of light and music just the influence to
+which he would wish to subject her before trying the last experiment
+of all which can stir the soul of a woman?  He knew the mechanism of
+that impressionable state which served Coleridge so excellently
+well,--
+
+    "All impulses of soul and sense
+     Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve
+     The music, and the doleful tale,
+     The rich and balmy eve,"--
+
+though he hardly expected such startling results as happened in that
+case,--which might be taken as an awful warning not to sing moving
+ballads to young ladies of susceptible feelings, unless one is
+prepared for very serious consequences.  Without expecting that
+Myrtle would rush into his arms, he did think that she could not help
+listening to him in the intervals of the delicious music, in some
+recess where the roses and jasmines and heliotropes made the air
+heavy with sweetness, and the crimson curtains drooped in heavy folds
+that half hid their forms from the curious eyes all round them.  Her
+heart would swell like Genevieve's as he told her in simple phrase
+that she was his life, his love, his all,--for in some two or three
+words like these he meant to put his appeal, and not in fine poetical
+phrases: that would do for Gifted Hopkins and rhyming tom-tits of
+that feather.
+
+Full of his purpose, involving the plans of his whole life, implying,
+as he saw clearly, a brilliant future or a disastrous disappointment,
+with a great unexploded mine of consequences under his feet, and the
+spark ready to fall into it, he walked about the gilded saloon with a
+smile upon his lips so perfectly natural and pleasant, that one would
+have said he was as vacant of any aim, except a sort of superficial
+good-matured disposition to be amused, as the blankest-eyed simpleton
+who had tied himself up in a white cravat and come to bore and be
+bored.
+
+Yet under this pleasant smile his mind was so busy with its thoughts
+that he had forgotten all about the guests from Oxbow Village who, as
+Myrtle had told him, were to come this evening.  His eye was all at
+once caught by a familiar figure, and he recognized Master Byles
+Gridley, accompanied by Mr. Gifted Hopkins, at the door of the
+saloon.  He stepped forward at once to meet, and to present them.
+
+Mr. Gridley in evening costume made an eminently dignified and
+respectable appearance.  There was an unusual lock of benignity upon
+his firmly moulded features, and an air of ease which rather
+surprised Mr. Bradshaw, who did not know all the social experiences
+which had formed a part of the old Master's history.  The greeting
+between them was courteous, but somewhat formal, as Mr. Bradshaw was
+acting as one of the masters of ceremony.  He nodded to Gifted in an
+easy way, and led them both into the immediate Presence.
+
+This is my friend Professor Gridley, Mrs. Ketchum, whom I have the
+honor of introducing to you,--a very distinguished scholar, as I have
+no doubt you are well aware.  And this is my friend Mr. Gifted
+Hopkins, a young poet of distinction, whose fame will reach you by
+and by, if it has not come to your ears already."
+
+The two gentlemen went through the usual forms, the poet a little
+crushed by the Presence, but doing his best.  While the lady was
+making polite speeches to them, Myrtle Hazard came forward.  She was
+greatly delighted to meet her old friend, and even looked upon the
+young poet with a degree of pleasure she would hardly have expected
+to receive from his company.  They both brought with them so many
+reminiscences of familiar scenes and events, that it was like going
+back for the moment to Oxbow Village.  But Myrtle did not belong to
+herself that evening, and had no opportunity to enter into
+conversation just then with either of them.  There was to be dancing
+by and by, and the younger people were getting impatient that it
+should begin.  At last the music sounded the well-known summons, and
+the floors began to ring to the tread of the dancers.  As usual on
+such occasions there were a large number of noncombatants, who stood
+as spectators around those who were engaged in the campaign of the
+evening.  Mr. Byles Gridley looked on gravely, thinking of the
+minuets and the gavots of his younger days.  Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who
+had never acquired the desirable accomplishment of dancing, gazed
+with dazzled and admiring eyes at the wonderful evolutions of the
+graceful performers.  The music stirred him a good deal; he had also
+been introduced to one or two young persons as Mr. Hopkins, the poet,
+and he began to feel a kind of excitement, such as was often the
+prelude of a lyric burst from his pen.  Others might have wealth and
+beauty, he thought to himself, but what were these to the gift of
+genius?  In fifty years the wealth of these people would have passed
+into other hands.  In fifty years all these beauties would be dead,
+or wrinkled and double-wrinkled great-grandmothers.  And when they
+were all gone and forgotten, the name of Hopkins would be still fresh
+in the world's memory.  Inspiring thought!  A smile of triumph rose
+to his lips; he felt that the village boy who could look forward to
+fame as his inheritance was richer than all the millionnaires, and
+that the words he should set in verse would have an enduring lustre
+to which the whiteness of pearls was cloudy, and the sparkle of
+diamonds dull.
+
+He raised his eyes, which had been cast down in reflection, to look
+upon these less favored children of Fortune, to whom she had given
+nothing but perishable inheritances.  Two or three pairs of eyes, he
+observed, were fastened upon him.  His mouth perhaps betrayed a
+little self-consciousness, but he tried to show his features in an
+aspect of dignified self-possession.  There seemed to be remarks and
+questionings going on, which he supposed to be something like the
+following:--
+
+Which is it?  Which is it? --Why, that one, there,--that young
+fellow,--don't you see? --What young fellow are you two looking at?
+Who is he?  What is he? --Why, that is Hopkins, the poet. --Hopkins,
+the poet!  Let me see him!  Let me see him!  Hopkins?  What!  Gifted
+Hopkins?  etc., etc.
+
+Gifted Hopkins did not hear these words except in fancy, but he did
+unquestionably find a considerable number of eyes concentrated upon
+him, which he very naturally interpreted as an evidence that he had
+already begun to enjoy a foretaste of the fame of which he should
+hereafter have his full allowance.  Some seemed to be glancing
+furtively, some appeared as if they wished to speak, and all the time
+the number of those looking at him seemed to be increasing.  A vision
+came through his fancy of himself as standing on a platform, and
+having persons who wished to look upon him and shake hands with him
+presented, as he had heard was the way with great people when going
+about the country.  But this was only a suggestion, and by no means a
+serious thought, for that would have implied infatuation.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was quite right in believing that he attracted many
+eyes.  At last those of Myrtle Hazard were called to him, and she
+perceived that an accident was making him unenviably conspicuous.
+The bow of his rather large white neck-tie had slid round and got
+beneath his left ear.  A not very good-natured or well-bred young
+fellow had pointed out the subject of this slight misfortune to one
+or two others of not much better taste or breeding, and thus the
+unusual attention the youthful poet was receiving explained itself.
+Myrtle no sooner saw the little accident of which her rural friend
+was the victim than she left her place in the dance with a simple
+courage which did her credit.
+
+"I want to speak to you a minute," she said.  "Come into this
+alcove."
+
+And the courageous young lady not only told Gifted what had happened
+to him, but found a pin somehow, as women always do on a pinch, and
+had him in presentable condition again almost before the bewildered
+young man knew what was the matter.  On reflection it occurred to
+him, as it has to other provincial young persons going to great
+cities, that he might perhaps have been hasty in thinking himself an
+object of general curiosity as yet.  There had hardly been time for
+his name to have become very widely known.  Still, the feeling had
+been pleasant for the moment, and had given him an idea of what the
+rapture would be, when, wherever he went, the monster digit (to hint
+a classical phrase) of the collective admiring public would be lifted
+to point him out, and the whisper would pass from one to another,
+"That's him!  That's Hopkins!"
+
+Mr. Murray Bradshaw had been watching the opportunity for carrying
+out his intentions, with his pleasant smile covering up all that was
+passing in his mind, and Master Byles Gridley, looking equally
+unconcerned, had been watching him.  The young man's time came at
+last.  Some were at the supper-table, some were promenading, some
+were talking, when he managed to get Myrtle a little apart from the
+rest, and led her towards one of the recesses in the apartment, where
+two chairs were invitingly placed.  Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes
+were sparkling,--the influences to which he had trusted had not been
+thrown away upon her.  He had no idea of letting his purpose be seen
+until he was fully ready.  It required all his self-mastery to avoid
+betraying himself by look or tone, but he was so natural that Myrtle
+was thrown wholly off her guard.  He meant to make her pleased with
+herself at the outset, and that not by point-blank flattery, of which
+she had had more than enough of late, but rather by suggestion and
+inference, so that she should find herself feeling happy without
+knowing how.  It would be easy to glide from that to the impression
+she had produced upon him, and get the two feelings more or less
+mingled in her mind.  And so the simple confession he meant to make
+would at length evolve itself logically, and hold by a natural
+connection to the first agreeable train of thought which he had
+called up.  Not the way, certainly, that most young men would arrange
+their great trial scene; but Murray Bradshaw was a lawyer in love as
+much as in business, and considered himself as pleading a cause
+before a jury of Myrtle Hazard's conflicting motives.  What would any
+lawyer do in a jury case but begin by giving the twelve honest men
+and true to understand, in the first place, that their intelligence
+and virtue were conceded by all, and that he himself had perfect
+confidence in them, and leave them to shape their verdict in
+accordance with these propositions and his own side of the case?
+
+Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the
+honeyed accents of the young pleader.  He flattered her with so much
+tact, that she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips
+of an admiration which he only shared with all around him.  But in
+him he made it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very
+real.  This it evidently was which had led him to trust her with his
+ambitions and his plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never
+keep them from her, and she was the one woman in the world to whom he
+thought he could safely give his confidence.
+
+The dread moment was close at hand.  Myrtle was listening with an
+instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and
+grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it
+all in preceding generations until time reached backwards to the
+sturdy savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down
+the primeval great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his
+hole in the rock, or into the tree where he had made his nest.  Why
+should not the coming question announce itself by stirring in the
+pulses and thrilling in the nerves of the descendant of all these
+grandmothers?
+
+She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind
+elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of
+Schehallion.  Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster
+than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose.  The
+steady nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and
+tremors tingling through them, as he came nearer and nearer the few
+simple words with which he was to make Myrtle Hazard the mistress' of
+his destiny.  His tones were becoming lower and more serious; there
+were slight breaks once or twice in the conversation; Myrtle had cast
+down her eyes.
+
+"There is but one word more to add," he murmured softly, as he bent
+towards her
+
+A grave voice interrupted him.  "Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw," said
+Master Bytes Gridley, "I wish to present a young gentleman to my
+friend here.  I promised to show him the most charming young person I
+have the honor to be acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge.
+Miss Hazard, I have the pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance
+my distinguished young friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay."
+
+Once mere, for the third time, these two young persons stood face to
+face.  Myrtle was no longer liable to those nervous seizures which
+any sudden impression was liable to produce when she was in her half-
+hysteric state of mind and body.  She turned to the new-comer, who
+found himself unexpectedly submitted to a test which he would never
+have risked of his own will.  He must go through it, cruel as it was,
+with the easy self-command which belongs to a gentleman in the most
+trying social exigencies.  He addressed her, therefore, in the usual
+terms of courtesy, and then turned and greeted Mr. Bradshaw, whom he
+had never met since their coming together at Oxbow Village.  Myrtle
+was conscious, the instant she looked upon Clement Lindsay, of the
+existence of some peculiar relation between them; but what, she could
+not tell.  Whatever it was, it broke the charm which had been weaving
+between her and Murray Bradshaw.  He was not foolish enough to make a
+scene.  What fault could he find with Clement Lindsay, who had only
+done as any gentleman would do with a lady to whom he had just been
+introduced, addressed a few polite words to her?  After saying those
+words, Clement had turned very courteously to him, and they had
+spoken with each other.  But Murray Bradshaw could not help seeing
+that Myrtle had transferred her attention, at least for the moment,
+from him to the new-comer.  He folded his arms and waited,--but he
+waited in vain.  The hidden attraction which drew Clement to the
+young girl with whom he had passed into the Valley of the Shadow of
+Death overmastered all other feelings, and he gave himself up to the
+fascination of her presence.
+
+The inward rage of Murray Bradshaw at being interrupted just at the
+moment when he was, as he thought, about to cry checkmate and finish
+the first great game he had ever played may well be imagined.  But it
+could not be helped.  Myrtle had exercised the customary privilege of
+young ladies at parties, and had turned from talking with one to
+talking with another,--that was all.  Fortunately, for him the young
+man who had been introduced at such a most critical moment was not
+one from whom he need apprehend any serious interference.  He felt
+grateful beyond measure to pretty Susan Posey, who, as he had good
+reason for believing, retained her hold upon her early lover, and was
+looking forward with bashful interest to the time when she should
+become Mrs. Lindsay.  It was better to put up quietly with his
+disappointment; and, if he could get no favorable opportunity that
+evening to resume his conversation at the interesting point where he
+left it off, he would call the next day and bring matters to a
+conclusion.
+
+He called accordingly the next morning, but was disappointed in not
+seeing Myrtle.  She had hardly slept that night, and was suffering
+from a bad headache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing
+company.
+
+He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had
+just left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village:
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+MINE AND COUNTERMINE.
+
+What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect
+on the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody
+especially interested knew but himself.  We may conjecture that it
+announced some fact, which had leaked out a little prematurely,
+relating to the issue of the great land-case in which the firm was
+interested.  However that might be,.  Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard
+that Myrtle had suddenly left the city for Oxbow Village,--for what
+reason he puzzled himself to guess,--than he determined to follow her
+at once, and take up the conversation he had begun at the party where
+it left off.  And as the young poet had received his quietus for the
+present at the publisher's, and as Master Gridley had nothing
+specially to detain him, they too returned at about the same time,
+and so our old acquaintances were once more together within the
+familiar precincts where we have been accustomed to see them.
+
+Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
+remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of
+the detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the
+habit of keeping an eye on mischievous students.  If any underhand
+contrivance was at work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he
+was interested, he was a dangerous person for the plotters, for he
+had plenty of time to attend to them, and would be apt to take a kind
+of pleasure in matching his wits against another crafty person's,
+--such a one, for instance, as Mr. Macchiavelli Bradshaw.
+
+Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the
+party; at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner.  When he
+found that the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he
+suspected something more than a coincidence.  When he learned that he
+was assiduously visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close
+communication with Miss Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was
+pressing the siege of Myrtle's heart.  But that there was some
+difficulty in the way was equally clear to him, for he ascertained,
+through channels which the attentive reader will soon have means of
+conjecturing, that Myrtle had seen him but once in the week following
+his return, and that in the presence of her dragons.  She had various
+excuses when he called,--headaches, perhaps, among the rest, as these
+are staple articles on such occasions.  But Master Gridley knew his
+man too well to think that slight obstacles would prevent his going
+forward to effect his purpose.
+
+"I think he will get her; if he holds on," the old man said to
+himself, "and he won't let go in a hurry, if there were any real love
+about it--but surely he is incapable of such a human weakness as the
+tender passion.  What does all this sudden concentration upon the
+girl mean?  He knows something about her that we don't know,--that
+must be it.  What did he hide that paper for, a year ago and more?
+Could that have anything to do with his pursuit of Myrtle Hazard
+today?"
+
+Master Gridley paused as he asked this question of himself, for a
+luminous idea had struck him.  Consulting daily with Cynthia Badlam,
+was he?  Could there be a conspiracy between these two persons to
+conceal some important fact, or to keep something back until it would
+be for their common interest to have it made known?
+
+Now Mistress Kitty Fagan was devoted, heart and soul, to Myrtle
+Hazard, and ever since she had received the young girl from Mr.
+Gridley's hands, when he brought her back safe and sound after her
+memorable adventure, had considered him as Myrtle's best friend and
+natural protector.  These simple creatures, whose thoughts are not
+taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great
+museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which
+are going on about them.  Mr. Gridley had met her, more or less
+accidentally, several times of late, and inquired very particularly
+about Myrtle, and how she got along at the house since her return,
+and whether she was getting over her headaches, and how they treated
+her in the family.
+
+"Bliss your heart, Mr. Gridley," Kitty said to him on one of these
+occasions, "it's ahltogither changed intirely.  Sure Miss Myrtle does
+jist iverythin' she likes, an' Miss Withers niver middles with her at
+ahl, excip' jist to roll up her eyes an' look as if she was the hid-
+moorner at a funeril whiniver Miss Myrtle says she wants to do this
+or that, or to go here or there.  It's Miss Badlam that's ahlwiz
+after her, an' a-watchin' her,--she thinks she's cunnin'er than a
+cat, but there 's other folks that's got eyes an' ears as good as
+hers.  It's that Mr. Bridshaw that's a puttin' his head together with
+Miss Badlam for somethin' or other, an' I don't believe there's no
+good in it, for what does the fox an' the cat be a whisperin' about,
+as if they was thaves an' incind'ries, if there ain't no mischief
+hatchin'?"
+
+"Why, Kitty," he said, "what mischief do you think is going on, and
+who is to be harmed?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley," she answered, "if there ain't somebody to be chated
+somehow, then I don't know an honest man and woman from two rogues.
+An' have n't I heard Miss Myrtle's name whispered as if there was
+somethin' goin' on agin' her, an' they was afraid the tahk would go
+out through the doors, an' up through the chimbley?  I don't want to
+tell no tales, Mr. Gridley, nor to hurt no honest body, for I'm a
+poor woman, Mr. Gridley, but I comes of dacent folks, an' I vallies
+my repitation an' character as much as if I was dressed in silks and
+satins instead of this mane old gown, savin' your presence, which is
+the best I 've got, an' niver a dollar to buy another.  But if I iver
+I hears a word, Mr. Gridley, that manes any kind of a mischief to
+Miss Myrtle,--the Lard bliss her soul an' keep ahl the divils away
+from her!--I'll be runnin' straight down here to tell ye ahl about
+it,--be right sure o' that, Mr. Gridley."
+
+"Nothing must happen to Myrtle," he said," that we can help.  If you
+see anything more that looks wrong, you had better come down here at
+once and let me know, as you say you will.  At once, you understand.
+And, Kitty, I am a little particular about the dress of people who
+come to see me, so that if you would just take the trouble to get you
+a tidy pattern of gingham or calico, or whatever you like of that
+sort for a gown, you would please me; and perhaps this little trifle
+will be a convenience to you when you come to pay for it."
+
+Kitty thanked him with all the national accompaniments, and trotted
+off to the store, where Mr. Gifted Hopkins displayed the native
+amiability of his temper by fumbling down everything in the shape of
+ginghams and calicoes they had on the shelves, without a murmur at
+the taste of his customer, who found it hard to get a pattern
+sufficiently emphatic for her taste.  She succeeded at last, and laid
+down a five-dollar bill as if she were as used to the pleasing figure
+on its face as to the sight of her own five digits.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had struck a spade deeper than he knew into his
+first countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples
+about the means of obtaining information which might have embarrassed
+a diplomatist of higher degree.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM
+
+"Is Miss Hazard in, Kitty?"
+
+"Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, but she won't see nobody."
+
+"What's the meaning of that, Kitty?  Here is the third time within
+three days you've told me I could n't see her.  She saw Mr. Gridley
+yesterday, I know; why won't she see me to-day?"
+
+"Y' must ask Miss Myrtle what the rason is, it's none o' my business,
+Mr. Bridshaw.  That's the order she give me."
+
+"Is Miss Badlam in?"
+
+Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, an' I 'll go cahl her."
+
+"Bedad," said Kitty Fagan to herself, "the cat an' the fox is goin'
+to have another o' thim big tahks togither, an' sure the old hole for
+the stove-pipe has niver been stopped up yet."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Cynthia went into the parlor together, and
+Mistress Kitty retired to her kitchen.  There was a deep closet
+belonging to this apartment, separated by a partition from the
+parlor.  There was a round hole high up in this partition through
+which a stove-pipe had once passed.  Mistress Kitty placed a stool
+just under this opening, upon which, as on a, pedestal, she posed
+herself with great precaution in the attitude of the goddess of other
+people's secrets, that is to say, with her head a little on one side,
+so as to bring her liveliest ear close to the opening.  The
+conversation which took place in the hearing of the invisible third
+party began in a singularly free-and-easy manner on Mr. Bradshaw's
+part.
+
+"What the d--- is the reason I can't see Myrtle, Cynthia?"
+
+"That's more than I can tell you, Mr. Bradshaw.  I can watch her
+goings on, but I can't account for her tantrums."
+
+"You say she has had some of her old nervous whims,--has the doctor
+been to see her?"
+
+"No indeed.  She has kept to herself a good deal, but I don't think
+there's anything in particular the matter with her.  She looks well
+enough, only she seems a little queer,--as girls do that have taken a
+fancy into their heads that they're in love, you know,--absent-
+minded,--does n't seem to be interested in things as you would expect
+after being away so long."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked as if this did not please him particularly.  If
+he was the object of her thoughts she would not avoid him, surely.
+
+"Have you kept your eye on her steadily?"
+
+"I don't believe there is an hour we can't account for,--Kitty and I
+between us."
+
+"Are you sure you can depend on Kitty?"
+
+["Depind on Kitty, is it?  Oh, an' to be sure ye can depind on Kitty
+to kape watch at the stove-pipe hole, an' to tell all y'r plottin's
+an' contrivin's to them that'll get the cheese out o' y'r mousetrap
+for ye before ye catch any poor cratur in it."  This was the
+inaudible comment of the unseen third party.]
+
+"Of course I can depend on her as far as I trust her.  All she knows
+is that she must look out for the girl to see that she does not run
+away or do herself a mischief.  The Biddies don't know much, but they
+know enough to keep a watch on the--"
+
+"Chickens."  Mr. Bradshaw playfully finished the sentence for Miss
+Cynthia.
+
+[" An' on the foxes, an' the cats, an' the wazels, an' the hen-hahks,
+an' ahl the other bastes," added the invisible witness, in unheard
+soliloquy.]
+
+"I ain't sure whether she's quite as stupid as she looks," said the
+suspicious young lawyer.  "There's a little cunning twinkle in her
+eye sometimes that makes me think she might be up to a trick on
+occasion.  Does she ever listen about to hear what people are
+saying?"
+
+"Don't trouble yourself about Kitty Fagan,' for pity's sake, Mr.
+Bradshaw.  The Biddies are all alike, and they're all as stupid as
+owls, except when you tell 'em just what to do, and how to do it.  A
+pack of priest-ridden fools!"
+
+The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap.  The stout
+muscles gave an involuntary jerk.  The substantial frame felt the
+thrill all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing
+creaked sharply under its burden.
+
+Murray Bradshaw started.  He got up and opened softly all the doors
+leading from the room, one after another, and looked out.
+
+"I thought I heard a noise as if somebody was moving, Cynthia.  It's
+just as well to keep our own matters to ourselves."
+
+"If you wait till this old house keeps still, Mr. Bradshaw, you might
+as well wait till the river has run by.  It's as full of rats and
+mice as an old cheese is of mites.  There's a hundred old rats in
+this house, and that's what you hear."
+
+["An' one old cat; that's what I hear."  Third party.]
+
+"I told you, Cynthia, I must be off on this business to-morrow.  I
+want to know that everything is safe before I go.  And, besides, I
+have got something to say to you that's important, very important,
+mind you."
+
+He got up once more and opened every door softly and looked out.  He
+fixed his eye suspiciously on a large sofa at the other side of the
+room, and went, looking half ashamed of his extreme precaution, and
+peeped under it, to see if there was any one hidden thereto listen.
+Then he came back and drew his chair close up to the table at which
+Miss Badlam had seated herself.  The conversation which followed was
+in a low tone, and a portion of it must be given in another place in
+the words of the third party.  The beginning of it we are able to
+supply in this connection.
+
+"Look here, Cynthia; you know what I am going for.  It's all right, I
+feel sure, for I have had private means of finding out.  It's a sure
+thing; but I must go once more to see that the other fellows don't
+try any trick on us.  You understand what is for my advantage is for
+yours, and, if I go wrong, you go overboard with me.  Now I must
+leave the--you know--behind me.  I can't leave it in the house or the
+office: they might burn up.  I won't have it about me when I am
+travelling.  Draw your chair a little more this way.  Now listen."
+
+["Indade I will," said the third party to herself.  The reader will
+find out in due time whether she listened to any purpose or not.]
+
+In the mean time Myrtle, who for some reason was rather nervous and
+restless, had found a pair of half-finished slippers which she had
+left behind her.  The color came into her cheeks when she remembered
+the state of mind she was in when she was working on them for the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker.  She recollected Master Gridley's mistake about
+their destination, and determined to follow the hint he had given.
+It would please him better if she sent them to good Father Pemberton,
+she felt sure, than if he should get them himself.  So she enlarged
+them somewhat, (for the old man did not pinch his feet, as the
+younger clergyman was in the habit of doing, and was, besides, of
+portly dimensions, as the old orthodox three-deckers were apt to be,)
+and worked E. P. very handsomely into the pattern, and sent them to
+him with her love and respect, to his great delight; for old
+ministers do not have quite so many tokens of affection from fair
+hands as younger ones.
+
+What made Myrtle nervous and restless?  Why had she quitted the city
+so abruptly, and fled to her old home, leaving all the gayeties
+behind her which had so attracted and dazzled her?
+
+She had not betrayed herself at the third meeting with the young man
+who stood in such an extraordinary relation to her,--who had actually
+given her life from his own breath,--as when she met him for the
+second time.  Whether his introduction to her at the party, just at
+the instant when Murray Bradshaw was about to make a declaration,
+saved her from being in another moment the promised bride of that
+young gentleman, or not, we will not be so rash as to say.  It
+looked, certainly, as if he was in a fair way to carry his point; but
+perhaps she would have hesitated, or shrunk back, when the great
+question came to stare her in the face.
+
+She was excited, at any rate, by the conversation, so that, when
+Clement was presented to her, her thoughts could not at once be all
+called away from her other admirer, and she was saved from all danger
+of that sudden disturbance which had followed their second meeting.
+Whatever impression he made upon her developed itself gradually,
+--still, she felt strangely drawn towards him.  It was not simply in
+his good looks, in his good manners, in his conversation, that she
+found this attraction, but there was a singular fascination which she
+felt might be dangerous to her peace, without explaining it to
+herself in words.  She could hardly be in love with this young
+artist; she knew that his affections were plighted to another, a fact
+which keeps most young women from indulging unruly fancies; yet her
+mind was possessed by his image to such an extent that it left little
+room for that of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had been just ready to enter on a career of worldly
+vanity and ambition.  It is hard to blame her, for we know how she
+came by the tendency.  She had every quality, too, which fitted her
+to shine in the gay world; and the general law is, that those who
+have the power have the instinct to use it.  We do not suppose that
+the bracelet on her arm was an amulet, but it was a symbol.  It
+reminded her of her descent; it kept alive the desire to live over
+the joys and excitements of a bygone generation.  If she had accepted
+Murray Bradshaw, she would have pledged herself to a worldly life.
+If she had refused him, it would perhaps have given her a taste of
+power that might have turned her into a coquette.
+
+This new impression saved her for the time.  She had come back to her
+nest in the village like a frightened bird; her heart was throbbing,
+her nerves were thrilling, her dreams were agitated; she wanted to be
+quiet, and could not listen to the flatteries or entreaties of her
+old lover.
+
+It was a strong will and a subtle intellect that had arrayed their
+force and skill against the ill-defended citadel of Myrtle's heart.
+Murray Bradshaw was perfectly determined, and not to be kept back by
+any trivial hindrances, such as her present unwillingness to accept
+him, or even her repugnance to him, if a freak of the moment had
+carried her so far.  It was a settled thing: Myrtle Hazard must
+become Mrs. Bradshaw; and nobody could deny that, if he gave her his
+name, they had a chance, at least, for a brilliant future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY.
+
+"I 'd like to go down to the store this mornin', Miss Withers, plase.
+Sure I've niver a shoe to my fut, only jist these two that I've got
+on, an' one other pair, and thim is so full of holes that whin I 'm
+standin' in 'em I'm outside of 'em intirely."
+
+"You can go, Kitty," Miss Silence answered, funereally.
+
+Thereupon Kitty Fagan proceeded to array herself in her most tidy
+apparel, including a pair of shoes not exactly answering to her
+description, and set out straight for the house of the Widow Hopkins.
+Arrived at that respectable mansion, she inquired for Mr. Gridley,
+and was informed that he was at home.  Had a message for him,--could
+she see him in his study?  She could if she would wait a little
+while.  Mr. Gridley was busy just at this minute.  Sit down, Kitty,
+and warm yourself at the cooking-stove.
+
+Mistress Kitty accepted Mrs. Hopkins's hospitable offer, and
+presently began orienting herself, and getting ready to make herself
+agreeable.  The kindhearted Mrs. Hopkins had gathered about her
+several other pensioners besides the twins.  These two little people,
+it may be here mentioned, were just taking a morning airing in charge
+of Susan Posey, who strolled along in company with Gifted Hopkins on
+his way to the store."
+
+Mistress Kitty soon began the conversational blandishments so natural
+to her good-humored race.  "It's a little blarney that'll jist suit
+th' old lady," she said to herself, as she made her first
+conciliatory advance.
+
+"An' sure an' it's a beautiful kitten you've got there, Mrs. Hopkins.
+An' it's a splendid mouser she is, I'll be bound.  Does n't she look
+as if she'd clans the house out o'them little bastes, bad luck to em.
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked benignantly upon the more than middle-aged tabby,
+slumbering as if she had never known an enemy, and turned smiling to
+Mistress Kitty.  "Why, bless your heart, Kitty, our old puss would
+n't know a mouse by sight, if you showed her one.  If I was a mouse,
+I'd as lieves have a nest in one of that old cat's ears as anywhere
+else.  You couldn't find a safer place for one."
+
+"Indade, an' to be sure she's too big an' too handsome a pussy to be
+after wastin' her time on them little bastes.  It's that little
+tarrier dog of yours, Mrs. Hopkins, that will be after worryin' the
+mice an' the rats, an' the thaves too, I 'll warrant.  Is n't he a
+fust-rate-lookin' watch-dog, an' a rig'ler rat-hound?"
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked at the little short-legged and short-winded
+animal of miscellaneous extraction with an expression of contempt and
+affection, mingled about half and half.  "Worry 'em!  If they wanted
+to sleep, I rather guess he would worry 'em!  If barkin' would do
+their job for 'em, nary a mouse nor rat would board free gratis in my
+house as they do now.  Noisy little good-for-nothing tike,--ain't
+you, Fret?"
+
+Mistress Kitty was put back a little by two such signal failures.
+There was another chance, however, to make her point, which she
+presently availed herself of,--feeling pretty sure this time that she
+should effect a lodgement.  Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing
+Kitty, first with one eye and then with the other, evidently
+preparing to make a remark, but awkward with a stranger.  "That 's a
+beautiful part y 've got there," Kitty said, buoyant with the
+certainty that she was on safe ground this time; "and tahks like a
+book, I 'll be bound.  Poll!  Poll!  Poor Poll!"
+
+She put forth her hand to caress the intelligent and affable bird,
+which, instead of responding as expected, "squawked," as our phonetic
+language has it, and, opening a beak imitated from a tooth-drawing
+instrument of the good old days, made a shrewd nip at Kitty's
+forefinger.  She drew it back with a jerk.
+
+"An' is that the way your part tahks, Mrs. Hopkins?"
+
+"Talks, bless you, Kitty!  why, that parrot hasn't said a word this
+ten year.  He used to say Poor Poll!  when we first had him, but he
+found it was easier to squawk, and that's all he ever does nowadays,
+--except bite once in a while."
+
+"Well, an' to be sure," Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her
+defeats, " if you'll kape a cat that does n't know a mouse when she
+sees it, an' a dog that only barks for his livin', and a part that
+only squawks an' bites an' niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-
+hearted woman that's alive, an' bliss ye, if ye was only a good
+Catholic, the Holy Father 'd make a saint of ye in less than no
+time!"
+
+So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite
+of her three successive discomfitures.
+
+"You may come up now, Kitty," said Mr. Gridley over the stairs.  He
+had just finished and sealed a letter.
+
+"Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars?  And how
+does our young lady seem to be of late?"
+
+"Whisht!  whisht!  your honor."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw's lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive
+listener.  She opened every door in the room, "by your lave," as she
+said.  She looked all over the walls to see if there was any old
+stovepipe hole or other avenue to eye or ear.  Then she went, in her
+excess of caution, to the window.  She saw nothing noteworthy except
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins and the charge he convoyed, large and small, in
+the distance.  The whole living fleet was stationary for the moment,
+he leaning on the fence with his cheek on his hand, in one of the
+attitudes of the late Lord Byron; she, very near him, listening,
+apparently, in the pose of Mignon aspirant au ciel, as rendered by
+Carlo Dolce Scheffer.
+
+Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr.
+Gridley, who told her to sit down, which she did, first making a
+catch at her apron to dust the chair with, and then remembering that
+she had left that part of her costume at home. --Automatic movements,
+curious.
+
+Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between
+Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for
+herself as the reporter of the occasion.  She then repeated to him,
+in her own way, that part of the conversation which has been already
+laid before the reader.  There is no need of going over the whole of
+this again in Kitty's version, but we may fit what followed into the
+joints of what has been already told.
+
+"He cahled her Cynthy, d' ye see, Mr. Gridley, an' tahked to her jist
+as asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he
+did.  An' so, says he, I'm goin' away, says he, an' I'm goin' to be
+gahn siveral days, or perhaps longer, says he, an' you'd better kape
+it, says he."
+
+"Keep what, Kitty?  What was it he wanted her to keep?" said Mr.
+Gridley, who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot,
+and meant to follow it.  He was getting impatient with the "says
+he's" with which Kitty double-leaded her discourse.
+
+"An' to be sure ain't I tellin' you, Mr. Gridley, jist as fast as my
+breath will let me?  An' so, says he, you'd better kape it, says he,
+mixed up with your other paupers, says he," (Mr. Gridley started,)
+"an' thin we can find it in the garret, says he, whinever we want it,
+says he.  An' if it all goes right out there, says he, it won't be
+lahng before we shall want to find it, says he.  And I can dipind on
+you, says he, for we're both in the same boat, says he, an' you knows
+what I knows, says he, an' I knows what you knows, says be.  And thin
+he taks a stack o' paupers out of his pocket, an' he pulls out one of
+'em, an' he says to her, says he, that's the pauper, says he, an' if
+you die, says be, niver lose sight of that day or night, says he, for
+it's life an' dith to both of us, says he.  An' thin he asks her if
+she has n't got one o' them paupers--what is 't they cahls 'em?--
+divilops, or some sich kind of a name--that they wraps up their
+letters in; an' she says no, she has n't got none that's big enough
+to hold it.  So he says, give me a shate o' pauper, says he.  An'
+thin he takes the pauper that she give him, an' he folds it up like
+one o' them--divilops, if that's the name of 'em; and thin he pulls a
+stick o' salin'-wax out of his pocket, an' a stamp, an' he takes the
+pauper an' puts it into th' other pauper, along with the rest of the
+paupers, an' thin he folds th' other pauper over the paupers, and
+thin he lights a candle, an' he milts the salin'-wax, and he sales up
+the pauper that was outside th' other paupers, an' he writes on the
+back of the pauper, an' thin he hands it to Miss Badlam."
+
+"Did you see the paper that he showed her before he fastened it up
+with the others, Kitty?"
+
+"I did see it, indade, Mr. Gridley, and it's the truth I'm tellin'
+ye."
+
+"Did you happen to notice anything about it, Kitty?  "
+
+"I did, indade, Mr. Gridley.  It was a longish kind of a pauper, and
+there was some blotches of ink on the back of it,--an' they looked
+like a face without any mouth, for, says I, there's two spots for the
+eyes, says I, and there's a spot for the nose, says I, and there's
+niver a spot for the mouth, says I"
+
+This was the substance of what Master Byles Gridley got out of Kitty
+Fagan.  It was enough, yes, it was too much.  There was some deep-
+laid plot between Murray Bradshaw and Cynthia Badlam, involving the
+interests of some of the persons connected with the late Malachi
+Withers; for that the paper described by Kitty was the same that he
+had seen the young man conceal in the Corpus Juris Civilis, it was
+impossible to doubt.  If it had been a single spot an the back of it,
+or two, he might have doubted.  But three large spots "blotches" she
+had called them, disposed thus *.* --would not have happened to be on
+two different papers, in all human probability.
+
+After grave consultation of all his mental faculties in committee of
+the whole, he arrived at the following conclusion,--that Miss Cynthia
+Badlam was the depositary of a secret involving interests which he
+felt it his business to defend, and of a document which was
+fraudulently withheld and meant to be used for some unfair purpose.
+And most assuredly, Master Gridley said to himself, he held a master-
+key, which, just so certainly as he could make up his mind to use it,
+would open any secret in the keeping of Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+
+He proceeded, therefore, without delay, to get ready for a visit to
+that lady at The Poplars.  He meant to go thoroughly armed, for he
+was a very provident old gentleman.  His weapons were not exactly of
+the kind which a housebreaker would provide himself with, but of a
+somewhat peculiar nature.
+
+Weapon number one was a slip of paper with a date and a few words
+written upon it.  "I think this will fetch the document," he said to
+himself, "if it comes to the worst.  Not if I can help it,--not if I
+can help it.  But if I cannot get at the heart of this thing
+otherwise, why, I must come to this.  Poor woman!--Poor woman!"
+
+Weapon number two was a small phial containing spirits of hartshorn,
+sal volatile, very strong, that would stab through the nostrils, like
+a stiletto, deep into the gray kernels that lie in the core of the
+brain.  Excellent in cases of sudden syncope or fainting, such as
+sometimes require the opening of windows, the dashing on of cold
+water, the cutting of stays, perhaps, with a scene of more or less
+tumultuous perturbation and afflux of clamorous womanhood.
+
+So armed, Byles Gridley, A. M., champion of unprotected innocence,
+grasped his ivory-handled cane and sallied forth on his way to The
+Poplars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM.
+
+MISS Cynthia Badlam was seated in a small parlor which she was
+accustomed to consider her own during her long residences at The
+Poplars.  The entry stove warmed it but imperfectly, and she looked
+pinched and cold, for the evenings were still pretty sharp, and the
+old house let in the chill blasts, as old houses are in the habit of
+doing.  She was sitting at her table, with a little trunk open before
+her.  She had taken some papers from it, which she was looking over,
+when a knock at her door announced a visitor, and Master Byles
+Gridley entered the parlor.
+
+As he came into the room, she gathered the papers together and
+replaced them in the trunk, which she locked, throwing an unfinished
+piece of needle-work over it, putting the key in her pocket, and
+gathering herself up for company.  Something of all this Master
+Gridley saw through his round spectacles, but seemed not to see, and
+took his seat like a visitor making a call of politeness.
+
+A visitor at such an hour, of the male sex, without special
+provocation, without social pretext, was an event in the life of the
+desolate spinster.  Could it be--No, it could not--and yet--and yet!
+Miss Cynthia threw back the rather common-looking but comfortable
+shawl which covered her shoulders, and showed her quite presentable
+figure, arrayed with a still lingering thought of that remote
+contingency which might yet offer itself at some unexpected moment;
+she adjusted the carefully plaited cap, which was not yet of the
+lasciate ogni speranza pattern, and as she obeyed these instincts of
+her sex, she smiled a welcome to the respectable, learned, and
+independent bachelor.  Mr. Gridley had a frosty but kindly age before
+him, with a score or so of years to run, which it was after all not
+strange to fancy might be rendered more cheerful by the companionship
+of a well-conserved and amiably disposed woman, if any such should
+happen to fall in his way.
+
+That smile came very near disconcerting the plot of Master Byles
+Gridley.  He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as
+he thought, against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down
+all resistance.  He had come armed with an instrument of torture
+worse than the thumb-screw, worse than the pulleys which attempt the
+miracle of adding a cubit to the stature, worse than the brazier of
+live coals brought close to the naked soles of the feet,--an
+instrument which, instead of trifling with the nerves, would clutch
+all the nerve-centres and the heart itself in its gripe, and hold
+them until it got its answer, if the white lips had life enough left
+to shape one.  And here was this unfortunate maiden lady smiling at
+him, setting her limited attractions in their best light, pleading
+with him in that natural language which makes any contumacious
+bachelor feel as guilty as Cain before any single woman.  If Mr.
+Gridley had been alone, he would have taken a good sniff at his own
+bottle of sal volatile; for his kind heart sunk within him as he
+thought of the errand upon which he had come.  It would not do to
+leave the subject of his vivisection under any illusion as to the
+nature of his designs.
+
+Good evening, Miss Badlam," he said, "I have come to visit you on a
+matter of business."
+
+What was the internal panorama which had unrolled itself at the
+instant of his entrance, and which rolled up as suddenly at the sound
+of his serious voice and the look of his grave features?  It cannot
+be reproduced, though pages were given to it; for some of the
+pictures were near, and some were distant; some were clearly seen,
+and some were only hinted; some were not recognized in the intellect
+at all, and yet they were implied, as it were, behind the others.
+Many times we have all found ourselves glad or sorry, and yet we
+could not tell what thought it was that reflected the sunbeam or cast
+the shadow.  Took into Cynthia's suddenly exalted consciousness and
+see the picture, actual and potential, unroll itself in all its
+details of the natural, the ridiculous, the selfish, the pitiful, the
+human.  Glimpses, hints, echoes, suggestions, involving tender
+sentiments hitherto unknown, we may suppose, to that unclaimed
+sister's breast,--pleasant excitement of receiving congratulations
+from suddenly cordial friends; the fussy delights of buying furniture
+and shopping for new dresses,--(it seemed as if she could hear
+herself saying, "Heavy silks,--best goods, if you please,")--with
+delectable thumping down of flat-sided pieces of calico, cambric,
+"rep," and other stiffs, and rhythmic evolution of measured yards,
+followed by sharp snip of scissors, and that cry of rending tissues
+dearer to woman's ear than any earthly sound until she hears the
+voice of her own first-born,(much of this potentially, remember,)--
+thoughts of a comfortable settlement, an imposing social condition, a
+cheerful household, and by and by an Indian summer of serene
+widowhood,--all these, and infinite other involved possibilities had
+mapped themselves in one long swift flash before Cynthia's inward
+eye, and all vanished as the old man spoke those few words.  The look
+on his face, and the tone of his cold speech, had instantly swept
+them all away, like a tea-set sliding in a single crash from a
+slippery tray.
+
+What could be the "business" on which he had come to her with that
+solemn face?--she asked herself, as she returned his greeting and
+offered him a chair.  She was conscious of a slight tremor as she put
+this question to her own intelligence.
+
+"Are we like to be alone and undisturbed?" Mr. Gridley asked.  It was
+a strange question,--men do act strangely sometimes.  She hardly
+knew.  whether to turn red or white.
+
+"Yes, there is nobody like to come in at present," she answered.  She
+did not know what to make of it.  What was coming next,
+--a declaration, or an accusation of murder?
+
+"My business," Mr. Gridley said, very gravely, "relates to this.  I
+wish to inspect papers which I have reason to believe exist, and
+which have reference to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers.  Can
+you help me to get sight of any of these papers not to be found at
+the Registry of Deeds or the Probate Office?"
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Gridley, but may I ask you what particular concern
+you have with the affairs of my relative, Cousin Malachi Withers,
+that's been dead and buried these half-dozen years?"
+
+"Perhaps it would take some time to answer that question fully, Miss
+Badlam.  Some of these affairs do concern those I am interested in,
+if not myself directly."
+
+"May I ask who the person or persons may be on whose account you wish
+to look at papers belonging to my late relative, Malachi Withers?"
+
+"You can ask me almost anything, Miss Badlam, but I should really be
+very much obliged if you would answer my question first.  Can you
+help me to get a sight of any papers relating to the estate of
+Malachi Withers, not to be found at the Registry of Deeds or the
+Probate Office,--any of which you may happen to have any private and
+particular knowledge?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gridley; but I don't understand why you come
+to me with such questions.  Lawyer Penhallow is the proper person, I
+should think, to go to.  He and his partner that was--Mr. Wibird, you
+know--settled the estate, and he has got the papers, I suppose, if
+there are any, that ain't to be found in the offices you mention."
+
+Mr. Gridley moved his chair a little, so as to bring Miss Badlam's
+face a little more squarely in view.
+
+"Does Mr. William Murray Bradshaw know anything about any papers,
+such as I am referring to, that may have been sent to the office?"
+
+The lady felt a little moisture stealing through all her pores, and
+at the same time a certain dryness of the vocal organs, so that her
+answer came in a slightly altered tone which neither of them could
+help noticing.
+
+"You had better ask Mr. William Murray Bradshaw yourself about that,"
+she answered.  She felt the hook now, and her spines were rising,
+partly with apprehension, partly with irritation.
+
+"Has that young gentleman ever delivered into your hands any papers
+relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your safe
+keeping?"
+
+"What do you mean by asking me these questions, Mr. Gridley?  I don't
+choose to be catechised about Murray Bradshaw's business.  Go to him,
+if you please, if you want to find out about it."
+
+"Excuse my persistence, Miss Badlam, but I must prevail upon you to
+answer my question.  Has Mr. William Murray Bradshaw ever delivered
+into your hands any papers relating to the affairs of the late
+Malachi Withers, for your safe keeping?"
+
+"Do you suppose I am going to answer such questions as you are
+putting me because you repeat them over, Mr. Gridley?  Indeed I
+cha'n't.  Ask him, if you please, whatever you wish to know about his
+doings."
+
+She drew herself up and looked savagely at him.  She had talked
+herself into her courage.  There was a color in her cheeks and a
+sparkle in her eye; she looked dangerous as a cobra.
+
+"Miss Cynthia Badlam," Master Gridley said, very deliberately, "I am
+afraid we do not entirely understand each other.  You must answer my
+question precisely, categorically, point-blank, and on the instant.
+Will you do this at once, or will you compel me to show you the
+absolute necessity of your doing it, at the expense of pain to both
+of us?  Six words from me will make you answer all my questions."
+
+"You can't say six words, nor sixty, Mr. Gridley, that will make me
+answer one question I do not choose to.  I defy you!"
+
+"I will not say one, Miss Cynthia Badlam.  There are some things one
+does not like to speak in words.  But I will show you a scrap of
+paper, containing just six words and a date; not one word more nor
+one less.  You shall read them.  Then I will burn the paper in the
+flame of your lamp.  As soon after that as you feel ready, I will ask
+the same question again."
+
+Master Gridley took out from his pocket-book a scrap of paper, and
+handed it to Cynthia Badlam.  Her hand shook as she received it, for
+she was frightened as well as enraged, and she saw that Mr. Gridley
+was in earnest and knew what he was doing.
+
+She read the six words, he looking at her steadily all the time, and
+watching her as if he had just given her a drop of prussic acid.
+
+No cry.  No sound from her lips.  She stared as if half stunned for
+one moment, then turned her head and glared at Mr. Gridley as if she
+would have murdered him if she dared.  In another instant her face
+whitened, the scrap of paper fluttered to the floor, and she would
+have followed it but for the support of both Mr. Gridley's arms.  He
+disengaged one of them presently, and felt in his pocket for the sal
+volatile.  It served him excellently well, and stung her back again
+to her senses very quickly.  All her defiant aspect had gone.
+
+"Look!" he said, as he lighted the scrap of paper in the flame."
+You understand me, and you see that I must be answered the next time
+I ask my question."
+
+She opened her lips as if to speak.  It was as when a bell is rung in
+a vacuum,--no words came from them,--only a faint gasping sound, an
+effort at speech.  She was caught tight in the heart-screw.
+
+"Don't hurry yourself, Miss Cynthia," he said, with a certain
+relenting tenderness of manner.  " Here, take another sniff of the
+smelling-salts.  Be calm, be quiet,--I am well disposed towards you,
+--I don't like to give you trouble.  There, now, I must have the
+answer to that question; but take your time, take your time."
+
+"Give me some water,--some water!" she said, in a strange hoarse
+whisper.  There was a pitcher of water and a tumbler on an old marble
+sideboard near by.  He filled the tumbler, and Cynthia emptied it as
+if she had just been taken from the rack, and could have swallowed a
+bucketful.
+
+"What do you want to know?" she asked.
+
+"I wish to know all that you can tell me about a certain paper, or
+certain papers, which I have reason to believe Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw committed to your keeping."
+
+"There is only one paper of any consequence.  Do you want to make him
+kill me? or do you want to make me kill myself?"
+
+"Neither, Miss Cynthia, neither.  I wish to see that paper, but not
+for any bad purpose.  Don't you think, on the whole, you have pretty
+good reason to trust me?  I am a very quiet man, Miss Cynthia.  Don't
+be afraid of me; only do what I ask,--it will be a great deal better
+for you in the end."
+
+She thrust her trembling hand into her pocket, and took out the key
+of the little trunk.  She drew the trunk towards her, put the key in
+the lock, and opened it.  It seemed like pressing a knife into her
+own bosom and turning the blade.  That little trunk held all the
+records of her life the forlorn spinster most cherished;--a few
+letters that came nearer to love-letters than any others she had ever
+received; an album, with flowers of the summers of 1840 and 1841
+fading between its leaves; two papers containing locks of hair, half
+of a broken ring, and other insignificant mementos which had their
+meaning, doubtless, to her,--such a collection as is often priceless
+to one human heart, and passed by as worthless in the auctioneer's
+inventory.  She took the papers out mechanically, and laid them on
+the table.  Among them was an oblong packet, sealed with what
+appeared to be the office seal of Messrs. Penhallow and Bradshaw.
+
+"Will you allow me to take that envelope containing papers, Miss
+Badlam?  "Mr. Gridley asked, with a suavity and courtesy in his tone
+and manner that showed how he felt for her sex and her helpless
+position.
+
+She seemed to obey his will as if she had none of her own left.  She
+passed the envelope to him, and stared at him vacantly while he
+examined it.  He read on the back of the package : "Withers Estate--
+old papers--of no importance apparently.  Examine hereafter."
+
+"May I ask when, where, and of whom you obtained these papers, Miss
+Badlam?"
+
+"Have pity on me, Mr. Gridley,--have pity on me.  I am a lost woman
+if you do not.  Spare me! for God's sake, spare me!  There will no
+wrong come of all this, if you will but wait a little while.  The
+paper will come to light when it is wanted, and all will be right.
+But do not make me answer any more questions, and let me keep this
+paper.  O Mr. Gridley!  I am in the power of a dreadful man--"
+
+"You mean Mr. William Murray Bradshaw?"
+
+"I mean him."
+
+"Has there not been some understanding between you that he should
+become the approved suitor of Miss Myrtle Hazard?"
+
+Cynthia wrung her hands and rocked herself backward and forward in
+her misery, but answered not a word.  What could she answer, if she
+had plotted with this "dreadful man" against a young and innocent
+girl, to deliver her over into his hands, at the risk of all her
+earthly hopes and happiness?
+
+Master Gridley waited long and patiently for any answer she might
+have the force to make.  As she made none, he took upon himself to
+settle the whole matter without further torture of his helpless
+victim.
+
+"This package must go into the hands of the parties who had the
+settlement of the estate of the late Malachi Withers.  Mr. Penhallow
+is the survivor of the two gentlemen to whom that business was
+intrusted.  How long is Mr. William Murray Bradshaw like to be away?"
+
+"Perhaps a few days,--perhaps weeks,--and then he will come back and
+kill me,--or--or--worse!  Don't take that paper, Mr. Gridley,--he
+isn't like you! you would n't--but he would--he would send me to
+everlasting misery to gain his own end, or to save himself.  And yet
+he is n't every way bad, and if he did marry Myrtle she'd think there
+never was such a man,--for he can talk her heart out of her, and the
+wicked in him lies very deep and won't ever come out, perhaps, if the
+world goes right with him."  The last part of this sentence showed
+how Cynthia talked with her own conscience; all her mental and moral
+machinery lay open before the calm eyes of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+His thoughts wandered a moment from the business before him; he had
+just got a new study of human nature, which in spite of himself would
+be shaping itself into an axiom for an imagined new edition of
+"Thoughts on the Universe," something like this,"The greatest saint
+may be a sinner that never got down to " hard pan."  It was not the
+time to be framing axioms.
+
+"Poh!  poh!" he said to himself; "what are you about making phrases,
+when you have got a piece of work like this in hand?"  Then to
+Cynthia, with great gentleness and kindness of manner: "Have no fear
+about any consequences to yourself.  Mr. Penhallow must see that
+paper--I mean those papers.  You shall not be a loser nor a sufferer
+if you do your duty now in these premises."
+
+Master Gridley, treating her, as far as circumstances permitted, like
+a gentleman, had shown no intention of taking the papers either
+stealthily or violently.  It must be with her consent.  He had laid
+the package down upon the table, waiting for her to give him leave to
+take it.  But just as he spoke these last words, Cynthia, whose eye
+had been glancing furtively at it while he was thinking out his
+axiom, and taking her bearings to it pretty carefully, stretched her
+hand out, and, seizing the package, thrust it into the sanctuary of
+her bosom.
+
+"Mr. Penhallow must see those papers, Miss Cynthia Badlam," Mr.
+Gridley repeated calmly.  "If he says they or any of them can be
+returned to your keeping, well and good.  But see them he must, for
+they have his office seal and belong in his custody, and, as you see
+by the writing on the back, they have not been examined.  Now there
+may be something among them which is of immediate importance to the
+relatives of the late deceased Malachi Withers, and therefore they
+must be forthwith submitted to the inspection of the surviving
+partner of the firm of Wibird and Penhallow.  This I propose to do,
+with your consent, this evening.  It is now twenty-five minutes past
+eight by the true time, as my watch has it.  At half past eight
+exactly I shall have the honor of bidding you good evening, Miss
+Cynthia Badlam, whether you give me those papers or not.  I shall go
+to the office of Jacob Penhallow, Esquire, and there make one of two
+communications to him; to wit, these papers and the facts connected
+therewith, or another statement, the nature of which you may perhaps
+conjecture."
+
+There is no need of our speculating as to what Mr. Byles Gridley, an
+honorable and humane man, would have done, or what would have been
+the nature of that communication which he offered as an alternative
+to the perplexed woman.  He had not at any rate miscalculated the
+strength of his appeal, which Cynthia interpreted as he expected.
+She bore the heart-screw about two minutes.  Then she took the
+package from her bosom, and gave it with averted face to Master Byles
+Gridley, who, on receiving it, made her a formal but not unkindly
+bow, and bade her good evening.
+
+"One would think it had been lying out in the dew," he said, as he
+left the house and walked towards Mr. Penhallow's residence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+
+MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CONSULTS WITH JACOB PENHALLOW, ESQUIRE
+
+Lawyer Penhallow was seated in his study, his day's work over, his
+feet in slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which
+Sir Walter Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old
+Reports.  He was a knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but
+honest, and therefore less ready to suspect the honesty of others.
+He had a great belief in his young partner's ability, and, though he
+knew him to be astute, did not think him capable of roguery.
+
+It was at his request that Mr. Bradshaw had undertaken his journey,
+which, as he believed,--and as Mr. Bradshaw had still stronger
+evidence of a strictly confidential nature which led him to feel
+sure,--would end in the final settlement of the great land claim in
+favor of their client.  The case had been dragging along from year to
+year, like an English chancery suit; and while courts and lawyers and
+witnesses had been sleeping, the property had been steadily growing.
+A railroad had passed close to one margin of the township, some mines
+had been opened in the county, in which a village calling itself a
+city had grown big enough to have a newspaper and Fourth of July
+orations.  It was plain that the successful issue of the long process
+would make the heirs of the late Malachi Withers possessors of an
+ample fortune, and it was also plain that the firm of Penhallow and
+Bradshaw were like to receive, in such case, the largest fee that had
+gladdened the professional existence of its members.
+
+Mr. Penhallow had his book open before him, but his thoughts were
+wandering from the page.  He was thinking of his absent partner, and
+the probable results of his expedition.  What would be the
+consequence if all this property came into the possession of Silence
+Withers?  Could she have any liberal intentions with reference to
+Myrtle Hazard, the young girl who had grown up with her, or was the
+common impression true, that she was bent on endowing an institution,
+and thus securing for herself a favorable consideration in the higher
+courts, where her beneficiaries would be, it might be supposed,
+influential advocates?  He could not help thinking that Mr. Bradshaw
+believed that Myrtle Hazard would eventually come to apart at least
+of this inheritance.  For the story was, that he was paying his court
+to the young lady whenever he got an opportunity, and that he was
+cultivating an intimacy with Miss Cynthia Badlam.  "Bradshaw would
+n'tmake a move in that direction," Mr. Penhallow said to himself,
+"until he felt pretty sure that it was going to be a paying business.
+If he was only a young minister now, there'd be no difficulty about
+it.  Let any man, young or old, in a clerical white cravat, step up
+to Myrtle Hazard, and ask her to be miserable in his company through
+this wretched life, and aunt Silence would very likely give them her
+blessing, and add something to it that the man in the white cravat
+would think worth even more than that was.  But I don't know what
+she'll say to Bradshaw.  Perhaps he 'd better have a hint to go to
+meeting a little more regularly.  However, I suppose he knows what
+he's about."
+
+He was thinking all this over when a visitor was announced, and Mr.
+Byles Gridley entered the study.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley said, wiping his forehead.
+"Quite warm, is n't it, this evening?"
+
+"Warm!" said Mr. Penhallow, "I should think it would freeze pretty
+thick to-night.  I should have asked you to come up to the fire and
+warm yourself.  But take off your coat, Mr. Gridley,--very glad to
+see you.  You don't come to the house half as often as you come to
+the office.  Sit down, sit down."
+
+Mr. Gridley took off his outside coat and sat down.  "He does look
+warm, does n't he?" Mr. Penhallow thought.  "Wonder what has heated
+up the old gentleman so.  Find out quick enough, for he always goes
+straight to business."
+
+"Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley began at once, "I have come on a very
+grave matter, in which you are interested as well as myself, and I
+wish to lay the whole of it before you as explicitly as I can, so
+that we may settle this night before I go what is to be done.  I am
+afraid the good standing of your partner, Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw, is concerned in the matter.  Would it be a surprise to you,
+if he had carried his acuteness in some particular case like the one
+I am to mention beyond the prescribed limits?"
+
+The question was put so diplomatically that there was no chance for
+an indignant denial of the possibility of Mr. Bradshaw's being
+involved in any discreditable transaction.
+
+"It is possible," he answered, "that Bradshaw's keen wits may have
+betrayed him into sharper practice than I should altogether approve
+in any business we carried on together.  He is a very knowing young
+man, but I can't think he is foolish enough, to say nothing of his
+honesty, to make any false step of the kind you seem to hint.  I
+think he might on occasion go pretty near the line, but I don't
+believe he would cross it."
+
+"Permit me a few questions, Mr. Penhallow.  You settled the estate of
+the late Malachi Withers, did you not?"
+
+"Mr. Wibird and myself settled it together."
+
+"Have you received any papers from any of the family since the
+settlement of the estate?"
+
+"Let me see.  Yes; a roll of old plans of the Withers Place, and so
+forth,--not of much use, but labelled and kept.  An old trunk with
+letters and account-books, some of them in Dutch,--mere curiosities.
+A year ago or more, I remember that Silence sent me over some papers
+she had found in an odd corner,--the old man hid things like a
+magpie.  I looked over most of them,--trumpery not worth keeping,--
+old leases and so forth."
+
+"Do you recollect giving some of them to Mr. Bradshaw to look over?"
+
+"Now I come to think of it, I believe I did; but he reported to me,
+if I remember right, that they amounted to nothing."
+
+"If any of those papers were of importance, should you think your
+junior partner ought to keep them from your knowledge?"
+
+"I need not answer that question, Mr. Gridley.  Will you be so good
+as to come at once to the facts on which you found your suspicions,
+and which lead you to put these questions to me?"
+
+Thereupon Mr. Gridley proceeded to state succinctly the singular
+behavior of Murray Bradshaw in taking one paper from a number handed
+to him by Mr. Penhallow, and concealing it in a volume.  He related
+how he was just on the point of taking out the volume which contained
+the paper, when Mr. Bradshaw entered and disconcerted him.  He had,
+however, noticed three spots on the paper by which he should know it
+anywhere.  He then repeated the substance of Kitty Fagan's story,
+accenting the fact that she too noticed three remarkable spots on the
+paper which Mr. Bradshaw had pointed out to Miss Badlam as the one so
+important to both of them.  Here he rested the case for the moment.
+
+Mr. Penhallow looked thoughtful.  There was something questionable in
+the aspect of this business.  It did obviously suggest the idea of an
+underhand arrangement with Miss Cynthia, possibly involving some very
+grave consequences.  It would have been most desirable, he said, to
+have ascertained what these papers, or rather this particular paper,
+to which so much importance was attached, amounted to.  Without that
+knowledge there was nothing, after all, which it might not be
+possible to explain.  He might have laid aside the spotted paper to
+examine for some object of mere curiosity.  It was certainly odd that
+the one the Fagan woman had seen should present three spots so like
+those on the other paper, but people did sometimes throw treys at
+backgammon, and that which not rarely happened with two dice of six
+faces might happen if they had sixty or six hundred faces.  On the
+whole, he did not see that there was any ground, so far, for anything
+more than a vague suspicion.  He thought it not unlikely that Mr.
+Bradshaw was a little smitten with the young lady up at The Poplars,
+and that he had made some diplomatic overtures to the duenna, after
+the approved method of suitors.  She was young for Bradshaw,--very
+young,--but he knew his own affairs.  If he chose to make love to a
+child, it was natural enough that he should begin by courting her
+nurse.
+
+Master Byles Gridley lost himself for half a minute in a most
+discreditable inward discussion as to whether Laura Penhallow was
+probably one or two years older than Mr. Bradshaw.  That was his way,
+he could not help it.  He could not think of anything without these
+mental parentheses.  But he came back to business at the end of his
+half-minute.
+
+"I can lay the package before you at this moment, Mr. Penhallow.  I
+have induced that woman in whose charge it was left to intrust it to
+my keeping, with the express intention of showing it to you.  But it
+is protected by a seal, as I have told you, which I should on no
+account presume to meddle with."
+
+Mr. Gridley took out the package of papers.
+
+"How damp it is!" Mr. Penhallow said; " must have been lying in some
+very moist neighborhood."
+
+"Very," Mr. Gridley answered, with a peculiar expression which said,
+"Never mind about that."
+
+"Did the party give you possession of these documents without making
+any effort to retain them?" the lawyer asked.
+
+"Not precisely.  It cost some effort to induce Miss Badlam to let
+them go out of her hands.  I hope you think I was justified in making
+the effort I did, not without a considerable strain upon my feelings,
+as well as her own, to get hold of the papers?"
+
+"That will depend something on what the papers prove to be, Mr.
+Gridley.  A man takes a certain responsibility in doing just what you
+have done.  If, for instance, it should prove that this envelope
+contained matters relating solely to private transactions between Mr.
+Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, concerning no one but themselves,--and if
+the words on the back of the envelope and the seal had been put there
+merely as a protection for a package containing private papers of a
+delicate but perfectly legitimate character--"
+
+The lawyer paused, as careful experts do, after bending the bow of an
+hypothesis, before letting the arrow go.  Mr. Gridley felt very warm
+indeed, uncomfortably so, and applied his handkerchief to his face.
+Could n't be anything in such a violent supposition as that, and yet
+such a crafty fellow as that Bradshaw,--what trick was he not up to?
+Absurd!  Cynthia was not acting,--Rachel would n't be equal to such a
+performance!--" why then, Mr. Gridley," the lawyer continued, "I
+don't see but what my partner would have you at an advantage, and, if
+disposed to make you uncomfortable, could do so pretty effectively.
+But this, you understand, is only a supposed case, and not a very
+likely one.  I don't think it would have been prudent in you to
+meddle with that seal.  But it is a very different matter with regard
+to myself.  It makes no difference, so far as I am concerned, where
+this package came from, or how it was obtained.  It is just as
+absolutely within my control as any piece of property I call my own.
+I should not hesitate, if I saw fit, to break this seal at once, and
+proceed to the examination of any papers contained within the
+envelope.  If I found any paper of the slightest importance relating
+to the estate, I should act as if it had never been out of my
+possession.
+
+"Suppose, however, I chose to know what was in the package, and,
+having ascertained, act my judgment about returning it to the party
+from whom you obtained it.  In such case I might see fit to restore
+or cause it to be restored, to the party, without any marks of
+violence having been used being apparent.  If everything is not
+right, probably no questions would be asked by the party having
+charge of the package.  If there is no underhand work going on, and
+the papers are what they profess to be, nobody is compromised but
+yourself, so far as I can see, and you are compromised at any rate,
+Mr. Gridley, at least in the good graces of the party from whom you
+obtained the documents.  Tell that party that I took the package
+without opening it, and shall return it, very likely, without
+breaking the seal.  Will consider of the matter, say a couple of
+days.  Then you shall hear from me, and she shall hear from you.  So.
+So.  Yes, that's it.  A nice business.  A thing to sleep on.  You had
+better leave the whole matter of dealing with the package to me.  If
+I see fit to send it back with the seal unbroken, that is my affair.
+But keep perfectly quiet, if you please, Mr. Gridley, about the whole
+matter.  Mr. Bradshaw is off, as you know, and the business on which
+he is gone is important,--very important.  He can be depended on for
+that; he has acted all along as if he had a personal interest in the
+success of our firm beyond his legal relation to it."
+
+Mr. Penhallow's light burned very late in the office that night, and
+the following one.  He looked troubled and absent-minded, and when
+Miss Laura ventured to ask him how long Mr. Bradshaw was like to be
+gone, he answered her in such a way that the girl who waited at table
+concluded that he did n't mean to have Miss Laury keep company with
+Mr. Bradshaw, or he'd never have spoke so dreadful hash to her when
+she asked about him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+SUSAN POSEY'S TRIAL.
+
+A day or two after Myrtle Hazard returned to the village, Master
+Byles Gridley, accompanied by Gifted Hopkins, followed her, as has
+been already mentioned, to the same scene of the principal events of
+this narrative.  The young man had been persuaded that it would be
+doing injustice to his talents to crowd their fruit prematurely upon
+the market.  He carried his manuscript back with him, having
+relinquished the idea of publishing for the present.  Master Byles
+Gridley, on the other hand, had in his pocket a very flattering
+proposal, from the same publisher to whom he had introduced the young
+poet, for a new and revised edition of his work, "Thoughts on the
+Universe," which was to be remodelled in some respects, and to have a
+new title not quite so formidable to the average reader.
+
+It would be hardly fair to Susan Posey to describe with what delight
+and innocent enthusiasm she welcomed back Gifted Hopkins.  She had
+been so lonely since he was away?  She had read such of his poems as
+she possessed--duplicates of his printed ones, or autographs which he
+had kindly written out for her--over and over again, not without the
+sweet tribute of feminine sensibility, which is the most precious of
+all testimonials to a poet's power over the heart.  True, her love
+belonged to another,--but then she was so used to Gifted!  She did so
+love to hear him read his poems,--and Clement had never written that
+"little bit of a poem to Susie," which she had asked him for so long
+ago!  She received him therefore with open arms,--not literally, of
+course, which would have been a breach of duty and propriety, but in
+a figurative sense, which it is hoped no reader will interpret to her
+discredit.
+
+The young poet was in need of consolation.  It is true that he had
+seen many remarkable sights during his visit to the city; that he had
+got "smarted up," as his mother called it, a good deal; that he had
+been to Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party, where he had looked upon life in
+all its splendors; and that he brought back many interesting
+experiences, which would serve to enliven his conversation for a long
+time.  But he had failed in the great enterprise he had undertaken.
+He was forced to confess to his revered parent, and his esteemed
+friend Susan Posey, that his genius, which was freely acknowledged,
+was not thought to be quite ripe as yet.  He told the young lady some
+particulars of his visit to the publisher, how he had listened with
+great interest to one of his poems, "The Triumph of Song,"--how he
+had treated him with marked and flattering attention; but that he
+advised him not to risk anything prematurely, giving him the hope
+that by and by he would be admitted into that series of illustrious
+authors which it was the publisher's privilege to present to the
+reading public.  In short, he was advised not to print.  That was the
+net total of the matter, and it was a pang to the susceptible heart
+of the poet.  He had hoped to have come home enriched by the sale of
+his copyright, and with the prospect of seeing his name before long
+on the back of a handsome volume.
+
+Gifted's mother did all in her power to console him in his
+disappointment.  There was plenty of jealous people always that
+wanted to keep young folks from rising in the world.  Never mind, she
+did n't believe but what Gifted could make jest as good verses as any
+of them that they kept such a talk about.  She had a fear that he
+might pine away in consequence of the mental excitement he had gone
+through, and solicited his appetite with her choicest appliances,--of
+which he partook in a measure which showed that there was no
+immediate cause of alarm.
+
+But Susan Posey was more than a consoler,--she was an angel to him in
+this time of his disappointment.  "Read me all the poems over again,"
+she said,--"it is almost the only pleasure I have left, to hear you
+read your beautiful verses."  Clement Lindsay had not written to
+Susan quite so often of late as at some former periods of the history
+of their love.  Perhaps it was that which had made her look paler
+than usual for some little time.  Something was evidently preying on
+her.  Her only delight seemed to be in listening to Gifted as he
+read, sometimes with fine declamatory emphasis, sometimes in low,
+tremulous tones, the various poems enshrined in his manuscript.  At
+other times she was sad, and more than once Mrs. Hopkins had seen a
+tear steal down her innocent cheek, when there seemed to be no
+special cause for grief.  She ventured to speak of it to Master Byles
+Gridley.
+
+"Our Susan's in trouble, Mr. Gridley, for some reason or other that's
+unbeknown to me, and I can't help wishing you could jest have a few
+words with her.  You're a kind of a grandfather, you know, to all the
+young folks, and they'd tell you pretty much everything about
+themselves.  I calc'late she is n't at ease in her mind about
+somethin' or other, and I kind o' think, Mr. Gridley, you could coax
+it out of her."
+
+"Was there ever anything like it?" said Master Byles Gridley to
+himself.  "I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take
+care of at this rate.  Susan Posey in trouble, too!  Well, well,
+well, it's easier to get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a
+big ship off the rocks.  Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily
+enough; but Myrtle Hazard floats in deeper water.  We must make Susan
+Posey tell her own story, or let her tell it, for it will all come
+out of itself."
+
+"I am going to dust the books in the open shelves this morning.  I
+wonder if Miss Susan Posey would n't like to help for half an hour or
+so," Master Gridley remarked at the breakfast-table.
+
+The amiable girl's very pleasant countenance lighted up at the
+thought of obliging the old man who had been so kind to her and so
+liberal to her friend, the poet.  She would be delighted to help him;
+she would dust them all for him, if he wanted her to.  No, Master
+Gridley said, he always wanted to have a hand in it; and, besides,
+such a little body as she was could not lift those great folios out
+of the lower shelves without overstraining herself; she might handle
+the musketry and the light artillery, but he must deal with the heavy
+guns himself.  "As low down as the octavos, Susan Posey, you shall
+govern; below that, the Salic law."
+
+Susan did not low much about the Salic law; but she knew he meant
+that he would dust the big books and she would attend to the little
+ones.
+
+A very young and a very pretty girl is sometimes quite charming in a
+costume which thinks of nothing less than of being attractive.  Susan
+appeared after breakfast in the study, her head bound with a kerchief
+of bright pattern, a little jacket she had outgrown buttoned, in
+spite of opposition, close about her up to the throat, round which a
+white handkerchief was loosely tied, and a pair of old gauntlets
+protecting her hands, so that she suggested something between a
+gypsy, a jaunty soubrette, and the fille du regiment.
+
+Master Gridley took out a great volume from the lower shelf,--a folio
+in massive oaken covers with clasps Like prison hinges, bearing the
+stately colophon, white on a ground of vermilion, of Nicholas Jenson
+and his associates.  He opened the volume,--paused over its blue, and
+scarlet initial letter,--he turned page after page, admiring its
+brilliant characters, its broad, white marginal rivers, and the
+narrower white creek that separated the black-typed twin-columns, he
+turned back to the beginning and read the commendatory paragraph,"
+Nam ipsorum omnia fidgent tum correctione dignissima, tum cura
+imprimendo splendida ac miranda,' and began reading, "Incipit
+proemium super apparatum decretalium...." when it suddenly occurred
+to him that this was not exactly doing what he had undertaken to do,
+and he began whisking an ancient bandanna about the ears of the
+venerable volume.  All this time Miss Susan Posey was catching the
+little books by the small of their backs, pulling them out, opening
+them, and clapping them together, 'p-'p-'p!  'p-'p-'p!  and carefully
+caressing all their edges with a regular professional dusting-cloth,
+so persuasively that they yielded up every particle that a year had
+drifted upon them, and came forth refreshed and rejuvenated.  This
+process went on for a while, until Susan had worked down among
+the octavos and Master Gridley had worked up among the quartos.  He
+had got hold of Calmet's Dictionary, and was caught by the article
+Solomon, so that he forgot his occupation again.  All at once it
+struck him that everything was very silent,--the 'p-'p-'p!  of
+clapping the books had ceased, and the light rustle of Susan's dress
+was no longer heard.  He looked up and saw her standing perfectly
+still, with a book in one hand and her duster in the other.  She was
+lost in thought, and by the shadow on her face and the glistening of
+her blue eyes he knew it was her hidden sorrow that had just come
+back to her.  Master Gridley shut up his book, leaving Solomon to his
+fate, like the worthy Benedictine he was reading, without discussing
+the question whether he was saved or not.
+
+"Susan Posey, child, what is your trouble?"
+
+Poor Susan was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least
+touch upsets, and fell to crying.  It took her some time to get down
+the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them.  At last it
+ventured out,--showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the
+billow, sinking into the hollow, and climbing again into notice.
+
+"O Mr. Grid-ley--I can't--I can't--tell you or--any-body--what 's the
+mat-mat-matter.  My heart will br-br-break."
+
+"No, no, no, child," said Mr. Gridley, sympathetically stirred a
+little himself by the sight of Susan in tears and sobbing and
+catching her breath, "that mustn't be, Susan Posey.  Come off the
+steps, Susan Posey, and stop dusting the books,--I can finish them,--
+and tell me all abort your troubles.  I will try 'to help you out of
+them, and I have begun to think I know how to help young people
+pretty well.  I have had some experience at it."
+
+But Susan cried and sobbed all the more uncontrollably and
+convulsively.  Master Gridley thought he had better lead her at once
+to what he felt pretty sure was the source of her grief, and that,
+when she had had her cry out, she would probably make the hole in the
+ice he had broken big enough in a very few minutes.
+
+I think something has gone wrong between you and your friend, the
+young gentleman with whom you are in intimate relations, my child,
+and I think you had better talk freely with me, for I can perhaps
+give you a little counsel that will be of service."
+
+Susan cried herself quiet at last.  "There's nobody in the world like
+you, Mr. Gridley," she said, "and I've been wanting to tell you
+something ever so long.  My friend--Mr. Clem--Clement Lindsay does
+n't care for me as he used to,--I know he does n't.  He hasn't
+written to me for--I don't know but it's a month.  And O Mr. Gridley!
+he's such a great man, and I am such a simple person,--I can't help
+thinking--he would be happier with somebody else than poor little
+Susan Posey!"
+
+This last touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do
+those who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly,
+as a horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before
+she recovered her conversational road-gait.
+
+"O Mr. Gridley," she began again, at length, "if I only dared to tell
+him what I think,--that perhaps it would be happier for us both--if
+we could forget each other!  Ought I not to tell him so?  Don't you
+think he would find another to make him happy?  Wouldn't he forgive
+me for telling him he was free?  Were we not too young to know each
+other's hearts when we promised each other that we would love as long
+as we lived?  Sha'n't I write him a letter this very day and tell him
+all?  Do you think it would be wrong in me to do it?  O Mr. Gridley,
+it makes me almost crazy to think about it.  Clement must be free!  I
+cannot, cannot hold him to a promise he does n't want to keep."
+
+There were so many questions in this eloquent rhapsody of Susan's
+that they neutralized each other, as one might say, and Master
+Gridley had time for reflection.  His thoughts went on something in
+this way:
+
+"Pretty clear case!  Guess Mr. Clement can make up his mind to it.
+Put it well, did n't she?  Not a word about our little Gifted!
+That's the trouble.  Poets!  how they do bewitch these schoolgirls!
+And having a chance every day, too, how could you expect her to stand
+it?"  Then aloud: "Susan Posey, you are a good, honest little girl as
+ever was.  I think you and Clement were too hasty in coming together
+for life before you knew what life meant.  I think if you write
+Clement a letter, telling him that you cannot help fearing that you
+two are not perfectly adapted to each other, on account of certain
+differences for which neither of you is responsible, and that you
+propose that each should release the other from the pledge given so
+long ago,--in that case, I say, I believe he will think no worse of
+you for so doing, and may perhaps agree that it is best for both of
+you to seek your happiness elsewhere than in each other."
+
+The book-dusting came to as abrupt a close as the reading of
+Lancelot.  Susan went straight to her room, dried her tears so as to
+write in a fair hand, but had to stop every few lines and take a turn
+at the "dust-layers," as Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's friend used to call
+the fountains of sensibility.  It would seem like betraying Susan's
+confidence to reveal the contents of this letter, but the reader may
+be assured that it was simple and sincere and very sweetly written,
+without the slightest allusion to any other young man, whether of the
+poetical or cheaper human varieties.
+
+It was not long before Susan received a reply from Clement Lindsay.
+It was as kind and generous and noble as she could have asked.  It
+was affectionate, as a very amiable brother's letter might be, and
+candidly appreciative of the reasons Susan had assigned for her
+proposal.  He gave her back her freedom, not that he should cease to
+feel an interest in her, always.  He accepted his own release, not
+that he would ever think she could be indifferent to his future
+fortunes.  And within a very brief period of time after sending his
+answer to Susan Posey, whether he wished to see her in person, or
+whether he had some other motive, he had packed his trunk, and made
+his excuses for an absence of uncertain length at the studio, and was
+on his way to Oxbow Village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+JUST AS YOU EXPECTED.
+
+The spring of 1861 had now arrived,--that eventful spring which was
+to lift the curtain and show the first scene of the first act in the
+mighty drama which fixed the eyes of mankind during four bloody
+years.  The little schemes of little people were going on in all our
+cities and villages without thought of the fearful convulsion which
+was soon coming to shatter the hopes and cloud the prospects of
+millions.  Our little Oxbow Village, which held itself by no means
+the least of human centres, was the scene of its own commotions, as
+intense and exciting to those concerned as if the destiny of the
+nation had been involved in them.
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay appeared suddenly in that important locality, and
+repaired to his accustomed quarters at the house of Deacon Rumrill.
+That worthy person received him with a certain gravity of manner,
+caused by his recollections of the involuntary transgression into
+which Mr. Lindsay had led him by his present of "Ivanhoe." --He was,
+on the whole, glad to see him, for his finances were not yet wholly
+recovered from the injury inflicted on them by the devouring element.
+But he could not forget that his boarder had betrayed him into a
+breach of the fourth commandment, and that the strict eyes of his
+clergyman had detected him in the very commission of the offence.  He
+had no sooner seen Mr. Clement comfortably installed, therefore, than
+he presented himself at the door of his chamber with the book,
+enveloped in strong paper and very securely tied round with a stout
+string.
+
+"Here is your vollum, Mr. Lindsay," the Deacon said.  "I understand
+it is not the work of that great and good mahn who I thought wrote
+it.  I did not see anything immoral in it as fur as I read, but it
+belongs to what I consider a very dangerous class of publications.
+These novels and romances are awfully destructive to our youth.  I
+should recommend you, as a young man of principle, to burn the
+vollum.  At least I hope you will not leave it about anywhere unless
+it is carefully tied up.  I have written upon the paper round it to
+warn off all the young persons of my household from meddling with
+it."
+
+True enough, Mr. Clement saw in strong black letters on the back of
+the paper wrapping his unfortunate "Ivanhoe,"---
+
+"DANGEROUS READING FOR CHRISTIAN YOUTH.
+
+"TOUCH NOT THE UNCLEAN THING."
+
+"I thought you said you had Scott's picture hung up in your parlor,
+Deacon Rumrill," he said, a little amused with the worthy man's fear
+and precautions.
+
+"It is the great Scott's likeness that I have in my parlor," he said;
+"I will show it to you if you will come with me."
+
+Mr. Clement followed the Deacon into that sacred apartment.
+
+"That is the portrait of the great Scott," he said, pointing to an
+engraving of a heavy-looking person whose phrenological developments
+were a somewhat striking contrast to those of the distinguished Sir
+Walter.
+
+"I will take good care that none of your young people see this
+volume," Mr. Clement said; "I trust you read it yourself, however,
+and found something to please you in it.  I am sure you are safe from
+being harmed by any such book.  Did n't you have to finish it,
+Deacon, after you had once begun?"
+
+"Well, I--I--perused a consid'able portion of the work," the Deacon
+answered, in a way that led Mr. Clement to think he had not stopped
+much short of Finis.  "Anything new in the city?"
+
+"Nothing except what you've all had,--Confederate States establishing
+an army and all that,--not very new either.  What has been going on
+here lately, Deacon?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Lindsay, not a great deal.  My new barn is pretty nigh
+done.  I've got as fine a litter of pigs as ever you see.  I don't
+know whether you're a judge of pigs or no.  The Hazard gal's come
+back, spilt, pooty much, I guess.  Been to one o' them fashionable
+schools,--I 've heerd that she 's learnt to dance.  I've heerd say
+that that Hopkins boy's round the Posey gal, come to think, she's the
+one you went with some when you was here,--I 'm gettin' kind o'
+forgetful.  Old Doctor Hurlbut's pretty low,--ninety-four year old,--
+born in '67,--folks ain't ginerally very spry after they're ninety,
+but he held out wonderful."
+
+"How's Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+"Well, the young squire, he's off travellin' somewhere in the West,
+or to Washin'ton, or somewhere else,--I don't jestly know where.
+They say that he's follerin' up the courts in the business about old
+Malachi's estate.  I don' know much about it."
+
+The news got round Oxbow Village very speedily that Mr. Clement
+Lindsay, generally considered the accepted lover of Miss Susan Posey,
+had arrived in that place.  Now it had come to be the common talk of
+the village that young Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were getting to
+be mighty thick with each other, and the prevailing idea was that
+Clement's visit had reference to that state of affairs.  Some said
+that Susan had given her young man the mitten, meaning thereby that
+she had signified that his services as a suitor were dispensed with.
+Others thought there was only a wavering in her affection for her
+lover, and that he feared for her constancy, and had come to
+vindicate his rights.
+
+Some of the young fellows, who were doubtless envious of Gifted's
+popularity with the fair sex, attempted in the most unjustifiable
+manner to play upon his susceptible nature.  One of them informed him
+that he had seen that Lindsay fellah raound taown with the darndest
+big stick y' ever did see.  Looked kind o' savage and wild like.
+Another one told him that perhaps he'd better keep a little shady;
+that are chap that had got the mittin was praowlin' abaout  -with a
+pistil,--one o' them Darringers,--abaout as long as your thumb, an'
+fire a bullet as big as a p'tatah-ball,--'a fellah carries one in his
+breeches-pocket, an' shoots y' right threugh his own pahnts, withaout
+ever takin' on it aout of his pocket.  The stable-keeper, who, it may
+be remembered, once exchanged a few playful words with Mr. Gridley,
+got a hint from some of these unfeeling young men, and offered the
+resources of his stable to the youth supposed to be in peril.
+
+"I 've got a faast colt, Mr. Hopkins, that 'll put twenty mild
+betwixt you an' this here village, as quick as any four huffs 'll dew
+it in this here caounty, if you should want to get away suddin.  I've
+heern tell there was some lookin' raound here that wouldn't be
+wholesome to meet,--jest say the word, Mr. Hopkins, an' I 'll have ye
+on that are colt's back in less than no time, an' start ye off full
+jump.  There's a good many that's kind o' worried for fear something
+might happen to ye, Mr. Hopkins,--y' see fellahs don't like to have
+other chaps cuttin' on 'em aout with their gals."
+
+Gifted Hopkins had become excessively nervous by this time.  It is
+true that everything in his intimacy with Susan Posey, so far, might
+come under the general head of friendship; but he was conscious that
+something more was in both their thoughts.  Susan had given him
+mysterious hints that her relations with Clement had undergone a
+change, but had never had quite courage enough, perhaps had too much
+delicacy, to reveal the whole truth.
+
+Gifted was walking home, deeply immersed in thoughts excited by the
+hints which hail been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his
+imagination, when all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement
+Lindsay coming straight towards him.  Gifted was unarmed, except with
+a pair of blunt scissors, which he carried habitually in his pocket.
+What should he do?  Should he fly?  But he was never a good runner,
+being apt to find himself scant o' breath, like Hamlet, after violent
+exercise.  His demeanor on the occasion did credit to his sense of
+his own virtuous conduct and his self-possession.  He put his hand
+out, while yet at a considerable distance, and marched up towards
+Clement, smiling with all the native amiability which belonged to
+him.
+
+To his infinite relief, Clement put out his hand to grasp the one
+offered him, and greeted the young poet in the most frank and cordial
+manner.
+
+"And how is Miss Susan Posey, Mr. Hopkins?" asked Clement, in the
+most cheerful tone.  "It is a long while since I have seen her, and
+you must tell her that I hope I shall not leave the village without
+finding time to call upon her.  She and I are good friends always,
+Mr. Hopkins, though perhaps I shall not be quite so often at your
+mother's as I was during my last visit to Oxbow Village."
+
+Gifted felt somewhat as the subject of one of those old-fashioned
+forms of argument, formerly much employed to convince men of error in
+matters of religion, must have felt when the official who
+superintended the stretching-machine said, "Slack up!"
+
+He told Mr. Clement all about Susan, and was on the point of saying
+that if he, Mr. Clement, did not claim any engrossing interest in
+her, he, Gifted, was ready to offer her the devotion of a poet's
+heart.  Mr. Clement, however, had so many other questions to ask him
+about everybody in the village, more particularly concerning certain
+young persons in whom he seemed to be specially interested, that
+there was no chance to work in his own revelations of sentiment.
+
+Clement Lindsay had come to Oxbow Village with a single purpose.  He
+could now venture to trust himself in the presence of Myrtle Hazard.
+He was free, and he knew nothing to show that she had lost the
+liberty of disposing of her heart.  But after an experience such as
+he had gone through, he was naturally distrustful of himself, and
+inclined to be cautious and reserved in yielding to a new passion.
+Should he tell her the true relations in which they stood to each
+other,--that she owed her life to him, and that he had very nearly
+sacrificed his own in saving hers?  Why not?  He had a claim on her
+gratitude for what he had done in her behalf, and out of this
+gratitude there might naturally spring a warmer feeling.
+
+No, he could not try to win her affections by showing that he had
+paid for them beforehand.  She seemed to be utterly unconscious of
+the fact that it was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters.
+If the thought came to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it
+would be time enough to tell her the story.  If not, the moment might
+arrive when he could reveal to her the truth that he was her
+deliverer, without accusing himself of bribing her woman's heart to
+reward him for his services.  He would wait for that moment.
+
+It was the most natural thing in the world that Mr. Lindsay, a young
+gentleman from the city, should call to see Miss Hazard, a young lady
+whom he had met recently at a party.  To that pleasing duty he
+addressed himself the evening after his arrival.
+
+"The young gentleman's goin' a courtin', I calc'late," was the remark
+of the Deacon's wife when she saw what a comely figure Mr. Clement
+showed at the tea-table.
+
+"A very hahnsome young mahn," the Deacon replied, "and looks as if he
+might know consid'able.  An architect, you know,--a sort of a
+builder.  Wonder if he has n't got any good plans for a hahnsome
+pigsty.  I suppose he 'd charge somethin' for one, but it couldn't be
+much, an' he could take it out in board."
+
+"Better ask him," his wife--said; "he looks mighty pleasant; there's
+nothin' lost by askin', an' a good deal got sometimes, grandma used
+to say."
+
+The Deacon followed her advice.  Mr. Clement was perfectly good-
+natured about it, asked the Deacon the number of snouts in his
+menagerie, got an idea of the accommodations required, and sketched
+the plaza of a neat, and appropriate edifice for the Porcellarium, as
+Master Gridley afterwards pleasantly christened it, which was carried
+out by the carpenter, and stands to this day a monument of his
+obliging disposition, and a proof that there is nothing so humble
+that taste cannot be shown in it.
+
+"What'll be your charge for the plan of the pigsty, Mr. Lindsay?" the
+Deacon inquired with an air of interest,--he might have become
+involved more deeply than he had intended.  "How much should you call
+about right for the picter an' figgerin'?"
+
+"Oh, you're quite welcome to my sketch of a plan, Deacon.  I've seen
+much showier buildings tenanted by animals not very different from
+those your edifice is meant for."
+
+Mr. Clement found the three ladies sitting together in the chill, dim
+parlor at The Poplars.  They had one of the city papers spread out on
+the table, and Myrtle was reading aloud the last news from Charleston
+Harbor.  She rose as Mr. Clement entered, and stepped forward to meet
+him.  It was a strange impression this young man produced upon her,--
+not through the common channels of the intelligence, not exactly that
+"magnetic " influence of which she had had experience at a former
+time.  It did not over come her as at the moment of their second
+meeting.  But it was something she must struggle against, and she had
+force and pride and training enough now to maintain her usual
+tranquillity, in spite of a certain inward commotion which seemed to
+reach her breathing and her pulse by some strange, inexplicable
+mechanism.
+
+Myrtle, it must be remembered, was no longer the simple country girl
+who had run away at fifteen, but a young lady of seventeen, who had
+learned all that more than a year's diligence at a great school could
+teach her, who had been much with girls of taste and of culture, and
+was familiar with the style and manners of those who came from what
+considered itself the supreme order in the social hierarchy.  Her
+natural love for picturesque adornment was qualified by a knowledge
+of the prevailing modes not usual in so small a place as Oxbow
+Village.  All this had not failed to produce its impression on those
+about her.  Persons who, like Miss Silence Withers, believe, not in
+education, inasmuch as there is no healthy nature to be educated, but
+in transformation, worry about their charges up to a certain period
+of their lives.  Then, if the transformation does not come, they seem
+to think their cares and duties are at an end, and, considering their
+theories of human destiny, usually accept the situation with
+wonderful complacency.  This was the stage which Miss Silence Withers
+had reached with reference to Myrtle.  It made her infinitely more
+agreeable, or less disagreeable, as the reader may choose one or the
+other statement, than when she was always fretting about her
+"responsibility."  She even began to take an interest in some of
+Myrtle's worldly experiences, and something like a smile would now
+and then disarrange the chief-mourner stillness of her features, as
+Myrtle would tell some lively story she had brought away from the gay
+society she had frequented.
+
+Cynthia Badlam kept her keen eyes on her like a hawk.  Murray
+Bradshaw was away, and here was this handsome and agreeable youth
+coming in to poach on the preserve of which she considered herself
+the gamekeeper.  What did it mean?  She had heard the story about
+Susan's being off with her old love and on with a new one.  Ah ha!
+this is the game, is it?
+
+Clement Lindsay passed not so much a pleasant evening, as one of
+strange, perplexed, and mingled delight and inward conflict.  He had
+found his marble once more turned to flesh and blood, and breathing
+before him.  This was the woman he was born for; her form was fit to
+model his proudest ideal from, her eyes melted him when they rested
+for an instant on his face,--her voice reached the hidden
+sensibilities of his inmost nature; those which never betray their
+existence until the outward chord to which they vibrate in response
+sends its message to stir them.  But was she not already pledged to
+that other,--that cold-blooded, contriving, venal, cynical, selfish,
+polished, fascinating man of the world, whose artful strategy would
+pass with nine women out of ten for the most romantic devotion?
+
+If he had known the impression he made, he would have felt less
+anxiety with reference to this particular possibility.  Miss Silence
+expressed herself gratified with his appearance, and thought he
+looked like a good young man,--he reminded her of a young friend of
+hers who--[It was the same who had gone to one of the cannibal
+islands as a missionary,--and stayed there.] Myrtle was very quiet.
+She had nothing to say about Clement, except that she had met him at
+a party in the city, and found him agreeable.  Miss Cynthia wrote a
+letter to Murray Bradshaw that very evening, telling him that he had
+better come back to Oxbow Village as quickly as he could, unless he
+wished to find his place occupied by an intruder.
+
+In the mean time, the country was watching the garrison in Charleston
+Harbor.  All at once the first gun of the four years' cannonade
+hurled its ball against the walls of Fort Sumter.  There was no
+hamlet in the land which the reverberations of that cannon-roar did
+not reach.  There was no valley so darkened by overshadowing hills
+that it did not see the American flag hauled down on the 13th of
+April.  There was no loyal heart in the North that did not answer to
+the call of the country to its defenders which went forth two days
+later.  The great tide of feeling reached the locality where the
+lesser events of our narrative were occurring.  A meeting of the
+citizens was instantly called.  The venerable Father Pemberton opened
+it with a prayer that filled every soul with courage and high
+resolve.  The young farmers and mechanics of that whole region joined
+the companies to which they belonged, or organized in squads and
+marched at once, or got ready to march, to the scene of conflict.
+
+The contagion of warlike patriotism reached the most peacefully
+inclined young persons.
+
+"My country calls me," Gifted Hopkins said to Susan Posey, "and I am
+preparing to obey her summons.  If I can pass the medical
+examination, which it is possible I may, though I fear my
+constitution may be thought too weak, and if no obstacle impedes me,
+I think of marching in the ranks of the Oxbow Invincibles.  If I go,
+Susan, and I fall, will you not remember me .  .  .  as one who .  .
+.  cherished the tenderest .  .  .  sentiments .  .  .  towards you .
+.  .  and who had looked forward to the time when .  .  .  when .  ."
+
+His eyes told the rest.  He loved!
+
+Susan forgot all the rules of reserve to which she had been trained.
+What were cold conventionalities at such a moment?  "Never!  never!"
+she said, throwing her arms about his neck and mingling her tears
+with his, which were flowing freely.  "Your country does not need
+your sword ....  but it does need .  .  .  your pen.  Your poems will
+inspire .  .  .  our soldiers.  .  .  .  The Oxbow Invincibles will
+march to victory, singing your songs .  .  .  .  If you go .  .  .
+and if you..  .  fall .  .  .  O Gifted!  .  .  .  I .  .  .  I .  .
+.  yes, I shall die too!"
+
+His love was returned.  He was blest!
+
+"Susan," he said, "my own Susan, I yield to your wishes at every
+sacrifice.  Henceforth they will be my law.  Yes, I will stay and
+encourage my brave countrymen to go forward to the bloody field.  My
+voice shall urge them on to the battle-ground.  I will give my
+dearest breath to stimulate their ardor.
+
+O Susan!  My own, own Susan!"
+
+While these interesting events had been going on beneath the modest
+roof of the Widow Hopkins, affairs had been rapidly hastening to a
+similar conclusion under the statelier shadow of The Poplars.
+Clement Lindsay was so well received at his first visit that he
+ventured to repeat it several times, with so short intervals that it
+implied something more than a common interest in one of the members
+of the household.  There was no room for doubt who this could be, and
+Myrtle Hazard could not help seeing that she was the object of his
+undisguised admiration.  The belief was now general in the village
+that Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were either engaged or on the
+point of being so; and it was equally understood that, whatever might
+be the explanation, she and her former lover had parted company in an
+amicable manner.
+
+Love works very strange transformations in young women.  Sometimes it
+leads them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,--their
+whole thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so
+as to keep out all other images.  Poor darlings!  We smile at their
+little vanities, as if they were very trivial things compared with
+the last Congressman's speech or the great Election Sermon; but
+Nature knows well what she is about.  The maiden's ribbon or ruffle
+means a great deal more for her than the judge's wig or the priest's
+surplice.
+
+It was not in this way that the gentle emotion awaking in the breast
+of Myrtle Hazard betrayed itself.  As the thought dawned in her
+consciousness that she was loved, a change came over her such as the
+spirit that protected her, according to the harmless fancy she had
+inherited, might have wept for joy to behold, if tears could flow
+from angelic eyes.  She forgot herself and her ambitions,--the
+thought of shining in the great world died out in the presence of new
+visions of a future in which she was not to be her own,--of feelings
+in the depth of which the shallow vanities which had drawn her young
+eyes to them for a while seemed less than nothing.  Myrtle had not
+hitherto said to herself that Clement was her lover, yet her whole
+nature was expanding and deepening in the light of that friendship
+which any other eye could have known at a glance for the great
+passion.
+
+Cynthia Badlam wrote a pressing letter to Murray Bradshaw.  "There is
+no time to be lost; she is bewitched, and will be gone beyond hope if
+this business is not put a stop to."
+
+Love moves in an accelerating ratio; and there comes a time when the
+progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings
+two young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer
+together, into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an
+infinity between the moment when all is told and that which went just
+before.
+
+They were sitting together by themselves in the dimly lighted parlor.
+They had told each other many experiences of their past lives, very
+freely, as two intimate friends of different sex might do.  Clement
+had happened to allude to Susan, speaking very kindly and tenderly of
+her.  He hoped this youth to whom she was attached would make her
+life happy.  "You know how simple-hearted and good she is; her image
+will always be a pleasant one in my memory,--second to but one
+other."
+
+Myrtle ought, according to the common rules of conversation, to have
+asked, What other?  but she did not.  She may have looked as if she
+wanted to ask,--she may have blushed or turned pale, perhaps she
+could not trust her voice; but whatever the reason was, she sat
+still, with downcast eyes.  Clement waited a reasonable time, but,
+finding it was of no use, began again.
+
+"Your image is the one other,--the only one, let me say, for all else
+fades in its presence,--your image fills all my thought.  Will you
+trust your life and happiness with one who can offer you so little
+beside his love?  You know my whole heart is yours."
+
+Whether Myrtle said anything in reply or not, whether she acted like
+Coleridge's Genevieve,--that is, "fled to him and wept," or suffered
+her feelings to betray themselves in some less startling confession,
+we will leave untold.  Her answer, spoken or silent, could not have
+been a cruel one, for in another moment Clement was pressing his lips
+to hers, after the manner of accepted lovers.
+
+"Our lips have met to-day for the second time," he said, presently.
+
+She looked at him in wonder.  What did he mean?  The second time!
+How assuredly he spoke!  She looked him calmly in the face, and
+awaited his explanation.
+
+"I have a singular story to tell you.  On the morning of the 16th of
+June, now nearly two years ago, I was sitting in my room at
+Alderbank, some twenty miles down the river, when I heard a cry for
+help coming from the river.  I ran down to the bank, and there I saw
+a boy in an old boat--"
+
+When it came to the "boy" in the old boat, Myrtle's cheeks flamed so
+that she could not bear it, and she covered her face with both her
+hands.  But Clement told his story calmly through to the end, sliding
+gently over its later incidents, for Myrtle's heart was throbbing
+violently, and her breath a little catching and sighing, as when she
+had first lived with the new life his breath had given her.
+
+
+"Why did you ask me for myself, when you could have claimed me?" she
+said.
+
+"I wanted a free gift, Myrtle," Clement answered, "and I have it."
+
+They sat in silence, lost in the sense of that new life which had
+suddenly risen on their souls.
+
+The door-bell rang sharply.  Kitty Fagan answered its summons, and
+presently entered the parlor and announced that Mr. Bradshaw was in
+the library, and wished to see the ladies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+MURRAY BRADSHAW PLAYS HIS LAST CARD.
+
+"How can I see that man this evening, Mr. Lindsay?"
+
+"May I not be Clement, dearest?  I would not see him at all, Myrtle.
+I don't believe you will find much pleasure in listening to his fine
+speeches."
+
+"I cannot endure it. --Kitty, tell him I am engaged, and cannot see
+him this evening.  No, no!  don't say engaged, say very much
+occupied."
+
+Kitty departed, communing with herself in this wise:--" Ockipied, is
+it?  An' that's what ye cahl it when ye 're kapin' company with one
+young gintleman an' don't want another young gintleman to come in an'
+help the two of ye?  Ye won't get y'r pigs to market to-day, Mr.
+Bridshaw, no, nor to-morrow, nayther, Mr. Bridshaw.  It's Mrs.
+Lindsay that Miss Myrtle is goin' to be,--an' a big cake there'll be
+at the weddin' frosted all over,--won't ye be plased with a slice o'
+that, Mr. Bridshaw?"
+
+With these reflections in her mind, Mistress Kitty delivered her
+message, not without a gleam of malicious intelligence in her look
+that stung Mr. Bradshaw sharply.  He had noticed a hat in the entry,
+and a little stick by it which he remembered well as one he had seen
+carried by Clement Lindsay.  But he was used to concealing his
+emotions, and he greeted the two older ladies who presently came into
+the library so pleasantly, that no one who had not studied his face
+long and carefully would have suspected the bitterness of heart that
+lay hidden far down beneath his deceptive smile.  He told Miss
+Silence, with much apparent interest, the story of his journey.  He
+gave her an account of the progress of the case in which the estate
+of which she inherited the principal portion was interested.  He did
+not tell her that a final decision which would settle the right to
+the great claim might be expected at any moment, and he did not tell
+her that there was very little doubt that it would be in favor of the
+heirs of Malachi Withers.  He was very sorry he could not see Miss
+Hazard that evening,--hoped he should be more fortunate to-morrow
+forenoon, when he intended to call again,--had a message for her from
+one of her former school friends, which he was anxious to give her.
+He exchanged certain looks and hints with Miss Cynthia, which led her
+to withdraw and bring down the papers he had entrusted to her.  At
+the close of his visit, she followed him into the entry with a lamp,
+as was her common custom.
+
+"What's the meaning of all this, Cynthia?  Is that fellow making love
+to Myrtle?"
+
+"I'm afraid so, Mr. Bradshaw.  He's been here several times, and they
+seem to be getting intimate.  I couldn't do anything to stop it."
+
+"Give me the papers,--quick!"
+
+Cynthia pulled the package from her pocket.  Murray Bradshaw looked
+sharply at it.  A little crumpled,--crowded into her pocket.  Seal
+unbroken.  All safe.
+
+"I shall come again to-morrow forenoon.  Another day and it will be
+all up.  The decision of the court will be known.  It won't be my
+fault if one visit is not enough. --You don't suppose Myrtle is in
+love with this fellow?"
+
+"She acts as--if she might be.  You know he's broke with Susan Posey,
+and there's nothing to hinder.  If you ask my opinion, I think it's
+your last chance: she is n't a girl to half do things, and if she has
+taken to this man it will be hard to make her change her mind.  But
+she's young, and she has had a liking for you, and if you manage it
+well there's no telling."
+
+Two notes passed between Myrtle Hazard and Master Byles Gridley that
+evening.  Mistress Kitty Fagan, who had kept her ears pretty wide
+open, carried them.
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home in a very desperate state of feeling.  He
+had laid his plans, as he thought, with perfect skill, and the
+certainty of their securing their end.  These papers were to have
+been taken from the envelope, and found in the garret just at the
+right moment, either by Cynthia herself or one of the other members
+of the family, who was to be led on, as it were accidentally, to the
+discovery.  The right moment must be close at hand.  He was to offer
+his hand--and heart, of course--to Myrtle, and it was to be accepted.
+As soon as the decision of the land case was made known, or not long
+afterwards, there was to be a search in the garret for papers, and
+these were to be discovered in a certain dusty recess, where, of
+course, they would have been placed by Miss Cynthia.
+
+And now the one condition which gave any value to these arrangements
+seemed like to fail.  This obscure youth--this poor fool, who had
+been on the point of marrying a simpleton to whom he had made a
+boyish promise--was coming between him and the object of his long
+pursuit,--the woman who had every attraction to draw him to herself.
+It had been a matter of pride with Murray Bradshaw that he never lost
+his temper so as to interfere with the precise course of action which
+his cool judgment approved; but now he was almost beside himself with
+passion.  His labors, as he believed, had secured the favorable issue
+of the great case so long pending.  He had followed Myrtle through
+her whole career, if not as her avowed lover, at least as one whose
+friendship promised to flower in love in due season.  The moment had
+come when the scene and the characters in this village drama were to
+undergo a change as sudden and as brilliant as is seen in those fairy
+spectacles where the dark background changes to a golden palace and
+the sober dresses are replaced by robes of regal splendor.  The
+change was fast approaching; but he, the enchanter, as he had thought
+himself, found his wand broken, and his power given to another.
+
+He could not sleep during that night.  He paced his room, a prey to
+jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him
+from feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour.  He
+thought of all that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own
+intolerable anguish.  Of revenge.  If Myrtle rejected his suit,
+should he take her life on the spot, that she might never be
+another's,--that neither man nor woman should ever triumph over him,
+--the proud ambitious man, defeated, humbled, scorned?  No! that was
+a meanness of egotism which only the most vulgar souls could be
+capable of.  Should he challenge her lover?  It was not the way of
+the people and time, and ended in absurd complications, if anybody
+was foolish enough to try it.  Shoot him?  The idea floated through
+his mind, for he thought of everything; but he was a lawyer, and not
+a fool, and had no idea of figuring in court as a criminal.  Besides,
+he was not a murderer,--cunning was his natural weapon, not violence.
+He had a certain admiration of desperate crime in others, as showing
+nerve and force, but he did not feel it to be his own style of doing
+business.
+
+During the night he made every arrangement for leaving the village
+the next day, in case he failed to make any impression on Myrtle
+Hazard and found that his chance was gone.  He wrote a letter to his
+partner, telling him that he had left to join one of the regiments
+forming in the city.  He adjusted all his business matters so that
+his partner should find as little trouble as possible.  A little
+before dawn he threw himself on the bed, but he could not sleep; and
+he rose at sunrise, and finished his preparations for his departure
+to the city.
+
+The morning dragged along slowly.  He could not go to the office, not
+wishing to meet his partner again.  After breakfast he dressed
+himself with great care, for he meant to show himself in the best
+possible aspect.  Just before he left the house to go to The Poplars,
+he took the sealed package from his trunk, broke open the envelope,
+took from it a single paper,--it had some spots on it which
+distinguished it from all the rest,--put it separately in his pocket,
+and then the envelope containing the other papers.  The calm smile be
+wore on his features as he set forth cost him a greater effort than
+he had ever made before to put it on.  He was moulding his face to
+the look with which he meant to present himself; and the muscles had
+been sternly fixed so long that it was a task to bring them to their
+habitual expression in company,--that of ingenuous good-nature.
+
+He was shown into the parlor at The Poplars; and Kitty told Myrtle
+that he had called and inquired for her and was waiting down stairs.
+
+"Tell him I will be down presently," she said.  "And, Kitty, now mind
+just what I tell you.  Leave your kitchen door open, so that you can
+hear anything fall in the parlor.  If you hear a book fall,--it will
+be a heavy one, and will make some noise,--run straight up here to my
+little chamber, and hang this red scarf out of the window.  The left-
+hand side-sash, mind, so that anybody can see it from the road.  If
+Mr. Gridley calls, show him into the parlor, no matter who is there."
+
+Kitty Fagan looked amazingly intelligent, and promised that she would
+do exactly as she was told.  Myrtle followed her down stairs almost
+immediately, and went into the parlor, where Mr. Bradshaw was
+waiting.
+
+Never in his calmest moments had he worn a more insinuating smile on
+his features than that with which he now greeted Myrtle.  So gentle,
+so gracious, so full of trust, such a completely natural expression
+of a kind, genial character did it seem, that to any but an expert it
+would have appeared impossible that such an effect could be produced
+by the skilful balancing of half a dozen pairs of little muscles that
+manage the lips and the corners of the mouth.  The tones of his voice
+were subdued into accord with the look of his features; his whole
+manner was fascinating, as far as any conscious effort could make it
+so.  It was just one of those artificially pleasing effects that so
+often pass with such as have little experience of life for the
+genuine expression of character and feeling.  But Myrtle had learned
+the look that shapes itself on the features of one who loves with a
+love that seeketh not its own, and she knew the difference between
+acting and reality.  She met his insinuating approach with a courtesy
+so carefully ordered that it was of itself a sentence without appeal.
+Artful persons often interpret sincere ones by their own standard.
+Murray Bradshaw thought little of this somewhat formal address,--a
+few minutes would break this thin film to pieces.  He was not only a
+suitor with a prize to gain, he was a colloquial artist about to
+employ all the resources of his specialty.
+
+He introduced the conversation in the most natural and easy way, by
+giving her the message from a former school-mate to which he had
+referred, coloring it so delicately, as he delivered it, that it
+became an innocent-looking flattery.  Myrtle found herself in a rose-
+colored atmosphere, not from Murray Bradshaw's admiration, as it
+seemed, but only reflected by his mind from another source.  That was
+one of his arts, always, if possible, to associate himself
+incidentally, as it appeared, and unavoidably, with an agreeable
+impression.
+
+So Myrtle was betrayed into smiling and being pleased before he had
+said a word about himself or his affairs.  Then he told her of the
+adventures and labors of his late expedition; of certain evidence
+which at the very last moment he had unearthed, and which was very
+probably the turning-point in the case.  He could not help feeling
+that she must eventually reap some benefit from the good fortune with
+which his efforts had been attended.  The thought that it might yet
+be so had been a great source of encouragement to him,--it would
+always be a great happiness to him to remember that he had done
+anything to make her happy.
+
+Myrtle was very glad that he had been so far successful,--she did not
+know that it made much difference to her, but she was obliged to him
+for the desire of serving her that he had expressed.
+
+"My services are always yours, Miss Hazard.  There is no sacrifice I
+would not willingly make for your benefit.  I have never had but one
+feeling toward you.  You cannot be ignorant of what that feeling is."
+
+"I know, Mr. Bradshaw, it has been one of kindness.  I have to thank
+you for many friendly attentions, for which I hope I have never been
+ungrateful."
+
+"Kindness is not all that I feel towards you, Miss Hazard.  If that
+were all, my lips would not tremble as they do now in telling you my
+feelings.--I love you."
+
+He sprang the great confession on Myrtle a little sooner than he had
+meant.  It was so hard to go on making phrases!  Myrtle changed color
+a little, for she was startled.
+
+The seemingly involuntary movement she made brought her arm against a
+large dictionary, which lay very near the edge of the table on which
+it was resting.  The book fell with a loud noise to the floor.
+
+There it lay.  The young man awaited her answer; he did not think of
+polite forms at such a moment.
+
+"It cannot be, Mr. Bradshaw,--it must not be.  I have known you long,
+and I am not ignorant of all your brilliant qualities, but you must
+not speak to me of love.  Your regard,--your friendly interest, tell
+me that I shall always have these, but do not distress me with
+offering more than these."
+
+"I do not ask you to give me your love in return; I only ask you not
+to bid me despair.  Let me believe that the time may come' when you
+will listen to me,--no matter how distant.  You are young,--you have
+a tender heart,--you would not doom one who only lives for you to
+wretchedness,--so long that we have known each other.  It cannot be
+that any other has come between us--"
+
+Myrtle blushed so deeply that there was no need of his finishing his
+question.
+
+"Do you mean, Myrtle Hazard, that you have cast me aside for another?
+--for this stranger--this artist--who was with you yesterday when I
+came, bringing with me the story of all I had done for you, yes, for
+you,--and was ignominiously refused the privilege of seeing you?"
+Rage and jealousy had got the better of him this time.  He rose as he
+spoke, and looked upon her with such passion kindling in his eyes
+that he seemed ready for any desperate act.
+
+"I have thanked you for any services you may have rendered me, Mr.
+Bradshaw," Myrtle answered, very calmly, "and I hope you will add one
+more to them by sparing me this rude questioning.  I wished to treat
+you as a friend; I hope you will not render that impossible."
+
+He had recovered himself for one more last effort.  "I was impatient
+overlook it, I beg you.  I was thinking of all the happiness I have
+labored to secure for you, and of the ruin to us both it would be if
+you scornfully rejected the love I offer you,--if you refuse to leave
+me any hope for the future,--if you insist on throwing yourself away
+on this man, so lately pledged to another.  I hold the key of all
+your earthly fortunes in my hand.  My love for you inspired me in all
+that I have done, and, now that I come to lay the result of my labors
+at your feet, you turn from me, and offer my reward to a stranger.
+I do not ask you to say this day that you will be mine,--I would not
+force your inclinations,--but I do ask you that you will hold
+yourself free of all others, and listen to me as one who may yet be
+more than a friend.  Say so much as this, Myrtle, and you shall have
+such a future as you never dreamed of.  Fortune, position, all that
+this world can give, shall be yours."
+
+"Never!  never!  If you could offer me the whole world, or take away
+from me all that the world can give, it would make no difference to
+me.  I cannot tell what power you hold over me, whether of life and
+death, or of wealth and poverty; but after talking to me of love, I
+should not have thought you would have wronged me by suggesting any
+meaner motive.  It is only because we have been on friendly terms so
+long that I have listened to you as I have done.  You have said more
+than enough, and I beg you will allow me to put an end to this
+interview."
+
+She rose to leave the room.  But Murray Bradshaw had gone too far to
+control himself,--he listened only to the rage which blinded him.
+
+"Not yet!" he said.  "Stay one moment, and you shall know what your
+pride and self-will have cost you!"
+
+Myrtle stood, arrested, whether by fear, or curiosity, or the passive
+subjection of her muscles to his imperious will, it would be hard to
+say.
+
+Murray Bradshaw took out the spotted paper from his breast-pocket,
+and held it up before her.  "Look here!" he exclaimed.  "This would
+have made you rich,--it would have crowned you a queen in society,--
+it would have given you all, and more than all, that you ever dreamed
+of luxury, of splendor, of enjoyment; and I, who won it for you,
+would have taught you how to make life yield every bliss it had in
+store to your wishes.  You reject my offer unconditionally?"
+
+Myrtle expressed her negative only by a slight contemptuous movement.
+
+Murray Bradshaw walked deliberately to the fireplace, and laid the
+spotted paper upon the burning coals.  It writhed and curled,
+blackened, flamed, and in a moment was a cinder dropping into ashes.
+He folded his arms, and stood looking at the wreck of Myrtle's
+future, the work of his cruel hand.  Strangely enough, Myrtle herself
+was fascinated, as it were, by the apparent solemnity of this
+mysterious sacrifice.  She had kept her eyes steadily on him all the
+time, and was still gazing at the altar on which her happiness had
+been in some way offered up, when the door was opened by Kitty Fagan,
+and Master Byles Gridley was ushered into the parlor.
+
+"Too late, old man!  "Murray Bradshaw exclaimed, in a hoarse and
+savage voice, as he passed out of the room, and strode through the
+entry and down the avenue.  It was the last time the old gate of The
+Poplars was to open or close for him.  The same day he left the
+village; and the next time his name was mentioned it was as an
+officer in one of the regiments just raised and about marching to the
+seat of war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+THE SPOTTED PAPER.
+
+What Master Gridley may have said to Myrtle Hazard that served to
+calm her after this exciting scene cannot now be recalled.  That
+Murray Bradshaw thought he was inflicting a deadly injury on her was
+plain enough.  That Master Gridley did succeed in convincing her that
+no great harm had probably been done her is equally certain.
+
+Like all bachelors who have lived a lonely life, Master Byles Gridley
+had his habits, which nothing short of some terrestrial convulsion--
+or perhaps, in his case, some instinct that drove him forth to help
+somebody in trouble--could possibly derange.  After his breakfast, he
+always sat and read awhile,--the paper, if a new one came to hand, or
+some pleasant old author,--if a little neglected by the world of
+readers, he felt more at ease with him, and loved him all the better.
+
+But on the morning after his interview with Myrtle Hazard, he had
+received a letter which made him forget newspapers, old authors,
+almost everything, for the moment.  It was from the publisher with
+whom he had had a conversation, it may be remembered, when he visited
+the city, and was to this effect: That Our Firm propose to print and
+stereotype the work originally published under the title of "Thoughts
+on the Universe"; said work to be remodelled according to the plan
+suggested by the Author, with the corrections, alterations,
+omissions, and additions proposed by him; said work to be published
+under the following title, to wit: ________ _________: said work to
+be printed in 12mo, on paper of good quality, from new types, etc.,
+etc., and for every copy thereof printed the author to receive, etc.,
+etc.
+
+Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over,
+to know if it could be really so.  So it really was.  His book had
+disappeared from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet
+the ground and never germinate disappear.  At last it had got a
+certain value as a curiosity for book-hunters.  Some one of them,
+keener-eyed than the rest, had seen that there was a meaning and
+virtue in this unsuccessful book, for which there was a new audience
+educated since it had tried to breathe before its time.  Out of this
+had grown at last the publisher's proposal.  It was too much: his
+heart swelled with joy, and his eyes filled with tears.
+
+How could he resist the temptation?  He took down his own particular
+copy of the book, which was yet to do him honor as its parent, and
+began reading.  As his eye fell on one paragraph after another, he
+nodded approval of this sentiment or opinion, he shook his head as if
+questioning whether this other were not to be modified or left out,
+he condemned a third as being no longer true for him as when it was
+written, and he sanctioned a fourth with his hearty approval.  The
+reader may like a few specimens from this early edition, now a
+rarity.  He shall have them, with Master Gridley's verbal comments.
+The book, as its name implied, contained "Thoughts" rather than
+consecutive trains of reasoning or continuous disquisitions.  What he
+read and remarked upon were a few of the more pointed statements
+which stood out in the chapters he was turning over.  The worth of
+the book must not be judged by these almost random specimens.
+
+"THE BEST THOUGHT, LIKE THE MOST PERFECT DIGESTION, IS DONE
+UNCONSCIOUSLY. --Develop that. --Ideas at compound interest in the
+mind. --Be aye sticking in an idea,--while you're sleeping it'll be
+growing.  Seed of a thought to-day,--flower to-morrow--next week--ten
+years from now, etc. --Article by and by for the....
+
+"CAN THE INFINITE BE SUPPOSED TO SHIFT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE
+ULTIMATE DESTINY OF ANY CREATED THING TO THE FINITE?  OUR THEOLOGIANS
+PRETEND THAT IT CAN.  I DOUBT. --Heretical.  Stet.
+
+"PROTESTANTISM MEANS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.  BUT IT IS AFRAID OF ITS
+OWN LOGIC. --Stet.  No logical resting-place short of None of your
+business.
+
+"THE SUPREME SELF-INDULGENCE IS TO SURRENDER THE WILL TO A SPIRITUAL
+DIRECTOR. --Protestantism gave up a great luxury. --Did it though?
+
+"ASIATIC MODES OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH DO NOT EXPRESS THE 'RELATIONS IN
+WHICH THE AMERICAN FEELS HIM SELF TO STAND TO HIS SUPERIORS IN THIS
+OR ANY OTHER SPHERE OF BEING.  REPUBLICANISM MUST HAVE ITS OWN
+RELIGIOUS PHRASEOLOGY, WHICH IS NOT THAT BORROWED FROM ORIENTAL
+DESPOTISMS.
+
+"IDOLS AND DOGMAS IN PLACE OF CHARACTER; PILLS AND THEORIES IN PLACE
+OF WHOLESOME LIVING.  SEE THE HISTORIES OF THEOLOGY AND MEDICINE
+PASSIM.--Hits 'em.
+
+"'OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.' DO YOU MEAN TO SAY JEAN CHAUVIN,
+THAT
+          'HEAVEN LIES ABOUT US IN OUR INFANCY'?
+
+"WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN OF YOUR ORGANIZATION?  YOUR SOUL WAS IN A HURRY,
+AND MADE A RUSH FOR A BODY.  THERE ARE PATIENT SPIRITS THAT HAVE
+WAITED FROM ETERNITY, AND NEVER FOUND PARENTS FIT TO BE BORN OF.
+--How do you know anything about all that?  Dele.
+
+"WHAT SWEET, SMOOTH VOICES THE NEGROES HAVE!  A HUNDRED GENERATIONS
+FED ON BANANAS.--COMPARE THEM WITH OUR APPLE-EATING WHITE FOLKS! --It
+won't do.  Bananas came from the West Indies.
+
+"TO TELL A MAN'S TEMPERAMENT BY HIS HANDWRITING.  SEE IF THE DOTS OF
+HIS I'S RUN AHEAD OR NOT, AND IF THEY DO, HOW FAR. --I have tried
+that--on myself.
+
+"MARRYING INTO SOME FAMILIES IS THE NEXT THING TO BEING CANONIZED.
+--Not so true now as twenty or thirty years ago.  As many bladders,
+but more pins.
+
+"FISH AND DANDIES ONLY KEEP ON ICE. --Who will take?  Explain in note
+how all warmth approaching blood heat spoils fops and flounders.
+
+"FLYING IS A LOST ART AMONG MEN AND REPTILES.  BATS FLY, AND MEN
+OUGHT TO.  TRY A LIGHT TURBINE.  RISE A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A
+MILE SLANTING,--RISE HALF A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE SLANTING,
+AND SO ON.  OR SLANT UP AND SLANT DOWN. --Poh!  You ain't such a fool
+as to think that is new,--are you?
+
+"Put in my telegraph project.  Central station.  Cables with
+insulated wires running to it from different quarters of the city.
+These form the centripetal system.  From central station, wires to
+all the livery stables, messenger stands, provision shops, etc., etc.
+These form the centrifugal system.  Any house may have a wire in the
+nearest cable at small cost.
+
+"DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED AFTER THE CONTINENTS HAVE GONE UNDER,
+AND COME UP AGAIN, AND DRIED, AND BRED NEW RACES?  HAVE YOUR NAME
+STAMPED ON ALL YOUR PLATES AND CUPS AND SAUCERS.  NOTHING OF YOU OR
+YOURS WILL LAST LIKE THOSE.  I NEVER SIT DOWN AT MY TABLE WITHOUT
+LOOKING AT THE CHINA SERVICE, AND SAYING, 'HERE ARE MY MONUMENTS.
+THAT BUTTER-DISH IS MY URN.  THIS SOUP-PLATE IS MY MEMORIAL TABLET.'
+NO NEED OF A SKELETON AT MY BANQUETS!  I FEED FROM MY TOMBSTONE AND
+READ MY EPITAPH AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERY TEACUP.--Good."
+
+He fell into a revery as he finished reading this last sentence.  He
+thought of the dim and dread future,--all the changes that it would
+bring to him, to all the living, to the face of the globe, to the
+order of earthly things.  He saw men of a new race, alien to all that
+had ever lived, excavating with strange, vast engines the old
+ocean-bed now become habitable land.  And as the great scoops turned
+out the earth they had fetched up from the unexplored depths, a relic
+of a former simple civilization revealed the fact that here a tribe
+of human beings had lived and perished. --Only the coffee-cup he had
+in his hand half an hour ago. --Where would he be then? and Mrs.
+Hopkins, and Gifted, and Susan, and everybody? and President
+Buchanan? and the Boston State-House? and Broadway? --O Lord, Lord,
+Lord! And the sun perceptibly smaller, according to the astronomers,
+and the earth cooled down a number of degrees, and inconceivable arts
+practised by men of a type yet undreamed of, and all the fighting
+creeds merged in one great universal
+
+A knock at his door interrupted his revery.  Miss Susan Posey
+informed him that a gentleman was waiting below who wished to see
+him.
+
+"Show him up to my study, Susan Posey, if you please," said Master
+Gridley.
+
+Mr. Penhallow presented himself at Mr. Gridley's door with a
+countenance expressive of a very high state of excitement.
+
+"You have heard the news, Mr. Gridley, I suppose?"
+
+"What news, Mr. Penhallow?"
+
+"First, that my partner has left very unexpectedly to enlist in a
+regiment just forming.  Second, that the great land case is decided
+in favor of the heirs of the late Malachi Withers."
+
+"Your partner must have known about it yesterday?"
+
+"He did, even before I knew it.  He thought himself possessed of a
+very important document, as you know, of which he has made, or means
+to make, some use.  You are aware of the artifice I employed to
+prevent any possible evil consequences from any action of his.
+I have the genuine document, of course.  I wish you to go over with
+me to The Poplars, and I should be glad to have good old Father
+Pemberton go with us; for it is a serious matter, and will be a great
+surprise to more than one of the family."
+
+They walked together to the old house, where the old clergyman had
+lived for more than half a century.  He was used to being neglected
+by the people who ran after his younger colleague; and the attention
+paid him in asking him to be present on an important occasion, as he
+understood this to be, pleased him greatly.  He smoothed his long
+white locks, and called a grand-daughter to help make him look fitly
+for such an occasion, and, being at last got into his grandest Sunday
+aspect, took his faithful staff, and set out with the two gentlemen
+for The Poplars.  On the way, Mr. Penhallow explained to him the
+occasion of their visit, and the general character of the facts he
+had to announce.  He wished the venerable minister to prepare Miss
+Silence Withers for a revelation which would materially change her
+future prospects.  He thought it might be well, also, if he would say
+a few words to Myrtle Hazard, for whom a new life, with new and
+untried temptations, was about to open.  His business was, as a
+lawyer, to make known to these parties the facts just come to his own
+knowledge affecting their interests.  He had asked Mr. Gridley to go
+with him, as having intimate relations with one of the parties
+referred to, and as having been the principal agent in securing to
+that party the advantages which were to accrue to her from the new
+turn of events.  "You are a second parent to her, Mr. Gridley," he
+said.  "Your vigilance, your shrewdness, and your-spectacles have
+saved her.  I hope she knows the full extent of her obligations to
+you, and that she will always look to you for counsel in all her
+needs.  She will want a wise friend, for she is to begin the world
+anew."
+
+What had happened, when she saw the three grave gentlemen at the door
+early in the forenoon, Mistress Kitty Fagan could not guess.
+Something relating to Miss Myrtle, no doubt: she wasn't goin' to be
+married right off to Mr. Clement,--was she,--and no church, nor cake,
+nor anything?  The gentlemen were shown into the parlor.  "Ask Miss
+Withers to go into the library, Kitty," said Master Gridley.
+"Dr. Pemberton wishes to speak with her."  The good old man was
+prepared for a scene with Miss Silence.  He announced to her, in a
+kind and delicate way, that she must make up her mind to the
+disappointment of certain expectations which she had long
+entertained, and which, as her lawyer, Mr. Penhallow, had come to
+inform her and others, were to be finally relinquished from this
+hour.
+
+To his great surprise, Miss Silence received this communication
+almost cheerfully.  It seemed more like a relief to her than anything
+else.  Her one dread in this world was her "responsibility "; and the
+thought that she might have to account for ten talents hereafter,
+instead of one, had often of late been a positive distress to her.
+There was also in her mind a secret disgust at the thought of the
+hungry creatures who would swarm round her if she should ever be in a
+position to bestow patronage.  This had grown upon her as the habits
+of lonely life gave her more and more of that fastidious dislike to
+males in general, as such, which is not rare in maidens who have seen
+the roses of more summers than politeness cares to mention.
+
+Father Pemberton then asked if he could see Miss Myrtle Hazard a few
+moments in the library before they went into the parlor, where they
+were to meet Mr. Penhallow and Mr. Gridley, for the purpose of
+receiving the lawyer's communication.
+
+What change was this which Myrtle had undergone since love had
+touched her heart, and her visions of worldly enjoyment had faded
+before the thought of sharing and ennobling the life of one who was
+worthy of her best affections,--of living for another, and of finding
+her own noblest self in that divine office of woman?  She had laid
+aside the bracelet which she had so long worn as a kind of charm as
+well as an ornament.  One would have said her features had lost
+something of that look of imperious beauty which had added to her
+resemblance to the dead woman whose glowing portrait hung upon her
+wall.  And if it could be that, after so many generations, the blood
+of her who had died for her faith could show in her descendants
+veins, and the soul of that elect lady of her race look out from her
+far-removed offspring's dark eyes, such a transfusion of the martyr's
+life and spiritual being might well seem to manifest itself in Myrtle
+Hazard.
+
+The large-hearted old man forgot his scholastic theory of human
+nature as he looked upon her face.  He thought he saw in her the
+dawning of that grace which some are born with; which some, like
+Myrtle, only reach through many trials and dangers; which some seem
+to show for a while and then lose; which too many never reach while
+they wear the robes of earth, but which speaks of the kingdom of
+heaven already begun in the heart of a child of earth.  He told her
+simply the story of the occurrences which had brought them together
+in the old house, with the message the lawyer was to deliver to its
+inmates.  He wished to prepare her for what might have been too
+sudden a surprise.
+
+But Myrtle was not wholly unprepared for some such revelation.  There
+was little danger that any such announcement would throw her mind
+from its balance after the inward conflict through which she had been
+passing.  For her lover had left her almost as soon as he had told
+her the story of his passion, and the relation in which he stood to
+her.  He, too, had gone to answer his country's call to her children,
+not driven away by crime and shame and despair, but quitting all--his
+new-born happiness, the art in which he was an enthusiast, his
+prospects of success and honor--to obey the higher command of duty.
+War was to him, as to so many of the noble youth who went forth, only
+organized barbarism, hateful but for the sacred cause which alone
+redeemed it from the curse that blasted the first murderer.  God only
+knew the sacrifice such young men as he made.
+
+How brief Myrtle's dream had been!  She almost doubted, at some
+moments, whether she would not awake from it, as from her other
+visions, and find it all unreal.  There was no need of fearing any
+undue excitement of her mind after the alternations of feeling she
+had just experienced.  Nothing seemed of much moment to her which
+could come from without,--her real world was within, and the light of
+its day and the breath of its life came from her love, made holy by
+the self-forgetfulness on both sides which was born with it.
+
+Only one member of the household was in danger of finding the
+excitement more than she could bear.  Miss Cynthia knew that all
+Murray Bradshaw's plans, in which he had taken care that she should
+have a personal interest, had utterly failed.  What he had done with
+the means of revenge in his power,--if, indeed, they were still in
+his power,--she did not know.  She only knew that there had been a
+terrible scene, and that he had gone, leaving it uncertain whether he
+would ever return.  It was with fear and trembling that she heard the
+summons which went forth, that the whole family should meet in the
+parlor to listen to a statement from Mr. Penhallow.  They all
+gathered as requested, and sat round the room, with the exception of
+Mistress Kitty Fagan, who knew her place too well to be sittin' down
+with the likes o' them, and stood with attentive ears in the doorway.
+
+Mr. Penhallow then read from a printed paper the decision of the
+Supreme Court in the land case so long pending, where the estate of
+the late Malachi Withers was the claimant, against certain parties
+pretending to hold under an ancient grant.  The decision was in favor
+of the estate.
+
+"This gives a great property to the heirs," Mr. Penhallow remarked,
+"and the question as to who these heirs are has to be opened.  For
+the will under which Silence Withers, sister of the deceased, has
+inherited is dated some years previous to the decease, and it was not
+very strange that a will of later date should be discovered.  Such a
+will has been discovered.  It is the instrument I have here."
+
+Myrtle Hazard opened her eyes very widely, for the paper Mr.
+Penlallow held looked exactly like that which Murray Bradshaw had
+burned, and, what was curious, had some spots on it just like some
+she had noticed on that.
+
+"This will," Mr. Penhallow said, "signed by witnesses dead or absent
+from this place, makes a disposition of the testator's property in
+some respects similar to that of the previous one, but with a single
+change, which proves to be of very great importance."
+
+Mr. Penhallow proceeded to read the will.  The important change in
+the disposition of the property was this: in case the land claim was
+decided in favor of the estate, then, in addition to the small
+provision made for Myrtle Hazard, the property so coming to the
+estate should all go to her.  There was no question about the
+genuineness and the legal sufficiency of this instrument.  Its date
+was not very long after the preceding one, at a period when, as was
+well known, he had almost given up the hope of gaining his case,
+and when the property was of little value compared to that which it
+had at present.
+
+A long silence followed this reading.  Then, to the surprise of all,
+Miss Silence Withers rose, and went to Myrtle Hazard, and wished her
+joy with every appearance of sincerity.  She was relieved of a great
+responsibility.  Myrtle was young and could bear it better.  She
+hoped that her young relative would live long to enjoy the blessings
+Providence had bestowed upon her, and to use them for the good of the
+community, and especially the promotion of the education of deserving
+youth.  If some fitting person could be found to advise Myrtle, whose
+affairs would require much care, it would be a great relief to her.
+
+They all went up to Myrtle and congratulated her on her change of
+fortune.  Even Cynthia Badlam got out a phrase or two which passed
+muster in the midst of the general excitement.  As for Kitty Fagan,
+she could not say a word, but caught Myrtle's hand and kissed it as
+if it belonged to her own saint; and then, suddenly applying her
+apron to her eyes, retreated from a scene which was too much for her,
+in a state of complete mental beatitude and total bodily
+discomfiture.
+
+Then Silence asked the old minister to make a prayer, and he
+stretched his hands up to Heaven, and called down all the blessings
+of Providence upon all the household, and especially upon this young
+handmaiden, who was to be tried with prosperity, and would need all
+aid from above to keep her from its dangers.
+
+Then Mr. Penhallow asked Myrtle if she had any choice as to the
+friend who should have charge of her affairs.  Myrtle turned to
+Master Byles Gridley, and said, "You have been my friend and
+protector so far, will you continue to be so hereafter?"
+
+Master Gridley tried very hard to begin a few words of thanks to her
+for her preference, but finding his voice a little uncertain,
+contented himself with pressing her hand and saying, "Most willingly,
+my dear daughter!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune
+came out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in
+marriage to Mr. Clement Lindsay.  But her friends hardly knew how to
+congratulate her on this last event.  Her lover was gone, to risk his
+life, not improbably to lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by
+wounds, or worn out with disease.
+
+Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of
+trial.  They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's
+determination had nerved her for womanly endurance.  They had not
+learned that a great cause makes great souls, or reveals them to
+themselves,--a lesson taught by so many noble examples in the times
+that followed.  Myrtle's only desire seemed to be to labor in some
+way to help the soldiers and their families.  She appeared to have
+forgotten everything for this duty; she had no time for regrets, if
+she were disposed to indulge them, and she hardly asked a question as
+to the extent of the fortune which had fallen to her.
+
+The next number of the "Banner and Oracle" contained two
+announcements which she read with some interest when her attention
+was called to them.  They were as follows:
+
+"A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late
+decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property
+estimated at a million of dollars or more.  It consists of a large
+tract of land purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers,
+now become of immense value by the growth of a city in its
+neighborhood, the opening of mines, etc., etc.  It is rumored that
+the lovely and highly educated heiress has formed a connection
+looking towards matrimony with a certain distinguished artist."
+
+"Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has
+been among the first to respond to the call of the country for
+champions to defend her from traitors.  We understand that he has
+obtained a captaincy in the _th regiment, about to march to the
+threatened seat of war.  May victory perch on his banners!"
+
+The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the
+very hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for
+the common cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the
+camp and the field, the other in the not less needful work which the
+good women carried on at home, or wherever their services were
+needed.  Clement--now Captain Lindsay--returned at the end of his
+first campaign charged with a special office.  Some months later,
+after one of the great battles, he was sent home wounded.  He wore
+the leaf on his shoulder which entitled him to be called Major
+Lindsay.  He recovered from his wound only too rapidly, for Myrtle
+had visited him daily in the military hospital where he had resided
+for treatment; and it was bitter parting.  The telegraph wires were
+thrilling almost hourly with messages of death, and the long pine
+boxes came by almost every train,--no need of asking what they held.
+
+Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the
+eagle on his shoulder,--he was Colonel Lindsay.  The lovers could not
+part again of their own free will.  Some adventurous women had
+followed their husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she
+could play the part of the Maid of Saragossa on occasion.  So Clement
+asked her if she would return with him as his wife; and Myrtle
+answered, with as much willingness to submit as a maiden might fairly
+show under such circumstances, that she would do his bidding.
+Thereupon, with the shortest possible legal notice, Father Pemberton
+was sent for, and the ceremony was performed in the presence of a few
+witnesses in the large parlor at The Poplars, which was adorned with
+flowers, and hung round with all the portraits of the dead members of
+the family, summoned as witnesses to the celebration.  One witness
+looked on with unmoved features, yet Myrtle thought there was a more
+heavenly smile on her faded lips than she had ever seen before
+beaming from the canvas,--it was Ann Holyoake, the martyr to her
+faith, the guardian spirit of Myrtle's visions, who seemed to breathe
+a holier benediction than any words--even those of the good old
+Father Pemberton himself--could convey.
+
+They went back together to the camp.  From that period until the end
+of the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and
+that of the hospital.  In the offices of mercy which she performed
+for the sick and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature
+seemed to be burned away.  The conflict of mingled lives in her blood
+had ceased.  No lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene
+resolve which had grown strong by every exercise of its high
+prerogative.  If she had been called now to die for any worthy cause,
+her race would have been ennobled by a second martyr, true to the
+blood of her who died under the cruel Queen.
+
+Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some
+months at intervals,--one never to be forgotten.  An officer was
+brought into the ward where she was in attendance.  "Shot through the
+lungs,--pretty nearly gone."
+
+She went softly to his bedside.  He was breathing with great
+difficulty; his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she
+recognized him in a moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,--Captain
+Bradshaw, as she knew by the bars on his coat flung upon the bed
+where he had just been laid.
+
+She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother;
+she saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would
+ever hear.
+
+He turned his glazing eyes upon her.  "Who are you?" he said in a
+feeble voice.
+
+"An old friend," she answered; "you knew me as Myrtle Hazard."
+
+He started.  "You by my bedside!  You caring for me!--for me, that
+burned the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes!  You
+can't forgive that,--I won't believe it!  Don't you hate me, dying as
+I am?"
+
+Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and
+countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down.  "I have nothing
+to forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw.  You may have meant to do me wrong, but
+Providence raised up a protector for me.  The paper you burned was
+not the original,--it was a copy substituted for it--"
+
+"And did the old man outwit me after all?" he cried out, rising
+suddenly in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a
+few more gasps of breath.  "I knew he was cunning, but I thought I
+was his match.  It must have been Byles Gridley,--nobody else.  And
+so the old man beat me after all, and saved you from ruin!  Thank God
+that it came out so!  Thank God!  I can die now.  Give me your hand,
+Myrtle."
+
+She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and
+he ceased to breathe.  Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of
+trust and love in it than of systematized articles of belief.  She
+cherished the fond hope that these last words of one who had erred so
+miserably were a token of some blessed change which the influences of
+the better world might carry onward until he should have outgrown the
+sins and the weaknesses of his earthly career.
+
+Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp.  From time to
+time they received stray copies of the "Banner and Oracle," which, to
+Myrtle especially, were full of interest, even to the last
+advertisement.  A few paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate
+to persons who have figured in this narrative.
+
+
+                    "TEMPLE OF HYMEN.
+
+"Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only
+daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth.  The editor of this paper
+returns his acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-
+cake.  May their shadows never be less!"
+
+Not many weeks after this appeared the following:
+
+"Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel
+Hurlbut, M. D., at the great age of XCVI years.
+
+"'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'"
+
+
+Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the
+tribute of a sigh to his memory,--there was nothing in a death like
+his to call for any aching regret.
+
+The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the
+village paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and
+shocked by receiving a number containing the following paragraph:
+
+
+                    CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT
+
+"It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house
+was struck by lightning about a month ago.  The frame of the building
+was a good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended
+from the injury it had received.  On Sunday last the congregation
+came together as usual.  The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit,
+the Rev. Doctor Pemberton having been detained by slight
+indisposition.  The sermon was from the text, "The wolf also shall
+dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid."
+(Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the millennium as--the reign of
+love and peace, in eloquent and impressive language.  He was in the
+midst of the prayer which follows the sermon, and had jest put up a
+petition that the spirit of affection and faith and trust might grow
+up and prevail among the flock of which he was the shepherd, more
+especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his arm, and
+carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had hung
+safely for nearly a century,--loosened, no doubt by the bolt which
+had fallen on the church,--broke from its fastenings, and fell with a
+loud crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its
+ruins.  The scene that followed beggars description.  Cries and
+shrieks resounded through the horse.  Two or three young women
+fainted entirely away.  Mr. Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted
+Hopkins, Esq., and others, came forward immediately, and after much
+effort succeeded in removing the wreck of the sounding-board, and
+extricating their unfortunate pastor.  He was not fatally injured, it
+is hoped; but, sad to relate, he received such a violent blow upon
+the spine of the back, that palsy of the lower extremities is like to
+ensue.  He is at present lying entirely helpless.  Every attention is
+paid to him by his affectionately devoted family."
+
+Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this
+unfortunate occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the
+following pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent
+number of the village paper:
+
+                    IMPOSING CEREMONY.
+
+"The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of
+baptism upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman,
+Gifted Hopkins, Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P.
+Hopkins, his amiable and respected lady.  The babe conducted himself
+with singular propriety on this occasion.  He received the Christian
+name of Byron Tennyson Browning.  May be prove worthy of his name and
+his parentage!"
+
+
+The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its
+unharmed survivors.  He returned with Myrtle to her native village,
+and they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence
+Withers, in the old family mansion.  Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle
+made a generous allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles
+distant, where she had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at
+The Poplars.  This was a convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe
+was invited to stay with them for a month or two; and one nurse and
+two single women under the same roof keep each other in a stew all
+the time, as the old dame somewhat sharply remarked.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector,
+and, with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property
+she inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that,
+when Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt
+that at least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give
+himself to sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing
+by him to pinch the features of all his ideals, and give them
+something of her own likeness.
+
+Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her
+responsibility.  She embellished her spare person a little more than
+in former years.  These young people looked so happy!  Love was not
+so unendurable, perhaps, after all.  No woman need despair,--
+especially if she has a house over her, and a snug little property.
+A worthy man, a former missionary, of the best principles, but of a
+slightly jocose and good-humored habit, thought that he could piece
+his widowed years with the not insignificant, fraction of life left
+to Miss Silence, to their mutual advantage.  He came to the village,
+therefore, where Father Pemberton was very glad to have him supply
+the pulpit in the place of his unfortunate disabled colleague.  The
+courtship soon began, and was brisk enough; for the good man knew
+there was no time to lose at his period of life,--or hers either, for
+that matter.  It was a rather odd specimen of love-making; for he was
+constantly trying to subdue his features to a gravity which they were
+not used to, and she was as constantly endeavoring to be as lively as
+possible, with the innocent desire of pleasing her light-hearted
+suitor.
+
+"Vieille fille fait jeune mariee."  Silence was ten years younger as
+a bride than she had seemed as a lone woman.  One would have said she
+had got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some
+half a dozen behind it,--where there is often good and reasonably
+cheerful conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the
+probable amount of his property, or the little slips he may have
+committed, and where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense
+sets the four waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-
+hour ago in the house of mourning.  But Miss Silence, that was,
+thought that two families, with all the possible complications which
+time might bring, would be better in separate establishments.  She
+therefore proposed selling The Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and
+removing to a house in the village, which would be large enough for
+them, at least for the present.  So the young folks bought the old
+house, and paid a mighty good price for it; and enlarged it, and
+beautified and glorified it, and one fine morning went together down
+to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence seemed in danger of being a
+little crowded,--for Gifted lived there with his Susan,--and what had
+happened might happen again,--and gave Master Byles Gridley a formal
+and most persuasively worded invitation to come up and make his home
+with them at The Poplars.
+
+Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised
+weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are
+looking upon him almost for the last time before they part from him,
+and see his face no more.  Let us not inquire too curiously, then,
+how he received this kind proposition.  It is enough, that, when he
+found that a new study had been built on purpose for him, and a
+sleeping-room attached to it so that he could live there without
+disturbing anybody if he chose, he consented to remove there for a
+while, and that he was there established amidst great rejoicing.
+
+Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health.  She found at
+last that she was going; and as she had a little property of her
+own,--as almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of
+it,--she was much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements
+to be made respecting its disposition.  The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was
+one day surprised by a message, that she wished to have an interview
+with him.  He rode over to the town in which she was residing, and
+there had a long conversation with her upon this matter.  When this
+was settled, her mind seemed too be more at ease.  She died with a
+comfortable assurance that she was going to a better world, and with
+a bitter conviction that it would be hard to find one that would
+offer her a worse lot than being a poor relation in this.
+
+Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob
+Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes
+as they should elect, educational or other.  Father Pemberton
+preached an admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her
+virtues, known to this people among whom she had long lived, and
+especially that crowning act by which she devoted all she had to
+purposes of charity-and benevolence.
+
+The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the
+misfortune of his colleague had incapacitated him from labor.  He
+generally preached in the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance
+of the people,--for the truth was that the honest minister who had
+married Miss Silence was not young enough or good-looking enough to
+be an object of personal attentions like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker, and the old minister appeared to great advantage contrasted
+with him in the pulpit.  Poor Mr. Stoker was now helpless, faithfully
+and tenderly waited upon by his own wife, who had regained her health
+and strength,--in no small measure, perhaps, from the great need of
+sympathy and active aid which her unfortunate husband now
+experienced.  It was an astonishment to herself when she found that
+she who had so long been served was able to serve another.  Some who
+knew his errors thought his accident was a judgment; but others
+believed that it was only a mercy in disguise,--it snatched him
+roughly from his sin, but it opened his heart to gratitude towards
+her whom his neglect could not alienate, and through gratitude to
+repentance and better thoughts.  Bathsheba had long ago promised
+herself to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was about to become the rector
+of a parish in the next town, the marriage was soon to take place.
+
+How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing!
+Clement loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength
+and fine humanity blended in them.  He was so fascinated by their
+noble expression that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and
+looked at him more like an artist taking his portrait than like an
+admiring friend.  He maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump
+of benevolence and as large a one of cautiousness as the two people
+most famous for the size of these organs on the phrenological chart
+he showed him, and proved it, or nearly proved it, by careful
+measurements of his head.  Master Gridley laughed, and read him a
+passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.
+
+The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the
+village.  Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the
+foundations of a public library.  Others thought it should be applied
+for the relief of the families of soldiers who had fallen in the war.
+Still another set would take it to build a monument to the memory of
+those heroes.  The trustees listened with the greatest candor to all
+these gratuitous hints.  It was, however, suggested, in a well-
+written anonymous article which appeared in the village paper, that
+it was desirable to follow the general lead of the testator's
+apparent preference.  The trustees were at liberty to do as they saw
+fit; but, other things being equal, same educational object should be
+selected.
+
+If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be
+very proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them.
+The trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion.  Why not
+apply it to the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and
+promising children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs.
+Hopkins had cared for so long without any recompense, and at a cost
+which would soon become beyond her means?  The good people of the
+neighborhood accepted this as the best solution of the difficulty.
+It was agreed upon at length by the trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam
+Fund for Educational Purposes should be applied for the benefit of
+the two foundlings, known as Isosceles and Helminthia Hopkins.
+
+Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two
+"preposterous names," as he called them, which in a moment of
+eccentric impulse he had given to these children of nature.  He
+ventured to hint as much to Mrs. Hopkins.  The good dame was vastly
+surprised.  She thought they was about as pooty names as anybody had
+had given 'em in the village.  And they was so handy, spoke short,
+Sossy and Minthy,--she never should know how to call 'em anything
+else.
+
+"But my dear Mrs. Hopkins," Master Gridley urged, "if you knew the
+meaning they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did
+very wrong to apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures,
+and that I am bound to rectify my error.  More than that, my dear
+madam, I mean to consult you as to the new names; and if we can fix
+upon proper and pleasing ones, it is my intention to leave a pretty
+legacy in my will to these interesting children."
+
+"Mr. Gridley," said Mrs. Hopkins, "you're the best man I ever see, or
+ever shall see, .  .  .  except my poor dear Ammi .  .  .  .  I 'll
+do jest as you say about that, or about anything else in all this
+livin' world."
+
+"Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?"
+
+"Byles Gridley Hopkins!" she answered instantly.
+
+"Good Lord!" said Mr. Gridley, "think a minute, my dear madam.  I
+will not say one word,--only think a minute, and mention some name
+that will not suggest quite so many winks and whispers."
+
+She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud,
+"Abraham Lincoln Hopkins."
+
+"Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past
+year, on a moderate computation."
+
+"Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything
+that you like.  To think of those dear babes having a fund--if that's
+the right name--on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope
+they won't get that till they're a hundred year old!"
+
+"What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins?  That means
+the gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather
+than a burden."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes.  She was
+weeping.  "Theodore!" she said, "Theodore!  My little brother's name,
+that I buried when I was only eleven year old.  Drownded.  The
+dearest little child that ever you see.  I have got his little mug
+with Theodore on it now.  Kep' o' purpose.  Our little Sossy shall
+have it.  Theodore P. Hopkins,--sha'n't it be, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins?  Theodore
+Parker, is it?"
+
+"Doesn't P.  stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best
+man in the world--next to you, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am.
+Now about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to
+call her,--surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in
+naming one of the objects of her charity."
+
+"Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins," said the good woman triumphantly,--"is
+that what you mean?"
+
+"Suppose we leave out one of the names,--four are too many.  I think
+the general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of
+her two benefactresses,--Cynthia Badlam Hopkins."
+
+"Why, law!  Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?--Minthy and Cynthy,--there
+ain't but one letter of difference!  Poor Cynthy would be pleased if
+she could know that one of our babes was to be called after her.  She
+was dreadful fond of children."
+
+On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely,
+the Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pembertan was summoned to officiate at three
+most interesting ceremonies,--a wedding and two christenings, one of
+the latter a double one.
+
+The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between
+the Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named
+clergyman.  He could not be present on account of his great
+infirmity, but the door of his chamber was left open that he might
+hear the marriage service performed.  The old, white-haired minister,
+assisted, as the papers said, by the bridegroom's father, conducted
+the ceremony according to the Episcopal form.  When he came to those
+solemn words in which the husband promises fidelity to the wife so
+long as they both shall live, the nurse, who was watching, near the
+poor father, saw him bury his face in his pillow, and heard him
+murmur the words, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"
+
+The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the
+old meeting-house.  Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came
+in, and stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms.  A
+slip of paper was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words
+were written:--"The name is Charles Hazard."
+
+The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe
+disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of
+its consecration.
+
+Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the
+broad aisle--marshalled by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted
+Hopkins bringing up the rear--the two children hitherto known as
+Isosceles and Helminthia.  They had been well schooled, and, as the
+mysterious and to them incomprehensible ceremony was enacted,
+maintained the most stoical aspect of tranquillity.  In Mrs.
+Hopkins's words, "They looked like picters, and behaved like angels."
+
+That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of
+some few friends at The Poplars.  It was such a great occasion that
+the Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,--which was,
+strictly speaking, secular time,--were relaxed.  Father Pemberton was
+there, and Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose
+Eveleth, with his son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her
+mother, now in comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband,
+Doctor Hurlbut and his wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob
+Penhallow, Esq., Mrs. Hopkins, her son and his wife (Susan Posey that
+was), the senior deacon of the old church (the admirer of the great
+Scott), the Editor-in-chief of the "Banner and Oracle," and in the
+background Nurse Byloe and the privileged servant, Mistress Kitty
+Fagan, with a few others whose names we need not mention.
+
+The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of
+two long services repaired by such simple refections as would not
+turn the holy day into a day of labor.  A large paper copy of the new
+edition of Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table.
+He never looked so happy,--could anything fill his cup fuller?  In
+the course of the evening Clement spoke of the many trials through
+which they had passed in common with vast numbers of their
+countrymen, and some of those peculiar dangers which Myrtle had had
+to encounter in the course of a life more eventful, and attended with
+more risks, perhaps, than most of them imagined.  But Myrtle, he
+said, had always been specially cared for.  He wished them to look
+upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who had been faithful to
+her in her gravest hours of trial and danger.  If they would follow
+him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they would have an
+opportunity to do so.
+
+Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest.  They all
+ascended to the little projecting chamber, through the window of
+which her scarlet jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about
+on the river in those early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the
+name of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+
+The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from
+which looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose
+continued presence with her descendants was the old family legend.
+But underneath it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some
+closely covered object upon it.  It was a mysterious arrangement,
+made without any knowledge on her part.
+
+"Now, then, Kitty!" Mr. Lindsay said.
+
+Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward,
+and removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object.  It was a
+lifelike marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+"And this is what you have been working at so long,--is it, Clement?"
+Myrtle said.
+
+"Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?", he answered,
+smiling.
+
+Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble
+forehead, saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Guardian Angel, by O. W. Holmes, Sr.
+#6 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet)
+
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+Title: The Guardian Angel
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet)
+(Not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.)
+
+Release Date: July, 2001 [Etext #2697]
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+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END*
+
+
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+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+
+TO MY READERS.
+
+"A new Preface" is, I find, promised with my story.  If there are any
+among my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the
+Moral appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and
+learn what I have to say here.
+
+This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
+remember, entitled "Elsie Venner."  Like that,--it is intended for
+two classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers
+of the "Morals" in Aesop and of this Preface.
+
+The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which
+some thought cruel, even on paper.  It imagined an alien element
+introduced into the blood of a human being before that being saw the
+light.  It showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with
+the ophidian characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during
+the pre-natal period.  Whether anything like this ever happened, or
+was possible, mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest
+the limitations of human responsibility in a simple and effective
+way.
+
+The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
+experience.  The successive development of inherited bodily aspects
+and habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see
+families grow up under their own eyes.  The same thing happens, but
+less obviously to common observation, in the mental and moral nature.
+There is something frightful in the way in which not only
+characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are
+repeated from generation to generation.  Jonathan Edwards the younger
+tells the story of a brutal wretch in New Haven who was abusing his
+father, when the old man cried out, "Don't drag me any further, for I
+did n't drag my father beyond this tree."  [The original version of
+this often-repeated story may be found in Aristotle's Ethics, Book
+7th, Chapter 7th.]  I have attempted to show the successive evolution
+of some inherited qualities in the character of Myrtle Hazard, not so
+obtrusively as to disturb the narrative, but plainly enough to be
+kept in sight by the small class of preface-readers.
+
+If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
+higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
+learned ladies.  If I should proclaim that they were protests against
+the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all
+human action from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the
+jealousy of the cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums.  By saying
+nothing about it, the large majority of those whom my book reaches,
+not being preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them
+beyond the simple facts of the narrative.
+
+Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
+limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
+self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
+intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in
+our new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown
+of scholarship.  If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of
+nature into the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as
+much as in the bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all
+that we are evil in to a divine thrusting on," we had better return
+at once to our old demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower
+House in his time-honored prerogatives.
+
+As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may be
+needed here to make some of my characters and statements appear
+probable.  The long-pending question involving a property which had
+become in the mean time of immense value finds its parallel in the
+great De Haro land-case, decided in the Supreme Court while this
+story was in progress (May 14th, 1867).  The experiment of breaking
+the child's will by imprisonment and fasting is borrowed from a
+famous incident, happening long before the case lately before one of
+the courts of a neighboring Commonwealth, where a little girl was
+beaten to death because she would not say her prayers.  The mental
+state involving utter confusion of different generations in a person
+yet capable of forming a correct judgment on other matters, is almost
+a direct transcript from nature.  I should not have ventured to
+repeat the questions of the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle
+Hazard about her family conditions, and their comments, had not a
+lady of fortune and position mentioned to me a similar circumstance
+in the school history of one of her own children.  Perhaps I should
+have hesitated in reproducing Myrtle Hazard's "Vision," but for a
+singular experience of his own related to me by the late Mr.
+Forceythe Willson.
+
+Gifted Hopkins (under various alliasis) has been a frequent
+correspondent of mine.  I have also received a good many
+communications, signed with various names, which must have been from
+near female relatives of that young gentleman.  I once sent a kind of
+encyclical letter to the whole family connection; but as the delusion
+under which they labor is still common, and often leads to the
+wasting of time, the contempt of honest study or humble labor, and
+the misapplication of intelligence not so far below mediocrity as to
+be incapable of affording a respectable return when employed in the
+proper direction, I thought this picture from life might also be of
+service.  When I say that no genuine young poet will apply it to
+himself, I think I have so far removed the sting that few or none
+will complain of being wounded.
+
+It is lamentable to be forced to add that the Reverend Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker is only a softened copy of too many originals to whom, as a
+regular attendant upon divine worship from my childhood to the
+present time, I have respectfully listened, while they dealt with me
+and mine and the bulk of their fellow-creatures after the manner of
+their sect.  If, in the interval between his first showing himself in
+my story and its publication in a separate volume, anything had
+occurred to make me question the justice or expediency of drawing and
+exhibiting such a portrait, I should have reconsidered it, with the
+view of retouching its sharper features.  But its essential
+truthfulness has been illustrated every month or two, since my story
+has been in the course of publication, by a fresh example from real
+life, stamped in darker colors than any with which I should have
+thought of staining my pages.
+
+There are a great many good clergymen to one bad one, but a writer
+finds it hard to keep to the true proportion of good and bad persons
+in telling a story.  The three or four good ministers I have
+introduced in this narrative must stand for many whom I have known
+and loved, and some of whom I count to-day among my most valued
+friends.  I hope the best and wisest of them will like this story and
+approve it.  If they cannot all do this, I know they will recognize
+it as having been written with a right and honest purpose.
+
+BOSTON, 1867.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
+
+It is a quarter of a century since the foregoing Preface was written,
+and that is long enough to allow a story to be forgotten by the
+public, and very possibly by the writer of it also.  I will not
+pretend that I have forgotten all about "The Guardian Angel," but it
+is long since I have read it, and many of its characters and
+incidents are far from being distinct in my memory.  There are,
+however, a few points which hold their place among my recollections.
+The revolt of Myrtle Hazard from the tyranny of that dogmatic dynasty
+now breaking up in all directions has found new illustrations since
+this tale was written.  I need only refer to two instances of many.
+The first is from real life.  Mr. Robert C. Adams's work, "Travels in
+Faith from Tradition to Reason," is the outcome of the teachings of
+one of the most intransigeant of our New England Calvinists, the late
+Reverend Nehemiah Adams.  For an example in fiction,--fiction which
+bears all the marks of being copied from real life,--I will refer to
+"The Story of an African Farm."  The boy's honest, but terrible
+outburst, "I hate God," was, I doubt not, more acceptable in the view
+of his Maker than the lying praise of many a hypocrite who, having
+enthroned a demon as Lord of the Universe, thinks to conciliate his
+favor by using the phrases which the slaves of Eastern despots are in
+the habit of addressing to their masters.  I have had many private
+letters showing the same revolt of reasoning natures against
+doctrines which shock the more highly civilized part of mankind in
+this nineteenth century and are leading to those dissensions which
+have long shown as cracks, and are fast becoming lines of cleavage in
+some of the largest communions of Protestantism.
+
+The principle of heredity has been largely studied since this story
+was written.  This tale, like "Elsie Venner," depends for its deeper
+significance on the ante-natal history of its subject.  But the story
+was meant to be readable for those who did not care for its
+underlying philosophy.  If it fails to interest the reader who
+ventures upon it, it may find a place on an unfrequented bookshelf in
+common with other "medicated novels."
+
+Perhaps I have been too hard with Gifted Hopkins and the tribe of
+rhymesters to which he belongs.  I ought not to forget that I too
+introduced myself to the reading world in a thin volume of verses;
+many of which had better not have been written, and would not be
+reprinted now, but for the fact that they have established a right to
+a place among my poems in virtue of long occupancy.  Besides,
+although the writing of verses is often a mark of mental weakness, I
+cannot forget that Joseph Story and George Bancroft each published
+his little book, of rhymes, and that John Quincy Adams has left many
+poems on record, the writing of which did not interfere with the vast
+and important labors of his illustrious career.
+
+BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 7, 1891.
+
+O.  W.  H.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                    THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+AN ADVERTISEMENT.
+
+
+On Saturday, the 18th day of June, 1859, the "State Banner and
+Delphian Oracle," published weekly at Oxbow Village, one of the
+principal centres in a thriving river-town of New England, contained
+an advertisement which involved the story of a young life, and
+stained the emotions of a small community.  Such faces of dismay,
+such shaking of heads, such gatherings at corners, such halts of
+complaining, rheumatic wagons, and dried-up, chirruping chaises, for
+colloquy of their still-faced tenants, had not been known since the
+rainy November Friday, when old Malachi Withers was found hanging in
+his garret up there at the lonely house behind the poplars.
+
+The number of the "Banner and Oracle" which contained this
+advertisement was a fair specimen enough of the kind of newspaper to
+which it belonged.  Some extracts from a stray copy of the issue of
+the date referred to will show the reader what kind of entertainment
+the paper was accustomed to furnish its patrons, and also serve some
+incidental purposes of the writer in bringing into notice a few
+personages who are to figure in this narrative.
+
+The copy in question was addressed to one of its regular
+subscribers,--"B. Gridley, Esq."  The sarcastic annotations at
+various points, enclosed in brackets and italicised that they may be
+distinguished from any other comments, were taken from the pencilled
+remarks of that gentleman, intended for the improvement of a member
+of the family in which he resided, and are by no means to be
+attributed to the harmless pen which reproduces them.
+
+Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons
+acquainted with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a
+schoolmaster, a college tutor, and afterwards for many years
+professor,--a man of learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets,
+such as are hardly to be found, except in old, unmarried students,
+--the double flowers of college culture, their stamina all turned to
+petals, their stock in the life of the race all funded in the
+individual.  Being a man of letters, Byles Gridley naturally rather
+undervalued the literary acquirements of the good people of the rural
+district where he resided, and, having known much of college and
+something of city life, was apt to smile at the importance they
+attached to their little local concerns.  He was, of course, quite as
+much an object of rough satire to the natural observers and
+humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,--perhaps
+not in any village where a score or two of families are brought
+together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
+characters of a real-life stock company.
+
+The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
+worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire,
+whose handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored
+lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely
+groomed willow--hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were,
+monumental parlor.  Her household consisted of herself, her son,
+nineteen years of age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small
+children, twins, left upon her doorstep when little more than mere
+marsupial possibilities, taken in for the night, kept for a week, and
+always thereafter cherished by the good soul as her own; also of Miss
+Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the "Academy" in another
+part of the same town, a distant relative, boarding with her.
+
+What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to
+guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly
+to hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of
+the old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not
+believe a word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as
+to growl to himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the
+way about it.
+
+The leading article of the "Banner and Oracle" for June 18th must
+have been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked,
+several of the "metropolitan" journals of the date of June 15th and
+thereabout had evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some
+of his ideas before he gave them to the public.  The Foreign News by
+the Europa at Halifax, 15th, was spread out in the amplest dimensions
+the type of the office could supply.  More battles!  The Allies
+victorious!  The King and General Cialdini beat the Austrians at
+Palestro!  400 Austrians drowned in a canal!  Anti-French feeling in
+Germany!  Allgermine Zeiturg talks of conquest of Allsatia and
+Loraine and the occupation of Paris! [Vicious digs with a pencil
+through the above proper names.] Race for the Derby won by Sir Joseph
+Hawley's Musjid!  [That's what England cares for!  Hooray for the
+Darby!  Italy be deedeed!]  Visit of Prince Alfred to the Holy Land.
+Letter from our, own Correspondent.  [Oh!  Oh!  A West Minkville?]
+Cotton advanced.  Breadstuffs declining.--Deacon Rumrill's barn
+burned down on Saturday night.  A pig missing; supposed to have
+"fallen a prey to the devouring element."  [Got roasted.]  A yellow
+mineral had been discovered on the Doolittle farm, which, by the
+report of those who had seen it, bore a strong resemblance to
+California gold ore.  Much excitement in the neighborhood in
+consequence [Idiots!  Iron pyrites!] A hen at Four Corners had just
+laid an egg measuring 7 by 8 inches.  Fetch on your biddies!
+[Editorial wit!]  A man had shot an eagle measuring six feet and a
+half from tip to tip of his wings.--Crops suffering for want of rain
+[Always just so.  "Dry times, Father Noah!"]  The editors had
+received a liberal portion of cake from the happy couple whose
+matrimonial union was recorded in the column dedicated to Hymen.
+Also a superior article of [article of!  bah!] steel pen from the
+enterprising merchant [shopkeeper] whose advertisement was to be
+found on the third page of this paper.--An interesting Surprise
+Party [cheap theatricals] had transpired [bah!] on Thursday evening
+last at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker.  The parishioners had
+donated [donated! GIVE is a good word enough for the Lord's Prayer.
+DONATE our daily bread!] a bag of meal, a bushel of beans, a keg of
+pickles, and a quintal of salt-fish.  The worthy pastor was much
+affected, etc., etc.  [Of course.  Call'em.  SENSATION parties and
+done with it!] The Rev. Dr. Pemberton and the venerable Dr. Hurlbut
+honored the occasion with their presence.--We learn that the Rev.
+Ambrose Eveleth, rector of St. Bartholomew's Chapel, has returned
+from his journey, and will officiate to-morrow.
+
+Then came strings of advertisements, with a luxuriant vegetation of
+capitals and notes of admiration.  More of those PRIME GOODS!  Full
+Assortments of every Article in our line!  [Except the one thing you
+want!] Auction Sale.  Old furniture, feather-beds, bed-spreads
+[spreads!  ugh!], setts [setts!] crockery-ware, odd vols., ullage
+bbls. of this and that, with other household goods, etc., etc.,
+etc.,--the etceteras meaning all sorts of insane movables, such as
+come out of their bedlam-holes when an antiquated domestic
+establishment disintegrates itself at a country "vandoo."--Several
+announcements of "Feed," whatever that may be,--not restaurant
+dinners, anyhow,--also of "Shorts,"--terms mysterious to city ears as
+jute and cudbear and gunnybags to such as drive oxen in the remote
+interior districts.--Then the marriage column above alluded to, by
+the fortunate recipients of the cake.  Right opposite, as if for
+matrimonial ground-bait, a Notice that Whereas my wife, Lucretia
+Babb, has left my bed and board, I will not be responsible, etc.,
+etc., from this date.--Jacob Penhallow (of the late firm Wibird and
+Penhallow) had taken Mr. William Murray Bradshaw into partnership,
+and the business of the office would be carried on as usual under the
+title Penhallow and Bradshaw, Attorneys at Law.  Then came the
+standing professional card of Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut and Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, the medical patriarch of the town and his son.  Following
+this, hideous quack advertisements, some of them with the
+certificates of Honorables, Esquires, and Clergymen.--Then a cow,
+strayed or stolen from the subscriber.--Then the advertisement
+referred to in our first paragraph:
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD has been missing from her home in this place
+since Thursday morning, June 16th.  She is fifteen years old, tall
+and womanly for her age, has dark hair and eyes, fresh complexion,
+regular features, pleasant smile and voice, but shy with strangers.
+Her common dress was a black and white gingham check, straw hat,
+trimmed with green ribbon.  It is feared she may have come to harm in
+some way, or be wandering at large in a state of temporary mental
+alienation.  Any information relating to the missing child will be
+gratefully received and properly rewarded by her afflicted aunt,
+
+MISS SILENCE WITHERS,
+Residing at the Withers Homestead, otherwise known as "The Poplars,"
+in this village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+GREAT EXCITEMENT
+
+The publication of the advertisement in the paper brought the village
+fever of the last two days to its height.  Myrtle Hazard's
+disappearance had been pretty well talked round through the immediate
+neighborhood, but now that forty-eight hours of search and inquiry
+had not found her, and the alarm was so great that the young girl's
+friends were willing to advertise her in a public journal, it was
+clear that the gravest apprehensions were felt and justified.  The
+paper carried the tidings to many who had not heard it.  Some of the
+farmers who had been busy all the week with their fields came into
+the village in their wagons on Saturday, and there first learned the
+news, and saw the paper, and the placards which were posted up, and
+listened, open-mouthed, to the whole story.
+
+Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and
+some stir in the neighboring settlements.  Of course there was a
+great variety of comment, its character depending very much on the
+sense, knowledge, and disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young
+people who talked over the painful and mysterious occurrence.
+
+The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest.
+Nurse Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the girl
+when she was a little bright-eyed child, handed over "the baby" she
+was holding to another attendant, and got on her things to go
+straight up to The Poplars.  She had been holding "the baby" these
+forty years and more, but somehow it never got to be more than a
+month or six weeks old.  She reached The Poplars after much toil and
+travail.  Mistress Fagan, Irish, house-servant, opened the door, at
+which Nurse Byloe knocked softly, as she was in the habit of doing at
+the doors of those who sent for her.
+
+"Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?" asked Nurse Byloe.
+
+"Niver a blissed word," said she.  "Miss Withers is upstairs with
+Miss Bathsheby, a cryin' and a lamentin'.  Miss Badlam's in the
+parlor.  The men has been draggin' the pond.  They have n't found not
+one thing, but only jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the
+gray cat,--it's them nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied
+round her neck and then drownded her."  [P. Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had
+a snarl of similar string in his pocket.]
+
+Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor.  A woman was
+sitting there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself
+with the blackest of black fans.
+
+"Nuss Byloe, is that you?  Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you,
+though we 're all in trouble.  Set right down, Nuss, do.  Oh, it's
+dreadful times!"
+
+A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was
+here called on for its function.
+
+Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of
+those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so
+fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as
+they flatten under the subsiding person.
+
+The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin
+of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion
+at intervals for some years.  She appeared to be thirty-five years
+old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth,
+though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often
+the case with women.  She wore a not unbecoming cap; frequent
+headaches had thinned her locks somewhat of late years.  Features a
+little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a quick and restless glance,
+which rather avoided being met, gave the impression that she was a
+wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very possibly, crafty person.
+
+"I could n't help comin'," said Nurse Byloe, "we do so love our
+babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?"
+
+The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the
+possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing
+such a speech.
+
+"I never tended children as you have, Nuss," she said.  "But I 've
+known Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think
+she should have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above
+all things and desperately wicked,'"--and she wept.
+
+"Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?" said Nurse Byloe.  "Y' don't
+think anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?"
+
+"Child!" said Cynthia Badlam,--"child enough to wear this very gown I
+have got on and not find it too big for her neither."  [It would have
+pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]
+
+The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange
+of intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its
+specialty.  Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it
+is all the conversation of the lower animals.  Only the dull senses
+of men are dead to it as to the music of the spheres.
+
+Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together,
+through whole fields of suggestive speculation, until the dumb
+growths of thought ripened in both their souls into articulate
+speech, consentingly, as the movement comes after the long stillness
+of a Quaker meeting.
+
+Their lips opened at the same moment.  "You don't mean"--began Nurse
+Byloe, but stopped as she heard Miss Badlam also speaking.
+
+"They need n't drag the pond," she said.  "They need n't go beating
+the woods as if they were hunting a patridge,--though for that matter
+Myrtle Hazard was always more like a patridge than she was like a
+pullet.  Nothing ever took hold of that girl,--not catechising, nor
+advising, nor punishing.  It's that dreadful will of hers never was
+broke.  I've always been afraid that she would turn out a child of
+wrath.  Did y' ever watch her at meetin' playing with posies and
+looking round all the time of the long prayer?  That's what I've seen
+her do many and many a time.  I'm afraid--Oh dear!  Miss Byloe, I'm
+afraid to say--what I'm afraid of.  Men are so wicked, and young
+girls are full of deceit and so ready to listen to all sorts of
+artful creturs that take advantage of their ignorance and tender
+years."  She wept once more, this time with sobs that seemed
+irrepressible.
+
+"Dear suz!" said the nurse, "I won't believe no sech thing as
+wickedness about Myrtle Hazard.  You mean she's gone an' run off with
+some good-for-nothin' man or other?  If that ain't what y' mean, what
+do y' mean?  It can't be so, Miss Badlam: she's one o' my babies.  At
+any rate, I handled her when she fust come to this village,--and none
+o' my babies never did sech a thing.  Fifteen year old, and be
+bringin' a whole family into disgrace!  If she was thirty year old,
+or five-an'-thirty or more, and never'd had a chance to be married,
+and if one o' them artful creturs you was talkin' of got hold of her,
+then, to be sure,--why, dear me!--law!  I never thought, Miss
+Badlam!--but then of course you could have had your pickin' and
+choosin' in the time of it; and I don't mean to say it's too late now
+if you felt called that way, for you're better lookin' now than some
+that's younger, and there's no accountin' for tastes."
+
+A sort of hysteric twitching that went through the frame of Cynthia
+Badlam dimly suggested to the old nurse that she was not making her
+slightly indiscreet personality much better by her explanations.  She
+stopped short, and surveyed the not uncomely person of the maiden
+lady sitting before her with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes,
+and one hand clenching the arm of the reeking-chair, as if some spasm
+had clamped it there.  The nurse looked at her with a certain growing
+interest she had never felt before.  It was the first time for some
+years that she had had such a chance, partly because Miss Cynthia had
+often been away for long periods,--partly because she herself had
+been busy professionally.  There was no occasion for her services, of
+course, in the family at The Poplars; and she was always following
+round from place to place after that everlasting migratory six-weeks
+or less old baby.
+
+There was not a more knowing pair of eyes, in their way, in a circle
+of fifty miles, than those kindly tranquil orbs that Nurse Byloe
+fixed on Cynthia Badlam.  The silver threads in the side fold of
+hair, the delicate lines at the corner of the eye, the slight drawing
+down at the angle of the mouth,--almost imperceptible, but the nurse
+dwelt upon it,--a certain moulding of the features as of an artist's
+clay model worked by delicate touches with the fingers, showing that
+time or pain or grief had had a hand in shaping them, the contours,
+the adjustment of every fold of the dress, the attitude, the very way
+of breathing, were all passed through the searching inspection of the
+ancient expert, trained to know all the changes wrought by time and
+circumstance.  It took not so long as it takes to describe it, but it
+was an analysis of imponderables, equal to any of Bunsen's with the
+spectroscope.
+
+Miss Badlam removed her handkerchief and looked in a furtive,
+questioning way, in her turn, upon the nurse.
+
+"It's dreadful close here,--I'm 'most smothered," Nurse Byloe said;
+and, putting her hand to her throat, unclasped the catch of the
+necklace of gold beads she had worn since she was a baby,--a bead
+having been added from time to time as she thickened.  It lay in a
+deep groove of her large neck, and had not troubled her in breathing
+before, since the day when her husband was run over by an ox-team.
+
+At this moment Miss Silence Withers entered, followed by Bathsheba
+Stoker, daughter of Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+She was the friend of Myrtle, and had come to comfort Miss Silence,
+and consult with her as to what further search they should institute.
+The two, Myrtle's aunt and her friend, were as unlike as they could
+well be.  Silence Withers was something more than forty years old, a
+shadowy, pinched, sallow, dispirited, bloodless woman, with the
+habitual look of the people in the funeral carriage which follows
+next to the hearse, and the tone in speaking that may be noticed in a
+household where one of its members is lying white and still in a
+cool, darkened chamber overhead.  Bathsheba Stoker was not called
+handsome; but she had her mother's youthful smile, which was so fresh
+and full of sweetness that she seemed like a beauty while she was
+speaking or listening; and she could never be plain so long as any
+expression gave life to her features.  In perfect repose, her face, a
+little prematurely touched by sad experiences,--for she was but
+seventeen years old,--had the character and decision stamped in its
+outlines which any young man who wanted a companion to warn, to
+comfort, and command him, might have depended on as warranting the
+courage, the sympathy, and the sense demanded for such a
+responsibility.  She had been trying her powers of consolation on
+Miss Silence.  It was a sudden freak of Myrtle's.  She had gone off
+on some foolish but innocent excursion.  Besides, she was a girl that
+would take care of herself; for she was afraid of nothing, and
+nimbler than any boy of her age, and almost as strong as any.  As for
+thinking any bad thoughts about her, that was a shame; she cared for
+none of the young fellows that were round her.  Cyprian Eveleth was
+the one she thought most of; but Cyprian was as true as his sister
+Olive, and who else was there?
+
+To all this Miss Silence answered only by sighing and moaning, For
+two whole days she had been kept in constant fear and worry, afraid
+every minute of some tragical message, perplexed by the conflicting
+advice of all manner of officious friends, sleepless of course
+through the two nights, and now utterly broken down and collapsed.
+
+Bathsheba had said all she could in the way of consolation, and
+hastened back to her mother's bedside, which she hardly left, except
+for the briefest of visits.
+
+"It's a great trial, Miss Withers, that's laid on you," said Nurse
+Byloe.
+
+"If I only knew that she was dead, and had died in the Lord," Miss
+Silence answered,--"if I only knew that but if she is living in sin,
+or dead in wrong--doing, what is to become of me?--Oh, what is to
+become of me when 'He maketh inquisition far blood'?"
+
+"Cousin Silence," said Miss Cynthia, "it is n't your fault, if that
+young girl has taken to evil ways.  If going to meeting three times
+every Sabbath day, and knowing the catechism by heart, and reading of
+good books, and the best of daily advice, and all needful discipline,
+could have corrected her sinful nature, she would never have run away
+from a home where she enjoyed all these privileges.  It's that Indian
+blood, Cousin Silence.  It's a great mercy you and I have n't got any
+of it in our veins!  What can you expect of children that come from
+heathens and savages?  You can't lay it to yourself, Cousin Silence,
+if Myrtle Hazard goes wrong"---
+
+"The Lord will lay it to me,--the Lord will lay it to me," she
+moaned.  "Did n't he say to Cain, 'Where is Abel, thy brother?'"
+
+Nurse Byloe was getting very red in the face.  She had had about
+enough of this talk between the two women.  "I hope the Lard 'll take
+care of Myrtle Hazard fust, if she's in trouble, 'n' wants help," she
+said; "'n' then look out for them that comes next.  Y' 're too
+suspicious, Miss Badlam; y' 're too easy to believe stories.  Myrtle
+Hazard was as pretty a child and as good a child as ever I see, if
+you did n't rile her; 'n' d' d y' ever see one o' them hearty lively
+children, that had n't a sperrit of its own?  For my part, I'd rather
+handle one of 'em than a dozen o' them little waxy, weak-eyed, slim-
+necked creturs that always do what they tell 'em to, and die afore
+they're a dozen year old; and never was the time when I've seen
+Myrtle Hazard, sence she was my baby, but what it's always been,
+'Good mornin', Miss Byloe,' and 'How do you do, Miss Byloe?  I'm so
+glad to see you.'  The handsomest young woman, too, as all the old
+folks will agree in tellin' you, s'ence the time o' Judith Pride that
+was,--the Pride of the County they used to call her, for her beauty.
+Her great-grandma, y' know, Miss Cynthy, married old King David
+Withers.  What I want to know is, whether anything has been heerd,
+and jest what's been done about findin' the poor thing.  How d' ye
+know she has n't fell into the river?  Have they fired cannon?  They
+say that busts the gall of drownded folks, and makes the corpse rise.
+Have they looked in the woods everywhere?  Don't believe no wrong of
+nobody, not till y' must,--least of all of them that come o' the same
+folks, partly, and has lived with yo all their days.  I tell y',
+Myrtle Hazard's jest as innocent of all what y' 've been thinkin'
+about,--bless the poor child; she's got a soul that's as clean and
+sweet-well, as a pond-lily when it fust opens of a mornin', without a
+speck on it no more than on the fust pond-lily God Almighty ever
+made!"
+
+That gave a turn to the two women's thoughts, and their handkerchiefs
+went up to their faces.  Nurse Byloe turned her eyes quickly on
+Cynthia Badlam, and repeated her close inspection of every outline
+and every light and shadow in her figure.  She did not announce any
+opinion as to the age or good looks or general aspect or special
+points of Miss Cynthia; but she made a sound which the books write
+humph! but which real folks make with closed lips, thus: m'!--a sort
+of half-suppressed labio-palato-nasal utterance, implying that there
+is a good deal which might be said, and all the vocal organs want to
+have a chance at it, if there is to be any talking.
+
+Friends and neighbors were coming in and out; and the next person
+that came was the old minister, of whom, and of his colleague, the
+Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, some account may here be introduced.
+
+The Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton Father Pemberton as brother ministers
+called him, Priest Pemberton as he was commonly styled by the country
+people--would have seemed very old, if the medical patriarch of the
+village had not been so much older.  A man over ninety is a great
+comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the
+extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that
+the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp.  Dr.
+Hurlbut, at ninety-two, made Priest Pemberton seem comparatively
+little advanced; but the college catalogue showed that he must be
+seventy-five years old, if, as we may suppose, he was twenty at the
+time of his graduation.
+
+He was a man of noble presence always, and now, in the grandeur of
+his flowing silver hair and with the gray shaggy brows overhanging
+his serene and solemn eyes, with the slow gravity of motion and the
+measured dignity of speech which gave him the air of an old pontiff,
+he was an imposing personage to look upon, and could be awful, if the
+occasion demanded it.  His creed was of the sternest: he was looked
+up to as a bulwark against all the laxities which threatened New
+England theology.  But it was a creed rather of the study and of the
+pulpit than of every-day application among his neighbors.  He dealt
+too much in the lofty abstractions which had always such fascinations
+for the higher class of New England divines, to busy himself as much
+as he might have done with the spiritual condition of individuals.
+He had also a good deal in him of what he used to call the Old Man,
+which, as he confessed, he had never succeeded in putting off,
+--meaning thereby certain qualities belonging to humanity, as much as
+the natural gifts of the dumb creatures belong to them, and tending
+to make a man beloved by his weak and erring fellow-mortals.
+
+In the olden time he would have lived and died king of his parish,
+monarch, by Divine right, as the noblest, grandest, wisest of all
+that made up the little nation within hearing of his meeting-house
+bell.  But Young Calvinism has less reverence and more love of
+novelty than its forefathers.  It wants change, and it loves young
+blood.  Polyandry is getting to be the normal condition of the
+Church; and about the time a man is becoming a little overripe for
+the livelier human sentiments, he may be pretty sure the women are
+looking round to find him a colleague.  In this way it was that the
+Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker became the colleague of the Rev. Eliphalet
+Pemberton.
+
+If one could have dived deep below all the Christian graces--the
+charity, the sweetness of disposition, the humility--of Father
+Pemberton, he would have found a small remnant of the "Old Man," as
+the good clergyman would have called it, which was never in harmony
+with the Rev. Mr. Stoker.  The younger divine felt his importance,
+and made his venerable colleague feel that he felt it.  Father
+Pemberton had a fair chance at rainy Sundays and hot summer-afternoon
+services; but the junior pushed him aside without ceremony whenever
+he thought there was like to be a good show in the pews.  As for
+those courtesies which the old need, to soften the sense of declining
+faculties and failing attractions, the younger pastor bestowed them
+in public, but was negligent of them, to say the least, when not on
+exhibition.
+
+Good old Father Pemberton could not love this man, but he would not
+hate him, and he never complained to him or of him.  It would have
+been of no use if he had: the women of the parish had taken up the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker; and when the women run after a minister or a doctor,
+what do the men signify?
+
+Why the women ran after him, some thought it was not hard to guess.
+He was not ill-looking, according to the village standard, parted his
+hair smoothly, tied his white cravat carefully, was fluent,
+plausible, had a gift in prayer, was considered eloquent, was fond of
+listening to their spiritual experiences, and had a sickly wife.
+This is what Byles Gridley said; but he was apt to be caustic at
+times.
+
+Father Pemberton visited his people but rarely.  Like Jonathan
+Edwards, like David Osgood, he felt his call to be to study-work, and
+was impatient of the egotisms and spiritual megrims, in listening to
+which, especially from the younger females of his flock, his
+colleague had won the hearts of so many of his parishioners.  His
+presence had a wonderful effect in restoring the despondent Miss
+Silence to her equanimity; for not all the hard divinity he had
+preached for half a century had spoiled his kindly nature; and not
+the gentle Melanchthon himself, ready to welcome death as a refuge
+from the rage and bitterness of theologians, was more in contrast
+with the disputants with whom he mingled, than the old minister, in
+the hour of trial, with the stern dogmatist in his study, forging
+thunderbolts to smite down sinners.
+
+It was well that there were no tithing-men about on that next day,
+Sunday; for it shone no Sabbath day for the young men within half a
+dozen miles of the village.  They were out on Bear Hill the whole
+day, beating up the bushes as if for game, scaring old crows out of
+their ragged nests, and in one dark glen startling a fierce-eyed,
+growling, bobtailed catamount, who sat spitting and looking all ready
+to spring at them, on the tall tree where he clung with his claws
+unsheathed, until a young fellow came up with a gun and shot him
+dead.  They went through and through the swamp at Musquash Hollow;
+but found nothing better than a wicked old snapping-turtle, evil to
+behold, with his snaky head and alligator tail, but worse to meddle
+with, if his horny jaws were near enough to spring their man-trap on
+the curious experimenter.  At Wood-End there were some Indians, ill-
+conditioned savages in a dirty tent, making baskets, the miracle of
+which was that they were so clean.  They had seen a young lady
+answering the description, about a week ago.  She had bought a
+basket.  Asked them if they had a canoe they wanted to sell.--Eyes
+like hers (pointing to a squaw with a man's hat on).
+
+At Pocasset the young men explored all the thick woods,--some who
+ought to have known better taking their guns, which made a talk, as
+one might well suppose it would.  Hunting on a Sabbath day!  They did
+n't mean to shoot Myrtle Hazard, did they? it was keenly asked.  A
+good many said it was all nonsense, and a mere excuse to get away
+from meeting and have a sort of frolic on pretence that it was a work
+of necessity and mercy, one or both.
+
+While they were scattering themselves about in this way, some in
+earnest, some rejoicing in the unwonted license, lifting off for a
+little while that enormous Sabbath-day pressure which weighs like
+forty atmospheres on every true-born Puritan, two young men had been
+since Friday in search of the lost girl, each following a clue of his
+own, and determined to find her if she was among the living.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth made for the village of Mapleton, where his sister
+Olive was staying, trusting that, with her aid, he might get a clue
+to the mystery of Myrtle's disappearance.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw struck for a railroad train going to the
+great seaport, at a station where it stops for wood and water.
+
+In the mean time, a third young man, Gifted Hopkins by name, son of
+the good woman already mentioned, sat down, with tears in his eyes,
+and wrote those touching stanzas, "The Lost Myrtle," which were
+printed in the next "Banner and Oracle," and much admired by many who
+read them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+ANTECEDENTS.
+
+The Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town.  It was built
+on the east bank of the river, a little above the curve which gave
+the name to Oxbow Village.  It stood on an elevation, its west gable
+close to the river's edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the
+foot of the slope behind it, woods at the east, open to the south,
+with a great row of Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the
+house.  The Hon. Selah Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the
+first colonists, built it for his own residence, in the early part of
+the last century.  Deeply impressed with his importance in the order
+of things, he had chosen to place it a little removed from the
+cluster of smaller dwellings about the Oxbow; and with some vague
+fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook the Rhine and the
+Danube, he had selected this eminence on which to place his
+substantial gambrel roofed dwelling-house.  Long afterwards a bay-
+window, almost a little room of itself, had been thrown out of the
+second story on the west side, so that it looked directly down on the
+river running beneath it.  The chamber, thus half suspended in the
+air, had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard; and
+as the boys paddling about on the river would often catch glimpses,
+through the window, of the little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket
+she fancied in those days, one of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it
+a name which became current among the young people, and indeed
+furnished to Gifted Hopkins the subject of one of his earliest poems,
+to wit, "The Fire-hang-bird's Nest."
+
+If we would know anything about the persons now living at the Withers
+Homestead, or The Poplars, as it was more commonly called of late
+years, we must take a brief inventory of some of their vital
+antecedents.  It is by no means certain that our individual
+personality is the single inhabitant of these our corporeal frames.
+Nay, there is recorded an experience of one of the living persons
+mentioned in this narrative,--to be given in full in its proper
+place, which, so far as it is received in evidence, tends to show
+that some, at least, who have long been dead, may enjoy a kind of
+secondary and imperfect, yet self-conscious life, in these bodily
+tenements which we are in the habit of considering exclusively our
+own.  There are many circumstances, familiar to common observers,
+which favor this belief to a certain extent.  Thus, at one moment we
+detect the look, at another the tone of voice, at another some
+characteristic movement of this or that ancestor, in our relations or
+others.  There are times when our friends do not act like themselves,
+but apparently in obedience to some other law than that of their own
+proper nature.  We all do things both awake and asleep which surprise
+us.  Perhaps we have cotenants in this house we live in.  No less
+than eight distinct personalities are said to have coexisted in a
+single female mentioned by an ancient physician of unimpeachable
+authority.  In this light we may perhaps see the meaning of a
+sentence, from a work which will be repeatedly referred to in this
+narrative, viz.: "This body in which we journey across the isthmus
+between the two oceans is not a private carriage, but an omnibus."
+
+The ancestry of the Withers family had counted a martyr to their
+faith before they were known as Puritans.  The record was obscure in
+some points; but the portrait, marked "Ann Holyoake, burned by ye
+bloudy Papists, ano 15.."  (figures illegible), was still hanging
+against the panel over the fireplace in the west parlor at The
+Poplars.  The following words were yet legible on the canvas:
+"Thou hast made a covenant O Lord with mee and my Children forever."
+
+The story had come down, that Ann Holyoake spoke these words in a
+prayer she offered up at the stake, after the fagots were kindled.
+There had always been a secret feeling in the family, that none of
+her descendants could finally fall from grace, in virtue of this
+solemn "covenant."
+
+There had been also a legend in the family, that the martyred woman's
+spirit exercised a kind of supervision over her descendants; that she
+either manifested herself to them, or in some way impressed them,
+from time to time; as in the case of the first pilgrim before he cast
+his lot with the emigrants,--of one Mrs. Winslow, a descendant in the
+third generation, when the Indians were about to attack the
+settlement where she lived,--and of another, just before he was
+killed at Quebec.
+
+There was a remarkable resemblance between the features of Ann
+Holyoake, as shown in the portrait, and the miniature likeness of
+Myrtle's mother.  Myrtle adopted the nearly obsolete superstition
+more readily on this account, and loved to cherish the fancy that the
+guardian spirit which had watched over her ancestors was often near
+her, and would be with her in her time of need.
+
+The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of
+that delusion.  A careless expression in one of her letters, that "ye
+Parson was as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em,"
+had got abroad, and given great offence to godly people.  There was
+no doubt that some odd "manifestations," as they would be called
+nowadays, had taken place in the household when she was a girl, and
+that she presented many of the conditions belonging to what are at
+the present day called mediums.
+
+Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty,
+loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings,
+and to hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic
+sentiments at town-meetings and in the General Court.  He loved to
+wear a crimson sash and a military cap with a large red feather, in
+which the village folk used to say he looked as "hahnsome as a
+piny,"--meaning a favorite flower of his, which is better spelt
+peony, and to which it was not unnatural that his admirers should
+compare him.
+
+If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough
+have sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who
+would have dropped into their places like posts into their holes,
+asking no questions of life, contented, like so many other honest
+folks, with the part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their
+wardrobe of flesh and bones being furnished them gratis, and nothing
+to do but to walk across the stage wearing it.  But Major Gideon
+Withers, for some reason or other, married a slender, sensitive,
+nervous, romantic woman, which accounted for the fact that his son
+David, "King David," as he was called in his time, had a very
+different set of tastes from his father, showing a turn for
+literature and sentiment in his youth, reading Young's "Night
+Thoughts," and Thomson's "Seasons," and sometimes in those early days
+writing verses himself to Celia or to Chloe, which sounded just as
+fine to him as Effie and Minnie sound to young people now, as
+Musidora, as Saccharissa, as Lesbia, as Helena, as Adah and Zillah,
+have all sounded to young people in their time,--ashes of roses as
+they are to us now, and as our endearing Scotch diminutives will be
+to others by and by.
+
+King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly because he was
+rich, and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew
+too old to write love-poems, married the famous beauty before
+mentioned, Miss Judith Pride, and the race came up again in vigor.
+Their son, Jeremy, took for his first wife a delicate, melancholic
+girl, who matured into a sad-eyed woman, and bore him two children,
+Malachi and Silence.
+
+When she died, he mourned for her bitterly almost a year, and then
+put on a ruffled shirt and went across the river to tell his grief to
+Miss Virginia Wild, there residing.  This lady was said to have a few
+drops of genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain
+that her cheek had a little of the russet tinge which a Seckel pear
+shows on its warmest cheek when it blushes.--Love shuts itself up in
+sympathy like a knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily.  All
+the rest followed in due order according to Nature's kindly
+programme.
+
+Captain Charles Hazard, of the ship Orient Pearl, fell desperately in
+love with the daughter of this second wife, married her, and carried
+her to India, where their first and only child was born, and received
+the name of Myrtle, as fitting her cradle in the tropics.  So her
+earliest impressions,--it would not be exact to call them
+recollections,--besides the smiles of her father and mother, were of
+dusky faces, of loose white raiment, of waving fans, of breezes
+perfumed with the sweet exhalations of sandal-wood, of gorgeous
+flowers and glowing fruit, of shady verandas, of gliding palanquins,
+and all the languid luxury of the South.  The pestilence which has
+its natural home in India, but has journeyed so far from its birth
+place in these later years, took her father and mother away,
+suddenly, in the very freshness of their early maturity.  A relation
+of Myrtle's father, wife of another captain, was returning to America
+on a visit, and the child was sent back, under her care, while still
+a mere infant, to her relatives at the old homestead.  During the
+long voyage, the strange mystery of the ocean was wrought into her
+consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to have become a part of her
+being.  The waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother; and,
+looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with
+tender care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the
+rhythm of their movement became a part of her, almost as much as her
+own pulse and breath.
+
+The instincts and qualities belonging to the ancestral traits which
+predominated in the conflict of mingled lives lay in this child in
+embryo, waiting to come to maturity.  It was as when several grafts,
+bearing fruit that ripens at different times, are growing upon the
+same stock.  Her earlier impulses may have been derived directly from
+her father and mother, but all the ancestors who have been mentioned,
+and more or less obscurely many others, came uppermost in their time,
+before the absolute and total result of their several forces had
+found its equilibrium in the character by which she was to be known
+as an individual.  These inherited impulses were therefore many,
+conflicting, some of them dangerous.  The World, the Flesh, and the
+Devil held mortgages on her life before its deed was put in her
+hands; but sweet and gracious influences were also born with her; and
+the battle of life was to be fought between them, God helping her in
+her need, and her own free choice siding with one or the other.  The
+formal statement of this succession of ripening characteristics need
+not be repeated, but the fact must be borne in mind.
+
+This was the child who was delivered into the hands of Miss Silence
+Withers, her mother's half--sister, keeping house with her brother
+Malachi, a bachelor, already called Old Malachi, though hardly
+entitled by his years to such a venerable prefix.  Both these persons
+had inherited the predominant traits of their sad-eyed mother.
+Malachi, the chief heir of the family property, was rich, but felt
+very poor.  He owned this fine old estate of some hundreds of acres.
+He had moneys in the bank, shares in various companies, wood-lots in
+the town; and a large tract of Western land, the subject of a lawsuit
+which seemed as if it would never be settled, and kept him always
+uneasy.
+
+Some said he hoarded gold somewhere about the old house, but nobody
+knew this for a certainty.  In spite of his abundant means, he talked
+much of poverty, and kept the household on the narrowest footing of
+economy.  One Irishwoman, with a little aid from her husband now and
+then, did all their work; and the only company they saw was Miss
+Cynthia Badlam, who, as a relative, claimed a home with them whenever
+she was so disposed.
+
+The "little Indian," as Malachi called her, was an awkward accession
+to the family.  Silence Withers knew no more about children and their
+ways and wants than if she had been a female ostrich.  Thus it was
+that she found it necessary to send for a woman well known in the
+place as the first friend whose acquaintance many of the little
+people of the town had made in this vale of tears.
+
+Thirty years of practice had taught Nurse Byloe the art of handling
+the young of her species with the soft firmness which one may notice
+in cats with their kittens,--more grandly in a tawny lioness mouthing
+her cubs.  Myrtle did not know she was held; she only felt she was
+lifted, and borne up, as a cherub may feel upon a white-woolly cloud,
+and smiled accordingly at the nurse, as if quite at home in her arms.
+
+"As fine a child as ever breathed the breath of life.  But where did
+them black eyes come from?  Born in Injy,--that 's it, ain't it?  No,
+it's her poor mother's eyes to be sure.  Does n't it seem as if there
+was a kind of Injin look to 'em?  She'll be a lively one to manage,
+if I know anything about childun.  See her clinchin' them little
+fists!"
+
+This was when Miss Silence came near her and brought her rather
+severe countenance close to the child for inspection of its features.
+The ungracious aspect of the woman and the defiant attitude of the
+child prefigured in one brief instant the history of many long coming
+years.
+
+It was not a great while before the two parties in that wearing
+conflict of alien lives, which is often called education, began to
+measure their strength against each other.  The child was bright,
+observing, of restless activity, inquisitively curious, very hard to
+frighten, and with a will which seemed made for mastery, not
+submission.
+
+The stern spinster to whose care this vigorous life was committed was
+disposed to discharge her duty to the girl faithfully and
+conscientiously; but there were two points in her character and
+belief which had a most important bearing on the manner in which she
+carried out her laudable intentions.  First, she was one of that
+class of human beings whose one single engrossing thought is their
+own welfare,--in the next world, it is true, but still their own
+personal welfare.  The Roman Church recognizes this class, and
+provides every form of specific to meet their spiritual condition.
+But in so far as Protestantism has thrown out works as a means of
+insuring future safety, these unfortunates are as badly off as
+nervous patients who have no drops, pills, potions, no doctors'
+rules, to follow.  Only tell a poor creature what to do, and he or
+she will do it, and be made easy, were it a pilgrimage of a thousand
+miles, with shoes full of split peas instead of boiled ones; but if
+once assured that doing does no good, the drooping Little-faiths are
+left at leisure to worry about their souls, as the other class of
+weaklings worry about their bodies.  The effect on character does not
+seem to be very different in the two classes.  Metaphysicians may
+discuss the nature of selfishness at their leisure; if to have all
+her thoughts centring on the one point of her own well-being by and
+by was selfishness, then Silence Withers was supremely selfish; and
+if we are offended with that form of egotism, it is no more than ten
+of the twelve Apostles were, as the reader may see by turning to the
+Gospel of St.  Matthew, the twentieth chapter and the twenty-fourth
+verse.
+
+The next practical difficulty was, that she attempted to carry out a
+theory which, whatever might be its success in other cases, did not
+work kindly in the case of Myrtle Hazard, but, on the contrary,
+developed a mighty spirit of antagonism in her nature, which
+threatened to end in utter lawlessness.  Miss Silence started from
+the approved doctrine, that all children are radically and utterly
+wrong in all their motives, feelings, thoughts, and deeds, so long as
+they remain subject to their natural instincts.  It was by the
+eradication, and not the education, of these instincts, that the
+character of the human being she was moulding was to be determined.
+The first great preliminary process, so soon as the child manifested
+any evidence of intelligent and persistent self-determination, was to
+break her will.
+
+There is no doubt that this was a legitimate conclusion from the
+teaching of Priest Pemberton, but it required a colder and harder
+nature than his own to carry out many of his dogmas to their
+practical application.  He wrought in the pure mathematics, so to
+speak, of theology, and left the working rules to the good sense and
+good feeling of his people.
+
+Miss Silence had been waiting for her opportunity to apply the great
+doctrine, and it came at last in a very trivial way.
+
+"Myrtle does n't want brown bread.  Myrtle won't have brown bread.
+Myrtle will have white bread."
+
+"Myrtle is a wicked child.  She will have what Aunt Silence says she
+shall have.  She won't have anything but brown bread."
+
+Thereupon the bright red lip protruded, the hot blood mounted to her
+face, the child untied her little "tire," got down from the table,
+took up her one forlorn, featureless doll, and went to bed without
+her supper.  The next morning the worthy woman thought that hunger
+and reflection would have subdued the rebellious spirit.  So there
+stood yesterday's untouched supper waiting for her breakfast.  She
+would not taste it, and it became necessary to enforce that extreme
+penalty of the law which had been threatened, but never yet put in
+execution.  Miss Silence, in obedience to what she felt to be a
+painful duty, without any passion, but filled with high, inexorable
+purpose, carried the child up to the garret, and, fastening her so
+that she could not wander about and hurt herself, left her to her
+repentant thoughts, awaiting the moment when a plaintive entreaty for
+liberty and food should announce that the evil nature had yielded and
+the obdurate will was broken.
+
+The garret was an awful place.  All the skeleton-like ribs of the
+roof showed in the dim light, naked overhead, and the only floor to
+be trusted consisted of the few boards which bridged the lath and
+plaster.  A great, mysterious brick tower climbed up through it,--it
+was the chimney, but it looked like a horrible cell to put criminals
+into.  The whole place was festooned with cobwebs,--not light films,
+such as the housewife's broom sweeps away before they have become a
+permanent residence, but vast gray draperies, loaded with dust,
+sprinkled with yellow powder from the beams where the worms were
+gnawing day and night, the home of old, hairy spiders who had, lived
+there since they were eggs and would leave it for unborn spiders who
+would grow old and huge like themselves in it, long after the human
+tenants had left the mansion for a narrower home.  Here this little
+criminal was imprisoned, six, twelve,--tell it not to mothers,
+--eighteen dreadful hours, hungry until she was ready to gnaw her
+hands, a prey to all childish imaginations; and here at her stern
+guardian's last visit she sat, pallid, chilled, almost fainting, but
+sullen and unsubdued.  The Irishwoman, poor stupid Kitty Fagan, who
+had no theory of human nature, saw her over the lean shoulders of the
+spinster, and, forgetting all differences of condition and questions
+of authority, rushed to her with a cry of maternal tenderness, and,
+with a tempest of passionate tears and kisses, bore her off to her
+own humble realm, where the little victorious martyr was fed from the
+best stores of the house, until there was as much danger from
+repletion as there had been from famine.  How the experiment might
+have ended but for this empirical and most unphilosophical
+interference, there is no saying; but it settled the point that the
+rebellious nature was not to be subjugated in a brief conflict.
+
+The untamed disposition manifested itself in greater enormities as
+she grew older.  At the age of four years she was detected in making
+a cat's-cradle at meeting, during sermon-time, and, on being
+reprimanded for so doing, laughed out loud, so as to be heard by
+Father Pemberton, who thereupon bent his threatening, shaggy brows
+upon the child, and, to his shame be it spoken, had such a sudden
+uprising of weak, foolish, grandfatherly feelings, that a mist came
+over his eyes, and he left out his "ninthly" altogether, thereby
+spoiling the logical sequence of propositions which had kept his
+large forehead knotty for a week.
+
+At eight years old she fell in love with the high-colored picture of
+Major Gideon Withers in the crimson sash and the red feather of his
+exalted military office.  It was then for the first time that her
+aunt Silence remarked a shade of resemblance between the child and
+the portrait.  She had always, up to this time, been dressed in sad
+colors, as was fitting, doubtless, for a forlorn orphan; but
+happening one day to see a small negro girl peacocking round in a
+flaming scarlet petticoat, she struck for bright colors in her own
+apparel, and carried her point at last.  It was as if a ground-
+sparrow had changed her gray feathers for the burning plumage of some
+tropical wanderer; and it was natural enough that Cyprian Eveleth
+should have called her the fire-hang-bird, and her little chamber the
+fire-hang-bird's nest,--using the country boy's synonyme for the
+Baltimore oriole.
+
+At ten years old she had one of those great experiences which give
+new meaning to the life of a child.
+
+Her uncle Malachi had seemed to have a strong liking for her at one
+time, but of late years his delusions had gained upon him, and under
+their influence he seemed to regard her as an encumbrance and an
+extravagance.  He was growing more and more solitary in his habits,
+more and more negligent of his appearance.  He was up late at night,
+wandering about the house from the cellar to the garret, so that, his
+light being seen flitting from window to window, the story got about
+that the old house was haunted.
+
+One dreary, rainy Friday in November, Myrtle was left alone in the
+house.  Her uncle had been gone since the day before.  The two women
+were both away at the village.  At such times the child took a
+strange delight in exploring all the hiding-places of the old
+mansion.  She had the mysterious dwelling-place of so many of the
+dead and the living all to herself.  What a fearful kind of pleasure
+in its silence and loneliness!  The old clock that Marmaduke Storr
+made in London more than a hundred years ago was clicking the steady
+pulse-beats of its second century.  The featured moon on its dial had
+lifted one eye, as if to watch the child, as it had watched so many
+generations of children, while the swinging pendulum ticked them
+along into youth, maturity, gray hairs, deathbeds,--ticking through
+the prayer at the funeral, ticking without grief through all the
+still or noisy woe of mourning,--ticking without joy when the smiles
+and gayety of comforted heirs had come back again.  She looked at
+herself in the tall, bevelled mirror in the best chamber.  She pulled
+aside the curtains of the stately bedstead whereon the heads of the
+house had slept until they died and were stretched out upon it, and
+the sheet shaped itself to them in vague, awful breadth of outline,
+like a block of monumental marble the sculptor leaves just hinted by
+the chisel.
+
+She groped her way up to the dim garret, the scene of her memorable
+punishment.  A rusty hook projected from one of the joists a little
+higher than a man's head.  Something was hanging from it,--an old
+garment, was it?  She went bravely up and touched--a cold hand.  She
+did what most children of that age would do,--uttered a cry and ran
+downstairs with all her might.  She rushed out of the door and called
+to the man Patrick, who was doing some work about the place.  What
+could be done was done, but it was too late.
+
+Uncle Malachi had made away with himself.  That was plain on the face
+of thing.  In due time the coroner's verdict settled it.  It was not
+so strange as it seemed; but it made a great talk in the village and
+all the country round about.  Everybody knew he had money enough, and
+yet he had hanged himself for fear of starving to death.
+
+For all that, he was found to have left a will, dated some years
+before, leaving his property to his sister Silence, with the
+exception of a certain moderate legacy to be paid in money to Myrtle
+Hazard when she should arrive at the age of twenty years.
+
+The household seemed more chilly than ever after this tragical event.
+Its depressing influence followed the child to school, where she
+learned the common branches of knowledge.  It followed her to the
+Sabbath-day catechisings, where she repeated the answers about the
+federal headship of Adam, and her consequent personal
+responsibilities, and other technicalities which are hardly milk for
+babes, perhaps as well as other children, but without any very
+profound remorse for what she could not help, so far as she
+understood the matter, any more than her sex or stature, and with no
+very clear comprehension of the phrases which the New England
+followers of the Westminster divines made a part of the elementary
+instruction of young people.
+
+At twelve years old she had grown tall and womanly enough to attract
+the eyes of the youth and older boys, several of whom made advances
+towards her acquaintance.  But the dreary discipline of the household
+had sunk into her soul, and she had been shaping an internal life for
+herself, which it was hard for friendship to penetrate.  Bathsheba
+Stoker was chained to the bedside of an invalid mother.  Olive
+Eveleth, a kind, true-hearted girl, belonged to another religious
+communion; and this tended to render their meetings less frequent,
+though Olive was still her nearest friend.  Cyprian was himself a
+little shy, and rather held to Myrtle through his sister than by any
+true intimacy directly with herself.  Of the other young men of the
+village Gifted Hopkins was perhaps the most fervent of her admirers,
+as he had repeatedly shown by effusions in verse, of which, under the
+thinnest of disguises, she was the object.
+
+William Murray Bradshaw, ten years older than herself, a young man of
+striking aspect and claims to exceptional ability, had kept his eye
+on her of late; but it was generally supposed that he would find a
+wife in the city, where he was in the habit of going to visit a
+fashionable relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.
+She, at any rate, understood very well that he meant, to use his own
+phrase, "to go in for a corner lot,"--understanding thereby a young
+lady with possessions and without encumbrances.  If the old man had
+only given his money to Myrtle, William Murray Bradshaw would have
+made sure of her; but she was not likely ever to get much of it.
+Miss Silence Withers, it was understood, would probably leave her
+money as the Rev. Mr. Stoker, her spiritual director, should
+indicate, and it seemed likely that most of it would go to a rising
+educational institution where certain given doctrines were to be
+taught through all time, whether disproved or not, and whether those
+who taught them believed them or not, provided only they would say
+they believed them.
+
+Nobody had promised to say masses for her soul if she made this
+disposition of her property, or pledged the word of the Church that
+she should have plenary absolution.  But she felt that she would be
+making friends in Influential Quarters by thus laying up her
+treasure, and that she would be safe if she had the good-will of the
+ministers of her sect.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had nearly reached the age of fourteen, and, though not
+like to inherit much of the family property, was fast growing into a
+large dower of hereditary beauty.  Always handsome, her features
+shaped themselves in a finer symmetry, her color grew richer, her
+figure promised a perfect womanly development, and her movements had
+the grace which high-breeding gives the daughter of a queen, and
+which Nature now and then teaches the humblest of village maidens.
+She could not long escape the notice of the lovers and flatterers of
+beauty, and the time of danger was drawing near.
+
+At this period of her life she made two discoveries which changed the
+whole course of her thoughts, and opened for her a new world of ideas
+and possibilities.
+
+Ever since the dreadful event of November, 1854, the garret had been
+a fearful place to think of, and still more to visit.  The stories
+that the house was haunted gained in frequency of repetition and
+detail of circumstance.  But Myrtle was bold and inquisitive, and
+explored its recesses at such times as she could creep among them
+undisturbed.  Hid away close under the eaves she found an old trunk
+covered with dust and cobwebs.  The mice had gnawed through its
+leather hinges, and, as it had been hastily stuffed full, the cover
+had risen, and two or three volumes had fallen to the floor.  This
+trunk held the papers and books which her great-grandmother, the
+famous beauty, had left behind her, records of the romantic days when
+she was the belle of the county,--storybooks, memoirs, novels, and
+poems, and not a few love-letters,--a strange collection, which, as
+so often happens with such deposits in old families, nobody had cared
+to meddle with, and nobody had been willing to destroy, until at last
+they had passed out of mind, and waited for a new generation to bring
+them into light again.
+
+The other discovery was of a small hoard of coin.  Under one of the
+boards which formed the imperfect flooring of the garret was hidden
+an old leather mitten.  Instead of a hand, it had a fat fist of
+silver dollars, and a thumb of gold half-eagles.
+
+Thus knowledge and power found their way to the simple and secluded
+maiden.  The books were hers to read as much as any other's; the gold
+and silver were only a part of that small provision which would be
+hers by and by, and if she borrowed it, it was borrowing of herself.
+The tree of the knowledge of good and evil had shaken its fruit into
+her lap, and, without any serpent to tempt her, she took thereof and
+did eat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+BYLES GRIDLEY, A. M.
+
+The old Master of Arts was as notable a man in his outside
+presentment as one will find among five hundred college alumni as
+they file in procession.  His strong, squared features, his
+formidable scowl, his solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his
+positive and as it were categorical stride, his slow, precise way of
+putting a statement, the strange union of trampling radicalism in
+some directions and high-stepping conservatism in others, which made
+it impossible to calculate on his unexpressed opinions, his testy
+ways and his generous impulses, his hard judgments and kindly
+actions, were characteristics that gave him a very decided
+individuality.
+
+He had all the aspects of a man of books.  His study, which was the
+best room in Mrs. Hopkins's house, was filled with a miscellaneous-
+looking collection of volumes, which his curious literary taste had
+got together from the shelves of all the libraries that had been
+broken up during his long life as a scholar.  Classics, theology,
+especially of the controversial sort, statistics, politics, law,
+medicine, science, occult and overt, general literature,--almost
+every branch of knowledge was represented.  His learning was very
+various, and of course mixed up, useful and useless, new and ancient,
+dogmatic and rational,--like his library, in short; for a library
+gathered like his is a looking-glass in which the owner's mind is
+reflected.
+
+The common people about the village did not know what to make of such
+a phenomenon.  He did not preach, marry, christen, or bury, like the
+ministers, nor jog around with medicines for sick folks, nor carry
+cases into court for quarrelsome neighbors.  What was he good for?
+Not a great deal, some of the wiseacres thought,--had "all sorts of
+sense but common sense,"--"smart mahn, but not prahctical."  There
+were others who read him more shrewdly.  He knowed more, they said,
+than all the ministers put together, and if he'd stan' for
+Ripresentative they 'd like to vote for him,--they hed n't hed a
+smart mahn in the Gineral Court sence Squire Wibird was thar.
+
+They may have overdone the matter in comparing his knowledge with
+that of all the ministers together, for Priest Pemberton was a real
+scholar in his special line of study,--as all D. D.'s are supposed to
+be, or they would not have been honored with that distinguished
+title.  But Mr. Byles Gridley not only had more learning than the
+deep-sea line of the bucolic intelligence could fathom; he had more
+wisdom also than they gave him credit for, even those among them who
+thought most of his abilities.
+
+In his capacity of schoolmaster he had sharpened his wits against
+those of the lively city boys he had in charge, and made such a
+reputation as "Master" Gridley, that he kept that title even after he
+had become a college tutor and professor.  As a tutor he had to deal
+with many of these same boys, and others like them, in the still more
+vivacious period of their early college life.  He got rid of his
+police duties when he became a professor, but he still studied the
+pupils as carefully as he used once to watch them, and learned to
+read character with a skill which might have fitted him for governing
+men instead of adolescents.  But he loved quiet and he dreaded
+mingling with the brawlers of the market-place, whose stock in trade
+is a voice and a vocabulary.  So it was that he had passed his life
+in the patient mechanical labor of instruction, leaving too many of
+his instincts and faculties in abeyance.
+
+The alluvium of all this experience bore a nearer resemblance to
+worldly wisdom than might have been conjectured; much nearer, indeed,
+than it does in many old instructors, whose eyes get fish-like as
+their blood grows cold, and who are not fit to be trusted with
+anything more practical than a gerund or a cosine.  Master Gridley
+not only knew a good deal of human nature, but he knew how to keep
+his knowledge to himself upon occasion.  He understood singularly
+well the ways and tendencies of young people.  He was shrewd in the
+detection of trickery, and very confident in those who had once
+passed the ordeal of his well-schooled observing powers.  He had no
+particular tendency to meddle with the personal relations of those
+about him; but if they were forced upon him in any way, he was like
+to see into them at least as quickly as any of his neighbors who
+thought themselves most endowed with practical skill.
+
+In leaving the duties of his office he considered himself, as he said
+a little despondently, like an old horse unharnessed and turned out
+to pasture.  He felt that he had separated himself from human
+interests, and was henceforth to live in his books with the dead,
+until he should be numbered with them himself.  He had chosen this
+quiet village as a place where he might pass his days undisturbed,
+and find a peaceful resting-place in its churchyard, where the gravel
+was dry, and the sun lay warm, and the glowing woods of autumn would
+spread their many-colored counterpane over the bed where he would be
+taking his rest.  It sometimes came over him painfully that he was
+never more to be of any importance to his fellow-creatures.  There
+was nobody living to whom he was connected by any very near ties.  He
+felt kindly enough to the good woman in whose house he lived; he
+sometimes gave a few words of counsel to her son; he was not
+unamiable with the few people he met; he bowed with great
+consideration to the Rev. Dr. Pemberton; and he studied with no small
+interest the physiognomy of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, to whose
+sermons he listened, with a black scowl now and then, and a nostril
+dilating with ominous intensity of meaning.  But he said sadly to
+himself, that his life had been a failure,--that he had nothing to
+show for it, and his one talent was ready in its napkin to give back
+to his Lord.
+
+He owed something of this sadness, perhaps, to a cause which many
+would hold of small significance.  Though he had mourned for no lost
+love, at least so far as was known, though he had never suffered the
+pang of parting with a child, though he seemed isolated from those
+joys and griefs which come with the ties of family, he too had his
+private urn filled with the ashes of extinguished hopes.  He was the
+father of a dead book.
+
+Why "Thoughts on the Universe, by Byles Gridley, A. M.," had not met
+with an eager welcome and a permanent demand from the discriminating
+public, it would take us too long to inquire in detail.  Indeed; he
+himself was never able to account satisfactorily for the state of
+things which his bookseller's account made evident to him.  He had
+read and re-read his work; and the more familiar he became with it,
+the less was he able to understand the singular want of popular
+appreciation of what he could not help recognizing as its
+excellences.  He had a special copy of his work, printed on large
+paper and sumptuously bound.  He loved to read in this, as people
+read over the letters of friends who have long been dead; and it
+might have awakened a feeling of something far removed from the
+ludicrous, if his comments on his own production could have been
+heard.  "That's a thought, now, for you!--See Mr. Thomas Babington
+Macaulay's Essay printed six years after thus book."  "A felicitous
+image! and so everybody would have said if only Mr. Thomas Carlyle
+had hit upon it."  "If this is not genuine pathos, where will you
+find it, I should like to know?  And nobody to open the book where it
+stands written but one poor old man--in this generation, at least--in
+this generation!"  It may be doubted whether he would ever have loved
+his book with such jealous fondness if it had gone through a dozen
+editions, and everybody was quoting it to his face.  But now it lived
+only for him; and to him it was wife and child, parent, friend, all
+in one, as Hector was all in all to his spouse.  He never tired of
+it, and in his more sanguine moods he looked forward to the time when
+the world would acknowledge its merits, and his genius would find
+full recognition.  Perhaps he was right: more than one book which
+seemed dead and was dead for contemporary readers has had a
+resurrection when the rivals who triumphed over it lived only in the
+tombstone memory of antiquaries.  Comfort for some of us, dear
+fellow-writer
+
+It followed from the way in which he lived that he must have some
+means of support upon which he could depend.  He was economical, if
+not over frugal in some of his habits; but he bought books, and took
+newspapers and reviews, and had money when money was needed; the fact
+being, though it was not generally known, that a distant relative had
+not long before died, leaving him a very comfortable property.
+
+His money matters had led him to have occasional dealings with the
+late legal firm of Wibird and Penhallow, which had naturally passed
+into the hands of the new partnership, Penhallow and Bradshaw.  He
+had entire confidence in the senior partner, but not so much in the
+young man who had been recently associated in the business.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, commonly called by his last two names,
+was the son of a lawyer of some note for his acuteness, who marked
+out his calling for him in having him named after the great Lord
+Mansfield.  Murray Bradshaw was about twenty-five years old, by
+common consent good-looking, with a finely formed head, a searching
+eye, and a sharp-cut mouth, which smiled at his bidding without the
+slightest reference to the real condition of his feeling at the
+moment.  This was a great convenience; for it gave him an appearance
+of good-nature at the small expense of a slight muscular movement
+which was as easy as winking, and deceived everybody but those who
+had studied him long and carefully enough to find that this play of
+his features was what a watch maker would call a detached movement.
+
+He had been a good scholar in college, not so much by hard study as
+by skilful veneering, and had taken great pains to stand well with
+the Faculty, at least one of whom, Byles Gridley, A. M., had watched
+him with no little interest as a man with a promising future,
+provided he were not so astute as to outwit and overreach himself in
+his excess of contrivance.  His classmates could not help liking him;
+as to loving him, none of them would have thought of that.  He was so
+shrewd, so keen, so full of practical sense, and so good-humored as
+long as things went on to his liking, that few could resist his
+fascination.  He had a way of talking with people about what they
+were interested in, as if it were the one matter in the world nearest
+to his heart.  But he was commonly trying to find out something, or
+to produce some impression, as a juggler is working at his miracle
+while he keeps people's attention by his voluble discourse and make-
+believe movements.  In his lightest talk he was almost always edging
+towards a practical object, and it was an interesting and instructive
+amusement to watch for the moment at which he would ship the belt of
+his colloquial machinery on to the tight pulley.  It was done so
+easily and naturally that there was hardly a sign of it.  Master
+Gridley could usually detect the shifting action, but the young man's
+features and voice never betrayed him.
+
+He was a favorite with the other sex, who love poetry and romance, as
+he well knew, for which reason he often used the phrases of both, and
+in such a way as to answer his purpose with most of those whom he
+wished to please.  He had one great advantage in the sweepstakes of
+life: he was not handicapped with any burdensome ideals.  He took
+everything at its marked value.  He accepted the standard of the
+street as a final fact for to-day, like the broker's list of prices.
+
+His whole plan of life was laid out.  He knew that law was the best
+introduction to political life, and he meant to use it for this end.
+He chose to begin his career in the country, so as to feel his way
+more surely and gradually to its ultimate aim; but he had no
+intention of burning his shining talents in a grazing district,
+however tall its grass might grow.  His business was not with these
+stiff-jointed, slow-witted graziers, but with the supple, dangerous,
+far-seeing men who sit scheming by the gas-light in the great cities,
+after all the lamps and candles are out from the Merrimac to the
+Housatonic.  Every strong and every weak point of those who might
+probably be his rivals were laid down on his charts, as winds and
+currents and rocks are marked on those of a navigator.  All the young
+girls in the country, and not a few in the city, with which, as
+mentioned, he had frequent relations, were on his list of possible
+availabilities in the matrimonial line of speculation, provided
+always that their position and prospects were such as would make them
+proper matches for so considerable a person as the future Hon.
+William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Master Gridley had made a careful study of his old pupil since they
+had resided in the same village.  The old professor could not help
+admiring him, notwithstanding certain suspicious elements in his
+character; for after muddy village talk, a clear stream of
+intelligent conversation was a great luxury to the hard-headed
+scholar.  The more he saw of him, the more he learned to watch his
+movements, and to be on his guard in talking with him.  The old man
+could be crafty, with all his simplicity, and he had found out that
+under his good-natured manner there often lurked some design more or
+less worth noting, and which might involve other interests deserving
+protection.
+
+For some reason or other the old Master of Arts had of late
+experienced a certain degree of relenting with regard to himself,
+probably brought about by the expressions of gratitude from worthy
+Mrs. Hopkins for acts of kindness to which he himself attached no
+great value.  He had been kind to her son Gifted; he had been
+fatherly with Susan Posey, her relative and boarder; and he had shown
+himself singularly and unexpectedly amiable with the little twins who
+had been adopted by the good woman into her household.  In fact, ever
+since these little creatures had begun to toddle about and explode
+their first consonants, he had looked through his great round
+spectacles upon them with a decided interest; and from that time it
+seemed as if some of the human and social sentiments which had never
+leafed or flowered in him, for want of their natural sunshine, had
+begun growing up from roots which had never lost their life.  His
+liking for the twins may have been an illustration of that singular
+law which old Dr. Hurlbut used to lay down, namely, that at a certain
+period of life, say from fifty to sixty and upward, the grand-
+paternal instinct awakens in bachelors, the rhythms of Nature
+reaching them in spite of her defeated intentions; so that when men
+marry late they love their autumn child with a twofold affection,
+--father's and grandfather's both in one.
+
+However this may be, there is no doubt that Mr. Byles Gridley was
+beginning to take a part in his neighbors' welfare and misfortunes,
+such as could hardly have been expected of a man so long lost in his
+books and his scholastic duties.  And among others, Myrtle Hazard had
+come in for a share of his interest.  He had met her now and then in
+her walks to and from school and meeting, and had been taken with her
+beauty and her apparent unconsciousness of it, which he attributed to
+the forlorn kind of household in which she had grown up.  He had got
+so far as to talk with her now and then, and found himself puzzled,
+as well he might be, in talking with a girl who had been growing into
+her early maturity in antagonism with every influence that surrounded
+her.
+
+"Love will reach her by and by," he said, "in spite of the dragons up
+at the den yonder.
+
+    "'Centum fronte oculos, centum cervice gerebat
+     Argus, et hos unus saepe fefellit amor.'"
+
+But there was something about Myrtle,--he hardly knew whether to call
+it dignity, or pride, or reserve, or the mere habit of holding back
+brought about by the system of repression under which she had been
+educated,--which kept even the old Master of Arts at his distance.
+Yet he was strongly drawn to her, and had a sort of presentiment that
+he might be able to help her some day, and that very probably she
+would want his help; for she was alone in the world, except for the
+dragons, and sure to be assailed by foes from without and from
+within.
+
+He noticed that her name was apt to come up in his conversations with
+Murray Bradshaw; and, as he himself never introduced it, of course
+the young man must have forced it, as conjurers force a card, and
+with some special object.  This set him thinking hard; and, as a
+result of it, he determined the next time Mr. Bradshaw brought her
+name up to set him talking.
+
+So he talked, not suspecting how carefully the old man listened.
+
+"It was a demonish hard case," he said, "that old Malachi had left
+his money as he did.  Myrtle Hazard was going to be the handsomest
+girl about, when she came to her beauty, and she was coming to it
+mighty fast.  If they could only break that will, but it was no use
+trying.  The doctors said he was of sound mind for at least two years
+after making it.  If Silence Withers got the land claim, there'd be a
+pile, sure enough.  Myrtle Hazard ought to have it.  If the girl had
+only inherited that property--whew?  She'd have been a match for any
+fellow.  That old Silence Withers would do just as her minister told
+her,--even chance whether she gives it to the Parson-factory, or
+marries Bellamy Stoker, and gives it to him after his wife's dead.
+He'd take it if he had to take her with it.  Earn his money, hey,
+Master Gridley?"
+
+"Why, you don't seem to think very well of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker?" said Mr. Gridley, smiling.
+
+"Think well of him?  Too fond of using the Devil's pitchfork for my
+fancy!  Forks over pretty much all the world but himself and his lot
+into--the bad place, you know; and toasts his own cheese with it with
+very much the same kind of comfort that other folks seem to take in
+that business.  Besides, he has a weakness for pretty saints--and
+sinners.  That's an odd name he has.  More belle amie than Joseph
+about him, I rather guess!"
+
+The old professor smiled again.  "So you don't think he believes all
+the mediaeval doctrines he is in the habit of preaching, Mr.
+Bradshaw?"
+
+"No, sir; I think he belongs to the class I have seen described
+somewhere.  'There are those who hold the opinion that truth is only
+safe when diluted,--about one fifth to four fifths lies,--as the
+oxygen of the air is with its nitrogen.  Else it would burn us all
+up.'"
+
+Byles Gridley colored and started a little.  This was one of his own
+sayings in "Thoughts on the Universe."  But the young man quoted it
+without seeming to suspect its authorship.
+
+"Where did you pick up that saying, Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+"I don't remember.  Some paper, I rather think.  It's one of those
+good things that get about without anybody's knowing who says 'em.
+Sounds like Coleridge."
+
+"That's what I call a compliment worth having," said Byles Gridley to
+himself, when he got home.  "Let me look at that passage."
+
+He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and got so much interested,
+reading on page after page, that he did not hear the little tea-bell,
+and Susan Posey volunteered to run up to his study and call him down
+to tea.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE TWINS.
+
+Miss Suzan Posey knocked timidly at his door and informed him that
+tea was waiting.  He rather liked Susan Posey.  She was a pretty
+creature, slight, blonde, a little too light, a village beauty of the
+second or third grade, effective at picnics and by moonlight,--the
+kind of girl that very young men are apt to remember as their first
+love.  She had a taste for poetry, and an admiration of poets; but,
+what was better, she was modest and simple, and a perfect sister and
+mother and grandmother to the two little forlorn twins who had been
+stranded on the Widow Hopkins's doorstep.
+
+These little twins, a boy and girl, were now between two and three
+years old.  A few words will make us acquainted with them.  Nothing
+had ever been known of their origin.  The sharp eyes of all the
+spinsters had been through every household in the village and
+neighborhood, and not a suspicion fixed itself on any one.  It was a
+dark night when they were left; and it was probable that they had
+been brought from another town, as the sound of wheels had been heard
+close to the door where they were found, had stopped for a moment,
+then been heard again, and lost in the distance.
+
+How the good woman of the house took them in and kept them has been
+briefly mentioned.  At first nobody thought they would live a day,
+such little absurd attempts at humanity did they seem.  But the young
+doctor came and the old doctor came, and the infants were laid in
+cotton-wool, and the room heated up to keep them warm, and baby-
+teaspoonfuls of milk given them, and after being kept alive in this
+way, like the young of opossums and kangaroos, they came to a
+conclusion about which they did not seem to have made up their
+thinking-pulps for some weeks, namely, to go on trying to cross the
+sea of life by tugging at the four-and-twenty oars which must be
+pulled day and night until the unknown shore is reached, and the oars
+lie at rest under the folded hands.
+
+As it was not very likely that the parents who left their offspring
+round on doorsteps were of saintly life, they were not presented for
+baptism like the children of church-members.  Still, they must have
+names to be known by, and Mrs. Hopkins was much exercised in the
+matter.  Like many New England parents, she had a decided taste for
+names that were significant and sonorous.  That which she had chosen
+for her oldest child, the young poet, was either a remarkable
+prophecy, or it had brought with it the endowments it promised.  She
+had lost, or, in her own more pictorial language, she had buried, a
+daughter to whom she had given the names, at once of cheerful omen
+and melodious effect, Wealthy Amadora.
+
+As for them poor little creturs, she said, she believed they was
+rained down out o' the skies, jest as they say toads and tadpoles
+come.  She meant to be a mother to 'em for all that, and give 'em
+jest as good names as if they was the governor's children, or the
+minister's.  If Mr. Gridley would be so good as to find her some kind
+of a real handsome Chris'n name for 'em, she'd provide 'em with the
+other one.  Hopkinses they shall be bred and taught, and Hopkinses
+they shall be called.  Ef their father and mother was ashamed to own
+'em, she was n't.  Couldn't Mr. Gridley pick out some pooty sounding
+names from some of them great books of his.  It's jest as well to
+have 'em pooty as long as they don't cost any more than if they was
+Tom and Sally.
+
+A grim smile passed over the rugged features of Byles Gridley.
+"Nothing is easier than that, Mrs. Hopkins," he said.  "I will give
+you two very pretty names that I think will please you and other
+folks.  They're new names, too.  If they shouldn't like to keep them,
+they can change them before they're christened, if they ever are.
+Isosceles will be just the name for the boy, and I'm sure you won't
+find a prettier name for the girl in a hurry than Helminthia."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was delighted with the dignity and novelty of these two
+names, which were forthwith adopted.  As they were rather long for
+common use in the family, they were shortened into the easier forms
+of Sossy and Minthy, under which designation the babes began very
+soon to thrive mightily, turning bread and milk into the substance of
+little sinners at a great rate, and growing as if they were put out
+at compound interest.
+
+This short episode shows us the family conditions surrounding Byles
+Gridley, who, as we were saying, had just been called down to tea by
+Miss Susan Posey.
+
+"I am coming, my dear," he said,--which expression quite touched Miss
+Susan, who did not know that it was a kind of transferred caress from
+the delicious page he was reading.  It was not the living child that
+was kissed, but the dead one lying under the snow, if we may make a
+trivial use of a very sweet and tender thought we all remember.
+
+Not long after this, happening to call in at the lawyer's office, his
+eye was caught by the corner of a book lying covered up by a pile of
+papers.  Somehow or other it seemed to look very natural to him.
+Could that be a copy of "Thoughts on the Universe"?  He watched his
+opportunity, and got a hurried sight of the volume.  His own
+treatise, sure enough!  Leaves Uncut.  Opened of itself to the one
+hundred and twentieth page.  The axiom Murray Bradshaw had quoted--he
+did not remember from what,--"sounded like Coleridge"--was staring
+him in the face from that very page.  When he remembered how he had
+pleased himself with that compliment the other day, he blushed like a
+school-girl; and then, thinking out the whole trick,--to hunt up his
+forgotten book, pick out a phrase or two from it, and play on his
+weakness with it, to win his good opinion,--for what purpose he did
+not know, but doubtless to use him in some way,--he grinned with a
+contempt about equally divided between himself and the young schemer.
+
+"Ah ha!" he muttered scornfully.  "Sounds like Coleridge, hey?
+Niccolo Macchiavelli Bradshaw!"
+
+From this day forward he looked on all the young lawyer's doings with
+even more suspicion than before.  Yet he would not forego his company
+and conversation; for he was very agreeable and amusing to study; and
+this trick he had played him was, after all, only a diplomatist's way
+of flattering his brother plenipotentiary.  Who could say?  Some time
+or other he might cajole England or France or Russia into a treaty
+with just such a trick.  Shallower men than he had gone out as
+ministers of the great Republic.  At any rate, the fellow was worth
+watching.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE USE OF SPECTACLES.
+
+The old Master of Arts had a great reputation in the house where he
+lived for knowing everything that was going on.  He rather enjoyed
+it; and sometimes amused himself with surprising his simple-hearted
+landlady and her boarders with the unaccountable results of his
+sagacity.  One thing was quite beyond her comprehension.  She was
+perfectly sure that Mr. Gridley could see out of the back of his
+head, just as other people see with their natural organs.  Time and
+again he had told her what she was doing when his back was turned to
+her, just as if he had been sitting squarely in front of her.  Some
+laughed at this foolish notion; but others, who knew more of the
+nebulous sciences, told her it was like's not jes' so.  Folks had
+read letters laid ag'in' the pits o' their stomachs, 'n' why should
+n't they see out o' the backs o' their heads?
+
+Now there was a certain fact at the bottom of this belief of Mrs.
+Hopkins; and as it world be a very small thing to make a mystery of
+so simple a matter, the reader shall have the whole benefit of
+knowing all there is in it,--not quite yet, however, of knowing all
+that came of it.  It was not the mirror trick, of course, which Mrs.
+Felix Lorraine and other dangerous historical personages have so long
+made use of.  It was nothing but this: Mr. Byles Gridley wore a pair
+of formidable spectacles with large round glasses.  He had often
+noticed the reflection of objects behind him when they caught their
+images at certain angles, and had got the habit of very often looking
+at the reflecting surface of one or the other of the glasses, when he
+seemed to be looking through them.  It put a singular power into his
+possession, which might possibly hereafter lead to something more
+significant than the mystification of the Widow Hopkins.
+
+A short time before Myrtle Hazard's disappearance, Mr. Byles Gridley
+had occasion to call again at the office of Penhallow and Bradshaw on
+some small matter of business of his own.  There were papers to look
+over, and he put on his great round-glassed spectacles.  He and Mr.
+Penhallow sat down at the table, and Mr. Bradshaw was at a desk
+behind them.  After sitting for a while, Mr. Penhallow seemed to
+remember something he had meant to attend to, for he said all at
+once: "Excuse me, Mr. Gridley.  Mr. Bradshaw, if you are not busy, I
+wish you would look over this bundle of papers.  They look like old
+receipted bills and memoranda of no particular use; but they came
+from the garret of the Withers place, and might possibly have
+something that would be of value.  Look them over, will you, and see
+whether there is anything there worth saving."
+
+The young man took the papers, and Mr. Penhallow sat down again at
+the table with Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+This last-named gentleman felt just then a strong impulse to observe
+the operations of Murray Bradshaw.  He could not have given any very
+good reason for it, any more than any of us can for half of what we
+do.
+
+"I should like to examine that conveyance we were speaking of once
+more," said he.  "Please to look at this one in the mean time, will
+you, Mr. Penhallow?"
+
+Master Gridley held the document up before him.  He did not seem to
+find it quite legible, and adjusted his spectacles carefully, until
+they were just as he wanted them.  When he had got them to suit
+himself, sitting there with his back to Murray Bradshaw, he could see
+him and all his movements, the desk at which he was standing, and the
+books in the shelves before him,--all this time appearing as if he
+were intent upon his own reading.
+
+The young man began in a rather indifferent way to look over the
+papers.  He loosened the band round them, and took them up one by
+one, gave a careless glance at them, and laid them together to tie up
+again when he had gone through them.  Master Gridley saw all this
+process, thinking what a fool he was all the time to be watching such
+a simple proceeding.  Presently he noticed a more sudden movement:
+the young man had found something which arrested his attention, and
+turned his head to see if he was observed.  The senior partner and
+his client were both apparently deep in their own affairs.  In his
+hand Mr. Bradshaw held a paper folded like the others, the back of
+which he read, holding it in such a way that Master Gridley saw very
+distinctly three large spots of ink upon it, and noticed their
+position.  Murray Bradshaw took another hurried glance at the two
+gentlemen, and then quickly opened the paper.  He ran it over with a
+flash of his eye, folded it again, and laid it by itself.  With
+another quick turn of his head, as if to see whether he were observed
+or like to be, he reached his hand out and took a volume down from
+the shelves.  In this volume he shut the document, whatever it was,
+which he had just taken out of the bundle, and placed the book in a
+very silent and as it were stealthy way back in its place.  He then
+gave a look at each of the other papers, and said to his partner:
+"Old bills, old leases, and insurance policies that have run out.
+Malachi seems to have kept every scrap of paper that had a signature
+to it."
+
+"That 's the way with the old misers, always," said Mr. Penhallow.
+
+Byles Gridley had got through reading the document he held,--or
+pretending to read it.  He took off his spectacles.
+
+"We all grow timid and cautious as we get old, Mr. Penhallow."  Then
+turning round to the young man, he slowly repeated the lines,
+
+   "'Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
+     Quaerit et inventis miser abstinet, ac timet uti;
+     Vel quod res omnes timide, gelideque ministrat '
+
+"You remember the passage, Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+While he was reciting these words from Horace, which he spoke slowly
+as if he relished every syllable, he kept his eyes on the young man
+steadily, but with out betraying any suspicion.  His old habits as a
+teacher made that easy.
+
+Murray Bradshaw's face was calm as usual, but there was a flush on
+his cheek, and Master Gridley saw the slight but unequivocal signs of
+excitement.
+
+"Something is going on inside there," the old man said to himself.
+He waited patiently, on the pretext of business, until Mr. Bradshaw
+got up and left the office.  As soon as he and the senior partner
+were alone, Master Gridley took a lazy look at some of the books in
+his library.  There stood in the book-shelves a copy of the Corpus
+Juris Civilis,--the fine Elzevir edition of 1664.  It was bound in
+parchment, and thus readily distinguishable at a glance from all the
+books round it.  Now Mr. Penhallow was not much of a Latin scholar,
+and knew and cared very little about the civil law.  He had fallen in
+with this book at an auction, and bought it to place in his shelves
+with the other "properties" of the office, because it would look
+respectable.  Anything shut up in one of those two octavos might stay
+there a lifetime without Mr. Penhallow's disturbing it; that Master
+Gridley knew, and of course the young man knew it too.
+
+We often move to the objects of supreme curiosity or desire, not in
+the lines of castle or bishop on the chess-board, but with the
+knight's zigzag, at first in the wrong direction, making believe to
+ourselves we are not after the thing coveted.  Put a lump of sugar in
+a canary-bird's cage, and the small creature will illustrate the
+instinct for the benefit of inquirers or sceptics.  Byles Gridley
+went to the other side of the room and took a volume of Reports from
+the shelves.  He put it back and took a copy of "Fearne on Contingent
+Remainders," and looked at that for a moment in an idling way, as if
+from a sense of having nothing to do.  Then he drew the back of his
+forefinger along the books on the shelf, as if nothing interested him
+in them, and strolled to the shelf in front of the desk at which
+Murray Bradshaw had stood.  He took down the second volume of the
+Corpus Juris Civilis, turned the leaves over mechanically, as if in
+search of some title, and replaced it.
+
+He looked round for a moment.  Mr. Penhallow was writing hard at his
+table, not thinking of him, it was plain enough.  He laid his hand on
+the FIRST volume of the Corpus Juris Civilis.  There was a document
+shut up in it.  His hand was on the book, whether taking it out or
+putting it back was not evident, when the door opened and Mr. William
+Murray Bradshaw entered.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Gridley," he said, "you are not studying the civil law, are
+you?"  He strode towards him as he spoke, his face white, his eyes
+fixed fiercely on him.
+
+"It always interests me, Mr. Bradshaw," he answered, "and this is a
+fine edition of it.  One may find a great many valuable things in the
+Corpus Juris Civilis."
+
+He looked impenetrable, and whether or not he had seen more than Mr.
+Bradshaw wished him to see, that gentleman could not tell.  But there
+stood the two books in their place, and when, after Master Gridley
+had gone, he looked in the first volume, there was the document he
+had shut up in it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MYRTLE'S LETTER--THE YOUNG MEN'S PURSUIT.
+
+"You know all about it, Olive?" Cyprian Eveleth said to his sister,
+after a brief word of greeting.
+
+"Know of what, Cyprian?"
+
+"Why, sister, don't you know that Myrtle Hazard is missing,--gone!
+--gone nobody knows where, and that we are looking in all directions
+to find her?"
+
+Olive turned very pale and was silent for a moment.  At the end of
+that moment the story seemed almost old to her.  It was a natural
+ending of the prison-life which had been round Myrtle since her
+earliest years.  When she got large and strong enough, she broke out
+of jail,--that was all.  The nursery-bar is always climbed sooner or
+later, whether it is a wooden or an iron one.  Olive felt as if she
+had dimly foreseen just such a finishing to the tragedy of the poor
+girl's home bringing-up.  Why could not she have done something to
+prevent it?  Well,--what shall we do now, and as it is?--that is the
+question.
+
+"Has she left no letter,--no explanation of her leaving in this way?"
+
+"Not a word, so far as anybody in the village knows."
+
+"Come over to the post-office with me; perhaps we may find a letter.
+I think we shall."
+
+Olive's sagacity and knowledge of her friend's character had not
+misled her.  She found a letter from Myrtle to herself, which she
+opened and read as here follows:
+
+MY DEAREST OLIVE:--Think no evil of me for what I have done.  The
+fire-hang-bird's nest, as Cyprian called it, is empty, and the poor
+bird is flown.
+
+I can live as I have lived no longer.  This place is chilling all the
+life out of me, and I must find another home.  It is far, far away,
+and you will not hear from me again until I am there.  Then I will
+write to you.
+
+You know where I was born,--under a hot sun and in the midst of
+strange, lovely scenes that I seem still to remember.  I must visit
+them again: my heart always yearns for them.  And I must cross the
+sea to get there,--the beautiful great sea that I have always longed
+for and that my river has been whispering about to me ever so many
+years.  My life is pinched and starved here.  I feel as old as aunt
+Silence, and I am only fifteen,--a child she has called me within a
+few days.  If this is to be a child, what is it to be a woman?
+
+I love you dearly,--and your brother is almost to me as if he were
+mine.  I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,--yes, and the old man
+that has spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to
+give you pain,--to leave you all,--but my way of life is killing me,
+and I am too young to die.  I cannot take the comfort with you, my
+dear friends, that I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of
+ice in my heart, and all the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.
+
+I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive.  Do you
+remember how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to
+flee into Egypt?  I have had a dream like that, Olive.  There is an
+old belief in our family that the spirit of one who died many
+generations ago watches over some of her descendants.  They say it
+led our first ancestor to come over here when it was a wilderness.  I
+believe it has appeared to others of the family in times of trouble.
+I have had a strange dream at any rate, and the one I saw, or thought
+I saw, told me to leave this place.  Perhaps I should have stayed if
+it had not been for that, but it seemed like an angel's warning.
+
+Nobody will know how I have gone, or which way I have taken.  On
+Monday, you may show this letter to my friends, not before.  I do not
+think they will be in danger of breaking their hearts for me at our
+house.  Aunt Silence cares for nothing but her own soul, and the
+other woman hates me, I always thought.  Kitty Fagan will cry hard.
+Tell her perhaps I shall come back by and by.  There is a little box
+in my room, with some keepsakes marked,--one is for poor Kitty.  You
+can give them to the right ones.  Yours is with them.
+
+Good-by, dearest.  Keep my secret, as I told you, till Monday.  And
+if you never see me again, remember how much I loved you.  Never
+think hardly of me, for you have grown up in a happy home, and do not
+know how much misery can be crowded into fifteen years of a young
+girl's life.  God be with you!
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+Olive could not restrain her tears, as she handed the letter to
+Cyprian.  "Her secret is as safe with you as with me," she said.
+"But this is madness, Cyprian, and we must keep her from doing
+herself a wrong.
+
+"What she means to do, is to get to Boston, in some way or other, and
+sail for India.  It is strange that they have not tracked her.  There
+is no time to be lost.  She shall not go out into the world in this
+way, child that she is.  No; she shall come back, and make her home
+with us, if she cannot be happy with these people.  Ours is a happy
+and a cheerful home, and she shall be to me as a younger sister, and
+your sister too, Cyprian.  But you must see her; you must leave this
+very hour; and you may find her.  Go to your cousin Edward, in
+Boston, at once; tell him your errand, and get him to help you find
+our poor dear sister.  Then give her the note I will write, and say I
+know your heart, Cyprian, and I can trust that to tell you what to
+say."
+
+In a very short time Cyprian Eveleth was on his way to Boston.  But
+another, keener even in pursuit than he, was there before him.
+
+Ever since the day when Master Gridley had made that over-curious
+observation of the young lawyer's proceedings at the office, Murray
+Bradshaw had shown a far livelier interest than before in the
+conditions and feelings of Myrtle Hazard.  He had called frequently
+at The Poplars to talk over business matters, which seemed of late to
+require a deal of talking.  He had been very deferential to Miss
+Silence, and had wound himself into the confidence of Miss Badlam.
+He found it harder to establish any very near relations with Myrtle,
+who had never seemed to care much for any young man but Cyprian
+Eveleth, and to care for him quite as much as Olive's brother as for
+any personal reason.  But he carefully studied Myrtle's tastes and
+ways of thinking and of life, so that, by and by, when she should
+look upon herself as a young woman, and not as a girl, he would have
+a great advantage in making her more intimate acquaintance.
+
+Thus, she corresponded with a friend of her mother's in India.  She
+talked at times as if it were her ideal home, and showed many tastes
+which might well be vestiges of early Oriental impressions.  She made
+herself a rude hammock,--such as are often used in hot climates,--and
+swung it between two elms.  Here she would lie in the hot summer
+days, and fan herself with the sandal-wood fan her friend in India
+had sent her,--the perfume of which, the women said, seemed to throw
+her into day-dreams, which were almost like trances.
+
+These circumstances gave a general direction to his ideas, which were
+presently fixed more exactly by two circumstances which he learned
+for himself and kept to himself; for he had no idea of making a hue
+and cry, and yet he did not mean that Myrtle Hazard should get away
+if he could help it.
+
+The first fact was this.  He found among the copies of the city
+newspaper they took at The Poplars a recent number from which a
+square had been cut out.  He procured another copy of this paper of
+the same date, and found that the piece cut out was an advertisement
+to the effect that the A 1 Ship Swordfish, Captain Hawkins, was to
+sail from Boston for Calcutta, on the 20th of June.
+
+The second fact was the following.  On the window-sill of her little
+hanging chamber, which the women allowed him to inspect, he found
+some threads of long, black, glossy hair caught by a splinter in the
+wood.  They were Myrtle's of course.  A simpleton might have
+constructed a tragedy out of this trivial circumstance,--how she had
+cast herself from the window into the waters beneath it,--how she had
+been thrust out after a struggle, of which this shred from her
+tresses was the dreadful witness,--and so on.  Murray Bradshaw did
+not stop to guess and wonder.  He said nothing about it, but wound
+the shining threads on his finger, and, as soon as he got home,
+examined them with a magnifier.  They had been cut off smoothly, as
+with a pair of scissors.  This was part of a mass of hair, then,
+which had been shorn and thrown from the window.  Nobody would do
+that but she herself.  What would she do it for?  To disguise her
+sex, of course.  The other inferences were plain enough.
+
+The wily young man put all these facts and hints together, and
+concluded that be would let the rustics drag the ponds and the river,
+and scour the woods and swamps, while he himself went to the seaport
+town from which she would without doubt sail if she had formed the
+project he thought on the whole most probable.
+
+Thus it was that we found him hurrying to the nearest station to
+catch the train to Boston, while they were all looking for traces of
+the missing girl nearer home.  In the cars he made the most
+suggestive inquiries he could frame, to stir up the gentlemanly
+conductor's memory.  Had any young fellow been on the train within a
+day or two, who had attracted his notice?  Smooth, handsome face,
+black eyes, short black hair, new clothes, not fitting very well,
+looked away when he paid his fare, had a soft voice like a woman's,--
+had he seen anybody answering to some such description as this?  The
+gentlemanly conductor had not noticed,--was always taking up and
+setting down way-passengers,--might have had such a young man
+aboard,--there was two or three students one day in the car singing
+college songs,--he did n't care how folks looked if they had their
+tickets ready,--and minded their own business,--and, so saying, he
+poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was reclining
+with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
+provoke in lovely woman,--"Fare!"
+
+It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel,
+where they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby,
+with nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and
+anything but clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable
+and mean, and to undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in
+the office, who, while he shoves the book round to you for your name,
+is making a hasty calculation as to how high up he can venture to
+doom you.  But Murray Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more
+than made up for by the air and tone which imply the habit of being
+attended to.  The clerk saw that in a glance, and, as he looked at
+the name and address in the book, spoke sharply in the explosive
+dialect of his tribe,--
+
+"Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!"
+
+When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he
+appeared in his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable
+countenance and gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two
+stories higher, where he found himself in a room not much better than
+a garret, feeling lonely enough, for he did not know he had an
+acquaintance in the same house.  The two young men were in and out so
+irregularly that it was not very strange that they did not happen to
+meet each other.
+
+The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in
+the city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward.  He
+was not only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and
+its ways, and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian's motives,
+his own were of such intensity that he thought of nothing else by
+day, and dreamed of nothing else by night.  He went to work,
+therefore, in the most systematic manner.  He first visited the ship
+Swordfish, lying at her wharf, saw her captain, and satisfied himself
+that as yet nobody at all corresponding to the description of Myrtle
+Hazard had been seen by any person on board.  He visited all the
+wharves, inquiring on every vessel where it seemed possible she might
+have been looking about.  Hotels, thoroughfares, every place where he
+might hear of her or meet her, were all searched.  He took some of
+the police into his confidence, and had half a dozen pairs of eyes
+besides his own opened pretty widely, to discover the lost girl.
+
+On Sunday, the 19th, he got the first hint which encouraged him to
+think he was on the trail of his fugitive.  He had gone down again to
+the wharf where the Swordfish, advertised to sail the next day, was
+lying.  The captain was not on board, but one of the mates was there,
+and he addressed his questions to him, not with any great hope of
+hearing anything important, but determined to lose no chance, however
+small.  He was startled with a piece of information which gave him
+such an exquisite pang of delight that he could hardly keep the usual
+quiet of his demeanor.  A youth corresponding to his description of
+Myrtle Hazard in her probable disguise had been that morning on board
+the Swordfish, making many inquires as to the hour at which she was
+to sail, and who were to be the passengers, and remained some time on
+board, going all over the vessel, examining her cabin accommodations,
+and saying he should return to-morrow before she sailed,--doubtless
+intending to take passage in her, as there was plenty of room on
+board.  There could be little question, from the description, who
+this young person was.  It was a rather delicate--looking, dark--
+haired youth, smooth-faced, somewhat shy and bashful in his ways, and
+evidently excited and nervous.  He had apparently been to look about
+him, and would come back at the last moment, just as the vessel was
+ready to sail, and in an hour or two be beyond the reach of inquiry.
+
+Murray Bradshaw returned to his hotel, and, going to his chamber,
+summoned all his faculties in state council to determine what course
+he should follow, now that he had the object of his search certainly
+within reaching distance.  There was no danger now of her eluding
+him; but the grave question arose, what was he to do when he stood
+face to face with her.  She must not go,--that was fixed.  If she
+once got off in that ship, she might be safe enough; but what would
+become of certain projects in which he was interested,--that was the
+question.  But again, she was no child, to be turned away from her
+adventure by cajolery, or by any such threats as common truants would
+find sufficient to scare them back to their duty.  He could tell the
+facts of her disguise and the manner of her leaving home to the
+captain of the vessel, and induce him to send her ashore as a stray
+girl, to be returned to her relatives.  But this would only make her
+furious with him; and he must not alienate her from himself, at any
+rate.  He might plead with her in the name of duty, for the sake of
+her friends, for the good name of the family.  She had thought all
+these things over before she ran away.  What if he should address her
+as a lover, throw himself at her feet, implore her to pity him and
+give up her rash scheme, and, if things came to the very worst, offer
+to follow her wherever she went, if she would accept him in the only
+relation that would render it possible.  Fifteen years old,--he
+nearly ten years older,--but such things had happened before, and
+this was no time to stand on trifles.
+
+He worked out the hypothesis of the matrimonial offer as he would
+have reasoned out the probabilities in a law case he was undertaking.
+
+1.  He would rather risk that than lose all hold upon her.  The girl
+was handsome enough for his ambitious future, wherever it might carry
+him.  She came of an honorable family, and had the great advantage of
+being free from a tribe of disagreeable relatives, which is such a
+drawback on many otherwise eligible parties.  To these considerations
+were to be joined other circumstances which we need not here mention,
+of a nature to add greatly to their force, and which would go far of
+themselves to determine his action.
+
+2.  How was it likely she would look on such an extraordinary
+proposition?  At first, no doubt, as Lady Anne looked upon the
+advances of Richard.  She would be startled, perhaps shocked.  What
+then?  She could not help feeling flattered at such an offer from
+him,--him, William Murray Bradshaw, the rising young man of his
+county, at her feet, his eyes melting with the love he would throw
+into them, his tones subdued to their most sympathetic quality, and
+all those phrases on his lips which every day beguile women older and
+more discreet than this romantic, long-imprisoned girl, whose rash
+and adventurous enterprise was an assertion of her womanhood and her
+right to dispose of herself as she chose.  He had not lived to be
+twenty-five years old without knowing his power with women.  He
+believed in himself so thoroughly, that his very confidence was a
+strong promise of success.
+
+3.  In case all his entreaties, arguments, and offers made no
+impression, should he make use of that supreme resource, not to be
+employed save in extreme need, but which was of a nature, in his
+opinion, to shake a resolution stronger than this young girl was like
+to oppose to it?  That would be like Christian's coming to his weapon
+called All-prayer, he said to himself, with a smile that his early
+readings of Bunyan should have furnished him an image for so
+different an occasion.  The question was one he could not settle till
+the time came,--he must leave it to the instinct of the moment.
+
+The next morning found him early waking after a night of feverish
+dreams.  He dressed himself with more than usual care, and walked
+down to the wharf where the Swordfish was moored.  The ship had left
+the wharf, and was lying out in the stream: A small boat had just
+reached her, and a slender youth, as he appeared at that distance,
+climbed, not over-adroitly, up the vessel's side.
+
+Murray Bradshaw called to a boatman near by and ordered the man to
+row him over as fast as he could to the vessel lying in the stream.
+He had no sooner reached the deck of the Swordfish than he asked for
+the young person who had just been put on board.
+
+"He is in the cabin, sir, just gone down with the captain," was the
+reply.
+
+His heart beat, in spite of his cool temperament, as he went down the
+steps leading to the cabin.  The young person was talking earnestly
+with the captain, and, on his turning round, Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw had the pleasure of recognizing his young friend, Mr.
+Cyprian Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+DOWN THE RIVER.
+
+Look at the flower of a morning-glory the evening before the dawn
+which is to see it unfold.  The delicate petals are twisted into a
+spiral, which at the appointed hour, when the sunlight touches the
+hidden springs of its life, will uncoil itself and let the day into
+the chamber of its virgin heart.  But the spiral must unwind by its
+own law, and the hand that shall try to hasten the process will only
+spoil the blossom which would have expanded in symmetrical beauty
+under the rosy fingers of morning.
+
+We may take a hint from Nature's handling of the flower in dealing
+with young souls, and especially with the souls of young girls,
+which, from their organization and conditions, require more careful
+treatment than those of their tougher-fibred brothers.  Many parents
+reproach themselves for not having enforced their own convictions on
+their children in the face of every inborn antagonism they
+encountered.  Let them not be too severe in their self-condemnation.
+A want of judgment in this matter has sent many a young person to
+Bedlam, whose nature would have opened kindly enough if it had only
+been trusted to the sweet influences of morning sunshine.  In such
+cases it may be that the state we call insanity is not always an
+unalloyed evil.  It may take the place of something worse, the
+wretchedness of a mind not yet dethroned, but subject to the
+perpetual interferences of another mind governed by laws alien and
+hostile to its own.  Insanity may perhaps be the only palliative left
+to Nature in this extremity.  But before she comes to that, she has
+many expedients.  The mind does not know what diet it can feed on
+until it has been brought to the starvation point.  Its experience is
+like that of those who have been long drifting about on rafts or in
+long-boats.  There is nothing out of which it will not contrive to
+get some sustenance.  A person of note, long held captive for a
+political offence, is said to have owed the preservation of his
+reason to a pin, out of which he contrived to get exercise and
+excitement by throwing it down carelessly on the dark floor of his
+dungeon, and then hunting for it in a series of systematic
+explorations until he had found it.
+
+Perhaps the most natural thing Myrtle Hazard could have done would
+have been to go crazy, and be sent to the nearest asylum, if
+Providence, which in its wisdom makes use of the most unexpected
+agencies, had not made a special provision for her mental welfare.
+She was in that arid household as the prophet in the land where there
+was no dew nor rain for these long years.  But as he had the brook
+Cherith, and the bread and flesh in the morning and the bread and
+flesh in the evening which the ravens brought him, so she had the
+river and her secret store of books.
+
+The river was light and life and music and companionship to her.  She
+learned to row herself about upon it, to swim boldly in it, for it
+had sheltered nooks but a little way above The Poplars.  But there
+was more than that in it,--it was infinitely sympathetic.  A river is
+strangely like a human soul.  It has its dark and bright days, its
+troubles from within, and its disturbances from without.  It often
+runs over ragged rocks with a smooth surface, and is vexed with
+ripples as it slides over sands that are level as a floor.  It
+betrays its various moods by aspects which are the commonplaces of
+poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles and frowns.  Its face is
+full of winking eyes, when the scattering rain-drops first fall upon
+it, and it scowls back at the storm-cloud, as with knitted brows,
+when the winds are let loose.  It talks, too, in its own simple
+dialect, murmuring, as it were, with busy lips all the way to the
+ocean, as children seeking the mother's breast and impatient of
+delay.  Prisoners who know what a flower or an insect has been to
+them in their solitary cell, invalids who have employed their vacant
+minds in studying the patterns of paper-hangings on the walls of
+their sick-chambers, can tell what the river was to the lonely,
+imaginative creature who used to sit looking into its depths, hour
+after hour, from the airy height of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+
+Of late a thought had mingled with her fancies which had given to the
+river the aspect of something more than a friend and a companion.  It
+appeared all at once as a Deliverer.  Did not its waters lead, after
+long wanderings, to the great highway of the world, and open to her
+the gates of those cities from which she could take her departure
+unchallenged towards the lands of the morning or of the sunset?
+Often, after a freshet, she had seen a child's miniature boat
+floating down on its side past her window, and traced it in
+imagination back to some crystal brook flowing by the door of a
+cottage far up a blue mountain in the distance.  So she now began to
+follow down the stream the airy shallop that held her bright fancies.
+These dreams of hers were colored by the rainbows of an enchanted
+fountain,--the books of adventure, the romances, the stories which
+fortune had placed in her hands,--the same over which the heart of
+the Pride of the County had throbbed in the last century, and on the
+pages of some of which the traces of her tears might still be seen.
+
+The literature which was furnished for Myrtle's improvement was
+chiefly of a religious character, and, however interesting and
+valuable to those to whom it was adapted, had not been chosen with
+any wise regard to its fitness for her special conditions.  Of what
+use was it to offer books like the "Saint's Rest" to a child whose
+idea of happiness was in perpetual activity?  She read "Pilgrim's
+Progress," it is true, with great delight.  She liked the idea of
+travelling with a pack on one's back, the odd shows at the House of
+the interpreter, the fighting, the adventures, the pleasing young
+ladies at the palace the name of which was Beautiful, and their very
+interesting museum of curiosities.  As for the allegorical meaning,
+it went through her consciousness like a peck of wheat through a
+bushel measure with the bottom out, without touching.
+
+But the very first book she got hold of out of the hidden treasury
+threw the "Pilgrim's Progress" quite into the shade.  It was the
+story of a youth who ran away and lived on an island,--one Crusoe,
+--a homely narrative, but evidently true, though full of remarkable
+adventures.  There too was the history, coming much nearer home, of
+Deborah Sampson, the young woman who served as a soldier in the
+Revolutionary War, with a portrait of her in man's attire, looking
+intrepid rather than lovely.  A virtuous young female she was, and
+married well, as she deserved to, and raised a family with as good a
+name as wife and mother as the best of them.  But perhaps not one of
+these books and stories took such hold of her imagination as the tale
+of Rasselas, which most young persons find less entertaining than the
+"Vicar of Wakefield," with which it is nowadays so commonly bound up.
+It was the prince's discontent in the Happy Valley, the iron gate
+opening to the sound of music, and closing forever on those it
+admitted, the rocky boundaries of the imprisoning valley, the visions
+of the world beyond, the projects of escape, and the long toil which
+ended in their accomplishment, which haunted her sleeping and waking.
+She too was a prisoner, but it was not in the Happy Valley.  Of the
+romances and the love-letters we must take it for granted that she
+selected wisely, and read discreetly; at least we know nothing to the
+contrary.
+
+There were mysterious reminiscences and hints of her past coming over
+her constantly.  It was in the course of the long, weary spring
+before her disappearance, that a dangerous chord was struck which
+added to her growing restlessness.  In an old closet were some
+seashells and coral-fans, and dried star-fishes and sea, horses, and
+a natural mummy of a rough-skinned dogfish.  She had not thought of
+them for years, but now she felt impelled to look after them.  The
+dim sea odors which still clung to them penetrated to the very inmost
+haunts of memory, and called up that longing for the ocean breeze
+which those who have once breathed and salted their blood with it
+never get over, and which makes the sweetest inland airs seem to them
+at last tame and tasteless.  She held a tigershell to her ear, and
+listened to that low, sleepy murmur, whether in the sense or in the
+soul we hardly know, like that which had so often been her lullaby,
+--a memory of the sea, as Landor and Wordsworth have sung.
+
+"You are getting to look like your father," Aunt Silence said one
+day; "I never saw it before.  I always thought you took after old
+Major Gideon Withers.  Well, I hope you won't come to an early grave
+like poor Charles,--or at any rate, that you may be prepared."
+
+It did not seem very likely that the girl was going out of the world
+at present, but she looked Miss Silence in the face very seriously,
+and said, "Why not an early grave, Aunt, if this world is such a bad
+place as you say it is?"
+
+"I'm afraid you are not fit for a better."
+
+She wondered if Silence Withers and Cynthia Badlam were just ripe for
+heaven.
+
+For some months Miss Cynthia Badlam, who, as was said, had been an
+habitual visitor at The Poplars, had lived there as a permanent
+resident.  Between her and Silence Withers, Myrtle Hazard found no
+rest for her soul.  Each of them was for untwisting the morning-glory
+without waiting for the sunshine to do it.  Each had her own wrenches
+and pincers to use for that purpose.  All this promised little for
+the nurture and admonition of the young girl, who, if her will could
+not be broken by imprisonment and starvation at three years old, was
+not likely to be over-tractable to any but gentle and reasonable
+treatment at fifteen.
+
+Aunt Silence's engine was responsibility,--her own responsibility,
+and the dreadful consequences which would follow to her, Silence, if
+Myrtle should in any way go wrong.  Ever since her failure in that
+moral coup d'etat by which the sinful dynasty of the natural self-
+determining power was to be dethroned, her attempts in the way of
+education had been a series of feeble efforts followed by plaintive
+wails over their utter want of success.  The face she turned upon the
+young girl in her solemn expostulations looked as if it were
+inscribed with the epitaphs of hope and virtue.  Her utterances were
+pitched in such a forlorn tone, that the little bird in his cage, who
+always began twittering at the sound of Myrtle's voice, would stop in
+his song, and cock his head with a look of inquiry full of pathos, as
+if he wanted to know what was the matter, and whether he could do
+anything to help.
+
+The specialty of Cynthia Badlam was to point out all the dangerous
+and unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and
+this young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up
+examples of those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil
+end, to present the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the
+lively girl's apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion
+that a bright example of excellence stood before her in the
+irreproachable relative who addressed her.  Especially with regard to
+the allurements which the world offers to the young and inexperienced
+female, Miss Cynthia Badlam was severe and eloquent.  Sometimes poor
+Myrtle would stare, not seeing the meaning of her wise caution,
+sometimes look at Miss Cynthia with a feeling that there was
+something about her that was false and forced, that she had nothing
+in common with young people, that she had no pity for them, only
+hatred of their sins, whatever these might be,--a hatred which seemed
+to extend to those sources of frequent temptation, youth and beauty,
+as if they were in themselves objectionable.
+
+Both the lone women at The Poplars were gifted with a thin vein of
+music.  They gave it expression in psalmody, of course, in which
+Myrtle, who was a natural singer, was expected to bear her part.
+This would have been pleasantry if the airs most frequently selected
+had been cheerful or soothing, and if the favorite hymns had been of
+a sort to inspire a love for what was lovely in this life, and to
+give some faint foretaste of the harmonies of a better world to come.
+But there is a fondness for minor keys and wailing cadences common to
+the monotonous chants of cannibals and savages generally, to such
+war-songs as the wild, implacable "Marseillaise," and to the favorite
+tunes of low--spirited Christian pessimists.  That mournful "China,"
+which one of our most agreeable story-tellers has justly singled out
+as the cry of despair itself, was often sung at The Poplars, sending
+such a sense of utter misery through the house, that poor Kitty Fagan
+would cross herself, and wring her hands, and think of funerals, and
+wonder who was going to die,--for she fancied she heard the Banshee's
+warning in those most dismal ululations.
+
+On the first Saturday of June, a fortnight before her disappearance,
+Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and
+came dome with her hands full of leaves and blossoms.  Silence
+Withers looked at them as if they were a kind of melancholy
+manifestation of frivolity on the part of the wicked old earth.  Not
+that she did not inhale their faint fragrance with a certain
+pleasure, and feel their beauty as none whose souls are not wholly
+shriveled and hardened can help doing, but the world was, in her
+estimate, a vale of tears, and it was only by a momentary
+forgetfulness that she could be moved to smile at anything.
+
+Miss Cynthia, a sharper-edged woman, had formed the habit of crushing
+everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost
+odious, as flower-de-luces do when handled roughly.  "There's a worm
+in that leaf, Myrtle.  He has rolled it all round him, and hidden
+himself from sight; but there is a horrid worm in it, for all it is
+so young and fresh.  There is a worm in every young soul, Myrtle."
+
+"But there is not a worm in every leaf, Miss Cynthia.  Look," she
+said," all these are open, and you can see all over and under them,
+and there is nothing there.  Are there never any worms in the leaves
+after they get old and yellow, Miss Cynthia?"
+
+That was a pretty fair hit for a simple creature of fifteen, but
+perhaps she was not so absolutely simple as one might have thought.
+
+It was on the evening of this same day that they were sitting
+together.  The sweet season was opening, and it seemed as if the
+whispering of the leaves, the voices of the birds, the softness of
+the air, the young life stirring in everything, called on all
+creatures to join the universal chorus of praise that was going up
+around them.
+
+"What shall we sing this evening?" said Miss Silence.
+
+"Give me one of the books, if you please, Cousin Silence," said Miss
+Cynthia."  It is Saturday evening.  Holy time has begun.  Let us
+prepare our minds for the solemnities of the Sabbath."
+
+She took the book, one well known to the schools and churches of this
+nineteenth century.
+
+"Book Second.  Hymn 44.  Long metre.  I guess 'Putney' will be as
+good a tune as any to sing it to."
+
+The trio began,--
+
+         "With holy fear, and humble song,"
+
+and got through the first verse together pretty well.  Then came the
+second verse:
+
+         "Far in the deep where darkness dwells,
+          The land of horror and despair,
+          Justice has built a dismal hell,
+          And laid her stores of vengeance there."
+
+Myrtle's voice trembled a little in singing this verse, and she
+hardly kept up her part with proper spirit.
+
+"Sing out, Myrtle," said Miss Cynthia, and she struck up the third
+verse:
+
+         "Eternal plagues and heavy chains,
+          Tormenting racks and fiery coals,
+          And darts t' inflict immortal pains,
+          Dyed in the blood of damned souls."
+
+This last verse was a duet, and not a trio.  Myrtle closed her lips
+while it was singing, and when it was done threw down the book with a
+look of anger and disgust.  The hunted soul was at bay.
+
+"I won't sing such words," she said, "and I won't stay here to hear
+them sung.  The boys in the streets say just such words as that, and
+I am not going to sing them.  You can't scare me into being good with
+your cruel hymn-book!"
+
+She could not swear: she was not a boy.  She would not cry: she felt
+proud, obdurate, scornful, outraged.  All these images, borrowed from
+the holy Inquisition, were meant to frighten her--and had simply
+irritated her.  The blow of a weapon that glances off, stinging, but
+not penetrating, only enrages.  It was a moment of fearful danger to
+her character, to her life itself.
+
+Without heeding the cries of the two women, she sprang up-stairs to
+her hanging chamber.  She threw open the window and looked down into
+the stream.  For one moment her head swam with the sudden,
+overwhelming, almost maddening thought that came over her,--the
+impulse to fling herself headlong into those running waters and dare
+the worst these dreadful women had threatened her with.  Something
+she often thought afterwards it was an invisible hand held her back
+during that brief moment, and the paroxysm--just such a paroxysm as
+throws many a young girl into the Thames or the Seine--passed away.
+She remained looking, in a misty dream, into the water far below.
+Its murmur recalled the whisper of the ocean waves.  And through the
+depths it seemed as if she saw into that strange, half--remembered
+world of palm-trees and white robes and dusky faces, and amidst them,
+looking upon her with ineffable love and tenderness, until all else
+faded from her sight, the face of a fair woman,--was it hers, so
+long, long dead, or that dear young mother's who was to her less a
+recollection than a dream?
+
+Could it have been this vision that soothed her, so that she
+unclasped her hands and lifted her bowed head as if she had heard a
+voice whispering to her from that unknown world where she felt there
+was a spirit watching over her?  At any rate, her face was never more
+serene than when she went to meeting with the two maiden ladies on
+the following day, Sunday, and heard the Rev. Mr. Stoker preach a
+sermon from Luke vii. 48, which made both the women shed tears, but
+especially so excited Miss Cynthia that she was in a kind of half-
+hysteric condition all the rest of the day.
+
+After that Myrtle was quieter and more docile than ever before.
+Could it be, Miss Silence thought, that the Rev. Mr. Stoker's sermon
+had touched her hard heart?  However that was, she did not once wear
+the stormy look with which she had often met the complaining
+remonstrances Miss Silence constantly directed against all the
+spontaneous movements of the youthful and naturally vivacious subject
+of her discipline.
+
+June is an uncertain month, as everybody knows, and there were frosts
+in many parts of New England in the June of 1859.  But there were
+also beautiful days and nights, and the sun was warm enough to be
+fast ripening the strawberries,--also certain plans which had been in
+flower some little time.  Some preparations had been going on in a
+quiet way, so that at the right moment a decisive movement could be
+made.  Myrtle knew how to use her needle, and always had a dexterous
+way of shaping any article of dress or ornament,--a natural gift not
+very rare, but sometimes very needful, as it was now.
+
+On the morning of the 15th of June she was wandering by the shores of
+the river, some distance above The Poplars, when a boat came drifting
+along by her, evidently broken loose from its fastenings farther up
+the stream.  It was common for such waifs to show themselves after
+heavy rains had swollen the river.  They might have run the gauntlet
+of nobody could tell how many farms, and perhaps passed by half a
+dozen towns and villages in the night, so that, if of common, cheap
+make, they were retained without scruple, by any who might find them,
+until the owner called for them, if he cared to take the trouble.
+
+Myrtle took a knife from her pocket, cut down a long, slender
+sapling, and coaxed the boat to the side of the bank.  A pair of old
+oars lay in the bottom of the boat; she took one of these and paddled
+it into a little cove, where it could lie hid among the thick alders.
+Then she went home and busied herself about various little matters
+more interesting to her than to us.
+
+She was never more amiable and gracious than on this day.  But she
+looked often at the clock, as they remembered afterwards, and studied
+over a copy of the Farmer's Almanac which was lying in the kitchen,
+with a somewhat singular interest.  The days were nearly at their
+longest, the weather was mild, the night promised to be clear and
+bright.
+
+The household was, to all appearance, asleep at the usual early hour.
+When all seemed quiet, Myrtle lighted her lamp, stood before her
+mirror, and untied the string that bound her long and beautiful.
+dark hair, which fell in its abundance over her shoulders and below
+her girdle.
+
+She lifted its heavy masses with one hand, and severed it with a
+strong pair of scissors, with remorseless exaction of every wandering
+curl, until she stood so changed by the loss of that outward glory of
+her womanhood, that she felt as if she had lost herself and found a
+brother she had never seen before.
+
+"Good-by, Myrtle!" she said, and, opening her window very gently, she
+flung the shining tresses upon the running water, and watched them
+for a few moments as they floated down the stream.  Then she dressed
+herself in the character of her imaginary brother, took up the
+carpet-bag in which she had placed what she chose to carry with her,
+stole softly down-stairs, and let herself out of a window on the
+lower floor, shutting it very carefully so as to be sure that nobody
+should be disturbed.
+
+She glided along, looking all about her, fearing she might be seen by
+some curious wanderer, and reached the cove where the boat she had
+concealed was lying.  She got into it, and, taking the rude oars,
+pulled herself into the middle of the swollen stream.  Her heart beat
+so that it seemed to her as if she could hear it between the strokes
+of the oar.  The lights were not all out in the village, and she
+trembled lest she should see the figure of some watcher looking from
+the windows in sight of which she would have to pass, and that a
+glimpse of this boat stealing along at so late an hour might give the
+clue to the secret of her disappearance, with which the whole region
+was to be busied in the course of the next day.
+
+Presently she came abreast of The Poplars.  The house lay so still,
+so peaceful,--it would wake to such dismay!  The boat slid along
+beneath her own overhanging chamber.
+
+"No song to-morrow from the Fire-hang-bird's Nest!" she said.  So she
+floated by the slumbering village, the flow of the river carrying her
+steadily on, and the careful strokes of the oars adding swiftness to
+her flight.
+
+At last she came to the "Broad Meadows," and knew that she was alone,
+and felt confident that she had got away unseen.  There was nothing,
+absolutely nothing, to point out which way she had gone.  Her boat
+came from nobody knew where, her disguise had been got together at
+different times in such a manner as to lead to no suspicion, and not
+a human being ever had the slightest hint that she had planned and
+meant to carry out the enterprise which she had now so fortunately
+begun.
+
+Not till the last straggling house had been long past, not till the
+meadows were stretched out behind her as well as before her,
+spreading far off into the distance on each side, did she give way to
+the sense of wild exultation which was coming fast over her.  But
+then, at last, she drew a long, long breath, and, standing up in the
+boat, looked all around her.  The stars were shining over her head
+and deep down beneath her.  The cool wind came fresh upon her cheek
+over the long grassy reaches.  No living thing moved in all the wide
+level circle which lay about her.  She had passed the Red Sea, and
+was alone in the Desert.
+
+She threw down her oars, lifted her hands like a priestess, and her
+strong, sweet voice burst into song,--the song of the Jewish maiden
+when she went out before the chorus of, women and sang that grand
+solo, which we all remember in its ancient words, and in their modern
+paraphrase,
+
+    "Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea!
+     Jehovah hath triumphed, his people are free!"
+
+The poor child's repertory was limited to songs of the religious sort
+mainly, but there was a choice among these.  Her aunt's favorites,
+beside "China," already mentioned, were "Bangor," which the worthy
+old New England clergyman so admired that he actually had the down-
+east city called after it, and "Windsor," and "Funeral Hymn."  But
+Myrtle was in no mood for these.  She let off her ecstasy in
+"Balerma," and "Arlington," and "Silver Street," and at last in that
+most riotous of devotional hymns, which sounds as if it had been
+composed by a saint who had a cellar under his chapel,--"Jordan."  So
+she let her wild spirits run loose; and then a tenderer feeling stole
+over her, and she sang herself into a more tranquil mood with the
+gentle music of "Dundee."  And again she pulled quietly and steadily
+at her oars, until she reached the wooded region through which the
+river winds after leaving the "Broad Meadows."
+
+The tumult in her blood was calmed, yet every sense and faculty was
+awake to the manifold delicious, mysterious impressions of that
+wonderful June night, The stars were shining between the tall trees,
+as if all the jewels of heaven had been set in one belt of midnight
+sky.  The voices of the wind, as they sighed through the pines,
+seemed like the breath of a sleeping child, and then, as they lisped
+from the soft, tender leaves of beeches and maples, like the half-
+articulate whisper of the mother hushing all the intrusive sounds
+that might awaken it.  Then came the pulsating monotone of the frogs
+from a far-off pool, the harsh cry of an owl from an old tree that
+overhung it, the splash of a mink or musquash, and nearer by, the
+light step of a woodchuck, as he cantered off in his quiet way to his
+hole in the nearest bank.  The laurels were just coming into bloom,--
+the yellow lilies, earlier than their fairer sisters, pushing their
+golden cups through the water, not content, like those, to float on
+the surface of the stream that fed them, emblems of showy wealth,
+and, like that, drawing all manner of insects to feed upon them.  The
+miniature forests of ferns came down to the edge of the stream, their
+tall, bending plumes swaying in the night breeze.  Sweet odors from
+oozing pines, from dewy flowers, from spicy leaves, stole out of the
+tangled thickets, and made the whole scene more dream-like with their
+faint, mingled suggestions.
+
+By and by the banks of the river grew lower and marshy, and in place
+of the larger forest-trees which had covered them stood slender
+tamaracks, sickly, mossy, looking as if they had been moon-struck and
+were out of their wits, their tufts of leaves staring off every way
+from their spindling branches.  The winds came cool and damp out of
+the hiding-places among their dark recesses.  The country people
+about here called this region the "Witches' Hollow," and had many
+stories about the strange things that happened there.  The Indians
+used to hold their "powwows,"  or magical incantations, upon a broad
+mound which rose out of the common level, and where some old hemlocks
+and beeches formed a dark grove, which served them as a temple for
+their demon-worship.  There were many legends of more recent date
+connected with this spot, some of them hard to account for, and no
+superstitious or highly imaginative person would have cared to pass
+through it alone in the dead of the night, as this young girl was
+doing.
+
+She knew nothing of all these fables and fancies.  Her own singular
+experiences in this enchanted region were certainly not suggested by
+anything she had heard, and may be considered psychologically curious
+by those who would not think of attributing any mystical meaning to
+them.  We are at liberty to report many things without attempting to
+explain them, or committing ourselves to anything beyond the fact
+that so they were told us.  The reader will find Myrtle's "Vision,"
+as written out at a later period from her recollections, at the end
+of this chapter.
+
+The night was passing, and she meant to be as far away as possible
+from the village she had left, before morning.  But the boat, like
+all craft on country rivers, was leaky, and she had to work until
+tired, bailing it out, before she was ready for another long effort.
+The old tin measure, which was all she had to bail with, leaked as
+badly as the boat, and her task was a tedious one.  At last she got
+it in good trim, and sat down to her oars with the determination to
+pull steadily as long as her strength would hold out.
+
+Hour after hour she kept at her work, sweeping round the long bends
+where the river was hollowing out one bank and building new shore on
+the opposite one, so as gradually to shift its channel; by clipper-
+shaped islands, sharp at the bows looking up stream, sharp too at the
+stern, looking down,--their shape solving the navigator's problem of
+least resistance, as a certain young artist had pointed out; by
+slumbering villages; by outlying farm-houses; between cornfields
+where the young plants were springing up in little thready fountains;
+in the midst of stumps where the forest had just been felled; through
+patches, where the fire of the last great autumnal drought had turned
+all the green beauty of the woods into brown desolation; and again
+amidst broad expanses of open meadow stretching as far as the eye
+could reach in the uncertain light.  A faint yellow tinge was
+beginning to stain the eastern horizon.  Her boat was floating
+quietly along, for she had at last taken in her oars, and she was now
+almost tired out with toil and excitement.  She rested her head upon
+her hands, and felt her eyelids closing in spite of herself.  And now
+there stole upon her ear a low, gentle, distant murmur, so soft that
+it seemed almost to mingle with the sound of her own breathing, but
+so steady, so uniform, that it soothed her to sleep, as if it were
+the old cradle-song the ocean used to sing to her, or the lullaby of
+her fair young mother.
+
+So she glided along, slowly, slowly, down the course of the winding
+river, and the flushing dawn kindled around her as she slumbered, and
+the low, gentle murmur grew louder and louder, but still she slept,
+dreaming of the murmuring ocean.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VIII.
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD'S STATEMENT.
+
+"A Vision seen by me, Myrtle Hazard, aged fifteen, on the night of
+June 15, 1859.  Written out at the request of a friend from my
+recollections.
+
+"The place where I saw these sights is called, as I have been told
+since, Witches' Hollow.  I had never been there before, and did not
+know that it was called so, or anything about it.
+
+"The first strange thing that I noticed was on coming near a kind of
+hill or mound that rose out of the low meadows.  I saw a burning
+cross lying on the slope of that mound.  It burned with a pale
+greenish light, and did not waste, though I watched it for a long
+time, as the boat I was in moved slowly with the current and I had
+stopped rowing.
+
+"I know that my eyes were open, and I was awake while I was looking
+at this cross.  I think my eyes were open when I saw these other
+appearances, but I felt just as if I were dreaming while awake.
+
+"I heard a faint rustling sound, and on looking up I saw many figures
+moving around me, and I seemed to see myself among them as if I were
+outside of myself.
+
+"The figures did not walk, but slid or glided with an even movement,
+as if without any effort.  They made many gestures, and seemed to
+speak, but I cannot tell whether I heard what they said, or knew its
+meaning in some other way.
+
+"I knew the faces of some of these figures.  They were the same I
+have seen in portraits, as long as I can remember, at the old house
+where I was brought up, called The Poplars.  I saw my father and my
+mother as they look in the two small pictures; also my grandmother,
+and her father and mother and grandfather, and one other person, who
+lived a great while ago.  All of these have been long dead, and the
+longer they had been dead the less like substance they looked and the
+more like shadows, so that the oldest was like one's breath of a
+frosty morning, but shaped like the living figure.
+
+"There was no motion of their breasts, and their lips seemed to be
+moving as if they were saying, Breath! Breath! Breath!  I thought
+they wanted to breathe the air of this world again in my shape, which
+I seemed to see as it were empty of myself and of these other selves,
+like a sponge that has water pressed out of it.
+
+"Presently it seemed to me that I returned to myself, and then those
+others became part of me by being taken up, one by one, and so lost
+in my own life.
+
+"My father and mother came up, hand in hand, looking more real than
+any of the rest.  Their figures vanished, and they seemed to have
+become a part of me; for I felt all at once the longing to live over
+the life they had led, on the sea and in strange countries.
+
+"Another figure was just like the one we called the Major, who was a
+very strong, hearty-looking man, and who is said to have drank hard
+sometimes, though there is nothing about it on his tombstone, which I
+used to read in the graveyard.  It seemed to me that there was
+something about his life that I did not want to make a part of mine,
+but that there was some right he had in me through my being of his
+blood, and so his health and his strength went all through me, and I
+was always to have what was left of his life in that shadow-like
+shape, forming a portion of mine.
+
+"So in the same way with the shape answering to the portrait of that
+famous beauty who was the wife of my great-grandfather, and used to
+be called the Pride of the County.
+
+"And so too with another figure which had the face of that portrait
+marked on the back, Ruth Bradford, who married one of my ancestors,
+and was before the court, as I have heard, in the time of the
+witchcraft trials.
+
+"There was with the rest a dark, wild-looking woman, with a head-
+dress of feathers.  She kept as it were in shadow, but I saw
+something of my own features in her face.
+
+"It was on my mind very strongly that the shape of that woman of our
+blood who was burned long ago by the Papists came very close to me,
+and was in some way made one with mine, and that I feel her presence
+with me since, as if she lived again in me; but not always,--only at
+times,--and then I feel borne up as if I could do anything in the
+world.  I had a feeling as if she were my guardian and protector.
+
+"It seems to me that these, and more, whom I have not mentioned, do
+really live over some part of their past lives in my life.  I do not
+understand it all, and perhaps it can be accounted for in some way I
+have not thought of.  I write it down as nearly as I can give it from
+memory, by request, and if it is printed at this time had rather have
+all the real names withheld.
+
+"MYRTLE HAZARD."
+
+
+NOTE BY THE FRIEND.
+
+"This statement must be accounted for in some way, or pass into the
+category of the supernatural.  Probably it was one of those
+intuitions, with objective projection, which sometimes come to
+imaginative young persons, especially girls, in certain exalted
+nervous conditions.  The study of the portraits, with the knowledge
+of some parts of the history of the persons they represented, and the
+consciousness of instincts inherited in all probability from these
+same ancestors, formed the basis of Myrtle's 'Vision.'  The lives of
+our progenitors are, as we know, reproduced in different proportions
+in ourselves.  Whether they as individuals have any consciousness of
+it, is another matter.  It is possible that they do get a second as
+it were fractional life in us.  It might seem that many of those
+whose blood flows in our veins struggle for the mastery, and by and
+by one or more get the predominance, so that we grow to be like
+father, or mother, or remoter ancestor, or two or more are blended in
+us, not to the exclusion, however, it must be understood, of a
+special personality of our own, about which these others are grouped.
+Independently of any possible scientific value, this 'Vision' serves
+to illustrate the above-mentioned fact of common experience, which is
+not sufficiently weighed by most moralists.
+
+"How much it may be granted to certain young persons to see, not in
+virtue of their intellectual gifts, but through those direct channels
+which worldly wisdom may possibly close to the luminous influx, each
+reader must determine for himself by his own standards of faith and
+evidence.
+
+"One statement of the narrative admits of a simple natural
+explanation, which does not allow the lovers of the marvellous to
+class it with the quasi-miraculous appearance seen by Colonel
+Gardiner, and given in full by Dr. Doddridge in his Life of that
+remarkable Christian soldier.  Decaying wood is often phosphorescent,
+as many readers must have seen for themselves.  The country people
+are familiar with the sight of it in wild timber-land, and have given
+it the name of 'Fox-fire.'  Two trunks of trees in this state, lying
+across each other, will account for the fact observed, and vindicate
+the truth of the young girl's story without requiring us to suppose
+any exceptional occurrence outside of natural laws."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY RECEIVES A LETTER, AND BEGINS HIS ANSWER.
+
+It was already morning when a young man living in the town of
+Alderbank, after lying awake for an hour thinking the unutterable
+thoughts that nineteen years of life bring to the sleeping and waking
+dreams of young people, rose from his bed, and, half dressing
+himself, sat down at his desk, from which he took a letter, which he
+opened and read.  It was written in a delicate, though hardly formed
+female hand, and crossed like a checker-board, as is usual with these
+redundant manuscripts.  The letter was as follows:
+
+
+OXBOW VILLAGE, June 13, 1859.
+
+MY DEAREST CLEMENT,--You was so good to write me such a sweet little
+bit of a letter,--only, dear, you never seem to be in quite so good
+spirits as you used to be.  I wish your Susie was with you to cheer
+you up; but no, she must be patient, and you must be patient too, for
+you are so ambitious!  I have heard you say so many times that nobody
+could be a great artist without passing years and years at work, and
+growing pale and lean with thinking so hard.  You won't grow pale and
+lean, I hope; for I do so love to see that pretty color in your
+cheeks you have always had ever since I have known you; and besides,
+I do not believe you will have to work so very hard to do something
+great,--you have so much genius, and people of genius do such
+beautiful things with so little trouble.  You remember those
+beautiful lines out of our newspaper I sent you?  Well, Mr. Hopkins
+told me he wrote those lines in one evening without stopping!  I wish
+you could see Mr. Hopkins,--he is a very talented person.  I cut out
+this little piece about him from the paper on purpose to show you,
+--for genius loves genius,--and you would like to hear him read his
+own poetry,--he reads it beautifully.  Please send this piece from
+the paper back, as I want to put it in my scrapbook, under his
+autograph:--
+
+"Our young townsman, Mr. Gifted Hopkins, has proved himself worthy of
+the name he bears.  His poetical effusions are equally creditable to
+his head and his heart, displaying the highest order of genius and
+powers of imagination and fancy hardly second to any writer of the
+age.  He is destined to make a great sensation in the world of
+letters."
+
+
+Mrs. Hopkins is the same good soul she always was.  She is very proud
+of her son, as is natural, and keeps a copy of everything he writes.
+I believe she cries over them every time she reads them.  You don't
+know how I take to little Sossy and Minthy, those two twins I have
+written to you about before.  Poor little creatures,--what a cruel
+thing it was in their father and mother not to take care of them!
+What do you think?  Old bachelor Gridley lets them come up into his
+room, and builds forts and castles for them with his big books!  "The
+world's coming to an end," Mrs. Hopkins said the first time he did
+so.  He looks so savage with that scowl of his, and talks so gruff
+when he is scolding at things in general, that nobody would have
+believed he would have let such little things come anywhere near him.
+But he seems to be growing kind to all of us and everybody.  I saw
+him talking to the Fire-hang-bird the other day.  You know who the
+Fire-hang-bird is, don't you?  Myrtle Hazard her name is.  I wish you
+could see her.  I don't know as I do, though.  You would want to make
+a statue of her, or a painting, I know.  She is so handsome that all
+the young men stand round to see her come out of meeting.  Some say
+that Lawyer Bradshaw is after her; but my! he is ten years older than
+she is.  She is nothing but a girl, though she looks as if she was
+eighteen.  She lives up at a place called The Poplars, with an old
+woman that is her aunt or something, and nobody seems to be much
+acquainted with her except Olive Eveleth, who is the minister's
+daughter at Saint Bartholomew's Church.  She never has beauxs round
+her, as some young girls do--they say that she is not happy with her
+aunt and another woman that stays with her, and that is the reason
+she keeps so much to herself.  The minister came to see me the other
+day,--Mr. Stoker his name is.  I was all alone, and it frightened me,
+for he looks, oh, so solemn on Sundays!  But he called me "My dear,"
+and did n't say anything horrid, you know, about my being such a
+dreadful, dreadful sinner, as I have heard of his saying to some
+people,--but he looked very kindly at me, and took my hand, and laid
+his hand on my shoulder like a brother, and hoped I would come and
+see him in his study.  I suppose I must go, but I don't want to.  I
+don't seem to like him exactly.
+
+I hope you love me as well as ever you did.  I can't help feeling
+sometimes as if you was growing away from me,--you know what I mean,
+--getting to be too great a person for such a small person as I am.
+
+I know I can't always understand you when you talk about art, and
+that you know a great deal too much for such a simple girl as I am.
+Oh, if I thought I could never make you happy!...  There, now!  I am
+almost ashamed to send this paper so spotted.  Gifted Hopkins wrote
+some beautiful verses one day on "A Maiden Weeping."  He compared the
+tears falling from her eyes to the drops of dew which one often sees
+upon the flowers in the morning.  Is n't it a pretty thought?
+
+I wish I loved art as well as I do poetry; but I am afraid I have not
+so much taste as some girls have.  You remember how I liked that
+picture in the illustrated magazine, and you said it was horrid.  I
+have been afraid since to like almost anything, for fear you should
+tell me some time or other it was horrid.  Don't you think I shall
+ever learn to know what is nice from what is n't?
+
+Oh, dear Clement, I wish you would do one thing to please me.  Don't
+say no, for you can do everything you try to,--I am sure you can.  I
+want you to write me some poetry,--just three or four little verses
+TO SUZIE.  Oh, I should feel so proud to have some lines written all
+on purpose for me.  Mr. Hopkins wrote some the other day, and printed
+them in the paper, "To M---e."  I believe he meant them for Myrtle,
+--the first and last letter of her name, you see, "M "and "e."
+
+Your letter was a dear one, only so short!  I wish yon would tell me
+all about what you are doing at Alderbank.  Have you made that model
+of Innocence that is to have my forehead, and hair parted like mine!
+Make it pretty, do, that is a darling.
+
+Now don't make a face at my letter.  It is n't a very good one, I
+know; but your poor little Susie does the best she can, and she loves
+you so much!
+
+Now do be nice and write me one little bit of a mite of a poem,--it
+will make me just as happy!
+
+I am very well, and as happy as I can be when you are away.
+
+Your affectionate        SUSIE.
+
+(Directed to Mr. Clement Lindsay, Alderbank.)
+
+
+The envelope of this letter was unbroken, as was before said, when
+the young man took it from his desk.  He did not tear it with the hot
+impatience of some lovers, but cut it open neatly, slowly, one would
+say sadly.  He read it with an air of singular effort, and yet with a
+certain tenderness.  When he had finished it, the drops were thick on
+his forehead; he groaned and put his hands to his face, which was
+burning red.
+
+This was what the impulse of boyhood, years ago, had brought him to!
+He was a stately youth, of noble bearing, of high purpose, of
+fastidious taste; and, if his broad forehead, his clear, large blue
+eyes, his commanding features, his lips, firm, yet plastic to every
+change of thought and feeling, were not an empty mask, might not
+improbably claim that Promethean quality of which the girl's letter
+had spoken,--the strange, divine, dread gift of genius.
+
+This poor, simple, innocent, trusting creature, so utterly incapable
+of coming into any true relation with his aspiring mind, his large
+and strong emotions,--this mere child, all simplicity and goodness,
+but trivial and shallow as the little babbling brooklet that ran by
+his window to the river, to lose its insignificant being in the swift
+torrent he heard rushing over the rocks,--this pretty idol for a weak
+and kindly and easily satisfied worshipper, was to be enthroned as
+the queen of his affections, to be adopted as the companion of his
+labors!  The boy, led by the commonest instinct, the mere attraction
+of biped to its female, which accident had favored, had thrown away
+the dearest possession of manhood,--liberty,--and this bauble was to
+be his lifelong reward!  And yet not a bauble either, for a pleasing
+person and a gentle and sweet nature, which had once made her seem to
+him the very paragon of loveliness, were still hers.  Alas!  her
+simple words were true,--he had grown away from her.  Her only fault
+was that she had not grown with him, and surely he could not reproach
+her with that.
+
+"No," he said to himself, "I will never leave her so long as her
+heart clings to me.  I have been rash, but she shall not pay the
+forfeit.  And if I may think of myself, my life need not be wretched
+because she cannot share all my being with me.  The common human
+qualities are more than all exceptional gifts.  She has a woman's
+heart; and what talent of mine is to be named by the love a true
+woman can offer in exchange for these divided and cold affections?
+If it had pleased God to mate me with one more equal in other ways,
+who could share my thoughts, who could kindle my inspiration, who had
+wings to rise into the air with me as well as feet to creep by my
+side upon the earth,--what cannot such a woman do for a man!
+
+"What!  cast away the flower I took in the bud because it does not
+show as I hoped it would when it opened?  I will stand by my word; I
+will be all as a man that I promised as a boy.  Thank God, she is
+true and pure and sweet.  My nest will be a peaceful one; but I must
+take wing alone,--alone."
+
+He drew one long sigh, and the cloud passed from his countenance.  He
+must answer that letter now, at once.  There were reasons, he
+thought, which made it important.  And so, with the cheerfulness
+which it was kind and becoming to show, so far as possible, and yet
+with a little excitement on one particular point, which was the cause
+of his writing so promptly, he began his answer.
+
+
+ALDERBANK, Thursday morning, June 16, 1859.
+
+MY DEAR SUSIE,--I have just been reading your pleasant letter; and if
+I do not send you the poem you ask for so eloquently, I will give you
+a little bit of advice, which will do just as well,--won't it, my
+dear?  I was interested in your account of various things going on at
+Oxbow Village.  I am very glad you find young Mr. Hopkins so
+agreeable a friend.  His poetry is better than some which I see
+printed in the village papers, and seems generally unexceptionable in
+its subjects and tone.  I do not believe he is a dangerous companion,
+though the habit of writing verse does not always improve the
+character.  I think I have seen it make more than one of my
+acquaintances idle, conceited, sentimental, and frivolous,--perhaps
+it found them so already.  Don't make too much of his talent, and
+particularly don't let him think that because he can write verses he
+has nothing else to do in this world.  That is for his benefit, dear,
+and you must skilfully apply it.
+
+Now about yourself.  My dear Susie, there was something in your
+letter that did not please me.  You speak of a visit from the Rev.
+Mr. Stoker, and of his kind, brotherly treatment, his cordiality of
+behavior, and his asking you to visit him in his study.  I am very
+glad to hear you say that you "don't seem to like him."  He is very
+familiar, it seems to me, for so new an acquaintance.  What business
+had he to be laying his hand on your shoulder?  I should like to see
+him try these free-and-easy ways in my presence!  He would not have
+taken that liberty, my dear!  No, he was alone with you, and thought
+it safe to be disrespectfully familiar.  I want you to maintain your
+dignity always with such persons, and I beg you not to go to the
+study of this clergyman, unless some older friend goes with you on
+every occasion, and sits through the visit.  I must speak plainly to
+you, my dear, as I have a right to.  If the minister has anything of
+importance to say, let it come through the lips of some mature
+person.  It may lose something of the fervor with which it would have
+been delivered at first hand, but the great rules of Christian life
+are not so dependent on the particular individual who speaks them,
+that you must go to this or that young man to find out what they are.
+If to any man, I should.  prefer the old gentleman whom you have
+mentioned in your letters, Father Pemberton.  You understand me, my
+dear girl, and the subject is not grateful.  You know how truly I am
+interested in all that relates to you,--that I regard you with an
+affection which
+
+     HELP!  HELP!  HELP!
+
+A cry as of a young person's voice was heard faintly, coming from the
+direction of the river.  Something in the tone of it struck to his
+heart, and he sprang as if he had been stabbed.  He flung open his
+chamber window and leaped from it to the ground.  He ran straight to
+the bank of the river by the side of which the village of Alderbank
+was built, a little farther down the stream than the house in which
+he was living.
+
+Everybody that travels in that region knows the beautiful falls which
+break the course of the river just above the village; narrow and
+swift, and surrounded by rocks of such picturesque forms that they
+are sought and admired by tourists.  The stream was now swollen, and
+rushed in a deep and rapid current over the ledges, through the rocky
+straits, plunging at last in tumult and foam, with loud, continuous
+roar, into the depths below the cliff from which it tumbled.
+
+A short distance above the fall there projected from the water a rock
+which had, by parsimonious saving during a long course of years,
+hoarded a little soil, out of which a small tuft of bushes struggled.
+to support a decent vegetable existence.  The high waters had nearly
+submerged it, but a few slender twigs were seen above their surface.
+
+A skiff was lying close to this rock, between it and the brink of the
+fall, which was but a few rods farther down.  In the skiff was a
+youth of fourteen or fifteen years, holding by the slender twigs, the
+boat dragging at them all the time, and threatening to tear them away
+and go over the fall.  It was not likely that the boy would come to
+shore alive if it did.  There were stories, it is true, that the
+Indians used to shoot the fall in their canoes with safety; but
+everybody knew that at least three persons had been lost by going
+over it since the town was settled; and more than one dead body had
+been found floating far down the river, with bruises and fractured
+bones, as if it had taken the same fatal plunge.
+
+There was no time to lose.  Clement ran a little way up the river-
+bank, flung off his shoes, and sprang from the bank as far as he
+could leap into the water.  The current swept him toward the fall,
+but he worked nearer and nearer the middle of the stream.  He was
+making for the rock, thinking he could plant his feet upon it and at
+the worst hold the boat until he could summon other help by shouting.
+He had barely got his feet upon the rock, when the twigs by which the
+boy was holding gave way.  He seized the boat, but it dragged him
+from his uncertain footing, and with a desperate effort he clambered
+over its side and found himself its second doomed passenger.
+
+There was but an instant for thought.
+
+"Sit still," he said, "and, just as we go over, put your arms round
+me under mine, and don't let go for your life!"
+
+He caught up the single oar, and with a few sharp paddle-strokes
+brought the skiff into the blackest centre of the current, where it
+was deepest, and would plunge them into the deepest pool.
+
+"Hold your breath!  God save us!  Now!"
+
+They rose, as if with one will, and stood for an instant, the arms of
+the younger closely embracing the other as he had directed.
+
+A sliding away from beneath them of the floor on which they stood, as
+the drop fails under the feet of a felon.  A great rush of air, and a
+mighty, awful, stunning roar,--an involuntary gasp, a choking flood
+of water that came bellowing after them, and hammered them down into
+the black depths so far that the young man, though used to diving and
+swimming long distances underwater, had well-nigh yielded to the
+fearful need of air, and sucked in his death in so doing.
+
+The boat came up to the surface, broken in twain, splintered, a load
+of firewood for those who raked the river lower down.  It had turned
+crosswise, and struck the rocks.  A cap rose to the surface, such a
+one as boys wear,--the same that boy had on.  And then--after how
+many seconds by the watch cannot be known, but after a time long
+enough, as the young man remembered it, to live his whole life over
+in memory--Clement Lindsay felt the blessed air against his face,
+and, taking a great breath, came to his full consciousness.  The arms
+of the boy were still locked around him as in the embrace of death.
+A few strokes brought him to the shore, dragging his senseless burden
+with him.
+
+He unclasped the arms that held him so closely encircled, and laid
+the slender form of the youth he had almost died to save gently upon
+the grass.  It was as if dead.  He loosed the ribbon that was round
+the neck, he tore open the checked shirt
+
+The story of Myrtle Hazard's sex was told; but she was deaf to his
+cry of surprise, and no blush came to her cold cheek.  Not too late,
+perhaps, to save her,--not too late to try to save her, at least!
+
+He placed his lips to hers, and filled her breast with the air from
+his own panting chest.  Again and again he renewed these efforts,
+hoping, doubting, despairing,--once more hoping, and at last, when he
+had almost ceased to hope, she gasped, she breathed, she moaned, and
+rolled her eyes wildly round her, she was born again into this mortal
+life.
+
+He caught her up in his arms, bore her to the house, laid her on a
+sofa, and, having spent his strength in this last effort, reeled and
+fell, and lay as one over whom have just been whispered the words,
+
+"He is gone."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+MR. CLEMENT LINDSAY FINISHES HIS LETTER--WHAT CAME OF IT.
+
+The first thing Clement Lindsay did, when he was fairly himself
+again, was to finish his letter to Susan Posey.  He took it up where
+it left off, "with an affection which " and drew a long dash, as
+above.  It was with great effort he wrote the lines which follow, for
+he had got an ugly blow on the forehead, and his eyes were "in
+mourning," as the gentlemen of the ring say, with unbecoming levity.
+
+"An adventure!  Just as I was writing these last words, I heard the
+cry of a young person, as it sounded, for help.  I ran to the river
+and jumped in, and had the pleasure of saving a life.  I got some
+bruises which have laid me up for a day or two; but I am getting over
+them very well now, and you need not worry about me at all.  I will
+write again soon; so pray do not fret yourself, for I have had no
+hurt that will trouble me for any time."
+
+Of course, poor Susan Posey burst out crying, and cried as if her
+heart would break.  Oh dear!  Oh dear! what should she do!  He was
+almost killed, she knew he was, or he had broken some of his bones.
+Oh dear!  Oh dear!  She would go and see him, there!--she must and
+would.  He would die, she knew he would,--and so on.
+
+It was a singular testimony to the evident presence of a human
+element in Mr. Bytes Gridley that the poor girl, on her extreme
+trouble, should think of him as a counsellor.  But the wonderful
+relenting kind of look on his grave features as he watched the little
+twins tumbling about his great books, and certain marks of real
+sympathy he had sometimes shown for her in her lesser woes,
+encouraged her, and she went straight to his study, letter in hand.
+She gave a timid knock at the door of that awful sanctuary.
+
+"Come in, Susan Posey," was its answer, in a pleasant tone.  The old
+master knew her light step and the maidenly touch of her small hand
+on the panel.
+
+What a sight!  'there were Sossy and Minthy intrenched in a
+Sebastopol which must have cost a good half-hour's engineering, and
+the terrible Bytes Gridley besieging the fortress with hostile
+manifestations of the most singular character.  He was actually
+discharging a large sugar-plum at the postern gate, which having been
+left unclosed, the missile would certainly have reached one of the
+garrison, when he paused as the door opened, and the great round
+spectacles and four wide, staring infants' eyes were levelled at Miss
+Susan Posey.
+
+She almost forgot her errand, grave as it was, in astonishment at
+this manifestation.  The old man had emptied his shelves of half
+their folios to build up the fort, in the midst of which he had
+seated the two delighted and uproarious babes.  There was his Cave's
+"Historia Literaria," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "History of the
+World," and a whole array of Christian Fathers, and Plato, and
+Aristotle, and Stanley's book of Philosophers, with Effigies, and the
+Junta Galen, and the Hippocrates of Foesius, and Walton's Polyglot,
+supported by Father Sanchez on one side and Fox's "Acts and
+Monuments" on the other,--an odd collection, as folios from lower
+shelves are apt to be.
+
+The besieger discharged his sugar-plum, which was so well aimed that
+it fell directly into the lap of Minthy, who acted with it as if the
+garrison had been on short rations for some time.
+
+He saw at once, on looking up, that there was trouble.  "What now,
+Susan Posey, my dear?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley, I am in such trouble!  What shall I do?  What shall I
+do?"
+
+She turned back the name and the bottom of the letter in such a way
+that Mr. Gridley could read nothing but the few lines relating their
+adventure.
+
+"So Mr. Clement Lindsay has been saving a life, has he, and got some
+hard knocks doing it, hey, Susan Posey?  Well, well, Clement Lindsay
+is a brave fellow, and there is no need of hiding his name, my child.
+Let me take the letter again a moment, Susan Posey.  What is the date
+of it?  June 16th.  Yes,--yes,--yes!"
+
+He read the paragraph over again, and the signature too, if he wanted
+to; for poor Susan had found that her secret was hardly opaque to
+those round spectacles and the eyes behind them, and, with a not
+unbecoming blush, opened the fold of the letter before she handed it
+back.
+
+"No, no, Susan Posey.  He will come all right.  His writing is
+steady, and if he had broken any bones he would have mentioned it.
+It's a thing his wife will be proud of, if he is ever married, Susan
+Posey," (blushes,) "and his children too," (more blushes running up
+to her back hair,) "and there 's nothing to be worried about.  But
+I'll tell you what, my dear, I've got a little business that calls me
+down the river tomorrow, and I shouldn't mind stopping an hour at
+Alderbank and seeing how our young friend Clement Lindsay is; and
+then, if he was going to have a long time of it, why we could manage
+it somehow that any friend who had any special interest in him could
+visit him, just to while away the tiresomeness of being sick.  That's
+it, exactly.  I'll stop at Alderbank, Susan Posey.  Just clear up
+these two children for me, will you, my dear?  Isosceles, come now,--
+that 's a good child.  Helminthia, carry these sugar-plums down--
+stairs for me, and take good care of them, mind!"
+
+It was a case of gross bribery and corruption, for the fortress was
+immediately, evacuated on the receipt of a large paper of red and
+white comfits, and the garrison marched down--stairs much like
+conquerors, under the lead of the young lady, who was greatly eased
+in mind by the kind words and the promise of Mr. Byles Gridley.
+
+But he, in the mean time, was busy with thoughts she did not suspect.
+"A young person," he said to himself,--"why a young person?  Why not
+say a boy, if it was a boy?  What if this should be our handsome
+truant?--'June 16th, Thursday morning!'--About time to get to
+Alderbank by the river, I should think.  None of the boats missing?
+What then?  She may have made a raft, or picked up some stray skiff.
+Who knows?  And then got shipwrecked, very likely.  There are rapids
+and falls farther along the river.  It will do no harm to go down
+there and look about, at any rate."
+
+On Saturday morning, therefore, Mr. Byles Gridley set forth to
+procure a conveyance to make a visit, as he said, dawn the river, and
+perhaps be gone a day or two.  He went to a stable in the village,
+and asked if they could let him have a horse.
+
+The man looked at him with that air of native superiority which the
+companionship of the generous steed confers on all his associates,
+down to the lightest weight among the jockeys.
+
+"Wal, I hain't got nothin' in the shape of a h'oss, Mr. Gridley.
+I've got a mare I s'pose I could let y' have."
+
+"Oh, very well," said the old master, with a twinkle in his eye as
+sly as the other's wink,--he had parried a few jokes in his time,--"
+they charge half-price for mares always, I believe."
+
+That was a new view of the subject.  It rather took the wind out of
+the stable-keeper, and set a most ammoniacal fellow, who stood
+playing with a currycomb, grinning at his expense.  But he rallied
+presently.
+
+"Wal, I b'lieve they do for some mares, when they let 'em to some
+folks; but this here ain't one o' them mares, and you ain't one o'
+them folks.  All my cattle's out but this critter, 'n' I don't jestly
+want to have nobody drive her that ain't pretty car'ful,--she's
+faast, I tell ye,--don't want no whip.--How fur d' d y' want t' go?"
+
+Mr. Gridley was quite serious now, and let the man know that he
+wanted the mare and a light covered wagon, at once, to be gone for
+one or two days, and would waive the question of sex in the matter of
+payment.
+
+Alderbank was about twenty miles down the river by the road.  On
+arriving there, he inquired for the house where a Mr. Lindsay lived.
+There was only one Lindsay family in town,--he must mean Dr. William
+Lindsay.  His house was up there a little way above the village,
+lying a few rods back from the river.
+
+He found the house without difficulty, and knocked at the door.  A
+motherly-looking woman opened it immediately, and held her hand up as
+if to ask him to speak and move softly.
+
+"Does Mr. Clement Lindsay live here?"
+
+"He is staying here for the present.  He is a nephew of ours.  He is
+in his bed from an injury."
+
+"Nothing very serious, I hope?"
+
+"A bruise on his head,--not very bad, but the doctor was afraid of
+erysipelas.  Seems to be doing well enough now."
+
+"Is there a young person here, a stranger?"
+
+"There is such a young person here.  Do you come with any authority
+to make inquiries?"
+
+"I do.  A young friend of mine is missing, arid I thought it possible
+I might learn something here about it.  Can I see this young person?"
+
+The matron came nearer to Byles Gridley, and said: "This person is a
+young woman disguised as a boy.  She was rescued by my nephew at the
+risk of his life, and she has been delirious ever since she has
+recovered her consciousness.  She was almost too far gone to be
+resuscitated, but Clement put his mouth to hers and kept her
+breathing until her own breath returned and she gradually came to."
+
+"Is she violent in her delirium?"
+
+"Not now.  No; she is quiet enough, but wandering,--wants to know
+where she is, and whose the strange faces are,--mine and my
+husband's,--that 's Dr. Lindsay,--and one of my daughters, who has
+watched with her."
+
+"If that is so, I think I had better see her.  If she is the person I
+suspect her to be, she will know me; and a familiar face may bring
+back her recollections and put a stop to her wanderings.  If she does
+not know me, I will not stay talking with her.  I think she will, if
+she is the one I am seeking after.  There is no harm in trying."
+
+Mrs. Lindsay took a good long look at the old man.  There was no
+mistaking his grave, honest, sturdy, wrinkled, scholarly face.  His
+voice was assured and sincere in its tones.  His decent black coat
+was just what a scholar's should be,--old, not untidy, a little shiny
+at the elbows with much leaning on his study-table, but neatly bound
+at the cuffs, where worthy Mrs. Hopkins had detected signs of fatigue
+and come to the rescue.  His very hat looked honest as it lay on the
+table.  It had moulded itself to a broad, noble head, that held
+nothing but what was true and fair, with a few harmless crotchets
+just to fill in with, and it seemed to know it.
+
+The good woman gave him her confidence at once.  "Is the person you
+are seeking a niece or other relative of yours?"
+
+(Why did not she ask if the girl was his daughter?  What is that look
+of paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers
+and old nurses know so well in men and in women?)
+
+"No, she is not a relative.  But I am acting for those who are."
+
+"Wait a moment and I will go and see that the room is all right."
+
+She returned presently.  "Follow me softly, if you please.  She is
+asleep,--so beautiful,--so innocent!"
+
+Byles Gridley, Master of Arts, retired professor, more than sixty
+years old, childless, loveless, stranded in a lonely study strewed
+with wrecks of the world's thought, his work in life finished, his
+one literary venture gone down with all it held, with nobody to care
+for him but accidental acquaintances, moved gently to the side of the
+bed and looked upon the pallid, still features of Myrtle Hazard.  He
+strove hard against a strange feeling that was taking hold of him,
+that was making his face act rebelliously, and troubling his eyes
+with sudden films.  He made a brief stand against this invasion.
+"A weakness,--a weakness!" he said to himself.  "What does all this
+mean?  Never such a thing for these twenty years!  Poor child!  poor
+child!--Excuse me, madam," he said, after a little interval, but for
+what offence he did not mention.  A great deal might be forgiven,
+even to a man as old as Byles Gridley, looking upon such a face,--so
+lovely, yet so marked with the traces of recent suffering, and even
+now showing by its changes that she was struggling in some fearful
+dream.  Her forehead contracted, she started with a slight convulsive
+movement, and then her lips parted, and the cry escaped from them,--
+how heart-breaking when there is none to answer it,--"Mother!"
+
+Gone back again through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood
+to that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she
+uttered was answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of
+clinging lips, the embrace of caressing arms!
+
+"It is better to wake her," Mrs. Lindsay said; "she is having a
+troubled dream.  Wake up, my child, here is a friend waiting to see
+you."
+
+She laid her hand very gently on Myrtle's forehead.  Myrtle opened
+her eyes, but they were vacant as yet.
+
+"Are we dead?" she said.  "Where am I?  This is n't heaven--there are
+no angels--Oh, no, no, no! don't send me to the other place--fifteen
+years,--only fifteen years old--no father, no mother--nobody loved
+me.  Was it wicked in me to live?  "Her whole theological training
+was condensed in that last brief question.
+
+The, old man took her hand and looked her in the face, with a
+wonderful tenderness in his squared features.  "Wicked to live, my
+dear?  No indeed!  Here!  look at me, my child; don't you know your
+old friend Byles Gridley?"
+
+She was awake now.  The sight of a familiar countenance brought back
+a natural train of thought.  But her recollection passed over
+everything that had happened since Thursday morning.
+
+"Where is the boat I was in?" she said.  "I have just been in the
+water, and I was dreaming that I was drowned.  Oh!  Mr. Gridley, is
+that you?  Did you pull me out of the water?"
+
+"No, my dear, but you are out of it, and safe and sound: that is the
+main point.  How do you feel now you are awake?"
+
+She yawned, and stretched her arms and looked round, but did not
+answer at first.  This was all natural, and a sign that she was
+coming right.  She looked down at her dress.  It was not
+inappropriate to her sex, being a loose gown that belonged to one of
+the girls in the house.
+
+"I feel pretty well," she answered, "but a little confused.  My boat
+will be gone, if you don't run and stop it now.  How did you get me
+into dry clothes so quick?"
+
+Master Byles Gridley found himself suddenly possessed by a large and
+luminous idea of the state of things, and made up his mind in a
+moment as to what he must do.  There was no time to be lost.  Every
+day, every hour, of Myrtle's absence was not only a source of anxiety
+and a cause of useless searching but it gave room for inventive
+fancies to imagine evil.  It was better to run some risk of injury to
+health, than to have her absence prolonged another day.
+
+"Has this adventure been told about in the village, Mrs. Lindsay?"
+
+"No, we thought it best to wait until she could tell her own story,
+expecting her return to consciousness every hour, and thinking there
+might be some reason for her disguise which it would be kinder to
+keep quiet about."
+
+"You know nothing about her, then?"
+
+"Not a word.  It was a great question whether to tell the story and
+make inquiries; but she was safe, and could hardly bear disturbance,
+and, my dear sir, it seemed too probable that there was some sad
+story behind this escape in disguise, and that the poor child might
+need shelter and retirement.  We meant to do as well as we could for
+her."
+
+"All right, Mrs. Lindsay.  You do not know who she is, then?"
+
+"No, sir, and perhaps it is as well that I should not know.  Then I
+shall not have to answer any questions about it."
+
+"Very good, madam,--just as it should be.  And your family, are they
+as discreet as yourself?"
+
+"Not one word of the whole story has been or will be told by any one
+of us.  That was agreed upon among us."
+
+"Now then, madam.  My name, as you heard me say, is Byles Gridley.
+Your husband will know it, perhaps; at any rate I will wait until he
+comes back.  This child is of good family and of good name.  I know
+her well, and mean, with your kind help, to save her from the
+consequences which her foolish adventure might have brought upon her.
+Before the bells ring for meeting to-morrow morning this girl must be
+in her bed at her home, at Oxbow Village, and we must keep her story
+to ourselves as far as may be.  It will all blow over, if we do.  The
+gossips will only know that she was upset in the river and cared for
+by some good people,--good people and sensible people too, Mrs.
+Lindsay.  And now I want to see the young man that rescued my friend
+here,--Clement Lindsay, I have heard his name before."
+
+Clement was not a beauty for the moment, but Master Gridley saw well
+enough that he was a young man of the right kind.  He knew them at
+sight, fellows with lime enough in their bones and iron enough in
+their blood to begin with,--shapely, large-nerved, firm-fibred and
+fine-fibred, with well-spread bases to their heads for the ground-
+floor of the faculties, and well-vaulted arches for the upper range
+of apprehensions and combinations.  "Plenty of basements," he used to
+say, "without attics and skylights.  Plenty of skylights without
+rooms enough and space enough below."  But here was "a three-story
+brain," he said to himself as he looked at it, and this was the youth
+who was to find his complement in our pretty little Susan Posey!  His
+judgment may seem to have been hasty, but he took the measure of
+young men of twenty at sight from long and sagacious observation, as
+Nurse Byloe knew the "heft" of a baby the moment she fixed her old
+eyes on it.
+
+Clement was well acquainted with Byles Gridley, though he had never
+seen him, for Susan's letters had had a good deal to say about him of
+late.  It was agreed between them that the story should be kept as
+quiet as possible, and that the young girl should not know the name
+of her deliverer,--it might save awkward complications.  It was not
+likely that she would be disposed to talk of her adventure, which had
+ended so disastrously, and thus the whole story would soon die out.
+
+The effect of the violent shock she had experienced was to change the
+whole nature of Myrtle for the time.  Her mind was unsettled: she
+could hardly recall anything except the plunge over the fall.  She
+was perfectly docile and plastic,--was ready to go anywhere Mr.
+Gridley wanted her to go, without any sign of reluctance.  And so it
+was agreed that he should carry her back in his covered wagon that
+very night.  All possible arrangements were made to render her
+journey comfortable.  The fast mare had to trot very gently, and the
+old master would stop and adjust the pillows from time to time, and
+administer the restoratives which the physician had got ready, all as
+naturally and easily as if he had been bred a nurse, vastly to his
+own surprise, and with not a little gain to his self-appreciation.
+He was a serviceable kind of body on occasion, after all, was he not,
+hey, Mr. Byles Gridley? he said to himself.
+
+At half past four o'clock on Sunday morning the shepherd brought the
+stray lamb into the paved yard at The Poplars, and roused the
+slumbering household to receive back the wanderer.
+
+It was the Irishwoman, Kitty Fagan, huddled together in such
+amorphous guise, that she looked as if she had been fitted in a
+tempest of petticoats and a whirlwind of old shawls, who presented
+herself at the door.
+
+But there was a very warm heart somewhere in that queer-looking
+bundle of clothes, and it was not one of those that can throb or
+break in silence.  When she saw the long covered wagon, and the grave
+face of the old master, she thought it was all over with the poor
+girl she loved, and that this was the undertaker's wagon bringing
+back only what had once been Myrtle Hazard.  She screamed aloud,--so
+wildly that Myrtle lifted her head from the pillow against which she
+had rested it, and started forward.
+
+The Irishwoman looked at her for a moment to assure herself that it
+was the girl she loved, and not her ghost.  Then it all came over
+her,--she had been stolen by thieves, who had carried her off by
+night, and been rescued by the brave old man who had brought her
+back.  What crying and kisses and prayers and blessings were poured
+forth, in a confusion of which her bodily costume was a fitting type,
+those who know the vocabulary and the enthusiasm of her eloquent race
+may imagine better than we could describe it.
+
+The welcome of the two other women was far less demonstrative.  There
+were awful questions to be answered before the kind of reception she
+was to have could be settled.  What they were, it is needless to
+suggest; but while Miss Silence was weeping, first with joy that her
+"responsibility" was removed, then with a fair share of pity and
+kindness, and other lukewarm emotions,--while Miss Badlam waited for
+an explanation before giving way to her feelings,--Mr. Gridley put
+the essential facts before them in a few words.  She had gone down
+the river some miles in her boat, which was upset by a rush of the
+current, and she had come very near being drowned.  She was got out,
+however, by a person living near by, and cared for by some kind women
+in a house near the river, where he had been fortunate enough to
+discover her.--Who cut her hair off?  Perhaps those good people,
+--she had been out of her head.  She was alive and unharmed, at any
+rate, wanting only a few days' rest.  They might be very thankful to
+get her back, and leave her to tell the rest of her story when she
+had got her strength and memory, for she was not quite herself yet,
+and might not be for some days.
+
+And so there she was at last laid in her own bed, listening again to
+the ripple of the waters beneath her, Miss Silence sitting on one
+side looking as sympathetic as her insufficient nature allowed her to
+look; the Irishwoman uncertain between delight at Myrtle's return and
+sorrow for her condition; and Miss Cynthia Badlaxn occupying herself
+about house-matters, not unwilling to avoid the necessity of
+displaying her conflicting emotions.
+
+Before he left the house, Mr. Gridley repeated the statement is the
+most precise manner,--some miles down the river--upset and nearly
+drowned--rescued almost dead--brought to and cared for by kind women
+in the house where he, Byles Gridley, found her.  These were the
+facts, and nothing more than this was to be told at present.  They
+had better be made known at once, and the shortest and best way would
+be to have it announced by the minister at meeting that forenoon.
+With their permission, he would himself write the note for Mr. Stoker
+to read, and tell the other ministers that they might announce it to
+their people.
+
+The bells rang for meeting, but the little household at The Poplars
+did not add to the congregation that day.  In the mean time Kitty
+Fagan had gone down with Mr. Byles Gridley's note, to carry it to the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker.  But, on her way, she stopped at the house of one
+Mrs. Finnegan, a particular friend of hers; and the great event of
+the morning furnishing matter for large discourse, and various social
+allurements adding to the fascination of having a story to tell,
+Kitty Fagan forgot her note until meeting had begun and the minister
+had read the text of his sermon.  "Bless my soul! and sure I 've
+forgot ahl about the letter!" she cried all at once, and away she
+tramped for the meeting-house.  The sexton took the note, which was
+folded, and said he would hand it up to the pulpit after the sermon,
+--it would not do to interrupt the preacher.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, as was said, a somewhat remarkable gift in
+prayer,--an endowment by no means confined to profoundly spiritual
+persons,--in fact, not rarely owing much of its force to a strong
+animal nature underlying the higher attributes.  The sweet singer of
+Israel would never have written such petitions and such hymns if his
+manhood had been less complete; the flavor of remembered frailties
+could not help giving a character to his most devout exercises, or
+they would not have come quite home to our common humanity.  But
+there is no gift more dangerous to the humility and sincerity of a
+minister.  While his spirit ought to be on its knees before the
+throne of grace, it is too apt to be on tiptoe, following with
+admiring look the flight of its own rhetoric.  The essentially
+intellectual character of an extemporaneous composition spoken to the
+Creator with the consciousness that many of his creatures are
+listening to criticise or to admire, is the great argument for set
+forms of prayer.
+
+The congregation on this particular Sunday was made up chiefly of
+women and old men.  The young men were hunting after Myrtle Hazard.
+Mr. Byles Gridley was in his place, wondering why the minister did
+not read his notice before the prayer.  This prayer, was never
+reported, as is the questionable custom with regard to some of these
+performances, but it was wrought up with a good deal of rasping force
+and broad pathos.  When he came to pray for "our youthful sister,
+missing from her pious home, perhaps nevermore to return to her
+afflicted relatives," and the women and old men began crying, Byles
+Gridley was on the very point of getting up and cutting short the
+whole matter by stating the simple fact that she had got back, all
+right, and suggesting that he had better pray for some of the older
+and tougher sinners before him.  But on the whole it would be more
+decorous to wait, and perhaps he was willing to hear what the object
+of his favorite antipathy had to say about it.  So he waited through
+the prayer.  He waited through the hymn, "Life is the time"--He
+waited to hear the sermon.
+
+The minister gave out his text from the Book of Esther, second
+chapter, seventh verse: "For she had neither father nor mother, and
+the maid was fair and beautiful."  It was to be expected that the
+reverend gentleman, who loved to produce a sensation, would avail
+himself of the excitable state of his audience to sweep the key-board
+of their emotions, while, as we may, say, all the stops were drawn
+out.  His sermon was from notes; for, though absolutely
+extemporaneous composition may be acceptable to one's Maker, it is
+not considered quite the thing in speaking to one's fellow-mortals.
+He discoursed for a time on the loss of parents, and on the dangers
+to which the unfortunate orphan is exposed.  Then he spoke of the
+peculiar risks of the tender female child, left without its natural
+guardians.  Warming with his subject, he dilated with wonderful
+unction on the temptations springing from personal attractions.  He
+pictured the "fair and beautiful" women of Holy Writ, lingering over
+their names with lover-like devotion.  He brought Esther before his
+audience, bathed and perfumed for the royal presence of Ahasuerus.
+He showed them the sweet young Ruth, lying down in her innocence at
+the feet of the lord of the manor.  He dwelt with special luxury on
+the charms which seduced the royal psalmist,--the soldier's wife for
+whom he broke the commands of the decalogue, and the maiden for whose
+attentions, in his cooler years, he violated the dictates of prudence
+and propriety.  All this time Byles Gridley had his stern eyes on
+him.  And while he kindled into passionate eloquence on these
+inspiring themes, poor Bathsheba, whom her mother had sent to church
+that she might get a little respite from her home duties, felt her
+blood growing cold in her veins, as the pallid image of the invalid
+wife, lying on her bed of suffering, rose in the midst of the glowing
+pictures which borrowed such warmth from her husband's imagination.
+
+The sermon, with its hinted application to the event of the past
+week, was over at last.  The shoulders of the nervous women were
+twitching with sobs.  The old men were crying in their vacant way.
+But all the while the face of Byles Gridley, firm as a rock in the
+midst of this lachrymal inundation, was kept steadily on the
+preacher, who had often felt the look that came through the two round
+glasses searching into the very marrow of his bones.
+
+As the sermon was finished, the sexton marched up through the broad
+aisle and handed the note over the door of the pulpit to the
+clergyman, who was wiping his face after the exertion of delivering
+his discourse.  Mr. Stoker looked at it, started, changed color,--his
+vision of "The Dangers of Beauty, a Sermon printed by Request," had
+vanished,--and passed the note to Father Pemberton, who sat by him in
+the pulpit.  With much pains he deciphered its contents, for his eyes
+were dim with years, and, having read it, bowed his head upon his
+hands in silent thanksgiving.  Then he rose in the beauty of his
+tranquil and noble old age, so touched with the message he had to
+proclaim to his people, that the three deep furrows on his forehead,
+which some said he owed to the three dogmas of original sin,
+predestination, and endless torment, seemed smoothed for the moment,
+and his face was as that of an angel while lie spoke.
+
+"Sisters and Brethren,--Rejoice with us, for we have found our lamb
+which had strayed from the fold.  This our daughter was dead and is
+alive again; she was lost and is found.  Myrtle Hazard, rescued from
+great peril of the waters, and cared for by good Samaritans, is now
+in her home.  Thou, O Lord, who didst let the water-flood overflow
+her, didst not let the deep swallow her up, nor the pit shut its
+mouth upon her.  Let us return our thanks to the God of Abraham, the
+God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, who is our God and Father, and who
+hath wrought this great deliverance."
+
+After his prayer, which it tried him sorely to utter in unbroken
+tones, he gave out the hymn,
+
+    "Lord, thou hast heard thy servant cry,
+     And rescued from the grave ";
+
+but it was hardly begun when the leading female voice trembled and
+stopped,--and another,--and then a third,--and Father Pemberton,
+seeing that they were all overcome, arose and stretched out his arms,
+and breathed over them his holy benediction.
+
+The village was soon alive with the news.  The sexton forgot the
+solemnity of the Sabbath, and the bell acted as if it was crazy,
+tumbling heels over head at such a rate, and with such a clamor, that
+a good many thought there was a fire, and, rushing out from every
+quarter, instantly caught the great news with which the air was
+ablaze.
+
+A few of the young men who had come back went even further in their
+demonstrations.  They got a small cannon in readiness, and without
+waiting for the going down of the sun, began firing rapidly, upon
+which the Rev. Mr. Stoker sallied forth to put a stop to this
+violation of the Sabbath.  But in the mean time it was heard on all
+the hills, far and near.  Some said they were firing in the hope of
+raising the corpse; but many who heard the bells ringing their crazy
+peals guessed what had happened.  Before night the parties were all
+in, one detachment bearing the body of the bob-tailed catamount swung
+over a pole, like the mighty cluster of grapes from Eshcol, and
+another conveying with wise precaution that monstrous snapping-turtle
+which those of our friends who wish to see will find among the
+specimens marked Chelydra, Serpentine in the great collection at
+Cantabridge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+VEXED WITH A DEVIL.
+
+It was necessary at once to summon a physician to advise as to the
+treatment of Myrtle, who had received a shock, bodily and mental, not
+lightly to be got rid of, and very probably to be followed by serious
+and varied disturbances.  Her very tranquillity was suspicious, for
+there must be something of exhaustion in it, and the reaction must
+come sooner or later.
+
+Old Dr. Lemuel Hurlbut, at the age of ninety-two, very deaf, very
+nearly blind, very feeble, liable to odd lapses of memory, was yet a
+wise counsellor in doubtful and difficult cases, and on rare
+occasions was still called upon to exercise his ancient skill.  Here
+was a case in which a few words from him might soothe the patient and
+give confidence to all who were interested in her.  Miss Silence
+Withers went herself to see him.
+
+"Miss Withers, father, wants to talk with you about her niece, Miss
+Hazard," said Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut.
+
+"Miss Withers, Miss Withers?--Oh, Silence Withers,--lives up at The
+Poplars.  How's the Deacon, Miss Withers?" [Ob.  1810.]
+
+"My grandfather is not living, Dr. Hurlbut," she screamed into his
+ear.
+
+"Dead, is he?  Well, it isn't long since he was with us; and they
+come and go,--they come and go.  I remember his father, Major Gideon
+Withers.  He had a great red feather on training-days,--that was what
+made me remember him.  Who did you say was sick and wanted to see me,
+Fordyce?"
+
+"Myrtle Hazard, father,--she has had a narrow escape from drowning,
+and it has left her in a rather nervous state.  They would like to
+have you go up to The Poplars and take a look at her.  You remember
+Myrtle Hazard?  She is the great-granddaughter of your old friend the
+Deacon."
+
+He had to wait a minute before his thoughts would come to order; with
+a little time, the proper answer would be evolved by the slow
+automatic movement of the rusted mental machinery.
+
+After the silent moment: "Myrtle Hazard, Myrtle Hazard,--yes, yes, to
+be sure!  The old Withers stock,--good constitutions,--a little apt
+to be nervous, one or two of 'em.  I've given 'em a good deal of
+valerian and assafoetida,--not quite so much since the new blood came
+in.  There is n't the change in folks people think,--same thing over
+and over again.  I've seen six fingers on a child that had a six-
+fingered great-uncle, and I've seen that child's grandchild born with
+six fingers.  Does this girl like to have her own way pretty well,
+like the rest of the family?"
+
+"A little too well, I suspect, father.  You will remember all about
+her when you come to see her and talk with her.  She would like to
+talk with you, and her aunt wants to see you too; they think there's
+nobody like the 'old Doctor'."
+
+He was not too old to be pleased with this preference, and said he
+was willing to go when they were ready.  With no small labor of
+preparation he was at last got to the house, and crept with his son's
+aid up to the little room over the water, where his patient was still
+lying.
+
+There was a little too much color in Myrtle's cheeks and a glistening
+lustre in her eyes that told of unnatural excitement.  It gave a
+strange brilliancy to her beauty, and might have deceived an
+unpractised observer.  The old man looked at her long and curiously,
+his imperfect sight excusing the closeness of his scrutiny.
+
+He laid his trembling hand upon her forehead, and then felt her pulse
+with his shriveled fingers.  He asked her various questions about
+herself, which she answered with a tone not quite so calm as natural,
+but willingly and intelligently.  They thought she seemed to the old
+Doctor to be doing very well, for he spoke cheerfully to her, and
+treated her in such a way that neither she nor any of those around
+her could be alarmed.  The younger physician was disposed to think
+she was only suffering from temporary excitement, and that it would
+soon pass off.
+
+They left the room to talk it over.
+
+"It does not amount to much, I suppose, father," said Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut.  "You made the pulse about ninety,--a little hard,--did n't
+you; as I did?  Rest, and low diet for a day or two, and all will be
+right, won't it?"
+
+Was it the feeling of sympathy, or was it the pride of superior
+sagacity, that changed the look of the old man's wrinkled features?
+"Not so fast,--not so fast, Fordyce," he said.  "I've seen that look
+on another face of the same blood,--it 's a great many years ago, and
+she was dead before you were born, my boy,--but I've seen that look,
+and it meant trouble then, and I'm afraid it means trouble now.  I
+see some danger of a brain fever.  And if she doesn't have that, then
+look out for some hysteric fits that will make mischief.  Take that
+handkerchief off of her head, and cut her hair close, and keep her
+temples cool, and put some drawing plasters to the soles of her feet,
+and give her some of my pilulae compositae, and follow them with some
+doses of sal polychrest.  I've been through it all before--in that
+same house.  Live folks are only dead folks warmed over.  I can see
+'em all in that girl's face, Handsome Judith, to begin with.  And
+that queer woman, the Deacon's mother,--there 's where she gets that
+hystericky look.  Yes, and the black-eyed woman with the Indian blood
+in her,--look out for that,--look out for that.  And--and--my son, do
+you remember Major Gideon Withers?" [Ob. 1780.]
+
+"Why no, father, I can't say that I remember the Major; but I know
+the picture very well.  Does she remind you of him?"
+
+He paused again, until the thoughts came slowly straggling, up to the
+point where the question left him.  He shook his head solemnly, and
+turned his dim eyes on his son's face.
+
+Four generations--four generations; man and wife,--yes, five
+generations, for old Selah Withers took me in his arms when I was a
+child, and called me 'little gal,' for I was in girl's clothes,--five
+generations before this Hazard child I 've looked on with these old
+eyes.  And it seems to me that I can see something of almost every
+one of 'em in this child's face, it's the forehead of this one, and
+it's the eyes of that one, and it's that other's mouth, and the look
+that I remember in another, and when she speaks, why, I've heard that
+same voice before--yes, yes as long ago as when I was first married;
+for I remember Rachel used to think I praised Handsome Judith's voice
+more than it deserved,--and her face too, for that matter.  You
+remember Rachel, my first wife,--don't you, Fordyce?"
+
+"No, father, I don't remember her, but I know her portrait."  (As he
+was the son of the old Doctor's second wife, he could hardly be
+expected to remember her predecessor.)
+
+The old Doctor's sagacity was not in fault about the somewhat
+threatening aspect of Myrtle's condition.  His directions were
+followed implicitly; for with the exception of the fact of
+sluggishness rather than loss of memory, and of that confusion of
+dates which in slighter degrees is often felt as early as middle-
+life, and increases in most persons from year to year, his mind was
+still penetrating, and his advice almost as trustworthy, as in his
+best days.
+
+It was very fortunate that the old Doctor ordered Myrtle's hair to be
+cut, and Miss Silence took the scissors and trimmed it at once.  So,
+whenever she got well and was seen about, there would be no mystery
+about the loss of her locks,--the Doctor had been afraid of brain
+fever, and ordered them to cut her hair.
+
+Many things are uncertain in this world, and among them the effect of
+a large proportion of the remedies prescribed by physicians.  Whether
+it was by the use of the means ordered by the old Doctor, or by the
+efforts of nature, or by both together, at any rate the first danger
+was averted, and the immediate risk from brain fever soon passed
+over.  But the impression upon her mind and body had been too
+profound to be dissipated by a few days' rest.  The hysteric stage
+which the wise old man had apprehended began to manifest itself by
+its usual signs, if anything can be called usual in a condition the
+natural order of which is disorder and anomaly.
+
+And now the reader, if such there be, who believes in the absolute
+independence and self-determination of the will, and the consequent
+total responsibility of every human being for every irregular nervous
+action and ill-governed muscular contraction, may as well lay down
+this narrative, or he may lose all faith in poor Myrtle Hazard, and
+all patience with the writer who tells her story.
+
+The mental excitement so long sustained, followed by a violent shock
+to the system, coming just at the period of rapid development, gave
+rise to that morbid condition, accompanied with a series of mental
+and moral perversions, which in ignorant ages and communities is
+attributed to the influence of evil spirits, but for the better-
+instructed is the malady which they call hysteria.  Few households
+have ripened a growth of womanhood without witnessing some of its
+manifestations, and its phenomena are largely traded in by scientific
+pretenders and religious fanatics.  Into this cloud, with all its
+risks and all its humiliations, Myrtle Hazard is about to enter.
+Will she pass through it unharmed, or wander from her path, and fall
+over one of those fearful precipices which lie before her?
+
+After the ancient physician had settled the general plan of
+treatment, its details and practical application were left to the
+care of his son.  Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut was a widower, not yet forty
+years old, a man of a fine masculine aspect and a vigorous nature.
+He was a favorite with his female patients,--perhaps many of them
+would have said because he was good-looking and pleasant in his
+manners, but some thought in virtue of a special magnetic power to
+which certain temperaments were impressible, though there was no
+explaining it.  But he himself never claimed any such personal gift,
+and never attempted any of the exploits which some thought were in
+his power if he chose to exercise his faculty in that direction.
+This girl was, as it were, a child to him, for he had seen her grow
+up from infancy, and had often held her on his knee in her early
+years.  The first thing he did was to get her a nurse, for he saw
+that neither of the two women about her exercised a quieting
+influence upon her nerves.  So he got her old friend, Nurse Byloe, to
+come and take care of her.
+
+The old nurse looked calm enough at one or two of his first visits,
+but the next morning her face showed that something had been going
+wrong.  "Well, what has been the trouble, Nurse?" the Doctor said, as
+soon as he could get her out of the room.
+
+"She's been attackted, Doctor, sence you been here, dreadful.  It's
+them high stirricks, Doctor, 'n' I never see 'em higher, nor more of
+'em.  Laughin' as ef she would bust.  Cryin' as ef she'd lost all her
+friends, 'n' was a follerin' their corpse to their graves.  And
+spassums,--sech spassums!  And ketchin' at her throat, 'n' sayin'
+there was a great ball a risin' into it from her stommick.  One time
+she had a kind o' lockjaw like.  And one time she stretched herself
+out 'n' laid jest as stiff as ef she was dead.  And she says now that
+her head feels as ef a nail had been driv' into it,--into the left
+temple, she says, and that's what makes her look so distressed now."
+
+The Doctor came once more to her bedside.  He saw that her forehead
+was contracted, and that she was evidently suffering from severe pain
+somewhere.
+
+"Where is your uneasiness, Myrtle?" he asked.
+
+She moved her hand very slowly, and pressed it on her left temple.
+He laid his hand upon the same spot, kept it there a moment, and then
+removed it.  She took it gently with her own, and placed it on her
+temple again.  As he sat watching her, he saw that her features were
+growing easier, and in a short time her deep, even breathing showed
+that she was asleep.
+
+"It beats all," the old nurse said.  "Why, she's been a complainin'
+ever sence daylight, and she hain't slep' not a wink afore, sence
+twelve o'clock las' night!  It's j es' like them magnetizers,--I
+never heerd you was one o' them kind, Dr. Hurlbut."
+
+"I can't say how it is, Nurse,--I have heard people say my hand was
+magnetic, but I never thought of its quieting her so quickly.  No
+sleep since twelve o'clock last night, you say?"
+
+"Not a wink, 'n' actin' as ef she was possessed a good deal o' the
+time.  You read your Bible, Doctor, don't you?  You're pious?  Do you
+remember about that woman in Scriptur' out of whom the Lord cast
+seven devils?  Well, I should ha' thought there was seventy devils in
+that gal last night, from the way she carr'd on.  And now she lays
+there jest as peaceful as a new-born babe,--that is, accordin' to the
+sayin' about 'em; for as to peaceful new-born babes, I never see one
+that come t' anything, that did n't screech as ef the haouse was
+afire 'n' it wanted to call all the fire-ingines within ten mild."
+
+The Doctor smiled, but he became thoughtful in a moment.  Did he
+possess a hitherto unexercised personal power, which put the key of
+this young girl's nervous system into his hands?  The remarkable
+tranquillizing effect of the contact of his hand with her forehead
+looked like an immediate physical action.
+
+It might have been a mere coincidence, however.  He would not form an
+opinion until his next visit.
+
+At that next visit it did seem as if some of Nurse Byloe's seventy
+devils had possession of the girl.  All the strange spasmodic
+movements, the chokings, the odd sounds, the wild talk, the laughing
+and crying, were in full blast.  All the remedies which had been
+ordered seemed to have been of no avail.  The Doctor could hardly
+refuse trying his quasi magnetic influence, and placed the tips of
+his fingers on her forehead.  The result was the same that had
+followed the similar proceeding the day before,--the storm was soon
+calmed, and after a little time she fell into a quiet sleep, as in
+the first instance.
+
+Here was an awkward affair for the physician, to be sure!  He held
+this power in his hands, which no remedy and no other person seemed
+to possess.  How long would he be chained to her; and she to him, and
+what would be the consequence of the mysterious relation which must
+necessarily spring up between a man like him, in the plenitude of
+vital force, of strongly attractive personality, and a young girl
+organized for victory over the calmest blood and the steadiest
+resistance?
+
+Every day after this made matters worse.  There was something almost
+partaking of the miraculous in the influence he was acquiring over
+her.  His "Peace, be still!" was obeyed by the stormy elements of
+this young soul, as if it had been a supernatural command.  How could
+he resist the dictate of humanity which called him to make his visits
+more frequent, that her intervals of rest might be more numerous?
+How could he refuse to sit at her bedside for a while in the evening,
+that she might be quieted, instead of beginning the night sleepless
+and agitated?
+
+The Doctor was a man of refined feeling as well as of principle, and
+he had besides a sacred memory in the deepest heart of his
+affections.  It was the common belief in the village that he would
+never marry again, but that his first and only love was buried in the
+grave of the wife of his youth.  It did not easily occur to him to
+suspect himself of any weakness with regard to this patient of his,
+little more than a child in years.  It did not at once suggest itself
+to him that she, in her strange, excited condition, might fasten her
+wandering thoughts upon him, too far removed by his age, as it
+seemed, to strike the fancy of a young girl under almost any
+conceivable conditions.
+
+Thus it was that many of those beautiful summer evenings found him
+sitting by his patient, the river rippling and singing beneath them,
+the moon shining over them, sweet odors from the thickets on the
+banks of the stream stealing in on the soft air that came through the
+open window, and every time they were thus together, the subtile
+influence which bound them to each other bringing them more and more
+into inexplicable harmonies and almost spiritual identity.
+
+But all this did not hinder the development of new and strange
+conditions in Myrtle Hazard.  Her will was losing its power.  "I
+cannot help it"--the hysteric motto--was her constant reply.  It is
+not pleasant to confess the truth, but she was rapidly undergoing a
+singular change of her moral nature.  She had been a truthful child.
+If she had kept her secret about what she had found in the garret,
+she thought she was exercising her rights, and she had never been
+obliged to tell any lies about it.
+
+But now she seemed to have lost the healthy instincts for veracity
+and honesty.  She feigned all sorts of odd symptoms, and showed a
+wonderful degree of cunning in giving an appearance of truth to them.
+It became next to impossible to tell what was real and what was
+simulated.  At one time she could not be touched ever so lightly
+without shrinking and crying out.  At another time she would squint,
+and again she would be half paralyzed for a time.  She would pretend
+to fast for days, living on food she had concealed and took secretly
+in the night.
+
+The nurse was getting worn out.  Kitty Fagan would have had the
+priest come to the house and sprinkle it with holy water.  The two
+women were beginning to get nervous themselves.  The Rev. Mr. Stoker
+said in confidence to Miss Silence, that there was reason to fear she
+might have been given over for a time to the buffetings of Satan, and
+that perhaps his (Mr. Stoker's) personal attentions might be useful
+in that case.  And so it appeared that the "young doctor" was the
+only being left with whom she had any complete relations and absolute
+sympathy.  She had become so passive in his hands that it seemed as
+if her only healthy life was, as it were, transmitted through him,
+and that she depended on the transfer of his nervous power, as the
+plant upon the light for its essential living processes.
+
+The two young men who had met in so unexpected a manner on board the
+ship Swordfish had been reasonably discreet in relating their
+adventures.  Myrtle Hazard may or may not have had the plan they
+attributed to her; however that was, they had looked rather foolish
+when they met, and had not thought it worth while to be very
+communicative about the matter when they returned.  It had at least
+given them a chance to become a little better acquainted with each
+other, and it was an opportunity which the elder and more artful of
+the two meant to turn to advantage.
+
+Of all Myrtle's few friends only one was in the habit of seeing her
+often during this period, namely, Olive Eveleth, a girl so quiet and
+sensible that she, if anybody, could be trusted with her.  But
+Myrtle's whole character seemed to have changed, and Olive soon found
+that she was in some mystic way absorbed into another nature.  Except
+when the physician's will was exerted upon her, she was drifting
+without any self-directing power, and then any one of those manifold
+impulses which would in some former ages have been counted as
+separate manifestations on the part of distinct demoniacal beings
+might take possession of her.  Olive did little, therefore, but visit
+Myrtle from time to time to learn if any change had occurred in her
+condition.  All this she reported to Cyprian, and all this was got
+out of him by Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+That gentleman was far from being pleased with the look of things as
+they were represented.  What if the Doctor, who was after all in the
+prime of life and younger-looking than some who were born half a
+dozen years after him, should get a hold on this young woman,--girl
+now, if you will, but in a very few years certain to come within
+possible, nay, not very improbable, matrimonial range of him?  That
+would be pleasant, wouldn't it?  It had happened sometimes, as he
+knew, that these magnetizing tricks had led to infatuation on the
+part of the subjects of the wonderful influence.  So he concluded to
+be ill and consult the younger Dr. Hurlbut, and incidentally find out
+how the land lay.
+
+The next question was, what to be ill with.  Some not ungentlemanly
+malady, not hereditary, not incurable, not requiring any obvious
+change in habits of life.  Dyspepsia would answer the purpose well
+enough: so Mr. Murray Bradshaw picked up a medical book and read ten
+minutes or more for that complaint.  At the end of this time he was
+an accomplished dyspeptic; for lawyers half learn a thing quicker
+than the members of any other profession.
+
+He presented himself with a somewhat forlorn countenance to Dr.
+Fordyce Hurlbut, as suffering from some of the less formidable
+symptoms of that affection.  He got into a very interesting
+conversation with him, especially about some nervous feelings which
+had accompanied his attack of indigestion.  Thence to nervous
+complaints in general.  Thence to the case of the young lady at The
+Poplars whom he was attending.  The Doctor talked with a certain
+reserve, as became his professional relations with his patient; but
+it was plain enough that, if this kind of intercourse went on much
+longer, it would be liable to end in some emotional explosion or
+other, and there was no saying how it would at last turn out.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was afraid to meddle directly.  He knew something
+more about the history of Myrtle's adventure than any of his
+neighbors, and, among other things, that it had given Mr. Byles
+Gridley a peculiar interest in her, of which he could take advantage.
+He therefore artfully hinted his fears to the old man, and left his
+hint to work itself out.
+
+However suspicious Master Gridley was of him and his motives, he
+thought it worth while to call up at The Poplars and inquire for
+himself of the nurse what was this new relation growing up between
+the physician and his young patient.
+
+She imparted her opinion to him in a private conversation with great
+freedom.  "Sech doin's!  sech doin's!  The gal's jest as much
+bewitched as ever any gal was sence them that was possessed in
+Scriptur'.  And every day it 's wus and wus.  Ef that Doctor don't
+stop comin', she won't breathe without his helpin' her to before
+long.  And, Mr. Gridley, I don't like to say so,--but I can't help
+thinkin' he's gettin' a little bewitched too.  I don't believe he
+means to take no kind of advantage of her; but, Mr. Gridley, you've
+seen them millers fly round and round a candle, and you know how it
+ginerally comes out.  Men is men and gals is gals.  I would n't trust
+no man, not ef he was much under a hundred year old,--and as for a
+gal--!"
+
+"Mulieri ne mortuae quidem credendum est," said Mr. Gridley.  "You
+wouldn't trust a woman even if she was dead, hey, Nurse?"
+
+"Not till she was buried, 'n' the grass growin' a foot high over
+her," said Nurse Byloe, "unless I'd know'd her sence she was a baby.
+I've know'd this one sence she was two or three year old; but this
+gal ain't Myrtle Hazard no longer,--she's bewitched into somethin'
+different.  I'll tell ye what, Mr. Gridley; you get old Dr. Hurlbut
+to come and see her once a day for a week, and get the young doctor
+to stay away.  I'll resk it.  She 'll have some dreadful tantrums at
+fust, but she'll come to it in two or three, days."
+
+Master Byles Gridley groaned in spirit.  He had come to this village
+to end his days in peace, and here he was just going to make a martyr
+of himself for the sake of a young person to whom he was under no
+obligation, except that he had saved her from the consequences of her
+own foolish act, at the expense of a great overturn of all his
+domestic habits.  There was no help for it.  The nurse was right, and
+he must perform the disagreeable duty of letting the Doctor know that
+he was getting into a track which might very probably lead to
+mischief, and that he must back out as fast as he could.
+
+At 2 P. M.  Gifted Hopkins presented the following note at the
+Doctor's door:
+
+"Mr. Byles Gridley would be much obliged to Dr. Fordyce Hurlbut if he
+would call at his study this evening."
+
+"Odd, is n't it, father, the old man's asking me to come and see him?
+Those old stub-twist constitutions never want patching."
+
+"Old man!  old man!  Who's that you call old,--not Byles Gridley,
+hey?  Old!  old!  Sixty year, more or less!  How old was Floyer when
+he died, Fordyce?  Ninety-odd, was n't it?  Had the asthma though, or
+he'd have lived to be as old as Dr. Holyoke,--a hundred year and
+over.  That's old.  But men live to be a good deal more than that
+sometimes.  What does Byles Gridley want of you, did you say?"
+
+"I'm sure I can't tell, father; I'll go and find out."  So he went
+over to Mrs. Hopkins's in the evening, and was shown up into the
+study.
+
+Master Gridley treated the Doctor to a cup of such tea as bachelors
+sometimes keep hid away in mysterious caddies.  He presently began
+asking certain questions about the grand climacteric, which eventful
+period of life he was fast approaching.  Then he discoursed of
+medicine, ancient and modern, tasking the Doctor's knowledge not a
+little, and evincing a good deal of acquaintance with old doctrines
+and authors.
+
+He had a few curious old medical books in his library, which he said
+he should like to show Dr. Hurlbut.
+
+"There, now!  What do you say to this copy of Joannes de Ketam,
+Venice, 1522?  Look at these woodcuts,--the first anatomical pictures
+ever printed, Doctor, unless these others of Jacobus Berengarius are
+older!  See this scene of the plague-patient, the doctor smelling at
+his pouncet-box, the old nurse standing square at the bedside, the
+young nurse with the bowl, holding back and turning her head away,
+and the old burial-hag behind her, shoving her forward, a very
+curious book, Doctor, and has the first phrenological picture in it
+ever made.  Take a look, too, at my Vesalius,--not the Leyden
+edition, Doctor, but the one with the grand old original figures,--so
+good that they laid them to Titian.  And look here, Doctor, I could
+n't help getting this great folio Albinus, 1747,--and the nineteenth
+century can't touch it, Doctor,--can't touch it for completeness and
+magnificence, so all the learned professors tell me!  Brave old
+fellows, Doctor, and put their lives into their books as you
+gentlemen don't pretend to do nowadays.  And good old fellows,
+Doctor,--high-minded, scrupulous, conscientious, punctilious,--
+remembered their duties to man and to woman, and felt all the
+responsibilities of their confidential relation to families.  Did you
+ever read the oldest of medical documents,--the Oath of Hippocrates?"
+
+The Doctor thought he had read it, but did not remember much about
+it.
+
+"It 's worth reading, Doctor,--it's worth remembering; and, old as it
+is, it is just as good to-day as it was when it was laid down as a
+rule of conduct four hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount was
+delivered.  Let me read it to you, Dr. Hurlbut."
+
+There was something in Master Gridley's look that made the Doctor
+feel a little nervous; he did not know just what was coming.
+
+Master Gridley took out his great Hippocrates, the edition of
+Foesius, and opened to the place.  He turned so as to face the
+Doctor, and read the famous Oath aloud, Englishing it as he went
+along.  When he came to these words which follow, he pronounced them
+very slowly and with special emphasis.
+
+"My life shall be pure and holy."
+
+"Into whatever house I enter, I will go for the good of the patient:
+
+"I will abstain from inflicting any voluntary injury, and from
+leading away any, whether man or woman, bond or free."
+
+The Doctor changed color as he listened, and the moisture broke out
+on his forehead.
+
+Master Gridley saw it, and followed up his advantage.  "Dr. Fordyce
+Hurlbut, are you not in danger of violating the sanctities of your
+honorable calling, and leading astray a young person committed to
+your sacred keeping?"
+
+While saying these words, Master Gridley looked full upon him, with a
+face so charged with grave meaning, so impressed with the gravity of
+his warning accents, that the Doctor felt as if he were before some
+dread tribunal, and remained silent.  He was a member of the Rev. Mr.
+Stoker's church, and the words he had just listened to were those of
+a sinful old heathen who had never heard a sermon in his life; but
+they stung him, for all that, as the parable of the prophet stung the
+royal transgressor.
+
+He spoke at length, for the plain honest words had touched the right
+spring of consciousness at the right moment; not too early, for he
+now saw whither he was tending,--not too late, for he was not yet in
+the inner spirals of the passion which whirls men and women to their
+doom in ever-narrowing coils, that will not unwind at the command of
+God or man.
+
+He spoke as one who is humbled by self-accusation, yet in a manly
+way, as became his honorable and truthful character.
+
+"Master Gridley," he said, "I stand convicted before you.  I know too
+well what you are thinking of.  It is true, I cannot continue my
+attendance on Myrtle--on Miss Hazard, for you mean her--without peril
+to both of us.  She is not herself.  God forbid that I should cease
+to be myself!  I have been thinking of a summer tour, and I will at
+once set out upon it, and leave this patient in my father's hands.  I
+think he will find strength to visit her under the circmnstances."
+
+The Doctor went off the next morning without saying a word to Myrtle
+Hazard, and his father made the customary visit in his place.
+
+That night the spirit tare her, as may well be supposed, and so the
+second night.  But there was no help for it: her doctor was gone,
+and the old physician, with great effort, came instead, sat by her,
+spoke kindly to her, left wise directions to her attendants, and
+above all assured them that, if they would have a little patience,
+they would see all this storm blow over.
+
+On the third night after his visit, the spirit rent her sore, and
+came out of her, or, in the phrase of to-day, she had a fierce
+paroxysm, after which the violence of the conflict ceased, and she
+might be called convalescent so far as that was concerned.
+
+But all this series of nervous disturbances left her in a very
+impressible and excitable condition.  This was just the state to
+invite the spiritual manipulations of one of those theological
+practitioners who consider that the treatment of all morbid states of
+mind short of raving madness belongs to them and not to the doctors.
+This same condition was equally favorable for the operations of any
+professional experimenter who would use the flame of religious
+excitement to light the torch of an earthly passion.  So many fingers
+that begin on the black keys stray to the white ones before the tune
+is played out!
+
+If Myrtle Hazard was in charge of any angelic guardian, the time was
+at hand when she would need all celestial influences; for the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker was about to take a deep interest in her
+spiritual welfare.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+SKIRMISHING.
+
+"So the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has called upon you, Susan Posey,
+has he?  And wants you to come and talk religion with him in his
+study, Susan Posey, does he?  Religion is a good thing, my dear, the
+best thing in the world, and never better than when we are young, and
+no young people need it more than young girls.  There are temptations
+to all, and to them as often as to any, Susan Posey.  And temptations
+come to them in places where they don't look for them, and from
+persons they never thought of as tempters.  So I am very glad to have
+your thoughts called to the subject of religion.  'Remember thy
+Creator in the days of thy youth.'
+
+"But Susan Posey, my dear, I think you hard better not break in upon
+the pious meditations of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker in his
+private study.  A monk's cell and a minister's library are hardly the
+places for young ladies.  They distract the attention of these good
+men from their devotions and their sermons.  If you think you must
+go, you had better take Mrs. Hopkins with you.  She likes religious
+conversation, and it will do her good too, and save a great deal of
+time for the minister, conversing with two at once.  She is of
+discreet age, and will tell you when it is time to come away,--you
+might stay too long, you know.  I've known young persons stay a good
+deal too long at these interviews,--a great deal too long, Susan
+Posey!"
+
+Such was the fatherly counsel of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+Susan was not very quick of apprehension, but she could not help
+seeing the justice of Master Gridley's remark, that for a young
+person to go and break in on the hours that a minister requires for
+his studies, without being accompanied by a mature friend who would
+remind her when it was time to go, would be taking an unfair
+advantage of his kindness in asking her to call upon him.  She
+promised, therefore, that she would never go without having Mrs.
+Hopkins as her companion, and with this assurance her old friend
+rested satisfied.
+
+It is altogether likely that he had some deeper reason for his advice
+than those with which he satisfied the simple nature of Susan Posey.
+Of that it will be easier to judge after a glance at the conditions
+and character of the minister and his household.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had, in addition to the personal advantages
+already alluded to, some other qualities which might prove attractive
+to many women.  He had, in particular, that art of sliding into easy
+intimacy with them which implies some knowledge of the female nature,
+and, above all, confidence in one's powers.  There was little doubt,
+the gossips maintained, that many of the younger women of his parish
+would have been willing, in certain contingencies, to lift for him
+that other end of his yoke under which poor Mrs. Stoker was fainting,
+unequal to the burden.
+
+That lady must have been some years older than her husband,--how many
+we need not inquire too curiously,--but in vitality she had long
+passed the prime in which he was still flourishing.  She had borne
+him five children, and cried her eyes hollow over the graves of three
+of them.  Household cares had dragged upon her; the routine of
+village life wearied her; the parishioners expected too much of her
+as the minister's wife; she had wanted more fresh air and more
+cheerful companionship; and her thoughts had fed too much on death
+and sin,--good bitter tonics to increase the appetite for virtue, but
+not good as food and drink for the spirit.
+
+But there was another grief which lay hidden far beneath these
+obvious depressing influences.  She felt that she was no longer to
+her husband what she had been to him, and felt it with something of
+self-reproach,--which was a wrong to herself, for she had been a true
+and tender wife.  Deeper than all the rest was still another feeling,
+which had hardly risen into the region of inwardly articulated
+thought, but lay unshaped beneath all the syllabled trains of
+sleeping or waking consciousness.
+
+The minister was often consulted by his parishioners upon spiritual
+matters, and was in the habit of receiving in his study visitors who
+came with such intent.  Sometimes it was old weak-eyed Deacon
+Rumrill, in great iron-bowed spectacles, with hanging nether lip and
+tremulous voice, who had got his brain onto a muddle about the beast
+with two horns, or the woman that fled into the wilderness, or other
+points not settled to his mind in Scott's Commentary.  The minister
+was always very busy at such times, and made short work of his
+deacon's doubts.  Or it might be that an ancient woman, a mother or a
+grandmother in Israel, came with her questions and her perplexities
+to her pastor; and it was pretty certain that just at that moment he
+was very deep in his next sermon, or had a pressing visit to make.
+
+But it would also happen occasionally that one of the tenderer ewe-
+lambs of the flock needed comfort from the presence of the shepherd.
+Poor Mrs. Stoker noticed, or thought she noticed, that the good man
+had more leisure for the youthful and blooming sister than for the
+more discreet and venerable matron or spinster.  The sitting was apt
+to be longer; and the worthy pastor would often linger awhile about
+the door, to speed the parting guest, perhaps, but a little too much
+after the fashion of young people who are not displeased with each
+other, and who often find it as hard to cross a threshold single as a
+witch finds it to get over a running stream.  More than once, the
+pallid, faded wife had made an errand to the study, and, after a keen
+look at the bright young cheeks, flushed with the excitement of
+intimate spiritual communion, had gone back to her chamber with her
+hand pressed against her heart, and the bitterness of death in her
+soul.
+
+The end of all these bodily and mental trials was, that the
+minister's wife had fallen into a state of habitual invalidism, such
+as only women, who feel all the nerves which in men are as insensible
+as telegraph-wires, can experience.
+
+The doctor did not know what to make of her case,--whether she would
+live or die,--whether she would languish for years, or, all at once,
+roused by some strong impression, or in obedience to some unexplained
+movement of the vital forces, take up her bed and walk.  For her bed
+had become her home, where she lived as if it belonged to her
+organism.  There she lay, a not unpleasing invalid to contemplate,
+always looking resigned, patient, serene, except when the one deeper
+grief was stirred, always arrayed with simple neatness, and
+surrounded with little tokens that showed the constant presence with
+her of tasteful and thoughtful affection.  She did not know, nobody
+could know, how steadily, how silently all this artificial life was
+draining the veins and blanching the cheek of her daughter Bathsheba,
+one of the everyday, air-breathing angels without nimbus or aureole
+who belong to every story which lets us into a few households, as
+much as the stars and the flowers belong to everybody's verses.
+
+Bathsheba's devotion to her mother brought its own reward, but it was
+not in the shape of outward commendation.  Some of the more
+censorious members of her father's congregation were severe in their
+remarks upon her absorption in the supreme object of her care.  It
+seems that this had prevented her from attending to other duties
+which they considered more imperative.  They did n't see why she
+shouldn't keep a Sabbath-school as well as the rest, and as to her
+not comin' to meetin' three times on Sabbath day like other folks,
+they couldn't account for it, except because she calculated that she
+could get along without the means of grace, bein' a minister's
+daughter.  Some went so far as to doubt if she had ever experienced
+religion, for all she was a professor.  There was a good many
+indulged a false hope.  To this, others objected her life of utter
+self-denial and entire surrender to her duties towards her mother as
+some evidence of Christian character.  But old Deacon Rumrill put
+down that heresy by showing conclusively from Scott's Commentary on
+Romans xi. 1-6, that this was altogether against her chance of being
+called, and that the better her disposition to perform good works,
+the more unlikely she was to be the subject of saving grace.  Some of
+these severe critics were good people enough themselves, but they
+loved active work and stirring companionship, and would have found
+their real cross if they had been called to sit at an invalid's
+bedside.
+
+As for the Rev. Mr. Stoker, his duties did not allow him to give so
+much time to his suffering wife as his feelings would undoubtedly
+have prompted.  He therefore relinquished the care of her (with great
+reluctance we may naturally suppose) to Bathsheba, who had inherited
+not only her mother's youthful smile, but that self-forgetfulness
+which, born with some of God's creatures, is, if not "grace," at
+least a manifestation of native depravity which might well be
+mistaken for it.
+
+The intimacy of mother and daughter was complete, except on a single
+point.  There was one subject on which no word ever passed between
+them.  The excuse of duties to others was by a tacit understanding a
+mantle to cover all short-comings in the way of attention from the
+husband and father, and no word ever passed between them implying a
+suspicion of the loyalty of his affections.  Bathsheba came at last
+so to fill with her tenderness the space left empty in the neglected
+heart, that her mother only spoke her habitual feeling when she said,
+"I should think you were in love with me, my darling, if you were not
+my daughter."
+
+This was a dangerous state of things for the minister.  Strange
+suggestions and unsafe speculations began to mingle with his dreams
+and reveries.  The thought once admitted that another's life is
+becoming superfluous and a burden, feeds like a ravenous vulture on
+the soul.  Woe to the man or woman whose days are passed in watching
+the hour-glass through which the sands run too slowly for longings
+that are like a skulking procession of bloodless murders!  Without
+affirming such horrors of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, it would not be
+libellous to say that his fancy was tampering with future
+possibilities, as it constantly happens with those who are getting
+themselves into training for some act of folly, or some crime, it may
+be, which will in its own time evolve itself as an idea in the
+consciousness, and by and by ripen into fact.
+
+It must not be taken for granted that he was actually on the road to
+some fearful deed, or that he was an utterly lost soul.  He was ready
+to yield to temptation if it came in his way; he would even court it,
+but he did not shape out any plan very definitely in his mind, as a
+more desperate sinner would have done.  He liked the pleasurable
+excitement of emotional relations with his pretty lambs, and enjoyed
+it under the name of religious communion.  There is a border land
+where one can stand on the territory of legitimate instincts and
+affections, and yet be so near, the pleasant garden of the Adversary,
+that his dangerous fruits and flowers are within easy reach.  Once
+tasted, the next step is like to be the scaling of the wall.  The
+Rev. Mr. Stoker was very fond of this border land.  His imagination
+was wandering over it too often when his pen was travelling almost of
+itself along the weary parallels of the page before him.  All at once
+a blinding flash would come over him the lines of his sermon would
+run together, the fresh manuscript would shrivel like a dead leaf,
+and the rows of hard-hearted theology on the shelves before him, and
+the broken-backed Concordance, and the Holy Book itself, would fade
+away as he gave himself up to the enchantment of his delirious dream.
+
+The reader will probably consider it a discreet arrangement that
+pretty Susan Posey should seek her pastor in grave company.  Mrs.
+Hopkins willingly consented to the arrangement which had been
+proposed, and agreed to go with the young lady on her visit to the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker's study.  They were both arrayed in their field-day
+splendors on this occasion.  Susan was lovely in her light curls and
+blue ribbons, and the becoming dress which could not help betraying
+the modestly emphasized crescendos and gently graded diminuendos of
+her figure.  She was as round as if she had been turned in a lathe,
+and as delicately finished as if she had been modelled for a Flora.
+She had naturally an airy toss of the head and a springy movement of
+the joints, such as some girls study in the glass (and make dreadful
+work of it), so that she danced all over without knowing it, like a
+little lively bobolink on a bulrush.  In short, she looked fit to
+spoil a homily for Saint Anthony himself.
+
+Mrs. Hopkins was not less perfect in her somewhat different style.
+She might be called impressive and imposing in her grand-costume,
+which she wore for this visit.  It was a black silk dress, with a
+crape shawl, a firmly defensive bonnet, and an alpaca umbrella with
+a stern-looking and decided knob presiding as its handle.  The dried-
+leaf rustle of her silk dress was suggestive of the ripe autumn of
+life, bringing with it those golden fruits of wisdom and experience
+which the grave teachers of mankind so justly prefer to the idle
+blossoms of adolescence.
+
+It is needless to say that the visit was conducted with the most
+perfect propriety in all respects.  Mrs. Hopkins was disposed to take
+upon herself a large share of the conversation.  The minister, on the
+other hand, would have devoted himself more particularly to Miss
+Susan, but, with a very natural make-believe obtuseness, the good
+woman drew his fire so constantly that few of his remarks, and hardly
+any of his insinuating looks, reached the tender object at which they
+were aimed.  It is probable that his features or tones betrayed some
+impatience at having thus been foiled of his purpose, for Mrs.
+Hopkins thought he looked all the time as if he wanted to get rid of
+her.  The three parted, therefore, not in the best humor all round.
+Mrs. Hopkins declared she'd see the minister in Jericho before she'd
+fix herself up as if she was goin' to a weddin' to go and see him
+again.  Why, he did n't make any more of her than if she'd been a
+tabby-cat.  She believed some of these ministers thought women's
+souls dried up like peas in a pod by the time they was forty year
+old; anyhow, they did n't seem to care any great about 'em, except
+while they was green and tender.  It was all Miss Se-usan, Miss Se-
+usan, Miss Se-usan, my dear!  but as for her, she might jest as well
+have gone with her apron on, for any notice he took of her.  She did
+n't care, she was n't goin' to be left out when there was talkin'
+goin' on, anyhow.
+
+Susan Posey, on her part, said she did n't like him a bit.  He looked
+so sweet at her, and held his head on one side,--law! just as if he
+had been a young beau!  And,--don't tell,--but he whispered that he
+wished the next time I came I wouldn't bring that Hopkins woman!
+
+It would not be fair to repeat what the minister said to himself; but
+we may own as much as this, that, if worthy Mrs. Hopkins had heard
+it, she would have treated him to a string of adjectives which would
+have greatly enlarged his conceptions of the female vocabulary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+BATTLE.
+
+In tracing the history of a human soul through its commonplace
+nervous perturbations, still more through its spiritual humiliations,
+there is danger that we shall feel a certain contempt for the subject
+of such weakness.  It is easy to laugh at the erring impulses of a
+young girl; but you who remember when_______ _________, only fifteen
+years old, untouched by passion, unsullied in name, was found in the
+shallow brook where she had sternly and surely sought her death,--
+(too true! too true!--ejus animae Jesu miserere!--but a generation
+has passed since then,)--will not smile so scornfully.
+
+Myrtle Hazard no longer required the physician's visits, but her mind
+was very far from being poised in the just balance of its faculties.
+She was of a good natural constitution and a fine temperament; but
+she had been overwrought by all that she had passed through, and,
+though happening to have been born in another land, she was of
+American descent.  Now, it has long been noticed that there is
+something in the influences, climatic or other, here prevailing,
+which predisposes to morbid religious excitement.  The graver reader
+will not object to seeing the exact statement of a competent witness
+belonging to a by-gone century, confirmed as it is by all that we see
+about us.
+
+"There is no Experienced Minister of the Gospel who hath not in the
+Cases of Tempted Souls often had this Experience, that the ill Cases
+of their distempered Bodies are the frequent Occasion and Original of
+their Temptations."  "The Vitiated Humours in many Persons, yield the
+Steams whereinto Satan does insinuate himself, till he has gained a
+sort of Possession in them, or at least an Opportunity to shoot into
+the Mind as many Fiery Darts as may cause a sad Life unto them; yea,
+'t is well if Self-Murder be not the sad end into which these hurred
+(?) People are thus precipitated.  New England, a country where
+Splenetic Maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any
+other, hath afforded Numberless Instances, of even pious People, who
+have contracted these Melancholy Indispositions which have unhinged
+them from all Service or Comfort; yea, not a few Persons have been
+hurried thereby to lay Violent Hands upon themselves at the last.
+These are among the unsearchable Judgments of God!"
+
+Such are the words of the Rev. Cotton Mather.
+
+The minister had hardly recovered from his vexatious defeat in the
+skirmish where the Widow Hopkins was his principal opponent, when he
+received a note from Miss Silence Withers, which promised another and
+more important field of conflict.  It contained a request that he
+would visit Myrtle Hazard, who seemed to be in a very excitable and
+impressible condition, and who might perhaps be easily brought under
+those influences which she had resisted from her early years, through
+inborn perversity of character.
+
+When the Rev. Mr. Stoker received this note, he turned very pale,--
+which was a bad sign.  Then he drew a long breath or two, and
+presently a flush tingled up to his cheek, where it remained a fixed
+burning glow.  This may have been from the deep interest he felt in
+Myrtle's spiritual welfare; but he had often been sent for by aged
+sinners in more immediate peril, apparently, without any such
+disturbance of the circulation.
+
+To know whether a minister, young or still in flower; is in safe or
+dangerous paths, there are two psychometers, a comparison between
+which will give as infallible a return as the dry and wet bulbs of
+the ingenious "Hygrodeik."  The first is the black broadcloth forming
+the knees of his pantaloons; the second, the patch of carpet before
+his mirror.  If the first is unworn and the second is frayed and
+threadbare, pray for him.  If the first is worn and shiny, while the
+second keeps its pattern and texture, get him to pray for you.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker should have gone down on his knees then and
+there, and sought fervently for the grace which he was like to need
+in the dangerous path just opening before him.  He did not do this;
+but he stood up before his looking-glass and parted his hair as
+carefully as if he had been separating the saints of his congregation
+from the sinners, to send the list to the statistical columns of a
+religious newspaper.  He selected a professional neckcloth, as
+spotlessly pure as if it had been washed in innocency, and adjusted
+it in a tie which was like the white rose of Sharon.  Myrtle Hazard
+was, he thought, on the whole, the handsomest girl he had ever seen;
+Susan Posey was to her as a buttercup from the meadow is to a tiger-
+lily.  He, knew the nature of the nervous disturbances through which
+she had been passing, and that she must be in a singularly
+impressible condition.  He felt sure that he could establish intimate
+spiritual relations with her by drawing out her repressed sympathies,
+by feeding the fires of her religious imagination, by exercising all
+those lesser arts of fascination which are so familiar to the Don
+Giovannis, and not always unknown to the San Giovannis.
+
+As for the hard doctrines which he used to produce sensations with in
+the pulpit, it would have been a great pity to worry so lovely a
+girl, in such a nervous state, with them.  He remembered a savory
+text about being made all things to all men, which would bear
+application particularly well to the case of this young woman.  He
+knew how to weaken his divinity, on occasion, as well as an old
+housewife to weaken her tea, lest it should keep people awake.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker was a man of emotions.  He loved to feel his
+heart beat; he loved all the forms of non-alcoholic drunkenness,
+which are so much better than the vinous, because they taste
+themselves so keenly, whereas the other (according to the statement
+of experts who are familiar with its curious phenomena) has a certain
+sense of unreality connected with it.  He delighted in the reflex
+stimulus of the excitement he produced in others by working on their
+feelings.  A powerful preacher is open to the same sense of
+enjoyment--an awful, tremulous, goose-flesh sort of state, but still
+enjoyment--that a great tragedian feels when he curdles the blood of
+his audience.
+
+Mr. Stoker was noted for the vividness of his descriptions of the
+future which was in store for the great bulk of his fellow-townsmen
+and fellow-worlds-men.  He had three sermons on this subject, known
+to all the country round as the sweating sermon, the fainting sermon,
+and the convulsion-fit sermon, from the various effects said to have
+been produced by them when delivered before large audiences.  It
+might be supposed that his reputation as a terrorist would have
+interfered with his attempts to ingratiate himself with his young
+favorites.  But the tragedian who is fearful as Richard or as Iago
+finds that no hindrance to his success in the part of Romeo.  Indeed,
+women rather take to terrible people; prize-fighters, pirates,
+highwaymen, rebel generals, Grand Turks, and Bluebeards generally
+have a fascination for the sex; your virgin has a natural instinct to
+saddle your lion.  The fact, therefore, that the young girl had sat
+under his tremendous pulpitings, through the sweating sermon, the
+fainting sermon, and the convulsion-fit sermon, did not secure her
+against the influence of his milder approaches.
+
+Myrtle was naturally surprised at receiving a visit from him; but she
+was in just that unbalanced state in which almost any impression is
+welcome.  He showed so much interest, first in her health, then in
+her thoughts and feelings, always following her lead in the
+conversation, that before he left her she felt as if she had made a
+great discovery; namely, that this man, so formidable behind the guns
+of his wooden bastion, was a most tenderhearted and sympathizing
+person when he came out of it unarmed.  How delightful he was as he
+sat talking in the twilight in low and tender tones, with respectful
+pauses of listening, in which he looked as if he too had just made a
+discovery,--of an angel, to wit, to whom he could not help unbosoming
+his tenderest emotions, as to a being from another sphere!
+
+It was a new experience to Myrtle.  She was all ready for the
+spiritual manipulations of an expert.  The excitability which had
+been showing itself in spasms and strange paroxysms had been
+transferred to those nervous centres, whatever they may be, cerebral
+or ganglionic, which are concerned in the emotional movements of the
+religious nature.  It was taking her at an unfair disadvantage, no
+doubt.  In the old communion, some priest might have wrought upon her
+while in this condition, and we might have had at this very moment
+among us another Saint Theresa or Jacqueline Pascal.  She found but a
+dangerous substitute in the spiritual companionship of a saint like
+the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+People think the confessional is unknown in our Protestant churches.
+It is a great mistake.  The principal change is, that there is no
+screen between the penitent and the father confessor.  The minister
+knew his rights, and very soon asserted them.  He gave aunt Silence
+to understand that he could talk more at ease if he and his young
+disciple were left alone together.  Cynthia Badlam did not like this
+arrangement.  She was afraid to speak about it; but she glared at
+them aslant, with the look of a biting horse when his eyes follow one
+sideways until they are all white but one little vicious spark of
+pupil.
+
+It was not very long before the Rev. Mr. Stoker had established
+pretty intimate relations with the household at The Poplars.  He had
+reason to think, he assured Miss Silence, that Myrtle was in a state
+of mind which promised a complete transformation of her character.
+He used the phrases of his sect, of course, in talking with the
+elderly lady; but the language which he employed with the young girl
+was free from those mechanical expressions which would have been like
+to offend or disgust her.
+
+As to his rougher formulae, he knew better than to apply them to a
+creature of her fine texture.  If he had been disposed to do so, her
+simple questions and answers to his inquiries would have made it
+difficult.  But it was in her bright and beautiful eyes, in her
+handsome features, and her winning voice, that he found his chief
+obstacle.  How could he look upon her face in its loveliness, and
+talk to her as if she must be under the wrath and curse of God for
+the mere fact of her existence?  It seemed more natural and it
+certainly was more entertaining, to question her in such a way as to
+find out what kind of theology had grown up in her mind as the result
+of her training in the complex scheme of his doctrinal school.  And
+as he knew that the merest child, so soon as it begins to think at
+all, works out for itself something like a theory of human nature, he
+pretty soon began sounding Myrtle's thoughts on this matter.
+
+What was her own idea; he would be pleased to know, about her natural
+condition as one born of a sinful race, and her inherited liabilities
+on that account?
+
+Myrtle smiled like a little heathen, as she was, according to the
+standard of her earlier teachings.  That kind of talk used to worry
+her when she was a child, sometimes.  Yes, she remembered its coming
+back to her in a dream she had, when--when--(She did not finish her
+sentence.)  Did he think she hated every kind of goodness and loved
+every kind of evil?  Did he think she was hateful to the Being who
+made her?
+
+The minister looked straight into the bright, brave, tender eyes, and
+answered, "Nothing in heaven or on earth could help loving you,
+Myrtle!"
+
+Pretty well for a beginning!
+
+Myrtle saw nothing but pious fervor in this florid sentiment.  But as
+she was honest and clear-sighted, she could not accept a statement
+which seemed so plainly in contradiction with his common teachings,
+without bringing his flattering assertion to the test of another
+question.
+
+Did he suppose, she asked, that any persons could be Christians, who
+could not tell the day or the year of their change from children of
+darkness to children of light.
+
+The shrewd clergyman, whose creed could be lax enough on occasion,
+had provided himself with authorities of all kinds to meet these
+awkward questions in casuistical divinity.  He had hunted up recipes
+for spiritual neuralgia, spasms, indigestion, psora, hypochondriasis,
+just as doctors do for their bodily counterparts.
+
+To be sure they could.  Why, what did the great Richard Baxter say in
+his book on Infant Baptism?  That at a meeting of many eminent
+Christians, some of them very famous ministers, when it was desired
+that every one should give an account of the time and manner of his
+conversion, there was but one of them all could do it.  And as for
+himself, Mr. Baxter said, he could not remember the day or the year
+when he began to be sincere, as he called it.  Why, did n't President
+Wheelock say to a young man who consulted him, that some persons
+might be true Christians without suspecting it?
+
+All this was so very different from the uncompromising way in which
+religious doctrines used to be presented to the young girl from the
+pulpit, that it naturally opened her heart and warmed her affections.
+Remember, if she needs excuse, that the defeated instincts of a
+strong nature were rushing in upon her, clamorous for their rights,
+and that she was not yet mature enough to understand and manage them.
+The paths of love and religion are at the fork of a road which every
+maiden travels.  If some young hand does not open the turnpike gate
+of the first, she is pretty sure to try the other, which has no toll-
+bar.  It is also very commonly noticed that these two paths, after
+diverging awhile, run into each other.  True love leads many
+wandering souls into the better way.  Nor is it rare to see those who
+started in company for the gates of pearl seated together on the
+banks that border the avenue to that other portal, gathering the
+roses for which it is so famous.
+
+It was with the most curious interest that the minister listened to
+the various heresies into which her reflections had led her.  Somehow
+or other they did not sound so dangerous coming from her lips as when
+they were uttered by the coarser people of the less rigorous
+denominations, or preached in the sermons of heretical clergymen.  He
+found it impossible to think of her in connection with those
+denunciations of sinners for which his discourses had been noted.
+Some of the sharp old church-members began to complain that his
+exhortations were losing their pungency.  The truth was, he was
+preaching for Myrtle Hazard.  He was getting bewitched and driven
+beside himself by the intoxication of his relations with her.
+
+All this time she was utterly unconscious of any charm that she was
+exercising, or of being herself subject to any personal fascination.
+She loved to read the books of ecstatic contemplation which he
+furnished her.  She loved to sing the languishing hymns which he
+selected for her.  She loved to listen to his devotional rhapsodies,
+hardly knowing sometimes whether she were in the body, or out of the
+body, while he lifted her upon the wings of his passion-kindled
+rhetoric.  The time came when she had learned to listen for his step,
+when her eyes glistened at meeting him, when the words he uttered
+were treasured as from something more than a common mortal, and the
+book he had touched was like a saintly relic.  It never suggested
+itself to her for an instant that this was anything more than such a
+friendship as Mercy might have cultivated with Great-Heart.  She gave
+her confidence simply because she was very young and innocent.  The
+green tendrils of the growing vine must wind round something.
+
+The seasons had been changing their scenery while the events we have
+told were occurring, and the loveliest days of autumn were now
+shining.  To those who know the "Indian summer" of our Northern
+States, it is needless to describe the influence it exerts on the
+senses and the soul.  The stillness of the landscape in that
+beautiful time is as if the planet were sleeping, like a top, before
+it begins to rock with the storms of autumn.  All natures seem to
+find themselves more truly in its light; love grows more tender,
+religion more spiritual, memory sees farther back into the past,
+grief revisits its mossy marbles, the poet harvests the ripe thoughts
+which he will tie in sheaves of verses by his winter fireside.
+
+The minister had got into the way of taking frequent walks with
+Myrtle, whose health had seemed to require the open air, and who was
+fast regaining her natural look.  Under the canopy of the scarlet,
+orange, and crimson leaved maples, of the purple and violet clad
+oaks, of the birches in their robes of sunshine, and the beeches in
+their clinging drapery of sober brown, they walked together while he
+discoursed of the joys of heaven, the sweet communion of kindred
+souls, the ineffable bliss of a world where love would be immortal
+and beauty should never know decay.  And while she listened, the
+strange light of the leaves irradiated the youthful figure of Myrtle,
+as when the stained window let in its colors on Madeline, the rose-
+bloom and the amethyst and the glory.
+
+"Yes!  we shall be angels together," exclaimed the Rev. Mr. Stoker.
+"Our souls were made for immortal union.  I know it; I feel it in
+every throb of my heart.  Even in this world you are as an angel to
+me, lifting me into the heaven where I shall meet you again, or it
+will not be heaven.  Oh, if on earth our communion could have been
+such as it must be hereafter!  O Myrtle, Myrtle!"
+
+He stretched out his hands as if to clasp hers between them in the
+rapture of his devotion.  Was it the light reflected from the glossy
+leaves of the poison sumach which overhung the path that made his
+cheek look so pale?  Was he going to kneel to her?
+
+Myrtle turned her dark eyes on him with a simple wonder that saw an
+excess of saintly ardor in these demonstrations, and drew back from
+it.
+
+"I think of heaven always as the place where I shall meet my mother,"
+she said calmly.
+
+These words recalled the man to himself for a moment and he was
+silent.  Presently he seated himself on a stone.  His lips were
+tremulous as he said, in a low tone, "Sit down by me, Myrtle."
+
+
+"No," she answered, with something which chilled him in her voice,"
+we will not stay here any longer; it is time to go home."
+
+"Full time!" muttered Cynthia Badlam, whose watchful eyes had been
+upon them, peering through a screen of yellow leaves, that turned her
+face pace as if with deadly passion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+FLANK MOVEMENT.
+
+Miss Cynthia Badlam was in the habit of occasionally visiting the
+Widow Hopkins.  Some said but then people will talk, especially in
+the country, where they have not much else to do, except in haying-
+time.  She had always known the widow, long before Mr. Gridley came
+there to board, or any other special event happened in her family.
+No matter what people said.
+
+Miss Badlam called to see Mrs. Hopkins, then, and the two had a long
+talk together, of which only a portion is on record.  Here are such
+fragments as have been preserved.
+
+"What would I do about it?  Why, I'd put a stop to such carry'n's on,
+mighty quick, if I had to tie the girl to the bedpost, and have a
+bulldog that world take the seat out of any pair of black pantaloons
+that come within forty rod of her,--that's what I'd do about it!  He
+undertook to be mighty sweet with our Susan one while, but ever sence
+he's been talkin' religion with Myrtle Hazard he's let us alone.  Do
+as I did when he asked our Susan to come to his study,--stick close
+to your girl and you 'll put a stop to all this business.  He won't
+make love to two at once, unless they 're both pretty young, I 'll
+warrant.  Follow her round, Miss Cynthy, and keep your eyes on her."
+
+"I have watched her like a cat, Mrs. Hopkins, but I can't follow her
+everywhere,--she won't stand what Susan Posey 'll stand.  There's no
+use our talking to her,--we 've done with that at our house.  You
+never know what that Indian blood of hers will make her do.  She's
+too high-strung for us to bit and bridle.  I don't want to see her
+name in the paper again, alongside of that" (She did not finish the
+sentence.) "I'd rather have her fished dead out of the river, or find
+her where she found her uncle Malachi!"
+
+"You don't think, Miss Cynthy, that the man means to inveigle the
+girl with the notion of marryin' her by and by, after poor Mrs.
+Stoker's dead and gone?"
+
+"The Lord in heaven forbid!" exclaimed Miss Cynthia, throwing up her
+hands.  "A child of fifteen years old, if she is a woman to look at!"
+
+"It's too bad,--it's too bad to think of, Miss Cynthy; and there's
+that poor woman dyin' by inches, and Miss Bathsheby settin' with her
+day and night, she has n't got a bit of her father in her, it's all
+her mother,--and that man, instead of bein' with her to comfort her
+as any man ought to be with his wife, in sickness and in health,
+that's what he promised.  I 'm sure when my poor husband was sick....
+To think of that man goin' about to talk religion to all the
+prettiest girls he can find in the parish, and his wife at home like
+to leave him so soon,--it's a shame,--so it is, come now!  Miss
+Cynthy, there's one of the best men and one of the learnedest men
+that ever lived that's a real friend of Myrtle Hazard, and a better
+friend to her than she knows of,--for ever sence he brought her home,
+he feels jest like a father to her,--and that man is Mr. Gridley,
+that lives in this house.  It's him I 'll speak to about the
+minister's carry'in's on.  He knows about his talking sweet to our
+Susan, and he'll put things to rights!  He's a master hand when he
+does once take hold of anything, I tell you that!  Jest get him to
+shet up them books of his, and take hold of anybody's troubles, and
+you'll see how he 'll straighten 'em out."
+
+There was a pattering of little feet on the stairs, and the two small
+twins, "Sossy" and "Minthy," in the home dialect, came hand in hand
+into the room, Miss Susan leaving them at the threshold, not wishing
+to interrupt the two ladies, and being much interested also in
+listening to Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who was reading some of his last
+poems to her, with great delight to both of them.
+
+The good woman rose to take them from Susan, and guide their
+uncertain steps.  "My babies, I call 'em, Miss Cynthy.  Ain't they
+nice children?  Come to go to bed, little dears?  Only a few minutes,
+Miss Cynthy."
+
+She took them into the bedroom on the same floor, where they slept,
+and, leaving the door open, began undressing them.  Cynthia turned
+her rocking-chair round so as to face the open door.  She looked on
+while the little creatures were being undressed; she heard the few
+words they lisped as their infant prayer, she saw them laid in their
+beds, and heard their pretty good-night.
+
+A lone woman to whom all the sweet cares of maternity have been
+denied cannot look upon a sight like this without feeling the void in
+her own heart where a mother's affection should have nestled.
+Cynthia sat perfectly still, without rocking, and watched kind Mrs.
+Hopkins at her quasi parental task.  A tear stole down her rigid face
+as she saw the rounded limbs of the children bared in their white
+beauty, and their little heads laid on the pillow.  They were
+sleeping quietly when Mrs. Hopkins left the room for a moment on some
+errand of her own.  Cynthia rose softly from her chair, stole swiftly
+to the bedside, and printed a long, burning kiss on each of their
+foreheads.
+
+When Mrs. Hopkins came back, she found the maiden lady sitting in her
+place just as she left her, but rocking in her chair and sobbing as
+one in sudden pangs of grief.
+
+"It is a great trouble, Miss Cynthy," she said,--"a great trouble to
+have such a child as Myrtle to think of and to care for.  If she was
+like our Susan Posey, now!--but we must do the best we can; and if
+Mr. Gridley once sets himself to it, you may depend upon it he 'll
+make it all come right.  I wouldn't take on about it if I was you.
+You let me speak to our Mr. Gridley.  We all have our troubles.  It
+is n't everybody that can ride to heaven in a C-spring shay, as my
+poor husband used to say; and life 's a road that 's got a good many
+thank-you-ma'ams to go bumpin' over, says he."
+
+Miss Badlam acquiesced in the philosophical reflections of the late
+Mr. Ammi Hopkins, and left it to his widow to carry out her own
+suggestion in reference to consulting Master Gridley.  The good woman
+took the first opportunity she had to introduce the matter, a little
+diffusely, as is often the way of widows who keep boarders.
+
+"There's something going on I don't like, Mr. Gridley.  They tell me
+that Minister Stoker is following round after Myrtle Hazard, talking
+religion at her jest about the same way he'd have liked to with our
+Susan, I calculate.  If he wants to talk religion to me or Silence
+Withers,--well, no, I don't feel sure about Silence,--she ain't as
+young as she used to be, but then ag'in she ain't so fur gone as
+some, and she's got money,--but if he wants to talk religion with me,
+he may come and welcome.  But as for Myrtle Hazard, she's been sick,
+and it's left her a little flighty by what they say, and to have a
+minister round her all the time ravin' about the next world as if he
+had a latch-key to the front door of it, is no way to make her come
+to herself again.  I 've seen more than one young girl sent off to
+the asylum by that sort of work, when, if I'd only had 'em, I'd have
+made 'em sweep the stairs, and mix the puddin's, and tend the babies,
+and milk the cow, and keep 'em too busy all day to be thinkin' about
+themselves, and have 'em dress up nice evenin's and see some young
+folks and have a good time, and go to meetin' Sundays, and then have
+done with the minister, unless it was old Father Pemberton.  He knows
+forty times as much about heaven as that Stoker man does, or ever 's
+like to,--why don't they run after him, I should like to know?
+Ministers are men, come now; and I don't want to say anything against
+women, Mr. Gridley, but women are women, that's the fact of it, and
+half of 'em are hystericky when they're young; and I've heard old Dr.
+Hurlbut say many a time that he had to lay in an extra stock of
+valerian and assafaetida whenever there was a young minister round,--
+for there's plenty of religious ravin', says he, that's nothin' but
+hysterics."
+
+[Mr. Fronde thinks that was the trouble with Bloody Queen Mary, but
+the old physician did not get the idea from him.]
+
+"Well, and what do you propose to do about the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker and his young proselyte, Miss Myrtle Hazard?" said Mr.
+Gridley, when Mrs. Hopkins at last gave him a chance to speak.
+
+"Mr. Gridley,"--Mrs. Hopkins looked full upon him as she spoke,--"
+people used to say that you was a good man and a great man and one of
+the learnedest men alive, but that you didn't know much nor care for
+much except books.  I know you used to live pretty much to yourself
+when you first came to board in this house.  But you've been very
+good to my son; ...and if Gifted lives till you ...till you are in
+...your grave, ...he will write a poem--I know he will--that will
+tell your goodness to babes unborn."
+
+[Here Master Gridley groaned, and repeated to himself silently,
+
+    "Scindentur vestes gemmae frangentur et aurum,
+     Carmina quam tribuent fama perennis erit."
+
+All this inwardly, and without interrupting the worthy woman's talk.]
+
+"And if ever Gifted makes a book,--don't say anything about it, Mr.
+Gridley, for goodness' sake, for he wouldn't have anybody know it,
+only I can't help thinking that some time or other he will print a
+book,--and if he does, I know whose name he'll put at the head of
+it,--'Dedicated to B. G., with the gratitude and respect--' There,
+now, I had n't any business to say a word about it, and it's only
+jest in case he does, you know.  I'm sure you deserve it all.  You've
+helped him with the best of advice.  And you've been kind to me when
+I was in trouble.  And you've been like a grandfather" [Master
+Gridley winced,--why could n't the woman have said father?--that
+grand struck his ear like a spade going into the gravel] "to those
+babes, poor little souls! left on my door-step like a couple of
+breakfast rolls,--only you know it's the baker left then.  I believe
+in you, Mr. Gridley, as I believe in my Maker and in Father
+Pemberton,--but, poor man, he's old, and you won't be old these
+twenty years yet."
+
+[Master Gridley shook his head as if to say that was n't so, but felt
+comforted and refreshed.]
+
+"You've got to help Myrtle Hazard again.  You brought her home when
+she come so nigh drowning.  You got the old doctor to go and see her
+when she come so nigh being bewitched with the magnetism and
+nonsense, whatever they call it, and the young doctor was so nigh
+bein' crazy, too.  I know, for Nurse Byloe told me all about it.  And
+now Myrtle's gettin' run away with by that pesky Minister Stoker.
+Cynthy Badlam was here yesterday crying and sobbing as if her heart
+would break about it.  For my part, I did n't think Cynthy cared so
+much for the girl as all that, but I saw her takin' on dreadfully
+with my own eyes.  That man's like a hen-hawk among the chickens,
+first he picks up one, and then he picks up another.  I should like
+to know if nobody but young folks has souls to be saved, and
+specially young women!"
+
+"Tell me all you know about Myrtle Hazard and Joseph Bellamy Stoker,"
+said Master Gridley.
+
+Thereupon that good lady related all that Miss Badlam had imparted to
+her, of which the reader knows the worst, being the interview of
+which the keen spinster had been a witness, having followed them for
+the express purpose of knowing, in her own phrase, what the minister
+was up to.
+
+It is not to be supposed that Myrtle had forgotten the discreet
+kindness of Master Gridley in bringing her back and making the best
+of her adventure.  He, on his part, had acquired a kind of right to
+consider himself her adviser, and had begun to take a pleasure in the
+thought that he, the worn-out and useless old pedant, as he had been
+in the way of considering himself, might perhaps do something even
+more important than his previous achievement to save this young girl
+from the dangers that surrounded her.  He loved his classics and his
+old books; he took an interest, too, in the newspapers and
+periodicals that brought the fermenting thought and the electric life
+of the great world into his lonely study; but these things just about
+him were getting strong hold on him, and most of all the fortunes of
+this beautiful young woman.  How strange!  For a whole generation he
+had lived in no nearer relation to his fellow-creatures than that of
+a half-fossilized teacher; and all at once he found himself face to
+face with the very most intense form of life, the counsellor of
+threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled loveliness.  What
+business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of which he had
+said in "Thoughts on the Universe,"--"Every man leads or is led by
+something that goes on four legs."
+
+Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes
+all human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of
+dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he
+were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an
+extra gallon of air at every breath, Then--you who have written a
+book that holds your heart-leaves between its pages will understand
+the movement--he took down "Thoughts on the Universe" for a
+refreshing draught from his own wellspring.  He opened as chance
+ordered it, and his eyes fell on the following passage:
+
+"The true American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch,
+the Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.'
+A homely utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and
+hierarchies.  These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that
+some things can NOT be done as well as others."
+
+"There, now!" he said, talking to himself in his usual way, "is n't
+that good?  It always seems to me that I find something to the point
+when I open that book.  'Some things can be done as well as others,'
+can they?  Suppose I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle
+Hazard?  I think I may say I am old and incombustible enough to be
+trusted.  She does not seem to be a safe neighbor to very inflammable
+bodies?"
+
+Myrtle was sitting in the room long known as the Study, or the
+Library, when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her.
+Miss Cynthia, who received him, led him to this apartment and left
+him alone with Myrtle.  She welcomed him very cordially, but colored
+as she did so,--his visit was a surprise.  She was at work on a piece
+of embroidery.  Her first instinctive movement was to thrust it out
+of sight with the thought of concealment; but she checked this, and
+before the blush of detection had reached her cheek, the blush of
+ingenuous shame for her weakness had caught and passed it, and was in
+full possession.  She sat with her worsted pattern held bravely in
+sight, and her cheek as bright as its liveliest crimson.
+
+"Miss Cynthia has let me in upon you," he said, "or I should not have
+ventured to disturb you in this way.  A work of art, is it, Miss
+Myrtle Hazard?"
+
+"Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridley,--for my pastor."
+
+"Oh!  oh!  That is well.  A good old man.  I have a great regard for
+the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.  I wish all ministers were as good and
+simple and pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton.  And I wish
+all the young people thought as much about their elders as you do,
+Miss Myrtle Hazard.  We that are old love little acts of kindness.
+You gave me more pleasure than you knew of, my dear, when you worked
+that handsome cushion for me.  The old minister will be greatly
+pleased,--poor old man!"
+
+"But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father
+Pemberton.  They are for--Mr. Stoker."
+
+"The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker!  He is not an old man, the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker.  He may perhaps be a widower before a great
+while.--Does he know that you are working those slippers for him?"
+
+"Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley.  I meant them for a surprise to him.  He
+has been so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I
+thought anybody did.  He is so different from what I thought; he
+makes religion so perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would
+agree with him, if they could only hear him talk."
+
+"Greatly interested in the souls of his people, is n't he?"
+
+"Too much, almost, I am afraid.  He says he has been too hard in his
+sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his
+hearers enough."
+
+"Don't you think he worries himself about the souls of young women
+rather more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?"
+
+There was something in the tone of this question that helped its
+slightly sarcastic expression.  Myrtle's jealousy for her minister's
+sincerity was roused.
+
+"How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley?  I am sure I wish you or anybody
+could have heard him talk as I have.  There is no age in souls, he
+says; and I am sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or
+young."
+
+"No age in souls,--no age in souls.  Souls of forty as young as souls
+of fifteen; that 's it."  Master Gridley did not say this loud.  But
+he did speak as follows: "I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev.
+Joseph Bellamy Stoker's love of being useful to people of all ages.
+You have had comfort in his companionship, and there are others who
+might be very glad to profit by it.  I know a very excellent person
+who has had trials, and is greatly interested in religious
+conversation.  Do you think he would be willing to let this friend of
+mine share in the privileges of spiritual intercourse which you
+enjoy?"
+
+There was but one answer possible.  Of course he would.
+
+"I hope it is so, my dear young lady.  But listen to me one moment.
+I love you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your own--
+grandfather."  (There was moral heroism in that word.) "I love you as
+if you were of my own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer
+me, I mean to keep watch against all dangers that threaten you in
+mind, body, or estate.  You may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt
+me; but until you say you distrust me, when any trouble comes near
+you, you will find me there.  Now, my dear child, you ought to know
+that the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker has the reputation of being too
+fond of prosecuting religious inquiries with young and handsome
+women."
+
+Myrtle's eyes fell,--a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself.
+
+"He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey,--a
+very pretty girl, as you know."
+
+Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.
+
+"I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about
+with him.  He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death,
+and cold-blooded enough to freeze any mother's blood if nature did
+not tell her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first
+good-looking young woman he can get to listen to him."
+
+Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.
+
+"Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man
+alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?"
+
+"Of course I would," said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts,
+her shame, her pride, were all excited.  "Who is your friend, Mr.
+Gridley?"
+
+"An excellent woman,--Mrs. Hopkins.  You know her, Gifted Hopkins's
+mother, with whom I am residing.  Shall the minister be given to
+understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?"
+
+Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations.  "As
+you say," she answered.  "Is there nobody that I can trust, or is
+everybody hunting me like a bird?"  She hid her face in her hands.
+
+"You can trust me, my dear," said Byles Gridley.  "Take your needle,
+my child, and work at your pattern,--it will come out a rose by and
+by.  Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken
+patiently, and the pattern will come out all right like the
+embroidery.  You can trust me.  Good-by, my dear."
+
+"Let her finish the slippers," the old man said to himself as he
+trudged home, "and make 'em big enough for Father Pemberton.  He
+shall have his feet in 'em yet, or my name is n't Byles Gridley!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+ARRIVAL OF REINFORCEMENTS.
+
+Myrtle Hazard waited until the steps of Master Byles Gridley had
+ceased to be heard, as he walked in his emphatic way through the long
+entry of the old mansion.  Then she went to her little chamber and
+sat down in a sort of revery.  She could not doubt his sincerity, and
+there was something in her own consciousness which responded to the
+suspicions he had expressed with regard to the questionable impulses
+of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker.
+
+It is not in the words that others say to us, but in those other
+words which these make us say to ourselves, that we find our gravest
+lessons and our sharpest rebukes.  The hint another gives us finds
+whole trains of thought which have been getting themselves ready to
+be shaped in inwardly articulated words, and only awaited the touch
+of a burning syllable, as the mottoes of a pyrotechnist only wait for
+a spark to become letters of fire.
+
+The artist who takes your photograph must carry you with him into his
+"developing" room, and he will give you a more exact illustration of
+the truth just mentioned.  There is nothing to be seen on the glass
+just taken from the camera.  But there is a potential, though
+invisible, picture hid in the creamy film which covers it.  Watch him
+as he pours a wash over it, and you will see that miracle wrought
+which is at once a surprise and a charm,--the sudden appearance of
+your own features where a moment before was a blank without a vestige
+of intelligence or beauty.
+
+In some such way the grave warnings of Master Byles Gridley had
+called up a fully shaped, but hitherto unworded, train of thought in
+the consciousness of Myrtle Hazard.  It was not merely their
+significance, it was mainly because they were spoken at the fitting
+time.  If they had been uttered a few weeks earlier, when Myrtle was
+taking the first stitch on the embroidered slippers, they would have
+been as useless as the artist's developing solution on a plate which
+had never been exposed in the camera.  But she had been of late in
+training for her lesson in ways that neither she nor anybody else
+dreamed of.  The reader who has shrugged his (or her) shoulders over
+the last illustration will perhaps hear this one which follows more
+cheerfully.  The physician in the Arabian Nights made his patient
+play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which contained drugs
+of marvellous efficacy.  Whether it was the drugs that made the sick
+man get well, or the exercise, is not of so much consequence as the
+fact that he did at any rate get well.
+
+These walks which Myrtle had taken with her reverend counsellor had
+given her a new taste for the open air, which was what she needed
+just now more than confessions of faith or spiritual paroxysms.  And
+so it happened that, while he had been stimulating all those
+imaginative and emotional elements of her nature which responded to
+the keys he loved to play upon, the restoring influences of the sweet
+autumnal air, the mellow sunshine, the soothing aspects of the woods
+and fields and sky, had been quietly doing their work.  The color was
+fast returning to her cheek, and the discords of her feelings and her
+thoughts gradually resolving themselves into the harmonious and
+cheerful rhythms of bodily and mental health.  It needed but the
+timely word from the fitting lips to change the whole programme of
+her daily mode of being.  The word had been spoken.  She saw its
+truth; but how hard it is to tear away a cherished illusion, to cast
+out an unworthy intimate!  How hard for any!--but for a girl so
+young, and who had as yet found so little to love and trust, how
+cruelly hard!
+
+She sat, still and stony, like an Egyptian statue.  Her eyes were
+fixed on a vacant chair opposite the one on which she was sitting.
+It was a very singular and fantastic old chair, said to have been
+brought over by the first emigrant of her race.  The legs and arms
+were curiously turned in spirals, the suggestions of which were half
+pleasing and half repulsive.  Instead of the claw-feet common in
+furniture of a later date, each of its legs rested on a misshapen
+reptile, which it seemed to flatten by its weight, as if it were
+squeezing the breath out of the ugly creature.  Over this chair hung
+the portrait of her beautiful ancestress, her neck and arms, the
+specialty of her beauty, bare, except for a bracelet on the left
+wrist, and her shapely figure set off by the ample folds of a rich
+crimson brocade.  Over Myrtle's bed hung that other portrait, which
+was to her almost as the pictures of the Mater Dolorosa to trustful
+souls of the Roman faith.  She had longed for these pictures while
+she was in her strange hysteric condition, and they had been hung up
+in her chamber.
+
+The night was far gone, as she knew by the declining of the
+constellations which she bad seen shining brightly almost overhead in
+the early evening, when she awoke, and found herself still sitting in
+the very attitude in which she was sitting hours before.  Her lamp
+had burned out, and the starlight but dimly illuminated her chamber.
+She started to find herself sitting there, chilled and stiffened by
+long remaining in one posture; and as her consciousness returned, a
+great fear seized her, and she sprang for a match.  It broke with the
+quick movement she made to kindle it, and she snatched another as if
+a fiend were after her.  It flashed and went out.  Oh the terror, the
+terror!  The darkness seemed alive with fearful presences.  The lurid
+glare of her own eyeballs flashed backwards into her brain.  She
+tried one more match; it kindled as it should, and she lighted
+another lamp.  Her first impulse was to assure herself that nothing
+was changed in the familiar objects around her.  She held the lamp up
+to the picture of Judith Pride.  The beauty looked at her, it seemed
+as if with a kind of lofty recognition in her eyes; but there she
+was, as always.  She turned the light upon the pale face of the
+martyr-portrait.  It looked troubled and faded, as it seemed to
+Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her
+childhood.  Then she threw the light on the old chair, and,
+shuddering, caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms
+and legs, and the flattened reptiles on which it stood.
+
+In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting
+there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange
+visitors.  Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed
+the breath of life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been
+what is called, in our poor language, dead.  One came in all the
+glory of her ripened beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by
+nature in that splendid animal equipment which in its day had
+captivated the eyes of all the lusty lovers of complete muliebrity.
+The other,--how delicate, how translucent, how aerial she seemed!
+yet real and true to the lineaments of her whom the young girl looked
+upon as her hereditary protector.
+
+The beautiful woman turned, and, with a face full of loathing and
+scorn, pointed to one of the reptiles beneath the feet of the chair.
+And while Myrtle's eyes followed hers, the flattened and half-crushed
+creature seemed to swell and spread like his relative in the old
+fable, like the black dog in Faust, until he became of tenfold size,
+and at last of colossal proportions.  And, fearful to relate, the
+batrachian features humanized themselves as the monster grew, and,
+shaping themselves more and more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle
+saw in them a hideous likeness of--No!  no! it was too horrible, was
+that the face which had been so close to hers but yesterday? were
+those the lips, the breath from which had stirred her growing curls
+as he leaned over her while they read together some passionate stanza
+from a hymn that was as much like a love-song as it dared to be in
+godly company?  A shadow of disgust--the natural repugnance of
+loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and she shrieked, as
+she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other figure.  She
+felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin hand seemed
+to take hers.  The warm life went out of her, and she was to herself
+as a dimly conscious shadow that glided with passive acquiescence
+wherever it was led.  Presently she found herself in a half-lighted
+apartment, where there were books on the shelves around, and a desk
+with loose manuscripts lying on it, and a little mirror with a worn
+bit of carpet before it.  And while she looked, a great serpent
+writhed in through the half-open door, and made the circuit of the
+room, laying one huge ring all round it, and then, going round again,
+laid another ring over the first, and so on until he was wound all
+round the room like the spiral of a mighty cable, leaving a hollow in
+the centre; and then the serpent seemed to arch his neck in the air,
+and bring his head close down to Myrtle's face; and the features were
+not those of a serpent, but of a man, and it hissed out the words she
+had read that very day in a little note which said, "Come to my study
+to-morrow, and we will read hymns together."
+
+Again she was back in her little chamber, she did not know how, and
+the two women were looking into her eyes with strange meaning in
+their own.  Something in them seemed to plead with her to yield to
+their influence, and her choice wavered which of them to follow, for
+each would have led her her own way,--whither she knew not.  It was
+the strife of her "Vision," only in another form,--the contest of two
+lives her blood inherited for the mastery of her soul.  The might of
+beauty conquered.  Myrtle resigned herself to the guidance of the
+lovely phantom, which seemed so much fuller of the unextinguished
+fire of life, and so like herself as she would grow to be when noon
+should have ripened her into maturity.
+
+Doors opened softly before them; they climbed stairs, and threaded
+corridors, and penetrated crypts, strange yet familiar to her eyes,
+which seemed to her as if they could see, as it were, in darkness.
+Then came a confused sense of eager search for something that she
+knew was hidden, whether in the cleft of a rock, or under the boards
+of a floor, or in some hiding-place among the skeleton rafters, or in
+a forgotten drawer, or in a heap of rubbish, she could not tell; but
+somewhere there was something which she was to find, and which, once
+found, was to be her talisman.  She was in the midst of this eager
+search when she awoke.
+
+The impression was left so strongly on her mind that with all her
+fears she could not resist the desire to make an effort to find what
+meaning there was in this frightfully real dream.  Her courage came
+back as her senses assured her that all around her was natural, as
+when she left it.  She determined to follow the lead of the strange
+hint her nightmare had given her.
+
+In one of the upper chambers of the old mansion there stood a tall,
+upright desk of the ancient pattern, with folding doors above and
+large drawers below.  "That desk is yours, Myrtle," her uncle Malachi
+had once said to her; "and there is a trick or two about it that it
+will pay you to study."  Many a time Myrtle had puzzled herself about
+the mystery of the old desk.  All the little drawers, of which there
+were a considerable number, she had pulled out, and every crevice, as
+she thought, she had carefully examined.  She determined to make one
+more trial.  It was the dead of the night, and this was a fearful old
+place to be wandering about; but she was possessed with an urgent
+feeling which would not let her wait until daylight.
+
+She stole like a ghost from her chamber.  She glided along the narrow
+entries as she had seemed to move in her dream.  She opened the
+folding doors of the great upright desk.  She had always before
+examined it by daylight, and though she had so often pulled all the
+little drawers out, she had never thoroughly explored the recesses
+which received them.  But in her new-born passion of search, she held
+her light so as to illuminate all these deeper spaces.  At once she
+thought she saw the marks of pressure with a finger.  She pressed her
+own finger on this place, and, as it yielded with a slight click, a
+small mahogany pilaster sprang forward, revealing its well-kept
+secret that it was the mask of a tall, deep, very narrow drawer.
+There was something heavy in it, and, as Myrtle turned it over, a
+golden bracelet fell into her hand.  She recognized it at once as
+that which had been long ago the ornament of the fair woman whose
+portrait hung in her chamber.  She clasped it upon her wrist, and
+from that moment she felt as if she were the captive of the lovely
+phantom who had been with her in her dream.
+
+"The old man walked last night, God save us!" said Kitty Fagan to
+Biddy Finnegan, the day after Myrtle's nightmare and her curious
+discovery.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+VICTORY.
+
+It seems probable enough that Myrtle's whole spiritual adventure was
+an unconscious dramatization of a few simple facts which her
+imagination tangled together into a kind of vital coherence.  The
+philosopher who goes to the bottom of things will remark that all the
+elements of her fantastic melodrama had been furnished her while
+waking.  Master Byles Gridley's penetrating and stinging caution was
+the text, and the grotesque carvings and the portraits furnished the
+"properties" with which her own mind had wrought up this scenic show.
+
+The philosopher who goes to the bottom of things might not find it so
+easy to account for the change which came over Myrtle Hazard from the
+hour when she clasped the bracelet of Judith Pride upon her wrist.
+She felt a sudden loathing of the man whom she had idealized as a
+saint.  A young girl's caprice?  Possibly.  A return of the natural
+instincts of girlhood with returning health?  Perhaps so.  An
+impression produced by her dream?  An effect of an influx from
+another sphere of being?  The working of Master Byles Gridley's
+emphatic warning?  The magic of her new talisman?
+
+We may safely leave these questions for the present.  As we have to
+tell, not what Myrtle Hazard ought to have done, and why she should
+have done it, but what she did do, our task is a simpler one than it
+would be to lay bare all the springs of her action.  Until this
+period, she had hardly thought of herself as a born beauty.  The
+flatteries she had received from time to time were like the chips and
+splinters under the green wood, when the chill women pretended to
+make a fire in the best parlor at The Poplars, which had a way of
+burning themselves out, hardly warming, much less kindling, the fore-
+stick and the back-log.
+
+Myrtle had a tinge of what some call superstition, and she began to
+look upon her strange acquisition as a kind of amulet.  Its
+suggestions betrayed themselves in one of her first movements.
+Nothing could be soberer than the cut of the dresses which the
+propriety of the severe household had established as the rule of her
+costume.  But the girl was no sooner out of bed than a passion came
+over her to see herself in that less jealous arrangement of drapery
+which the Beauty of the last century had insisted on as presenting
+her most fittingly to the artist.  She rolled up the sleeves of her
+dress, she turned down its prim collar and neck, and glanced from her
+glass to the portrait, from the portrait back to the glass.  Myrtle
+was not blind nor dull, though young, and in many things untaught.
+She did not say in so many words, "I too am a beauty," but she could
+mot help seeing that she had many of the attractions of feature and
+form which had made the original of the picture before her famous.
+The same stately carriage of the head, the same full-rounded neck,
+the same more than hinted outlines of figure, the same finely shaped
+arms and hands, and something very like the same features startled
+her by their identity in the permanent image of the canvas and the
+fleeting one of tile mirror.
+
+The world was hers then,--for she had not read romances and love-
+letters without finding that beauty governs it in all times and
+places.  Who was this middle-aged minister that had been hanging
+round her and talking to her about heaven, when there was not a
+single joy of earth that she had as yet tasted?  A man that had been
+saying all his fine things to Miss Susan Posey, too, had he, before
+he had bestowed his attentions on her?  And to a dozen other girls,
+too, nobody knows who!
+
+The revulsion was a very sadden one.  Such changes of feeling are apt
+to be sudden in young people whose nerves have been tampered with,
+and Myrtle was not of a temperament or an age to act with much
+deliberation where a pique came in to the aid of a resolve.  Master
+Gridley guessed sagaciously what would be the effect of his
+revelation, when he told her of the particular attentions the
+minister had paid to pretty Susan Posey and various other young
+women.
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker had parted his hair wonderfully that morning, and
+made himself as captivating as his professional costume allowed.  He
+had drawn down the shades of his windows so as to let in that subdued
+light which is merciful to crow's-feet and similar embellishments,
+and wheeled up his sofa so that two could sit at the table and read
+from the same book.
+
+At eleven o'clock he was pacing the room with a certain feverish
+impatience, casting a glance now and then at the mirror as he passed
+it.  At last the bell rang, and he himself went to answer it, his
+heart throbbing with expectation of meeting his lovely visitor.
+
+Myrtle Hazard appeared by an envoy extraordinary, the bearer of
+sealed despatches.  Mistress Kitty Fagan was the young lady's
+substitute, and she delivered into the hand of the astonished
+clergyman the following missive:
+
+TO THE REV. MR. STOKER.
+
+Reverend Sir,--I shall not come to your study this day.  I do not
+feel that I have any more need of religious counsel at this time, and
+I am told by a friend that there are others who will be glad to hear
+you talk on this subject.  I hear that Mrs. Hopkins is interested in
+religious subjects, and would have been glad to see you in my
+company.  As I cannot go with her, perhaps Miss Susan Posey will take
+my place.  I thank you for all the good things you have said to me,
+and that you have given me so much of your company.  I hope we shall
+sing hymns together in heaven some time, if we are good enough, but I
+want to wait for that awhile, for I do not feel quite ready.  I am
+not going to see you any more alone, reverend sir.  I think this is
+best, and I have good advice.  I want to see more of young people of
+my own age, and I have a friend, Mr. Gridley, who I think is older
+than you are, that takes an interest in me; and as you have many
+others that you must be interested in, he can take the place of a
+father better than you can do.  I return to you the hymn-book, I read
+one of those you marked, and do not care to read any more.
+
+Respectfully yours,
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD.
+
+
+The Rev. Mr. Stoker uttered a cry of rage as he finished this
+awkwardly written, but tolerably intelligible letter.  What could he
+do about it?  It would hardly do to stab Myrtle Hazard, and shoot
+Byles Gridley, and strangle Mrs. Hopkins, every one of which
+homicides he felt at the moment that he could have committed.  And
+here he was in a frantic paroxysm, and the next day was Sunday, and
+his morning's discourse was unwritten.  His savage mediaeval theology
+came to his relief, and he clutched out of a heap of yellow
+manuscripts his well-worn "convulsion-fit" sermon.  He preached it
+the next day as if it did his heart good, but Myrtle Hazard did not
+hear it, for she had gone to St. Bartholomew's with Olive Eveleth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+SAINT AND SINNER
+
+It happened a little after this time that the minister's invalid wife
+improved--somewhat unexpectedly in health, and, as Bathsheba was
+beginning to suffer from imprisonment in her sick-chamber, the
+physician advised very strongly that she should vary the monotony of
+her life by going out of the house daily for fresh air and cheerful
+companionship.  She was therefore frequently at the house of Olive
+Eveleth; and as Myrtle wanted to see young people, and had her own
+way now as never before, the three girls often met at the parsonage.
+Thus they became more and more intimate, and grew more and more into
+each other's affections.
+
+These girls presented three types of spiritual character which are to
+be found in all our towns and villages.  Olive had been carefully
+trained, and at the proper age confirmed.  Bathsheba had been prayed
+for, and in due time startled and converted.  Myrtle was a simple
+daughter of Eve, with many impulses like those of the other two
+girls, and some that required more watching.  She was not so safe,
+perhaps, as either of the other girls, for this world or the next;
+but she was on some accounts more interesting, as being a more
+genuine representative of that inexperienced and too easily deluded,
+yet always cherished, mother of our race, whom we must after all
+accept as embodying the creative idea of woman, and who might have
+been alive and happy now (though at a great age) but for a single
+fatal error.
+
+The Rev. Ambrose Eveleth, Rector of Saint Bartholomew's, Olive's
+father, was one of a class numerous in the Anglican Church, a
+cultivated man, with pure tastes, with simple habits, a good reader,
+a neat writer, a safe thinker, with a snug and well-fenced mental
+pasturage, which his sermons kept cropped moderately close without
+any exhausting demand upon the soil.  Olive had grown insensibly into
+her religious maturity, as into her bodily and intellectual
+developments, which one might suppose was the natural order of things
+in a well-regulated Christian--household, where the children are
+brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
+
+Bathsheba had been worried over and perplexed and depressed with
+vague apprehensions about her condition, conveyed in mysterious
+phrases and graveyard expressions of countenance, until about the age
+of fourteen years, when she had one of those emotional paroxysms very
+commonly considered in some Protestant sects as essential to the
+formation of religious character.  It began with a shivering sense of
+enormous guilt, inherited and practised from her earliest infancy.
+Just as every breath she ever drew had been malignantly poisoning the
+air with carbonic acid, so her every thought and feeling had been
+tainting the universe with sin.  This spiritual chill or rigor had in
+due order been followed by the fever-flush of hope, and that in its
+turn had ushered in the last stage, the free opening of all the
+spiritual pores in the peaceful relaxation of self-surrender.
+
+Good Christians are made by many very different processes.  Bathsheba
+had taken her religion after the fashion of her sect; but it was
+genuine, in spite of the cavils of the formalists, who could not
+understand that the spirit which kept her at her mother's bedside was
+the same as that which poured the tears of Mary of Magdala on the
+feet of her Lord, and led her forth at early dawn with the other Mary
+to visit his sepulchre.
+
+Myrtle was a child of nature, and of course, according to the out-
+worn formulae which still shame the distorted religion of humanity,
+hateful to the Father in Heaven who made her.  She had grown up in
+antagonism with all that surrounded her.  She had been talked to
+about her corrupt nature and her sinful heart, until the words had
+become an offence and an insult.  Bathsheba knew her father's
+fondness for young company too well to suppose that his intercourse
+with Myrtle had gone beyond the sentimental and poetical stage, and
+was not displeased when she found that there was some breach between
+them.  Myrtle herself did not profess to have passed through the
+technical stages of the customary spiritual paroxysm.  Still, the
+gentle daughter of the terrible preacher loved her and judged her
+kindly.  She was modest enough to think that perhaps the natural
+state of some girls might be at least as good as her own after the
+spiritual change of which she had been the subject.  A manifest
+heresy, but not new, nor unamiable, nor inexplicable.
+
+The excellent Bishop Joseph Hall, a painful preacher and solid divine
+of Puritan tendencies, declares that he prefers good-nature before
+grace in the election of a wife; because, saith he, "it will be a
+hard Task, where the Nature is peevish and froward, for Grace to make
+an entire Conquest whilst Life lasteth."  An opinion apparently
+entertained by many modern ecclesiastics, and one which may be
+considered very encouraging to those young ladies of the politer
+circles who have a fancy for marrying bishops and other fashionable
+clergymen.  Not of course that "grace" is so rare a gift among the
+young ladies of the upper social sphere; but they are in the habit of
+using the word with a somewhat different meaning from that which the
+good Bishop attached to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+VILLAGE POET.
+
+It was impossible for Myrtle to be frequently at Olive's without
+often meeting Olive's brother, and her reappearance with the bloom on
+her cheek was a signal which her other admirers were not likely to
+overlook as a hint to recommence their flattering demonstrations; and
+so it was that she found herself all at once the centre of attraction
+to three young men with whom we have made some acquaintance, namely,
+Cyprian Eveleth, Gifted Hopkins, and Murray Bradshaw.
+
+When the three girls were together at the house of Olive, it gave
+Cyprian a chance to see something of Myrtle in the most natural way.
+Indeed, they all became used to meeting him in a brotherly sort of
+relation; only, as he was not the brother of two of them, it gave him
+the inside track, as the sporting men say, with reference to any
+rivals for the good-will of either of these.  Of course neither
+Bathsheba nor Myrtle thought of him in any other light than as
+Olive's brother, and would have been surprised with the manifestation
+on his part of any other feeling, if it existed.  So he became very
+nearly as intimate with them as Olive was, and hardly thought of his
+intimacy as anything more than friendship, until one day Myrtle sang
+some hymns so sweetly that Cyprian dreamed about her that night; and
+what young person does not know that the woman or the man once
+idealized and glorified in the exalted state of the imagination
+belonging to sleep becomes dangerous to the sensibilities in the
+waking hours that follow?  Yet something drew Cyprian to the gentler
+and more subdued nature of Bathsheba, so that he often thought, like
+a gayer personage than himself, whose divided affections are famous
+in song, that he could have been blessed to share her faithful heart,
+if Myrtle had not bewitched him with her unconscious and innocent
+sorceries.  As for poor, modest Bathsheba, she thought nothing of
+herself, but was almost as much fascinated by Myrtle as if she had
+been one of the sex she was born to make in love with her.
+
+The first rival Cyprian was to encounter in his admiration of Myrtle
+Hazard was Mr. Gifted Hopkins.  This young gentleman had the enormous
+advantage of that all-subduing accomplishment, the poetical
+endowment.  No woman, it is pretty generally understood, can resist
+the youth or man who addresses her in verse.  The thought that she is
+the object of a poet's love is one which fills a woman's ambition
+more completely than all that wealth or office or social eminence can
+offer.  Do the young millionnaires and the members of the General
+Court get letters from unknown ladies, every day, asking for their
+autographs and photographs?  Well, then!
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins, being a poet, felt that it was so, to the very
+depth of his soul.  Could he not confer that immortality so dear to
+the human heart?  Not quite yet, perhaps,--though the "Banner and
+Oracle" gave him already "an elevated niche in the Temple of Fame,"
+to quote its own words,--but in that glorious summer of his genius,
+of which these spring blossoms were the promise.  It was a most
+formidable battery, then, which Cyprian's first rival opened upon the
+fortress of Myrtle's affections.
+
+His second rival, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, had made a half-
+playful bet with his fair relative, Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, that he
+would bag a girl within twelve months of date who should unite three
+desirable qualities, specified in the bet, in a higher degree than
+any one of the five who were on the matrimonial programme which she
+had laid out for him,--and Myrtle was the girl with whom he meant to
+win the bet.  When a young fellow like him, cool and clever, makes up
+his mind to bring down his bird, it is no joke, but a very serious
+and a tolerably certain piece of business.  Not being made a fool of
+by any boyish nonsense,--passion and all that,--he has a great
+advantage.  Many a woman rejects a man because he is in love with
+her, and accepts another because he is not.  The first is thinking
+too much of himself and his emotions,--the other makes a study of her
+and her friends, and learns what ropes to pull.  But then it must be
+remembered that Murray Bradshaw had a poet for his rival, to say
+nothing of the brother of a bosom friend.
+
+The qualities of a young poet are so exceptional, and such
+interesting objects of study, that a narrative like this can well
+afford to linger awhile in the delineation of this most envied of all
+the forms of genius.  And by contrasting the powers and limitations
+of two such young persons as Gifted Hopkins and Cyprian Eveleth, we
+may better appreciate the nature of that divine inspiration which
+gives to poetry the superiority it claims over every other form of
+human expression.
+
+Gifted Hopkins had shown an ear for rhythm, and for the simpler forms
+of music, from his earliest childhood.  He began beating with his
+heels the accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender
+age,--a habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself,
+as, though it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that
+which is beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and
+emphasize by vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the
+tune of Auld Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive when a
+large number of boots join in the performance.  He showed a
+remarkable talent for playing on one of the less complex musical
+instruments, too limited in compass to satisfy exacting ears, but
+affording excellent discipline to those who wish to write in the
+simpler metrical forms,--the same which summons the hero from his
+repose and stirs his blood in battle.
+
+By the time he was twelve years old he was struck with the pleasing
+resemblance of certain vocal sounds which, without being the same,
+yet had a curious relation which made them agree marvellously well in
+couples; as eyes with skies; as heart with art, also with part and
+smart; and so of numerous others, twenty or thirty pairs, perhaps,
+which number he considerably increased as he grew older, until he may
+have had fifty or more such pairs at his command.
+
+The union of so extensive a catalogue of words which matched each
+other, and of an ear so nice that it could tell if there were nine or
+eleven syllables in an heroic line, instead of the legitimate ten,
+constituted a rare combination of talents in the opinion of those
+upon whose judgment he relied.  He was naturally led to try his
+powers in the expression of some just thought or natural sentiment in
+the shape of verse, that wonderful medium of imparting thought and
+feeling to his fellow-creatures which a bountiful Providence had made
+his rare and inestimable endowment.
+
+It was at about this period of his life, that is to say, when he was
+of the age of thirteen, or we may perhaps say fourteen years, for we
+do not wish to overstate his precocity, that he experienced a
+sensation so entirely novel, that, to the best of his belief, it was
+such as no other young person had ever known, at least in anything
+like the same degree.  This extraordinary emotion was brought on by
+the sight of Myrtle Hazard, with whom he had never before had any
+near relations, as they had been at different schools, and Myrtle was
+too reserved to be very generally known among the young people of his
+age.
+
+Then it was that he broke forth in his virgin effort, "Lines to
+M----e," which were published in the village paper, and were claimed
+by all possible girls but the right one; namely, by two Mary Annes,
+one Minnie, one Mehitable, and one Marthie, as she saw fit to spell
+the name borrowed from her who was troubled about many things.
+
+The success of these lines, which were in that form of verse known to
+the hymn-books as "common metre," was such as to convince the youth
+that, whatever occupation he might be compelled to follow for a time
+to obtain a livelihood or to assist his worthy parent, his true
+destiny was the glorious career of a poet.  It was a most pleasing
+circumstance, that his mother, while she fully recognized the
+propriety of his being diligent in the prosaic line of business to
+which circumstances had called him, was yet as much convinced as he
+himself that he was destined to achieve literary fame.  She had read
+Watts and Select Hymns all through, she said, and she did n't see but
+what Gifted could make the verses come out jest as slick, and the
+sound of the rhymes jest as pooty, as Izik Watts or the Selectmen,
+whoever they was,--she was sure they couldn't be the selectmen of
+this town, wherever they belonged.  It is pleasant to say that the
+young man, though favored by nature with this rarest of talents, did
+not forget the humbler duties that Heaven, which dresses few singing-
+birds in the golden plumes of fortune, had laid upon him.  After
+having received a moderate amount of instruction at one of the less
+ambitious educational institutions of the town, supplemented, it is
+true, by the judicious and gratuitous hints of Master Gridley, the
+young poet, in obedience to a feeling which did him the highest
+credit, relinquished, at least for the time, the Groves of Academus,
+and offered his youth at the shrine of Plutus, that is, left off
+studying and took to business.  He became what they call a "clerk" in
+what they call a "store" up in the huckleberry districts, and kept
+such accounts as were required by the business of the establishment.
+His principal occupation was, however, to attend to the details of
+commerce as it was transacted over the counter.  This industry
+enabled him, to his great praise be it spoken, to assist his
+excellent parent, to clothe himself in a becoming manner, so that he
+made a really handsome figure on Sundays and was always of
+presentable aspect, likewise to purchase a book now and then, and to
+subscribe for that leading periodical which furnishes the best models
+to the youth of the country in the various modes of composition.
+
+Though Master Gridley was very kind to the young man, he was rather
+disposed to check the exuberance of his poetical aspirations.  The
+truth was, that the old classical scholar did not care a great deal
+for modern English poetry.  Give him an Ode of Horace, or a scrap
+from the Greek Anthology, and he would recite it with great inflation
+of spirits; but he did not think very much of "your Keatses, and your
+Tennysons, and the whole Hasheesh crazy lot," as he called the
+dreamily sensuous idealists who belong to the same century that
+brought in ether and chloroform.  He rather shook his head at Gifted
+Hopkins for indulging so largely in metrical composition.
+
+"Better stick to your ciphering, my young friend," he said to him,
+one day.  "Figures of speech are all very well, in their way; but if
+you undertake to deal much in them, you'll figure down your prospects
+into a mighty small sum.  There's some danger that it will take all
+the sense out of you, if you keep writing verses at this rate.  You
+young scribblers think any kind of nonsense will do for the public,
+if it only has a string of rhymes tacked to it.  Cut off the bobs of
+your kite, Gifted Hopkins, and see if it does n't pitch, and stagger,
+and come down head-foremost.  Don't write any stuff with rhyming
+tails to it that won't make a decent show for itself after you've
+chopped all the rhyming tails off.  That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins.
+Is there any book you would like to have out of my library?  Have you
+ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?"
+
+He had tried, the young man answered, on the recommendation of
+Cyprian Eveleth, but had found it rather hard reading.
+
+Master Gridley lifted his eyebrows very slightly, remembering that
+some had called Spenser the poet's poet.  "What a pity," he said to
+himself, "that this Gifted Hopkins has n't got the brains of that
+William Murray Bradshaw!  What's the reason, I wonder, that all the
+little earthen pots blow their covers off and froth over in rhymes at
+such a great rate, while the big iron pots keep their lids on, and do
+all their simmering inside?"
+
+That is the way these old pedants will talk, after all their youth
+and all their poetry, if they ever had any, are gone.  The smiles of
+woman, in the mean time, encouraged the young poet to smite the lyre.
+Fame beckoned him upward from her templed steep.  The rhymes which
+rose before him unbidden were as the rounds of Jacob's ladder, on
+which he would climb to a heaven of-glory.
+
+Master Gridley threw cold water on the young man's too sanguine
+anticipations of success.  "All up with the boy, if he's going to
+take to rhyming when he ought to be doing up papers of brown sugar
+and weighing out pounds of tea.  Poor-house,--that 's what it'll end
+in.  Poets, to be sure!  Sausage-makers!  Empty skins of old
+phrases,--stuff 'em with odds and ends of old thoughts that never
+were good for anything,--cut 'em up in lengths and sell'em to fools!
+
+"And if they ain't big fools enough to buy 'em, give'em away; and if
+you can't do that, pay folks to take'em.  Bah! what a fine style of
+genius common-sense is!  There's a passage in the book that would fit
+half these addle-headed rhymesters.  What is that saying of mine
+about I squinting brains?"
+
+He took down "Thoughts on the Universe," and read:--
+
+
+                    "Of Squinting Brains.
+
+"Where there is one man who squints with his eyes, there are a dozen
+who squint with their brains.  It is an infirmity in one of the eyes,
+making the two unequal in power, that makes men squint.  Just so it
+is an inequality in the two halves of the brain that makes some men
+idiots and others rascals.  I knows a fellow whose right half is a
+genius, but his other hemisphere belongs to a fool; and I had a
+friend perfectly honest on one side, but who was sent to jail because
+the other had an inveterate tendency in the direction of picking
+pockets and appropriating aes alienum."
+
+All this, talking and reading to himself in his usual fashion.
+
+The poetical faculty which was so freely developed in Gifted Hopkins
+had never manifested itself in Cyprian Eveleth, whose look and voice
+might, to a stranger, have seemed more likely to imply an imaginative
+nature.  Cyprian was dark, slender, sensitive, contemplative, a lover
+of lonely walks,--one who listened for the whispers of Nature and
+watched her shadows, and was alive to the symbolisms she writes over
+everything.  But Cyprian had never shown the talent or the
+inclination for writing in verse.
+
+He was on the pleasantest terms with the young poet, and being
+somewhat older, and having had the advantage of academic and college
+culture, often gave him useful hints as to the cultivation of his
+powers, such as genius frequently requires at the hands of humbler
+intelligences.  Cyprian was incapable of jealousy; and although the
+name of Gifted Hopkins was getting to be known beyond the immediate
+neighborhood, and his autograph had been requested by more than one
+young lady living in another county, he never thought of envying the
+young poet's spreading popularity.
+
+That the poet himself was flattered by these marks of public favor
+may be inferred from the growing confidence with which he expressed
+himself in his conversations with Cyprian, more especially in one
+which was held at the "store" where he officiated as "clerk."
+
+"I become more and more assured, Cyprian," he said, leaning over the
+counter, "that I was born to be a poet.  I feel it in my marrow.  I
+must succeed.  I must win the laurel of fame.  I must taste the
+sweets of"---
+
+" Molasses," said a bareheaded girl of ten who entered at that
+moment, bearing in her hand a cracked pitcher, "ma wants three gills
+of molasses."
+
+Gifted Hopkins dropped his subject and took up a tin measure.  He
+served the little maid with a benignity quite charming to witness,
+made an entry on a slate of .08, and resumed the conversation.
+
+"Yes, I am sure of it, Cyprian.  The very last piece I wrote was
+copied in two papers.  It was 'Contemplations in Autumn,' and--don't
+think I am too vain--one young lady has told me that it reminded her
+of Pollok.  You never wrote in verse, did you, Cyprian?"
+
+"I never wrote at all, Gifted, except school and college exercises,
+and a letter now and then.  Do you find it an easy and pleasant
+exercise to make rhymes?"
+
+Pleasant!  Poetry is to me a delight and a passion.  I never know
+what I am going to write when I sit down.  And presently the rhymes
+begin pounding in my brain,--it seems as if there were a hundred
+couples of them, paired like so many dancers,--and then these rhymes
+seem to take possession of me, like a surprise party, and bring in
+all sorts of beautiful thoughts, and I write and write, and the
+verses run measuring themselves out like"---
+
+"Ribbins,--any narrer blue ribbins, Mr. Hopkins?  Five eighths of a
+yard, if you please, Mr. Hopkins.  How's your folks?"  Then, in a
+lower tone, "Those last verses of yours in the Bannernoracle were
+sweet pooty."
+
+Gifted Hopkins meted out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid
+of certain brass nails on the counter.  He gave good measure, not
+prodigal, for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very
+moderate strain on the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with
+a contempt of infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in its
+genial mood.
+
+The young lady departed, after casting upon him one of those
+bewitching glances which the young poet--let us rather say the poet,
+without making odious distinctions--is in the confirmed habit of
+receiving from dear woman.
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins resumed: "I do not know where this talent, as my
+friends call it, of mine, comes from.  My father used to carry a
+chain for a surveyor sometimes, and there is a ten-foot pole in the
+house he used to measure land with.  I don't see why that should make
+me a poet.  My mother was always fond of Dr. Watts's hymns; but so
+are other young men's mothers, and yet they don't show poetical
+genius.  But wherever I got it, it comes as easy to me to write in
+verse as to write in prose, almost.  Don't you ever feel a longing to
+send your thoughts forth in verse, Cyprian?"
+
+"I wish I had a greater facility of expression very often," Cyprian
+answered; "but when I have my best thoughts I do not find that I have
+words that seem fitting to clothe them.  I have imagined a great many
+poems, Gifted, but I never wrote a rhyming verse, or verse of any
+kind.  Did you ever hear Olive play 'Songs without Words'?  If you
+have ever heard her, you will know what I mean by unrhymed and
+unversed poetry."
+
+"I am sure I don't know what you mean, Cyprian, by poetry without
+rhyme or verse, any more than I should if you talked about pictures
+that were painted on nothing, or statues that were made out of
+nothing.  How can you tell that anything is poetry, I should like to
+know, if there is neither a regular line with just so many syllables,
+nor a rhyme?  Of course you can't.  I never have any thoughts too
+beautiful to put in verse: nothing can be too beautiful for it."
+
+Cyprian left the conversation at this point.  It was getting more
+suggestive than interpenetrating, and he thought he might talk the
+matter over better with Olive.  Just then a little boy came in, and
+bargained with Gifted for a Jews-harp, which, having obtained, he
+placed against his teeth, and began playing upon it with a pleasure
+almost equal to that of the young poet reciting his own verses.
+
+"A little too much like my friend Gifted Hopkins's poetry," Cyprian
+said, as he left the "store."  "All in one note, pretty much.  Not a
+great many tunes, 'Hi Betty Martin,' 'Yankee Doodle,' and one or two
+more like them.  But many people seem to like them, and I don't doubt
+it is as exciting to Gifted to write them as it is to a great genius
+to express itself in a poem."
+
+Cyprian was, perhaps, too exacting.  He loved too well the sweet
+intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies
+of Milton.  These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted
+Hopkins.
+
+Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his
+friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of
+modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences
+of rhyme.  He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of
+childhood, its simplicity, its reverence.  It seemed as if nothing of
+all that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for
+there was no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and
+all else he could not help idealizing into its own conception of
+itself, so to speak.  He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the
+flower, and the root as well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his
+capacity of affection or admiration on the blossom or bud upon which
+his friend the poet lavished the wealth of his verse.  Thus Nature
+took him into her confidence.  She loves the men of science well, and
+tells them all her family secrets,--who is the father of this or that
+member of the group, who is brother, sister, cousin, and so on,
+through all the circle of relationship.  But there are others to whom
+she tells her dreams; not what species or genus her lily belongs to,
+but what vague thought it has when it dresses in white, or what
+memory of its birthplace that is which we call its fragrance.
+Cyprian was one of these.  Yet he was not a complete nature.  He
+required another and a wholly different one to be the complement of
+his own.  Olive came as near it as a sister could, but--we must
+borrow an old image--moonlight is no more than a cold and vacant
+glimmer on the sun-dial, which only answers to the great flaming orb
+of day.  If Cyprian could but find some true, sweet-tempered, well-
+balanced woman, richer in feeling than in those special imaginative
+gifts which made the outward world at times unreal to him in the
+intense reality of his own inner life, how he could enrich and adorn
+her existence,--how she could direct and chasten and elevate the
+character of all his thoughts and actions!
+
+"Bathsheba," said Olive, "it seems to me that Cyprian is getting more
+and more fascinated with Myrtle Hazard.  He has never got over the
+fancy he took to her when he first saw her in her red jacket, and
+called her the fire-hang-bird.  Wouldn't they suit each other by and
+by, after Myrtle has come to herself and grown into a beautiful and
+noble woman, as I feel sure she will in due time?"
+
+"Myrtle is very lovely," Bathsheba answered, "but is n't she a little
+too--flighty--for one like your brother?  Cyprian isn't more like
+other young men than Myrtle is like other young girls.  I have
+thought sometimes--I wondered whether out-of-the-way people and
+common ones do not get along best together.  Does n't Cyprian want
+some more every-day kind of girl to keep him straight?  Myrtle is
+beautiful, beautiful,--fascinates everybody.  Has Mr. Bradshaw been
+following after her lately?  He is taken with her too.  Didn't you
+ever think she would have to give in to Murray Bradshaw at last?  He
+looks to me like a man that would hold on desperately as a lover."
+
+If Myrtle Hazard, instead of being a half-finished school-girl,
+hardly sixteen years old, had been a young woman of eighteen or
+nineteen, it would have been plain sailing enough for Murray
+Bradshaw.  But he knew what a distance their ages seemed just now to
+put between them,--a distance which would grow practically less and
+less with every year, and he did not wish to risk anything so long as
+there was no danger of interference.  He rather encouraged Gifted
+Hopkins to write poetry to Myrtle.  "Go in, Gifted," he said,
+"there's no telling what may come of it," and Gifted did go in at a
+great rate.
+
+Murray Bradshaw did not write poetry himself, but he read poetry with
+a good deal of effect, and he would sometimes take a hint from one of
+Gifted Hopkins's last productions to recite a passionate lyric of
+Byron or Moore, into which he would artfully throw so much meaning
+that Myrtle was almost as much puzzled, in her simplicity, to know
+what it meant, as she had been by the religious fervors of the Rev.
+Mr. Stoker.
+
+He spoke well of Cyprian Eveleth.  A good young man,--limited, but
+exemplary.  Would succeed well as rector of a small parish.  That
+required little talent, but a good deal of the humbler sort of
+virtue.  As for himself, he confessed to ambition,--yes, a great deal
+of ambition.  A failing, he supposed, but not the worst of failings.
+He felt the instinct to handle the larger interests of society.  The
+village would perhaps lose sight of him for a time; but he meant to
+emerge sooner or later in the higher spheres of government or
+diplomacy.  Myrtle must keep his secret.  Nobody else knew it.  He
+could not help making a confidant of her,--a thing he had never done
+before with any other person as to his plans in life.  Perhaps she
+might watch his career with more interest from her acquaintance with
+him.  He loved to think that there was one woman at least who would
+be pleased to hear of his success if he succeeded, as with life and
+health he would,--who would share his disappointment if fate should
+not favor him.--So he wound and wreathed himself into her thoughts.
+
+It was not very long before Myrtle began to accept the idea that she
+was the one person in the world whose peculiar duty it was to
+sympathize with the aspiring young man whose humble beginnings she
+had the honor of witnessing.  And it is not very far from being the
+solitary confidant, and the single source of inspiration, to the
+growth of a livelier interest, where a young man and a young woman
+are in question.
+
+Myrtle was at this time her own mistress as never before.  The three
+young men had access to her as she walked to and from meeting and in
+her frequent rambles, besides the opportunities Cyprian had of
+meeting her in his sister's company, and the convenient visits which,
+in connection with the great lawsuit, Murray Bradshaw could make,
+without question, at The Poplars.
+
+It was not long before Cyprian perceived that he could never pass a
+certain boundary of intimacy with Myrtle.  Very pleasant and sisterly
+always she was with him; but she never looked as if she might mean
+more than she said, and cherished a little spark of sensibility which
+might be fanned into the flame of love.  Cyprian felt this so
+certainly that he was on the point of telling his grief to Bathsheba,
+who looked to him as if she would sympathize as heartily with him as
+his own sister, and whose sympathy would have a certain flavor in
+it,--something which one cannot find in the heart of the dearest
+sister that ever lived.  But Bathsheba was herself sensitive, and
+changed color when Cyprian ventured a hint or two in the direction of
+his thought, so that he never got so fax as to unburden his heart to
+her about Myrtle, whom she admired so sincerely that she could not
+have helped feeling a great interest in his passion towards her.
+
+As for Gifted Hopkins, the roses that were beginning to bloom fresher
+and fresher every day in Myrtle's cheeks unfolded themselves more and
+more freely, to speak metaphorically, in his song.  Every week she
+would receive a delicately tinted note with lines to "Myrtle
+awaking," or to "Myrtle retiring," (one string of verses a little too
+Musidora-ish, and which soon found itself in the condition of a
+cinder, perhaps reduced to that state by spontaneous combustion,) or
+to "The Flower of the Tropics," or to the "Nymph of the River-side,"
+or other poetical alias, such as bards affect in their sieges of the
+female heart.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was of a sanguine temperament.  As he read and re-read
+his verses it certainly seemed to him that they must reach the heart
+of the angelic being to whom they were addressed.  That she was slow
+in confessing the impression they made upon her, was a favorable
+sign; so many girls called his poems "sweet pooty," that those
+charming words, though soothing, no longer stirred him deeply.
+Myrtle's silence showed that the impression his verses had made was
+deep.  Time would develop her sentiments; they were both young; his
+position was humble as yet; but when he had become famous through the
+land-oh blissful thought!--the bard of Oxbow Village would bear a
+name that any woman would be proud to assume, and the M. H.  which
+her delicate hands had wrought on the kerchiefs she wore would yet
+perhaps be read, not Myrtle Hazard, but Myrtle Hopkins.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+SUSAN'S YOUNG MAN.
+
+There seems no reasonable doubt that Myrtle Hazard  might have made a
+safe thing of it with Gifted Hopkins, (if so inclined,) provided that
+she had only been secured against interference.  But the constant
+habit of reading his verses to Susan Posey was not without its risk
+to so excitable a nature as that of the young poet.  Poets were
+always capable of divided affections, and Cowley's "Chronicle" is a
+confession that would fit the whole tribe of them.  It is true that
+Gifted had no right to regard Susan's heart as open to the wiles of
+any new-comer.  He knew that she considered herself, and was
+considered by another, as pledged and plighted.  Yet she was such a
+devoted listener, her sympathies were so easily roused, her blue eyes
+glistened so tenderly at the least poetical hint, such as "Never, oh
+never," "My aching heart," "Go, let me weep,"--any of those touching
+phrases out of the long catalogue which readily suggests itself, that
+her influence was getting to be such that Myrtle (if really anxious
+to secure him) might look upon it with apprehension, and the owner of
+Susan's heart (if of a jealous disposition) might have thought it
+worth while to make a visit to Oxbow Village to see after his
+property.
+
+It may seem not impossible that some friend had suggested as much as
+this to the young lady's lover.
+
+The caution would have been unnecessary, or at least premature.
+Susan was loyal as ever to her absent friend.  Gifted Hopkins had
+never yet presumed upon the familiar relations existing between them
+to attempt to shake her allegiance.  It is quite as likely, after
+all, that the young gentleman about to make his appearance in Oxbow
+Village visited the place of his own accord, without a hint from
+anybody.  But the fact concerns us more than the reason of it, just
+now.
+
+"Who do you think is coming, Mr. Gridley?  Who do you think is
+coming?" said Susan Posey, her face covered with a carnation such as
+the first season may see in a city belle, but not the second.
+
+"Well, Susan Posey, I suppose I must guess, though I am rather slow
+at that business.  Perhaps the Governor.  No, I don't think it can be
+the Governor, for you would n't look so happy if it was only his
+Excellency.  It must be the President, Susan Posey,--President James
+Buchanan.  Have n't I guessed right, now, tell me, my dear?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley, you are too bad,--what do I care for governors and
+presidents?  I know somebody that's worth fifty million thousand
+presidents,--and he 's coming,--my Clement is coming," said Susan,
+who had by this time learned to consider the awful Byles Gridley as
+her next friend and faithful counsellor.
+
+Susan could not stay long in the house after she got her note
+informing her that her friend was soon to be with her.  Everybody
+told everything to Olive Eveleth, and Susan must run over to the
+parsonage to tell her that there was a young gentleman coming to
+Oxbow Village; upon which Olive asked who it was, exactly as if she
+did not know; whereupon Susan dropped her eyes and said, "Clement,--I
+mean Mr. Lindsay."
+
+That was a fair piece of news now, and Olive had her bonnet on five
+minutes after Susan was gone, and was on her way to Bathsheba's,--it
+was too bad that the poor girl who lived so out of the world
+shouldn't know anything of what was going on in it.  Bathsheba had
+been in all the morning, and the Doctor had said she must take the
+air every day; so Bathsheba had on her bonnet a little after Olive
+had gone, and walked straight up to The Poplars to tell Myrtle Hazard
+that a certain young gentleman, Clement Lindsay, was coming to Oxbow
+Village.
+
+It was perhaps fortunate that there was no special significance to
+Myrtle in the name of Clement Lindsay.  Since the adventure which had
+brought these two young persons together, and, after coming so near a
+disaster, had ended in a mere humiliation and disappointment, and but
+for Master Gridley's discreet kindness might have led to foolish
+scandal, Myrtle had never referred to it in any way.  Nobody really
+knew what her plans had been except Olive and Cyprian, who had
+observed a very kind silence about the whole matter.  The common
+version of the story was harmless, and near enough to the truth,
+--down the river,--boat upset,--pulled out,--taken care of by some
+women in a house farther down,--sick, brain fever,--pretty near it,
+anyhow,--old Dr. Hurlbut called in,--had her hair cut,--hystericky,
+etc., etc.
+
+Myrtle was contented with this statement, and asked no questions, and
+it was a perfectly understood thing that nobody alluded to the
+subject in her presence.  It followed from all this that the name of
+Clement Lindsay had no peculiar meaning for her.  Nor was she like to
+recognize him as the youth in whose company she had gone through her
+mortal peril, for all her recollections were confused and dreamlike
+from the moment when she awoke and found herself in the foaming
+rapids just above the fall, until that when her senses returned, and
+she saw Master Byles Gridley standing over her with that look of
+tenderness in his square features which had lingered in her
+recollection, and made her feel towards him as if she were his
+daughter.
+
+Now this had its advantage; for as Clement was Susan's young man, and
+had been so for two or three years, it would have been a great pity
+to have any such curious relations established between him and Myrtle
+Hazard as a consciousness on both sides of what had happened would
+naturally suggest.
+
+"Who is this Clement Lindsay, Bathsheba?" Myrtle asked.
+
+Why, Myrtle, don't you remember about Susan Posey's is-to-be,--the
+young man that has been well, I don't know, but I suppose engaged to
+her ever since they were children almost?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I remember now.  Oh dear!  I have forgotten so many
+things, I should think I had been dead and was coming back to life
+again.  Do you know anything about him, Bathsheba?  Did n't somebody
+say he was very handsome?  I wonder if he is really in love with
+Susan Posey.  Such a simple thing?  I want to see him.  I have seen
+so few young men."
+
+As Myrtle said these words, she lifted the sleeve a little on her
+left arm, by a half-instinctive and half-voluntary movement.  The
+glimmering gold of Judith Pride's bracelet flashed out the yellow
+gleam which has been the reddening of so many hands and the
+blackening of so, many souls since that innocent sin-breeder was
+first picked up in the land of Havilah.  There came a sudden light
+into her eye, such as Bathsheba had never seen there before.  It
+looked to her as if Myrtle were saying unconsciously to herself that
+she had the power of beauty, and would like to try its influence on
+the handsome young man whom she was soon to meet, even at the risk of
+unseating poor little Susan in his affections.  This pained the
+gentle and humble-minded girl, who, without having tasted the world's
+pleasures, had meekly consecrated herself to the lowly duties which
+lay nearest to her.  For Bathsheba's phrasing of life was in the
+monosyllables of a rigid faith.  Her conceptions of the human soul
+were all simplicity and purity, but elementary.  She could not
+conceive the vast license the creative energy allows itself in
+mingling the instincts which, after long conflict, may come into
+harmonious adjustment.  The flash which Myrtle's eye had caught from
+the gleam of the golden bracelet filled Bathsheba with a sudden fear
+that she was like to be led away by the vanities of that world lying
+in wickedness of which the minister's daughter had heard so much and
+seen so little.
+
+Not that Bathsheba made any fine moral speeches, to herself.  She
+only felt a slight shock, such as a word or a look from one we love
+too often gives us,--such as a child's trivial gesture or movement
+makes a parent feel,--that impalpable something which in the
+slightest possible inflection of a syllable or gradation of a tone
+will sometimes leave a sting behind it, even in a trusting heart.
+This was all.  But it was true that what she saw meant a great deal.
+It meant the dawning in Myrtle Hazard of one of her as yet unlived
+secondary lives.  Bathsheba's virgin perceptions had caught a faint
+early ray of its glimmering twilight.
+
+She answered, after a very slight pause, which this explanation has
+made seem so long, that she had never seen the young gentleman, and
+that she did not know about Susan's sentiments.  Only, as they had
+kept so long to each other, she supposed there must be love between
+them.
+
+Myrtle fell into a revery, with certain tableaux glowing along its
+perspectives which poor little Susan Posey would have shivered to
+look upon, if they could have been transferred from the purple clouds
+of Myrtle's imagination to the pale silvery mists of Susan's pretty
+fancies.  She sat in her day-dream long after Bathsheba had left her,
+her eyes fixed, not on the faded portrait of her beatified
+ancestress, but on that other canvas where the dead Beauty seemed to
+live in all the splendors of her full-blown womanhood.
+
+The young man whose name had set her thoughts roving was handsome, as
+the glance at him already given might have foreshadowed.  But his
+features had a graver impress than his age seemed to account for, and
+the sober tone of his letter to Susan implied that something had
+given him a maturity beyond his years.  The story was not an uncommon
+one.  At sixteen he had dreamed-and told his dream.  At eighteen he
+had awoke, and found, as he believed, that a young heart had grown to
+his so that its life was dependent on his own.  Whether it would have
+perished if its filaments had been gently disentangled from the
+object to which they had attached themselves, experienced judges of
+such matters may perhaps question.  To justify Clement in his
+estimate of the danger of such an experiment, we must remember that
+to young people in their teens a first passion is a portentous and
+unprecedented phenomenon.  The young man may have been mistaken in
+thinking that Susan would die if he left her, and may have done more
+than his duty in sacrificing himself; but if so, it was the mistake
+of a generous youth, who estimated the depth of another's feelings by
+his own.  He measured the depth of his own rather by what he felt
+they might be, than by that of any abysses they had yet sounded.
+
+Clement was called a "genius" by those who knew him, and was
+consequently in danger of being spoiled early.  The risk is great
+enough anywhere, but greatest in a new country, where there is an
+almost universal want of fixed standards of excellence.
+
+He was by nature an artist; a shaper with the pencil or the chisel, a
+planner, a contriver capable of turning his hand to almost any work
+of eye and hand.  It would not have been strange if he thought he
+could do everything, having gifts which were capable of various
+application,--and being an American citizen.  But though he was a
+good draughtsman, and had made some reliefs and modelled some
+figures, he called himself only an architect.  He had given him.
+self up to his art, not merely from a love of it and talent for it,
+but with a kind of heroic devotion, because he thought his country
+wanted a race of builders to clothe the new forms of religious,
+social, and national life afresh from the forest, the quarry, and the
+mine.  Some thought he would succeed, others that he would be a
+brilliant failure.
+
+"Grand notions,--grand notions," the master with whom he studied
+said.  "Large ground plan of life,--splendid elevation.  A little
+wild in some of his fancies, perhaps, but he's only a boy, and he's
+the kind of boy that sometimes grows to be a pretty big man.  Wait
+and see,--wait and see.  He works days, and we can let him dream
+nights.  There's a good deal of him, anyhow."  His fellow-students
+were puzzled.  Those who thought of their calling as a trade, and
+looked forward to the time when they should be embodying the ideals
+of municipal authorities in brick and stone, or making contracts with
+wealthy citizens, doubted whether Clement would have a sharp eye
+enough for business.  "Too many whims, you know.  All sorts of queer
+ideas in his head,--as if a boy like him were going to make things
+all over again!".
+
+No doubt there was something of youthful extravagance in his plans
+and expectations.  But it was the untamed enthusiasm which is the
+source of all great thoughts and deeds,--a beautiful delirium which
+age commonly tames down, and for which the cold shower-bath the world
+furnishes gratis proves a pretty certain cure.
+
+Creation is always preceded by chaos.  The youthful architect's mind
+was confused by the multitude of suggestions which were crowding in
+upon it, and which he had not yet had time or developed mature
+strength sufficient to reduce to order.  The young American of any
+freshness of intellect is stimulated to dangerous excess by the
+conditions of life into which he is born.  There is a double
+proportion of oxygen in the New World air.  The chemists have not
+found it out yet, but human brains and breathing-organs have long
+since made the discovery.
+
+Clement knew that his hasty entanglement had limited his
+possibilities of happiness in one direction, and he felt that there
+was a certain grandeur in the recompense of working out his defeated
+instincts through the ambitious medium of his noble art.  Had not
+Pharaohs chosen it to proclaim their longings for immortality,
+Caesars their passion for pomp and luxury, and priests to symbolize
+their conceptions of the heavenly mansions?  His dreams were on a
+grand scale; such, after all, are the best possessions of youth.  Had
+he but been free, or mated with a nature akin to his own, he would
+have felt himself as truly the heir of creation as any young man that
+lived.  But his lot was cast, and his youth had all the serious
+aspect to himself of thoughtful manhood.  In the region of his art
+alone he hoped always to find freedom and a companionship which his
+home life could never give him.
+
+Clement meant to have visited his beloved before he left Alderbank,
+but was called unexpectedly back to the city.  Happily Susan was not
+exacting; she looked up to him with too great a feeling of distance
+between them to dare to question his actions.  Perhaps she found a
+partial consolation in the company of Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who tried
+his new poems on her, which was the next best thing to addressing
+them to her.  "Would that you were with us at this delightful
+season," she wrote in the autumn; "but no, your Susan must not
+repine.  Yet, in the beautiful words of our native poet,
+
+"Oh would, oh would that thou wast here,
+For absence makes thee doubly dear;
+Ah! what is life while thou 'rt away?
+'T is night without the orb of day!'"
+
+The poet referred to, it need hardly be said, was our young and
+promising friend G. H., as he sometimes modestly signed himself.  The
+letter, it is unnecessary to state, was voluminous,--for a woman can
+tell her love, or other matter of interest, over and over again in as
+many forms as another poet, not G. H., found for his grief in ringing
+the musical changes of "In Memoriam."
+
+The answers to Susan's letters were kind, but not very long.  They
+convinced her that it was a simple impossibility that Clement could
+come to Oxbow Village, on account of the great pressure of the work
+he had to keep him in the city, and the plans he must finish at any
+rate.  But at last the work was partially got rid of, and Clement was
+coming; yes, it was so nice, and, oh dear! should n't she be real
+happy to see him?
+
+To Susan he appeared as a kind of divinity, almost too grand for
+human nature's daily food.  Yet, if the simple-hearted girl could
+have told herself the whole truth in plain words, she would have
+confessed to certain doubts which from time to time, and oftener of
+late, cast a shadow on her seemingly bright future.  With all the
+pleasure that the thought of meeting Clement gave her, she felt a
+little tremor, a certain degree of awe, in contemplating his visit.
+If she could have clothed her self-humiliation in the gold and purple
+of the "Portuguese Sonnets," it would have been another matter; but
+the trouble with the most common sources of disquiet is that they
+have no wardrobe of flaming phraseology to air themselves in; the
+inward burning goes on without the relief and gratifying display of
+the crater.
+
+"A friend of mine is coming to the village," she said to Mr. Gifted
+Hopkins.  "I want you to see him.  He is a genius,--as some other
+young men are."  (This was obviously personal, and the youthful poet
+blushed with ingenuous delight.)  "I have known him for ever so many
+years.  He and I are very good friends."  The poet knew that this
+meant an exclusive relation between them; and though the fact was no
+surprise to him, his countenance fell a little.  The truth was, that
+his admiration was divided between Myrtle, who seemed to him divine
+and adorable, but distant, and Susan, who listened to his frequent
+poems, whom he was in the habit of seeing in artless domestic
+costumes, and whose attractions had been gaining upon him of late in
+the enforced absence of his divinity.
+
+He retired pensive from this interview, and, flinging himself at his
+desk, attempted wreaking his thoughts upon expression, to borrow the
+language of one of his brother bards, in a passionate lyric which he
+began thus
+
+          "ANOTHER'S!
+
+"Another's!  Oh the pang, the smart!
+     Fate owes to Love a deathless grudge,--
+The barbed fang has rent a heart
+     Which--which
+
+"judge--judge,--no, not judge.  Budge, drudge, fudge--What a
+disgusting language English is!  Nothing fit to couple with such a
+word as grudge!  And the gush of an impassioned moment arrested in
+full flow, stopped short, corked up, for want of a paltry rhyme!
+Judge,--budge,--drudge,--nudge, oh!--smudge,--misery!--fudge.  In
+vain,--futile,--no use,--all up for to-night!"
+
+While the poet, headed off in this way by the poverty of his native
+tongue, sought inspiration by retiring into the world of dreams,--
+went to bed, in short, his more fortunate rival was just entering the
+village, where he was to make his brief residence at the house of
+Deacon Rumrill, who, having been a loser by the devouring element,
+was glad to receive a stray boarder when any such were looking about
+for quarters.
+
+For some reason or other he was restless that evening, and took out a
+volume he had brought with him to beguile the earlier hours of the
+night.  It was too late when he arrived to disturb the quiet of Mrs.
+Hopkins's household, and whatever may have been Clement's impatience,
+he held it in check, and sat tranquilly until midnight over the pages
+of the book with which he had prudently provided himself.
+
+"Hope you slept well last night," said the old Deacon, when Mr.
+Clement came down to breakfast the next morning.
+
+"Very well, thank you,--that is, after I got to bed.  But I sat up
+pretty late reading my favorite Scott.  I am apt to forget how the
+hours pass when I have one of his books in my hand."
+
+The worthy Deacon looked at Mr. Clement with a sudden accession of
+interest.
+
+"You couldn't find better reading, young man.  Scott is my favorite
+author.  A great man.  I have got his likeness in a gilt-frame
+hanging up in the other room.  I have read him all through three
+times."
+
+The young man's countenance brightened.  He had not expected to find
+so much taste for elegant literature in an old village deacon.
+
+"What are your favorites among his writings, Deacon?  I suppose you
+have your particular likings, as the rest of us have."
+
+The Deacon was flattered by the question.  "Well," he answered, "I
+can hardly tell you.  I like pretty much everything Scott ever wrote.
+Sometimes I think it is one thing, and sometimes another.  Great on
+Paul's Epistles,--don't you think so?"
+
+The honest fact was, that Clement remembered very little about
+"Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk,"--a book of Sir Walter's less famous
+than many of his others; but he signified his polite assent to the
+Deacon's statement, rather wondering at his choice of a favorite, and
+smiling at his queer way of talking about the Letters as Epistles.
+
+"I am afraid Scott is not so much read now-a-days as he once was, and
+as he ought to be," said Mr. Clement: "Such character, such nature
+and so much grace."
+
+"That's it,--that's it, young man," the Deacon broke in,--"Natur' and
+Grace,--Natur' and Grace.  Nobody ever knew better what those two
+words meant than Scott did, and I'm very glad to see--you've chosen
+such good wholesome reading.  You can't set up too late, young man,
+to read Scott.  If I had twenty children, they should all begin
+reading Scott as soon as they were old enough to spell sin,--and
+that's the first word my little ones learned, next to 'pa' and I
+'ma.' Nothing like beginning the lessons of life in good season."
+
+"What a grim old satirist!" Clement said to himself.  "I wonder if
+the old man reads other novelists.--Do tell me, Deacon, if you have
+read Thackeray's last story? "
+
+"Thackeray's story?  Published by the American Tract Society?"
+
+"Not exactly," Clement answered, smiling, and quite delighted to find
+such an unexpected vein of grave pleasantry about the demure-looking
+church-dignitary; for the Deacon asked his question without moving a
+muscle, and took no cognizance whatever of the young man's tone and
+smile.  First-class humorists are, as is well known, remarkable for
+the immovable solemnity of their features.  Clement promised himself
+not a little amusement from the curiously sedate drollery of the
+venerable Deacon, who, it was plain from his conversation, had
+cultivated a literary taste which would make him a more agreeable
+companion than the common ecclesiastics of his grade in country
+villages.
+
+After breakfast, Mr. Clement walked forth in the direction of Mrs.
+Hopkins's house, thinking as he went of the pleasant surprise his
+visit would bring to his longing and doubtless pensive Susan; for
+though she knew he was coming, she did not know that he was at that
+moment in Oxbow Village.
+
+As he drew near the house, the first thing he saw was Susan Posey,
+almost running against her just as he turned a corner.  She looked
+wonderfully lively and rosy, for the weather was getting keen and the
+frosts had begun to bite.  A young gentleman was walking at her side,
+and reading to her from a paper he held in his hand.  Both looked
+deeply interested,--so much so that Clement felt half ashamed of
+himself for intruding upon them so abruptly.
+
+But lovers are lovers, and Clement could not help joining them.  The
+first thing, of course, was the utterance of two simultaneous
+exclamations, "Why, Clement!"  "Why, Susan!"  What might have come
+next in the programme, but for the presence of a third party, is
+matter of conjecture; but what did come next was a mighty awkward
+look on the part of Susan Posey, and the following short speech:
+"Mr. Lindsay, let me introduce Mr. Hopkins, my friend, the poet I 've
+written to you about.  He was just reading two of his poems to me.
+Some other time, Gifted--Mr. Hopkins."
+
+"Oh no, Mr. Hopkins,--pray go on," said Clement.  "I 'm very fond of
+poetry."
+
+The poet did not require much urging, and began at once reciting over
+again the stanzas which were afterwards so much admired in the
+"Banner and Oracle,"--the first verse being, as the readers of that
+paper will remember,
+
+    "She moves in splendor, like the ray
+     That flashes from unclouded skies,
+     And all the charms of night and day
+     Are mingled in her hair and eyes."
+
+Clement, who must have been in an agony of impatience to be alone
+with his beloved, commanded his feelings admirably.  He signified his
+approbation of the poem by saying that the lines were smooth and the
+rhymes absolutely without blemish.  The stanzas reminded him forcibly
+of one of the greatest poets of the century.
+
+Gifted flushed hot with pleasure.  He had tasted the blood of his own
+rhymes; and when a poet gets as far as that, it is like wringing the
+bag of exhilarating gas from the lips of a fellow sucking at it, to
+drag his piece away from him.
+
+"Perhaps you will like these lines still better," he said; "the style
+is more modern:--
+
+     "'O daughter of the spiced South,
+          Her bubbly grapes have spilled the wine
+          That staineth with its hue divine
+     The red flower of thy perfect mouth.'"
+
+And so on, through a series of stanzas like these, with the pulp of
+two rhymes between the upper and lower crust of two others.
+
+Clement was cornered.  It was necessary to say something for the
+poet's sake,--perhaps for Susan's; for she was in a certain sense
+responsible for the poems of a youth of genius, of whom she had
+spoken so often and so enthusiastically.
+
+"Very good, Mr. Hopkins, and a form of verse little used, I should
+think, until of late years.  You modelled this piece on the style of
+a famous living English poet, did you not?"
+
+"Indeed I did not, Mr. Lindsay,--I never imitate.  Originality is, if
+I may be allowed to say so much for myself, my peculiar forte.  Why,
+the critics allow as much as that.  See here, Mr. Lindsay."
+
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins pulled out his pocket-book, and, taking therefrom
+a cutting from a newspaper,--which dropped helplessly open of itself,
+as if tired of the process, being very tender in the joints or
+creases, by reason of having been often folded and unfolded read
+aloud as follows:
+
+"The bard of Oxbow Pillage--our valued correspondent who writes over
+the signature of G. H.--is, in our opinion, more remarkable for his
+originality than for any other of his numerous gifts."
+
+Clement was apparently silenced by this, and the poet a little elated
+with a sense of triumph.  Susan could not help sharing his feeling of
+satisfaction, and without meaning it in the least, nay, without
+knowing it, for she was as simple and pure as new milk, edged a
+little bit--the merest infinitesimal atom--nearer to Gifted Hopkins,
+who was on one side of her, while Clement walked on the other.  Women
+love the conquering party,--it is the way of their sex.  And poets,
+as we have seen, are well-nigh irresistible when they exert their
+dangerous power of fascination upon the female heart.  But Clement
+was above jealousy; and, if be perceived anything of this movement,
+took no notice of it.
+
+He saw a good deal of his pretty Susan that day.  She was tender in
+her expressions and manners as usual, but there was a little
+something in her looks and language from time to time that Clement
+did not know exactly what to make of.  She colored once or twice when
+the young poet's name was mentioned.  She was not so full of her
+little plans for the future as she had sometimes been, "everything
+was so uncertain," she said.  Clement asked himself whether she felt
+quite as sure that her attachment would last as she once did.  But
+there were no reproaches, not even any explanations, which are about
+as bad between lovers.  There was nothing but an undefined feeling on
+his side that she did not cling quite so closely to him, perhaps, as
+he had once thought, and that, if he had happened to have been
+drowned that day when he went down with the beautiful young woman, it
+was just conceivable that Susan, who would have cried dreadfully, no
+doubt, would in time have listened to consolation from some other
+young man,--possibly from the young poet whose verses he had been
+admiring.  Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there is
+nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master Gridley used to
+say.  Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as Clement well
+knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up like the
+rose which had been washed, just washed in a shower, mentioned by
+Cowper.
+
+As for the poet, he learned more of his own sentiments during this
+visit of Clement's than he had ever before known.  He wandered about
+with a dreadfully disconsolate look upon his countenance.  He showed
+a falling-off in his appetite at tea-time, which surprised and
+disturbed his mother, for she had filled the house with fragrant
+suggestions of good things coming, in honor of Mr. Lindsay, who was
+to be her guest at tea.  And chiefly the genteel form of doughnut
+called in the native dialect cymbal ( Qu. Symbol?  B. G.) which
+graced the board with its plastic forms, suggestive of the most
+pleasing objects,--the spiral ringlets pendent from the brow of
+beauty; the magic circlet, which is the pledge of plighted
+affection,--the indissoluble knot, which typifies the union of
+hearts, which organs were also largely represented; this exceptional
+delicacy would at any other time have claimed his special notice.
+But his mother remarked that he paid little attention to these, and
+his, "No, I thank you," when it came to the preserved "damsels," as
+some call them, carried a pang with it to the maternal bosom.  The
+most touching evidence of his unhappiness--whether intentional or the
+result of accident was not evident was a broken heart, which he left
+upon his plate, the meaning of which was as plain as anything in the
+language of flowers.  His thoughts were gloomy during that day,
+running a good deal on the more picturesque and impressive methods of
+bidding a voluntary farewell to a world which had allured him with
+visions of beauty only to snatch them from his impassioned gaze.  His
+mother saw something of this, and got from him a few disjointed
+words, which led her to lock up the clothes-line and hide her late
+husband's razors,--an affectionate, yet perhaps unnecessary
+precaution, for self-elimination contemplated from this point of view
+by those who have the natural outlet of verse to relieve them is
+rarely followed by a casualty.  It may rather be considered as
+implying a more than average chance for longevity; as those who
+meditate an--imposing finish naturally save themselves for it, and
+are therefore careful of their health until the time comes, and this
+is apt to be indefinitely postponed so long as there is a poem to
+write or a proof to be corrected.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+THE SECOND MEETING.
+
+Miss Eveleth requests the pleasure of Mr. Lindsay's company to meet a
+few friends on the evening of the Feast of St. Ambrose, December 7th,
+Wednesday.
+
+THE PARSONAGE, December 6th.
+
+
+It was the luckiest thing in the world.  They always made a little
+festival of that evening at the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth's, in honor of
+his canonized namesake, and because they liked to have a good time.
+It came this year just at the right moment, for here was a
+distinguished stranger visiting in the place.  Oxbow Village seemed
+to be running over with its one extra young man,--as may be seen
+sometimes in larger villages, and even in cities of moderate
+dimensions.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had called on Clement the day after his
+arrival.  He had already met the Deacon in the street, and asked some
+questions about his transient boarder.
+
+A very interesting young man, the Deacon said, much given to the
+reading of pious books.  Up late at night after he came, reading
+Scott's Commentary.  Appeared to be as fond of serious works as other
+young folks were of their novels and romances and other immoral
+publications.  He, the Deacon, thought of having a few religious
+friends to meet the young gentleman, if he felt so disposed; and
+should like to have him, Mr. Bradshaw, come in and take a part in the
+exercises.--Mr. Bradshaw was unfortunately engaged.  He thought the
+young gentleman could hardly find time for such a meeting during his
+brief visit.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw expected naturally to see a youth of imperfect
+constitution, and cachectic or dyspeptic tendencies, who was in
+training to furnish one of those biographies beginning with the
+statement that, from his infancy, the subject of it showed no
+inclination for boyish amusements, and so on, until he dies out, for
+the simple reason that there was not enough of him to live.  Very
+interesting, no doubt, Master Byles Gridley would have said, but had
+no more to do with good, hearty, sound life than the history of those
+very little people to be seen in museums preserved in jars of
+alcohol, like brandy peaches.
+
+When Mr. Clement Lindsay presented himself, Mr. Bradshaw was a good
+deal surprised to see a young fellow of such a mould.  He pleased
+himself with the idea that he knew a man of mark at sight, and he set
+down Clement in that category at his first glance.  The young man met
+his penetrating and questioning look with a frank, ingenuous, open
+aspect, before which he felt himself disarmed, as it were, and thrown
+upon other means of analysis.  He would try him a little in talk.
+
+"I hope you like these people you are with.  What sort of a man do
+you find my old friend the Deacon?"
+
+Clement laughed.  "A very queer old character.  Loves his joke as
+well, and is as sly in making it, as if he had studied Joe Miller
+instead of the Catechism."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked at the young man to know what he meant.  Mr.
+Lindsay talked in a very easy way for a serious young person.  He was
+puzzled.  He did not see to the bottom of this description of the
+Deacon.  With a lawyer's instinct, he kept his doubts to himself and
+tried his witness with a new question.
+
+"Did you talk about books at all with the old man?"
+
+"To be sure I did.  Would you believe it,--that aged saint is a great
+novel-reader.  So he tells me.  What is more, he brings up his
+children to that sort of reading, from the time when they first begin
+to spell.  If anybody else had told me such a story about an old
+country deacon, I wouldn't have believed it; but he said so himself,
+to me, at breakfast this morning."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw felt as if either he or Mr. Lindsay must certainly be in
+the first stage of mild insanity, and he did not think that he
+himself could be out of his wits.  He must try one more question.  He
+had become so mystified that he forgot himself, and began putting his
+interrogation in legal form.
+
+"Will you state, if you please--I beg your pardon--may I ask who is
+your own favorite author?"
+
+"I think just now I like to read Scott better than almost anybody."
+
+"Do you mean the Rev. Thomas Scott, author of the Commentary?"
+
+Clement stared at Mr. Bradshaw, and wondered whether he was trying to
+make a fool of him.  The young lawyer hardly looked as if he could be
+a fool himself.
+
+"I mean Sir Walter Scott," he said, dryly.
+
+"Oh!" said Mr. Bradshaw.  He saw that there had been a slight
+misunderstanding between the young man and his worthy host, but it
+was none of his business, and there were other subjects of interest
+to talk about.
+
+"You know one of our charming young ladies very well, I believe, Mr.
+Lindsay.  I think you are an old acquaintance of Miss Posey, whom we
+all consider so pretty."
+
+Poor Clement!  The question pierced to the very marrow of his soul,
+but it was put with the utmost suavity and courtesy, and honeyed with
+a compliment to the young lady, too, so that there was no avoiding a
+direct and pleasant answer to it.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I have known the young lady you speak of for a long
+time, and very well,--in fact, as you must have heard, we are
+something more than friends.  My visit here is principally on her
+account."
+
+"You must give the rest of us a chance to see something of you during
+your visit, Mr. Lindsay.  I hope you are invited to Miss Eveleth's
+to-morrow evening?"
+
+"Yes, I got a note this morning.  Tell me, Mr. Bradshaw, who is there
+that I shall meet if I go?  I have no doubt there are girls here in
+the village I should like to see, and perhaps some young fellows that
+I should like to talk with.  You know all that's prettiest and
+pleasantest, of course."
+
+"Oh, we're a little place, Mr. Lindsay.  A few nice people, the rest
+comme Va, you know.  High-bush blackberries and low-bush black-
+berries,--you understand,--just so everywhere,--high-bush here and
+there, low-bush plenty.  You must see the two parsons' daughters,
+--Saint Ambrose's and Saint Joseph's,--and another girl I want
+particularly to introduce you to.  You shall form your own opinion of
+her.  I call her handsome and stylish, but you have got spoiled, you
+know.  Our young poet, too, one we raised in this place, Mr. Lindsay,
+and a superior article of poet, as we think,--that is, some of us,
+for the rest of us are jealous of him, because the girls are all
+dying for him and want his autograph.  And Cyp,--yes, you must talk
+to Cyp,--he has ideas.  But don't forget to get hold of old Byles
+Master Gridley I mean--before you go.  Big head.  Brains enough for a
+cabinet minister, and fit out a college faculty with what was left
+over.  Be sure you see old Byles.  Set him talking about his book,
+'Thoughts on the Universe.'  Did n't sell much, but has got knowing
+things in it.  I'll show you a copy, and then you can tell him you
+know it, and he will take to you.  Come in and get your dinner with
+me to-morrow.  We will dine late, as the city folks do, and after
+that we will go over to the Rector's.  I should like to show you some
+of our village people."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw liked the thought of showing the young man to some of
+his friends there.  As Clement was already "done for," or "bowled
+out," as the young lawyer would have expressed the fact of his being
+pledged in the matrimonial direction, there was nothing to be
+apprehended on the score of rivalry.  And although Clement was
+particularly good-looking, and would have been called a
+distinguishable youth anywhere, Mr. Bradshaw considered himself far
+more than his match, in all probability, in social accomplishments.
+He expected, therefore, a certain amount of reflex credit for
+bringing such a fine young fellow in his company, and a second
+instalment of reputation from outshining him in conversation.  This
+was rather nice calculating, but Murray Bradshaw always calculated.
+With most men life is like backgammon, half skill, and half luck, but
+with him it was like chess.  He never pushed a pawn without reckoning
+the cost, and when his mind was least busy it was sure to be half a
+dozen moves ahead of the game as it was standing.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw gave Clement a pretty dinner enough for such a place as
+Oxbow Village.  He offered him some good wine, and would have made
+him talk so as to show his lining, to use one of his own expressions,
+but Clement had apparently been through that trifling experience, and
+could not be coaxed into saying more than he meant to say.  Murray
+Bradshaw was very curious to find out how it was that he had become
+the victim of such a rudimentary miss as Susan Posey.  Could she be
+an heiress in disguise?  Why no, of course not; had not he made all
+proper inquiries about that when Susan came to town?  A small
+inheritance from an aunt or uncle, or some such relative, enough to
+make her a desirable party in the eyes of certain villagers perhaps,
+but nothing to allure a man like this, whose face and figure as
+marketable possessions were worth say a hundred thousand in the
+girl's own right, as Mr. Bradshaw put it roughly, with another
+hundred thousand if his talent is what some say, and if his
+connection is a desirable one, a fancy price,--anything he would
+fetch.  Of course not.  Must have got caught when he was a child.
+Why the diavolo didn't he break it off, then?
+
+There was no fault to find with the modest entertainment at the
+Parsonage.  A splendid banquet in a great house is an admirable
+thing, provided always its getting up did not cost the entertainer an
+inward conflict, nor its recollection a twinge of economical regret,
+nor its bills a cramp of anxiety.  A simple evening party in the
+smallest village is just as admirable in its degree, when the parlor
+is cheerfully lighted, and the board prettily spread, and the guests
+are made to feel comfortable without being reminded that anybody is
+making a painful effort.
+
+We know several of the young people who were there, and need not
+trouble ourselves for the others.  Myrtle Hazard had promised to
+come.  She had her own way of late as never before; in fact, the
+women were afraid of her.  Miss Silence felt that she could not be
+responsible for her any longer.  She had hopes for a time that Myrtle
+would go through the customary spiritual paroxysm under the influence
+of the Rev. Mr. Stoker's assiduous exhortations; but since she had
+broken off with him, Miss Silence had looked upon her as little
+better than a backslider.  And now that the girl was beginning to
+show the tendencies which seemed to come straight down to her from
+the belle of the last century, (whose rich physical developments
+seemed to the under-vitalized spinster as in themselves a kind of
+offence against propriety,) the forlorn woman folded her thin hands
+and looked on hopelessly, hardly venturing a remonstrance for fear of
+some new explosion.  As for Cynthia, she was comparatively easy since
+she had, through Mr. Byles Gridley, upset the minister's questionable
+arrangement of religious intimacy.  She had, in fact, in a quiet way,
+given Mr. Bradshaw to understand that he would probably meet Myrtle
+at the Parsonage if he dropped in at their small gathering.  Clement
+walked over to Mrs. Hopkins's after his dinner with the young lawyer,
+and asked if Susan was ready to go with him.  At the sound of his
+voice, Gifted Hopkins smote his forehead, and called himself, in
+subdued tones, a miserable being.  His imagination wavered uncertain
+for a while between pictures of various modes of ridding himself of
+existence, and fearful deeds involving the life of others.  He had no
+fell purpose of actually doing either, but there was a gloomy
+pleasure in contemplating them as possibilities, and in mentally
+sketching the "Lines written in Despair" which would be found in what
+was but an hour before the pocket of the youthful bard, G. H., victim
+of a hopeless passion.  All this emotion was in the nature of  a
+surprise to the young man.  He had fully believed himself desperately
+in love with Myrtle Hazard; and it was not until Clement came into
+the family circle with the right of eminent domain over the realm of
+Susan's affections, that this unfortunate discovered that Susan's
+pretty ways and morning dress and love of poetry and liking for his
+company had been too much for him, and that he was henceforth to be
+wretched during the remainder of his natural life, except so far as
+he could unburden himself in song.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw had asked the privilege of waiting upon
+Myrtle to the little party at the Eveleths.  Myrtle was not
+insensible to the attractions of the young lawyer, though she had
+never thought of herself except as a child in her relations with any
+of these older persons.  But she was not the same girl that she had
+been but a few months before.  She had achieved her independence by
+her audacious and most dangerous enterprise.  She had gone through
+strange nervous trials and spiritual experiences which had matured
+her more rapidly than years of common life would have done.  She had
+got back her health, bringing with it a riper wealth of womanhood.
+She had found her destiny in the consciousness that she inherited the
+beauty belonging to her blood, and which, after sleeping for a
+generation or two as if to rest from the glare of the pageant that
+follows beauty through its long career of triumph, had come to the
+light again in her life, and was to repeat the legends of the olden
+time in her own history.
+
+Myrtle's wardrobe had very little of ornament, such as the modistes
+of the town would have thought essential to render a young girl like
+her presentable.  There were a few heirlooms of old date, however,
+which she had kept as curiosities until now, and which she looked
+over until she found some lace and other convertible material, with
+which she enlivened her costume a little for the evening.  As she
+clasped the antique bracelet around her wrist, she felt as if it were
+an amulet that gave her the power of charming which had been so long
+obsolete in her lineage.  At the bottom of her heart she cherished a
+secret longing to try her fascinations on the young lawyer.  Who
+could blame her?  It was not an inwardly expressed intention,--it was
+the simple instinctive movement to subjugate the strongest of the
+other sex who had come in her way, which, as already said, is as
+natural to a woman as it is to a man to be captivated by the
+loveliest of those to whom he dares to aspire.
+
+Before William Murray Bradshaw and Myrtle Hazard had reached the
+Parsonage, the girl's cheeks were flushed and her dark eyes were
+flashing with a new excitement.  The young man had not made love to
+her directly, but he had interested her in herself by a delicate and
+tender flattery of manner, and so set her fancies working that she
+was taken with him as never before, and wishing that the Parsonage
+had been a mile farther from The Poplars.  It was impossible for a
+young girl like Myrtle to conceal the pleasure she received from
+listening to her seductive admirer, who was trying all his trained
+skill upon his artless companion.  Murray Bradshaw felt sure that the
+game was in his hands if he played it with only common prudence.
+There was no need of hurrying this child,--it might startle her to
+make downright love abruptly; and now that he had an ally in her own
+household, and was to have access to her with a freedom he had never
+before enjoyed, there was a refined pleasure in playing his fish,--
+this gamest of golden-scaled creatures,--which had risen to his fly,
+and which he wished to hook, but not to land, until he was sure it
+would be worth his while.
+
+They entered the little parlor at the Parsonage looking so beaming,
+that Olive and Bathsheba exchanged glances which implied so much that
+it would take a full page to tell it with all the potentialities
+involved.
+
+"How magnificent Myrtle is this evening, Bathsheba!" said Cyprian
+Eveleth, pensively.
+
+"What a handsome pair they are, Cyprian!" said Bathsheba cheerfully.
+
+Cyprian sighed.  "She always fascinates me whenever I look upon her.
+Is n't she the very picture of what a poet's love should be,--a poem
+herself,--a glorious lyric,--all light and music!  See what a smile
+the creature has!  And her voice!  When did you ever hear such tones?
+And when was it ever so full of life before."
+
+Bathsheba sighed.  "I do not know any poets but Gifted Hopkins.  Does
+not Myrtle look more in her place by the side of Murray Bradshaw than
+she would with Gifted hitched on her arm?"
+
+Just then the poet made his appearance.  He looked depressed, as if
+it had cost him an effort to come.  He was, however, charged with a
+message which he must deliver to the hostess of the evening.
+
+"They 're coming presently," he said.  "That young man and Susan.
+Wants you to introduce him, Mr. Bradshaw."
+
+The bell rang presently, and Murray Bradshaw slipped out into the
+entry to meet the two lovers.
+
+"How are you, my fortunate friend?" he said, as he met them at the
+door.  "Of course you're well and happy as mortal man can be in this
+vale of tears.  Charming, ravishing, quite delicious, that way of
+dressing your hair, Miss Posey!  Nice girls here this evening, Mr.
+Lindsay.  Looked lovely when I came out of the parlor.  Can't say how
+they will show after this young lady puts in an appearance."  In
+reply to which florid speeches Susan blushed, not knowing what else
+to do, and Clement smiled as naturally as if he had been sitting for
+his photograph.
+
+He felt, in a vague way, that he and Susan were being patronized,
+which is not a pleasant feeling to persons with a certain pride of
+character.  There was no expression of contempt about Mr. Bradshaw's
+manner or language at which he could take offence.  Only he had the
+air of a man who praises his neighbor without stint, with a calm
+consciousness that he himself is out of reach of comparison in the
+possessions or qualities which he is admiring in the other.  Clement
+was right in his obscure perception of Mr. Bradshaw's feeling while
+he was making his phrases.  That gentleman was, in another moment, to
+have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature he had just
+begun to tame.  He was going to extinguish the pallid light of
+Susan's prettiness in the brightness of Myrtle's beauty.  He would
+bring this young man, neutralized and rendered entirely harmless by
+his irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face to face with a
+masterpiece of young womanhood, and say to him, not in words, but as
+plainly as speech could have told him, "Behold my captive!"
+
+It was a proud moment for Murray Bradshaw.  He had seen, or thought
+that he had seen, the assured evidence of a speedy triumph over all
+the obstacles of Myrtle's youth and his own present seeming slight
+excess of maturity.  Unless he were very greatly mistaken, he could
+now walk the course; the plate was his, no matter what might be the
+entries.  And this youth, this handsome, spirited-looking, noble-
+aired young fellow, whose artist-eye could not miss a line of
+Myrtle's proud and almost defiant beauty, was to be the witness of
+his power, and to look in admiration upon his prize!  He introduced
+him to the others, reserving her for the last.  She was at that
+moment talking with the worthy Rector, and turned when Mr. Bradshaw
+spoke to her.
+
+"Miss Hazard, will you allow me to present to you my friend, Mr.
+Clement Lindsay?"
+
+They looked full upon each other, and spoke the common words of
+salutation.  It was a strange meeting; but we who profess to tell the
+truth must tell strange things, or we shall be liars.
+
+In poor little Susan's letter there was some allusion to a bust of
+Innocence which the young artist had begun, but of which he had said
+nothing in his answer to her.  He had roughed out a block of marble
+for that impersonation; sculpture was a delight to him, though
+secondary to his main pursuit.  After his memorable adventure, the
+image of the girl he had rescued so haunted him that the pale ideal
+which was to work itself out in the bust faded away in its perpetual
+presence, and--alas, poor Susan!  in obedience to the impulse that he
+could not control, he left Innocence sleeping in the marble, and
+began modelling a figure of proud and noble and imperious beauty, to
+which he gave the name of Liberty.
+
+The original which had inspired his conception was before him.  These
+were the lips to which his own had clung when he brought her back
+from the land of shadows.  The hyacinthine curl of her lengthening
+locks had added something to her beauty; but it was the same face
+which had haunted him.  This was the form he had borne seemingly
+lifeless in his arms, and the bosom which heaved so visibly before
+him was that which his eyes they were the calm eyes of a sculptor,
+but of a sculptor hardly twenty years old.
+
+Yes,--her bosom was heaving.  She had an unexplained feeling of
+suffocation, and drew great breaths,--she could not have said why,
+--but she could not help it; and presently she became giddy, and had
+a great noise in her ears, and rolled her eyes about, and was on the
+point of going into an hysteric spasm.  They called Dr. Hurlbut, who
+was making himself agreeable to Olive just then, to come and see what
+was the matter with Myrtle.
+
+"A little nervous turn,--that is all," he said.
+
+"Open the window.  Loose the ribbon round her neck.  Rub her hands.
+Sprinkle some water on her forehead.
+
+"A few drops of cologne.  Room too warm for her,--that 's all, I
+think."
+
+Myrtle came to herself after a time without anything like a regular
+paroxysm.  But she was excitable, and whatever the cause of the
+disturbance may have been, it seemed prudent that she should go home
+early; and the excellent Rector insisted on caring for her, much to
+the discontent of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+"Demonish odd," said this gentleman, "was n't it, Mr. Lindsay, that
+Miss Hazard should go off in that way.  Did you ever see her before?"
+
+"I--I--have seen that young lady before," Clement answered.
+
+"Where did you meet her?" Mr. Bradshaw asked, with eager interest.
+
+"I met her in the Valley of the Shadow of Death," Clement answered,
+very solemnly.--"I leave this place to-morrow morning.  Have you any
+commands for the city?"
+
+"Knows how to shut a fellow up pretty well for a young one, doesn't
+he?" Mr. Bradshaw thought to himself.
+
+"Thank you, no," he answered, recovering himself.  "Rather a
+melancholy place to make acquaintance in, I should think, that Valley
+you spoke of.  I should like to know about it."
+
+Mr. Clement had the power of looking steadily into another person's
+eyes in a way that was by no means encouraging to curiosity or
+favorable to the process of cross-examination.  Mr. Bradshaw was not
+disposed to press his question in the face of the calm, repressive
+look the young man gave him.
+
+"If he was n't bagged, I shouldn't like the shape of things any too
+well," he said to himself.
+
+The conversation between Mr. Clement Lindsay and Miss Susan Posey, as
+they walked home together, was not very brilliant.  "I am going to-
+morrow morning," he said, "and I must bid you good-by tonight."
+Perhaps it is as well to leave two lovers to themselves, under these
+circumstances.
+
+Before he went he spoke to his worthy host, whose moderate demands he
+had to satisfy, and with whom he wished to exchange a few words.
+
+"And by the way, Deacon, I have no use for this book, and as it is in
+a good type, perhaps you would like it.  Your favorite, Scott, and
+one of his greatest works.  I have another edition of it at home, and
+don't care for this volume."
+
+"Thank you, thank you, Mr. Lindsay, much obleeged.  I shall read that
+copy for your sake, the best of books next to the Bible itself."
+
+After Mr. Lindsay had gone, the Deacon looked at the back of the
+book.  "Scott's Works, Vol. IX."  He opened it at hazard, and
+happened to fall on a well-known page, from which he began reading
+aloud, slowly,
+
+    "When Izrul, of the Lord beloved,
+     Out of the land of bondage came."
+
+The whole hymn pleased the grave Deacon.  He had never seen this work
+of the author of the Commentary.  No matter; anything that such a
+good man wrote must be good reading, and he would save it up for
+Sunday.  The consequence of this was, that, when the Rev. Mr. Stoker
+stopped in on his way to meeting on the "Sabbath," he turned white
+with horror at the spectacle of the senior Deacon of his church
+sitting, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, absorbed in the pages of
+"Ivanhoe," which he found enormously interesting; but, so far as he
+had yet read, not occupied with religious matters so much as he had
+expected.
+
+Myrtle had no explanation to give of her nervous attack.  Mr.
+Bradshaw called the day after the party, but did not see her.  He met
+her walking, and thought she seemed a little more distant than
+common.  That would never do.  He called again at The Poplars a few
+days afterwards, and was met in the entry by Miss Cynthia, with whom
+he had a long conversation on matters involving Myrtle's interests
+and their own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+MADNESS?
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay returned to the city and his usual labors in a
+state of strange mental agitation.  He had received an impression for
+which he was unprepared.  He had seen for the second time a young
+girl whom, for the peace of his own mind, and for the happiness of
+others, he should never again have looked upon until Time had taught
+their young hearts the lesson which all hearts must learn, sooner or
+later.
+
+What shall the unfortunate person do who has met with one of those
+disappointments, or been betrayed into one of those positions, which
+do violence to all the tenderest feelings, blighting the happiness of
+youth, and the prospects of after years?
+
+If the person is a young man, he has various resources.  He can take
+to the philosophic meerschaum, and nicotine himself at brief
+intervals into a kind of buzzing and blurry insensibility, until he
+begins to "color" at last like the bowl of his own pipe, and even his
+mind gets the tobacco flavor.  Or he can have recourse to the more
+suggestive stimulants, which will dress his future up for him in
+shining possibilities that glitter like Masonic regalia, until the
+morning light and the waking headache reveal his illusion.  Some kind
+of spiritual anaesthetic he must have, if he holds his grief fast
+tied to his heartstrings.  But as grief must be fed with thought, or
+starve to death, it is the best plan to keep the mind so busy in
+other ways that it has no time to attend to the wants of that
+ravening passion.  To sit down and passively endure it, is apt to end
+in putting all the mental machinery into disorder.
+
+Clement Lindsay had thought that his battle of life was already
+fought, and that he had conquered.  He believed that he had subdued
+himself completely, and that he was ready, without betraying a shadow
+of disappointment, to take the insufficient nature which destiny had
+assigned him in his companion, and share with it all of his own
+larger being it was capable, not of comprehending, but of
+apprehending.
+
+He had deceived himself.  The battle was not fought and won.  There
+had been a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the enemy
+--intrenched in the very citadel of life--had rallied, and would make
+another desperate attempt to retrieve his defeat.
+
+The haste with which the young man had quitted the village was only a
+proof that he felt his danger.  He believed that, if he came into the
+presence of Myrtle Hazard for the third time, he should be no longer
+master of his feelings.  Some explanation must take place between
+them, and how was it possible that it should be without emotion? and
+in what do all emotions shared by a young man with such a young girl
+as this tend to find their last expression?
+
+Clement determined to stun his sensibilities by work.  He would give
+himself no leisure to indulge in idle dreams of what might have been.
+His plans were never so carefully finished, and his studies were
+never so continuous as now.  But the passion still wrought within
+him, and, if he drove it from his waking thoughts, haunted his sleep
+until he could endure it no longer, and must give it some
+manifestation.  He had covered up the bust of Liberty so closely,
+that not an outline betrayed itself through the heavy folds of
+drapery in which it was wrapped.  His thoughts recurred to his
+unfinished marble, as offering the one mode in which he could find a
+silent outlet to the feelings and thoughts which it was torture to
+keep imprisoned in his soul.  The cold stone would tell them, but
+without passion; and having got the image which possessed him out of
+himself into a lifeless form, it seemed as if he might be delivered
+from a presence which, lovely as it was, stood between him and all
+that made him seem honorable and worthy to himself.
+
+He uncovered the bust which he had but half shaped, and struck the
+first flake from the glittering marble.  The toil, once begun,
+fascinated him strangely, and after the day's work was done, and at
+every interval he could snatch from his duties, he wrought at his
+secret task.
+
+"Clement is graver than ever," the young men said at the office.
+"What's the matter, do you suppose?  Turned off by the girl they say
+he means to marry by and by?  How pale he looks too!  Must have
+something worrying him: he used to look as fresh as a clove pink."
+
+The master with whom he studied saw that he was losing color, and
+looking very much worn; and determined to find out, if he could,
+whether he was not overworking himself.  He soon discovered that his
+light was seen burning late into the night, that he was neglecting
+his natural rest, and always busy with some unknown task, not called
+for in his routine of duty or legitimate study.
+
+"Something is wearing on you, Clement," he said.  "You are killing
+yourself with undertaking too much.  Will you let me know what keeps
+you so busy when you ought to be asleep, or taking your ease and
+comfort in some way or other?"
+
+Nobody but himself had ever seen his marble or its model.  He had now
+almost finished it, laboring at it with such sleepless devotion, and
+he was willing to let his master have a sight of his first effort of
+the kind,--for he was not a sculptor, it must be remembered, though
+he had modelled in clay, not without some success, from time to time.
+
+"Come with me," he said.
+
+The master climbed the stairs with him up to his modest chamber.  A
+closely shrouded bust stood on its pedestal in the light of the
+solitary window.
+
+"That is my ideal personage," Clement said.  "Wait one moment, and
+you shall see how far I have caught the character of our uncrowned
+queen."
+
+The master expected, very naturally, to see the conventional young
+woman with classical wreath or feather headdress, whom we have placed
+upon our smallest coin, so that our children may all grow up loving
+Liberty.
+
+As Clement withdrew the drapery that covered his work, the master
+stared at it in amazement.  He looked at it long and earnestly, and
+at length turned his eyes, a little moistened by some feeling which
+thus betrayed itself, upon his scholar.
+
+"This is no ideal, Clement.  It is the portrait of a very young but
+very beautiful woman.  No common feeling could have guided your hand
+in shaping such a portrait from memory.  This must be that friend of
+yours of whom I have often heard as an amiable young person.  Pardon
+me, for you know that nobody cares more for you than I do,--I hope
+that you are happy in all your relations with this young friend of
+yours.  How could one be otherwise?"
+
+It was hard to bear, very hard.  He forced a smile.  "You are partly
+right," he said.  "There is a resemblance, I trust, to a living
+person, for I had one in my mind."
+
+"Did n't you tell me once, Clement, that you were attempting a bust
+of Innocence?  I do not see any block in your room but this.  Is that
+done?"
+
+"Done with!" Clement answered; and, as he said it, the thought stung
+through him that this was the very stone which was to have worn the
+pleasant blandness of pretty Susan's guileless countenance.  How the
+new features had effaced the recollection of the others!
+
+In a few days more Clement had finished his bust.  His hours were
+again vacant to his thick-coming fancies.  While he had been busy
+with his marble, his hands had required his attention, and he must
+think closely of every detail upon which he was at work.  But at
+length his task was done, and he could contemplate what he had made
+of it.  It was a triumph for one so little exercised in sculpture.
+The master had told him so, and his own eye could not deceive him.
+He might never succeed in any repetition of his effort, but this once
+he most certainly had succeeded.  He could not disguise from himself
+the source of this extraordinary good fortune in so doubtful and
+difficult an attempt.  Nor could he resist the desire of
+contemplating the portrait bust, which--it was foolish to talk about
+ideals--was not Liberty, but Myrtle Hazard.
+
+It was too nearly like the story of the ancient sculptor; his own
+work was an over-match for its artist.  Clement had made a mistake in
+supposing that by giving his dream a material form he should drive it
+from the possession of his mind.  The image in which he had fixed his
+recollection of its original served only to keep her living presence
+before him.  He thought of her as she clasped her arms around him,
+and they were swallowed up in the rushing waters, coming so near to
+passing into the unknown world together.  He thought of her as he
+stretched her lifeless form upon the bank, and looked for one brief
+moment on her unsunned loveliness,--"a sight to dream of, not to
+tell."  He thought of her as his last fleeting glimpse had shown her,
+beautiful, not with the blossomy prettiness that passes away with the
+spring sunshine, but with a rich vitality of which noble outlines and
+winning expression were only the natural accidents.  And that
+singular impression which the sight of him had produced upon her,
+--how strange!  How could she but have listened to him,--to him, who
+was, as it were, a second creator to her, for he had bought her back
+from the gates of the unseen realm,--if he had recalled to her the
+dread moments they had passed in each other's arms, with death, not
+love, in all their thoughts.  And if then he had told her how her
+image had remained with him, how it had colored all his visions, and
+mingled with all his conceptions, would not those dark eyes have
+melted as they were turned upon him?  Nay, how could he keep the
+thought away, that she would not have been insensible to his passion,
+if he could have suffered its flame to kindle in his heart?  Did it
+not seem as if Death had spared them for Love, and that Love should
+lead them together through life's long journey to the gates of Death?
+
+Never!  never!  never!  Their fates were fixed.  For him, poor insect
+as he was, a solitary flight by day, and a return at evening to his
+wingless mate!  For her--he thought he saw her doom.
+
+Could he give her up to the cold embraces of that passionless
+egotist, who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining
+net all around her?  Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly.  He
+could not perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we
+must do for him, for it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to
+describe analytically what we know as soon as we see it; but he felt
+in his inner consciousness all that we must tell for him.
+Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing, capable of winning a woman
+infinitely above himself, incapable of understanding her,--oh, if he
+could but touch him with the angel's spear, and bid him take his true
+shape before her whom he was gradually enveloping in the silken
+meshes of his subtle web!  He would make a place for her in the
+world,--oh yes, doubtless.  He would be proud of her in company,
+would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best lights.  But
+from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly
+established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly
+pattern.  He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her
+in their place his table of market-values.  He would teach her to
+submit her sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to
+the fashion of the moment, no matter which world or half-world it
+came from.  "As the husband is, the wife is,"--he would subdue her to
+what he worked in.
+
+All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the
+wife of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he
+did, from the few times he had seen him.  He would be rich by and by,
+very probably.  He looked like one of those young men who are sharp,
+and hard enough to come to fortune.  Then she would have to take her
+place in the great social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily
+opened that the animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of
+stereotyped toilets and the sound of impoverished tattle.  O misery
+of semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end
+to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of
+keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it
+at least from being utterly vapid!  How many fashionable women at the
+end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a
+relief from the desperate monotony of dressing, dawdling, and
+driving!
+
+This could not go on so forever.  Clement had placed a red curtain so
+as to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which
+his fancy turned to the semblance of life.  He would sit and look at
+the features his own hand had so faithfully wrought, until it seemed
+as if the lips moved, sometimes as if they were smiling, sometimes as
+if they were ready to speak to him.  His companions began to whisper
+strange things of him in the studio,--that his eye was getting an
+unnatural light,--that he talked as if to imaginary listeners,--in
+short, that there was a look as if something were going wrong with
+his brain, which it might be feared would spoil his fine
+intelligence.  It was the undecided battle, and the enemy, as in his
+noblest moments he had considered the growing passion, was getting
+the better of him.
+
+He was sitting one afternoon before the fatal bust which had smiled
+and whispered away his peace, when the post-man brought him a letter.
+It was from the simple girl to whom he had given his promise.  We
+know how she used to prattle in her harmless way about her innocent
+feelings, and the trifling matters that were going on in her little
+village world.  But now she wrote in sadness.  Something, she did not
+too clearly explain what, had grieved her, and she gave free
+expression to her feelings.  "I have no one that loves me but you,"
+she said; "and if you leave me I must droop and die.  Are you true to
+me, dearest Clement,--true as when we promised each other that we
+would love while life lasted?  Or have you forgotten one who will
+never cease to remember that she was once your own Susan?"
+
+Clement dropped the letter from his hand, and sat a long hour looking
+at the exquisitely wrought features of her who had come between him
+and honor and his plighted word.
+
+At length he arose, and, lifting the bust tenderly from its pedestal,
+laid it upon the cloth with which it had been covered.  He wrapped it
+closely, fold upon fold, as the mother whom man condemns and God
+pities wraps the child she loves before she lifts her hand against
+its life.  Then he took a heavy hammer and shattered his lovely idol
+into shapeless fragments.  The strife was over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+A CHANGE OF PROGRAMME.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw was in pretty intimate relations with
+Miss Cynthia Badlam.  It was well understood between them that it
+might be of very great advantage to both of them if he should in due
+time become the accepted lover of Myrtle Hazard.  So long as he could
+be reasonably secure against interference, he did not wish to hurry
+her in making her decision.  Two things he did wish to be sure of, if
+possible, before asking her the great question;--first, that she
+would answer it in the affirmative; and secondly, that certain
+contingencies, the turning of which was not as yet absolutely capable
+of being predicted, should happen as he expected.  Cynthia had the
+power of furthering his wishes in many direct and indirect ways, and
+he felt sure of her cooperation.  She had some reason to fear his
+enmity if she displeased him, and he had taken good care to make her
+understand that her interests would be greatly promoted by the
+success of the plan which he had formed, and which was confided to
+her alone.
+
+He kept the most careful eye on every possible source of disturbance
+to this quietly maturing plan.  He had no objection to have Gifted
+Hopkins about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him.  The
+youthful bard entertained her very innocently with his bursts of
+poetry, but she was in no danger from a young person so intimately
+associated with the yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-
+paper parcel.  There was Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any
+very particular solicitude.  Myrtle had evidently found out that she
+was handsome and stylish and all that, and it was not very likely she
+would take up with such a bashful, humble, country youth as this.  He
+could expect nothing beyond a possible rectorate in the remote
+distance, with one of those little pony chapels to preach in, which,
+if it were set up on a stout pole, would pass for a good-sized
+martin-house.  Cyprian might do to practise on, but there was no
+danger of her looking at him in a serious way.  As for that youth,
+Clement Lindsay, if he had not taken himself off as he did, Murray
+Bradshaw confessed to himself that he should have felt uneasy.  He
+was too good-looking, and too clever a young fellow to have knocking
+about among fragile susceptibilities.  But on reflection he saw there
+could be no danger.
+
+"All up with him,--poor diavolo!  Can't understand it--such a little
+sixpenny miss--pretty enough boiled parsnip blonde, if one likes that
+sort of thing--pleases some of the old boys, apparently.  Look out,
+Mr. L. remember Susanna and the Elders.  Good!
+
+"Safe enough if something new doesn't turn up.  Youngish.  Sixteen's
+a little early.  Seventeen will do.  Marry a girl while she's in the
+gristle, and you can shape her bones for her.  Splendid creature
+without her trimmings.  Wants training.  Must learn to dance, and
+sing something besides psalm-tunes."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw began humming the hymn, "When I can read my title
+clear," adding some variations of his own.  "That 's the solo for my
+prima donna!"
+
+In the mean time Myrtle seemed to be showing some new developments.
+One would have said that the instincts of the coquette, or at least
+of the city belle, were coming uppermost in her nature.  Her little
+nervous attack passed away, and she gained strength and beauty every
+day.  She was becoming conscious of her gifts of fascination, and
+seemed to please herself with the homage of her rustic admirers.  Why
+was it that no one of them had the look and bearing of that young man
+she had seen but a moment the other evening?  To think that he should
+have taken up with such a weakling as Susan Posey!  She sighed, and
+not so much thought as felt how kind it would have been in Heaven to
+have made her such a man.  But the image of the delicate blonde stood
+between her and all serious thought of Clement Lindsay.  She saw the
+wedding in the distance, and very foolishly thought to herself that
+she could not and would not go to it.
+
+But Clement Lindsay was gone, and she must content herself with such
+worshippers as the village afforded.  Murray Bradshaw was surprised
+and confounded at the easy way in which she received his compliments,
+and played with his advances, after the fashion of the trained ball-
+room belles, who know how to be almost caressing in manner, and yet
+are really as far off from the deluded victim of their suavities as
+the topmost statue of the Milan cathedral from the peasant that
+kneels on its floor.  He admired her all the more for this, and yet
+he saw that she would be a harder prize to win than he had once
+thought.  If he made up his mind that he would have her, he must go
+armed with all implements, from the red hackle to the harpoon.
+
+The change which surprised Murray Bradshaw could not fail to be
+noticed by all those about her.  Miss Silence had long ago come to
+pantomime, rolling up of eyes, clasping of hands, making of sad
+mouths, and the rest,--but left her to her own way, as already the
+property of that great firm of World & Co. which drives such sharp
+bargains for young souls with the better angels.  Cynthia studied her
+for her own purposes, but had never gained her confidence.  The Irish
+servant saw that some change had come over her, and thought of the
+great ladies she had sometimes looked upon in the old country.  They
+all had a kind of superstitious feeling about Myrtle's bracelet, of
+which she had told them the story, but which Kitty half believed was
+put in the drawer by the fairies, who brought her ribbons and
+partridge feathers, and other slight adornments with which she
+contrived to set off her simple costume, so as to produce those
+effects which an eye for color and cunning fingers can bring out of
+almost nothing.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was now in a sad, vacillating condition, between the
+two great attractions to which he was exposed.  Myrtle looked so
+immensely handsome ere Sunday when he saw her going to church, not to
+meeting, for she world not go, except when she knew Father Pemberton
+was going to be the preacher, that the young poet was on the point of
+going down on his knees to her, and telling her that his heart was
+hers and hers alone.  But he suddenly remembered that he had on his
+best trousers, and the idea of carrying the marks of his devotion in
+the shape of two dusty impressions on his most valued article of
+apparel turned the scale against the demonstration.  It happened the
+next morning, that Susan Posey wore the most becoming ribbon she had
+displayed for a long time, and Gifted was so taken with her pretty
+looks that he might very probably have made the same speech to her
+that he had been on the point of making to Myrtle the day before, but
+that he remembered her plighted affections, and thought what he
+should have to say for himself when Clement Lindsay, in a frenzy of
+rage and jealousy, stood before him, probably armed with as many
+deadly instruments as a lawyer mentions by name in an indictment for
+murder.
+
+Cyprian Eveleth looked very differently on the new manifestations
+Myrtle was making of her tastes and inclinations.  He had always felt
+dazzled, as well as attracted, by her; but now there was something in
+her expression and manner which made him feel still more strongly
+that they were intended for different spheres of life.  He could not
+but own that she was born for a brilliant destiny,--that no ball-
+room would throw a light from its chandeliers too strong for her,
+--that no circle would be too brilliant for her to illuminate by her
+presence.  Love does not thrive without hope, and Cyprian was
+beginning to see that it was idle in him to think of folding these
+wide wings of Myrtle's so that they would be shut up in any cage he
+could ever offer her.  He began to doubt whether, after all, he might
+not find a meeker and humbler nature better adapted to his own.  And
+so it happened that one evening after the three girls, Olive, Myrtle,
+and Bathsheba, had been together at the Parsonage, and Cyprian,
+availing himself of a brother's privilege, had joined them, he found
+he had been talking most of the evening with the gentle girl whose
+voice had grown so soft and sweet, during her long ministry in the
+sick-chamber, that it seemed to him more like music than speech.  It
+would not be fair to say that Myrtle was piqued to see that Cyprian
+was devoting himself to Bathsheba.  Her ambition was already reaching
+beyond her little village circle, and she had an inward sense that
+Cyprian found a form of sympathy in the minister's simple-minded
+daughter which he could not ask from a young woman of her own
+aspirations.
+
+Such was the state of affairs when Master Byles Gridley was one
+morning surprised by an early call from Myrtle.  He had a volume of
+Walton's Polyglot open before him, and was reading Job in the
+original, when she entered.
+
+"Why, bless me, is that my young friend Miss Myrtle Hazard?" he
+exclaimed.  "I might call you Keren-Happuch, which is Hebrew for
+Child of Beauty, and not be very far out of the way, Job's youngest
+daughter, my dear.  And what brings my young friend out in such good
+season this morning?  Nothing going wrong up at our ancient mansion,
+The Poplars, I trust?"
+
+"I want to talk with you, dear Master Gridley," she answered.  She
+looked as if she did not know just how to begin.
+
+"Anything that interests you, Myrtle, interests me.  I think you have
+some project in that young head of yours, my child.  Let us have it,
+in all its dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness.  I think I can
+guess, Myrtle, that we have a little plan of some kind or other.
+We don't visit Papa Job quite so early as this without some special
+cause,--do we, Miss Keren-Happuch?"
+
+"I want to go to the city--to school," Myrtle said, with the
+directness which belonged to her nature.
+
+"That is precisely what I want you to do myself, Miss Myrtle Hazard.
+I don't like to lose you from the village, but I think we must spare
+you for a while."
+
+"You're the best and dearest man that ever lived.  What could have
+made you think of such a thing for me, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Because you are ignorant, my child,--partly I want to see you fitted
+to take a look at the world without feeling like a little country
+miss.  Has your aunt Silence promised to bear your expenses while you
+are in the city?  It will cost a good deal of money."
+
+"I have not said a word to her about it.  I am sure I don't know what
+she would say.  But I have some money, Mr. Gridley."
+
+She showed him a purse with gold, telling him how she came by it.
+"There is some silver besides.  Will it be enough?"
+
+"No, no, my child, we must not meddle with that.  Your aunt will let
+me put it in the bank for you, I think, where it will be safe.  But
+that shall not make any difference.  I have got a little money lying
+idle, which you may just as well have the use of as not.  You can pay
+it back perhaps some time or other; if you did not, it would not make
+much difference.  I am pretty much alone in the world, and except a
+book now and then--Aut liberos aut libros, as our valiant heretic has
+it,--you ought to know a little Latin, Myrtle, but never mind--I have
+not much occasion for money.  You shall go to the best school that
+any of our cities can offer, Myrtle, and you shall stay there until
+we agree that you are fitted to come back to us an ornament to Oxbow
+Village, and to larger places than this if you are called there.  We
+have had some talk about it, your aunt Silence and I, and it is all
+settled.  Your aunt does not feel very rich just now, or perhaps she
+would do more for you.  She has many pious and poor friends, and it
+keeps her funds low.  Never mind, my child, we will have it all
+arranged for you, and you shall begin the year 1860 in Madam
+Delacoste's institution for young ladies.  Too many rich girls and
+fashionable ones there, I fear, but you must see some of all kinds,
+and there are very good instructors in the school,--I know one,--he
+was a college boy with me,--and you will find pleasant and good
+companions there, so he tells me; only don't be in a hurry to choose
+your friends, for the least desirable young persons are very apt to
+cluster about a new-comer."
+
+Myrtle was bewildered with the suddenness of the prospect thus held
+out to her.  It is a wonder that she did not bestow an embrace upon
+the worthy old master.  Perhaps she had too much tact.  It is a
+pretty way enough of telling one that he belongs to a past
+generation, but it does tell him that not over-pleasing fact.  Like
+the title of Emeritus Professor, it is a tribute to be accepted,
+hardly to be longed for.
+
+When the curtain rises again, it will show Miss Hazard in a new
+character, and surrounded by a new world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+MYRTLE HAZARD AT THE CITY SCHOOL.
+
+Mr. Bradshaw was obliged to leave town for a week or two on business
+connected with the great land-claim.  On his return, feeling in
+pretty good spirits, as the prospects looked favorable, he went to
+make a call at The Poplars.  He asked first for Miss Hazard.
+
+"Bliss your soul, Mr. Bridshaw," answered Mistress Kitty Fagan,
+"she's been gahn nigh a wake.  It's to the city, to the big school,
+they've sint her."
+
+This announcement seemed to make a deep impression on Murray
+Bradshaw, for his feelings found utterance in one of the most
+energetic forms of language to which ears polite or impolite are
+accustomed.  He next asked for Miss Silence, who soon presented
+herself.  Mr. Bradshaw asked, in a rather excited way, "Is it
+possible, Miss Withers, that your niece has quitted you to go to a
+city school?"
+
+Miss Silence answered, with her chief--mourner expression, and her
+death-chamber tone: "Yes, she has left us for a season.  I trust it
+may not be her destruction.  I had hoped in former years that she
+would become a missionary, but I have given up all expectation of
+that now.  Two whole years, from the age of four to that of six, I
+had prevailed upon her to give up sugar,--the money so saved to go to
+a graduate of our institution--who was afterwards----he labored among
+the cannibal-islanders.  I thought she seemed to take pleasure in
+this small act of self-denial, but I have since suspected that Kitty
+gave her secret lumps.  It was by Mr. Gridley's advice that she went,
+and by his pecuniary assistance.  What could I do?  She was bent on
+going, and I was afraid she would have fits, or do something
+dreadful, if I did not let her have her way.  I am afraid she will
+come back to us spoiled.  She has seemed so fond of dress lately, and
+once she spoke of learning--yes, Mr. Bradshaw, of learning to--dance!
+I wept when I heard of it.  Yes, I wept."
+
+That was such a tremendous thing to think of, and especially to speak
+of in Mr. Bradshaw's presence, for the most pathetic image in the
+world to many women is that of themselves in tears,--that it brought
+a return of the same overflow, which served as a substitute for
+conversation until Miss Badlam entered the apartment.
+
+Miss Cynthia followed the same general course of remark.  They could
+not help Myrtle's going if they tried.  She had always maintained
+that, if they had only once broke her will when she was little, they
+would have kept the upper hand of her; but her will never was broke.
+They came pretty near it once, but the child would n't give in.
+
+Miss Cynthia went to the door with Mr. Bradshaw, and the conversation
+immediately became short and informal.
+
+"Demonish pretty business!  All up for a year or more,--hey?"
+
+Don't blame me,--I couldn't stop her."
+
+"Give me her address,--I 'll write to her.  Any young men teach in
+the school?"
+
+"Can't tell you.  She'll write to Olive and Bathsheba, and I'll find
+out all about it."
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place, containing many interesting remarks and
+inquiries, some of the latter relating to Madam Delacoste's
+institution for the education of young ladies.
+
+While this was going on at Oxbow Village, Myrtle was establishing
+herself at the rather fashionable school to which Mr. Gridley had
+recommended her.  Mrs. or Madam Delacoste's boarding-school had a
+name which on the whole it deserved pretty well.  She had some very
+good instructors for girls who wished to get up useful knowledge in
+case they might marry professors or ministers.  They had a chance to
+learn music, dancing, drawing, and the way of behaving in company.
+There was a chance, too, to pick up available acquaintances, for many
+rich people sent their daughters to the school, and it was something
+to have been bred in their company.
+
+There was the usual division of the scholars into a first and second
+set, according to the social position, mainly depending upon the
+fortune, of the families to which they belonged.  The wholesale
+dealer's daughter very naturally considered herself as belonging to a
+different order from the retail dealer's daughter.  The keeper of a
+great hotel and the editor of a widely circulated newspaper were
+considered as ranking with the wholesale dealers, and their daughters
+belonged also to the untitled nobility which has the dollar for its
+armorial bearing.  The second set had most of the good scholars, and
+some of the prettiest girls; but nobody knew anything about their
+families, who lived off the great streets and avenues, or vegetated
+in country towns.
+
+Myrtle Hazard's advent made something like a sensation.  They did not
+know exactly what to make of her.  Hazard?  Hazard?  No great firm of
+that name.  No leading hotel kept by any Hazard, was there?  No
+newspaper of note edited by anybody called Hazard, was there?  Came
+from where?  Oxbow Village.  Oh, rural district.  Yes.--Still they
+could not help owning that she was handsome, a concession which of
+course had to be made with reservations.
+
+"Don't you think she's vuiry good-lookin'?" said a Boston girl to a
+New York girl.  "I think she's real pooty."
+
+"I dew, indeed.  I didn't think she was haaf so handsome the feeest
+time I saw her," answered the New York girl.
+
+"What a pity she had n't been bawn in Bawston!"
+
+"Yes, and moved very young to Ne Yock!"
+
+"And married a sarsaparilla man, and lived in Fiff Avenoo, and moved
+in the fust society."
+
+"Better dew that than be strong-mainded, and dew your own cook'n, and
+live in your own kitch'n."
+
+"Don't forgit to send your card when you are Mrs. Old Dr. Jacob!"
+
+"Indeed I shaan't.  What's the name of the alley, and which bell?"
+The New York girl took out a memorandum-book as if to put it down.
+
+"Had n't you better let me write it for you, dear?" said the Boston
+girl.  "It is as well to have it legible, you know."
+
+"Take it," said the New York girl.  "There 's tew York shill'ns in it
+when I hand it to you."
+
+"Your whole quarter's allowance, I bullieve,--ain't it?" said the
+Boston girl.
+
+"Elegant manners, correct deportment, and propriety of language will
+be strictly attended to in this institution.  The most correct
+standards of pronunciation will be inculcated by precept and example.
+It will be the special aim of the teachers to educate their pupils
+out of all provincialisms, so that they may be recognized as well-
+bred English scholars wherever the language is spoken in its purity."
+--Extract from the Prospectus of Madam Delacoste's Boarding-school.
+
+Myrtle Hazard was a puzzle to all the girls.  Striking, they all
+agreed, but then the criticisms began.  Many of the girls chattered a
+little broken French, and one of them, Miss Euphrosyne De Lacy, had
+been half educated in Paris, so that she had all the phrases which
+are to social operators what his cutting instruments are to the
+surgeon.  Her face she allowed was handsome; but her style, according
+to this oracle, was a little bourgeoise, and her air not exactly
+comme il faut.  More specifically, she was guilty of contours
+fortement prononces,--corsage de paysanne,--quelque chose de sauvage,
+etc., etc.  This girl prided herself on her figure.
+
+Miss Bella Pool, (La Belle Poule as the demi-Parisian girl had
+christened her,) the beauty of the school, did not think so much of
+Myrtle's face, but considered her figure as better than the De Lacy
+girl's.
+
+The two sets, first and second, fought over her as the Greeks and
+Trojans over a dead hero, or the Yale College societies over a live
+freshman.  She was nobody by her connections, it is true, so far as
+they could find out, but then, on the other hand, she had the walk of
+a queen, and she looked as if a few stylish dresses and a season or
+two would make her a belle of the first water.  She had that air of
+indifference to their little looks and whispered comments which is
+surest to disarm all the critics of a small tattling community.  On
+the other hand, she came to this school to learn, and not to play;
+and the modest and more plainly dressed girls, whose fathers did not
+sell by the cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some
+hundreds of people, considered her as rather in sympathy with them
+than with the daughters of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who
+were grappling and rolling over each other in the golden dust of the
+great city markets.
+
+She did not mean to belong exclusively to either of their sets.  She
+came with that sense of manifold deficiencies, and eager ambition to
+supply them, which carries any learner upward, as if on wings, over
+the heads of the mechanical plodders and the indifferent routinists.
+She learned, therefore, in a way to surprise the experienced
+instructors.  Her somewhat rude sketching soon began to show
+something of the artist's touch.  Her voice, which had only been
+taught to warble the simplest melodies, after a little training began
+to show its force and sweetness and flexibility in the airs that
+enchant drawing-room audiences.  She caught with great readiness the
+manner of the easiest girls, unconsciously, for she inherited old
+social instincts which became nature with the briefest exercise.  Not
+much license of dress was allowed in the educational establishment of
+Madam Delacoste, but every girl had an opportunity to show her taste
+within the conventional limits prescribed.  And Myrtle soon began to
+challenge remark by a certain air she contrived to give her dresses,
+and the skill with which she blended their colors.
+
+"Tell you what, girls," said Miss Berengaria Topping, female
+representative of the great dynasty that ruled over the world-famous
+Planet Hotel, "she's got style, lots of it.  I call her perfectly
+splendid, when she's got up in her swell clothes.  That oriole's wing
+she wears in her bonnet makes her look gorgeous, she'll be a stunning
+Pocahontas for the next tableau."
+
+Miss Rose Bugbee, whose family opulence grew out of the only
+merchantable article a Hebrew is never known to seek profit from,
+thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken
+in hand in good season.  So it came about that, before many weeks had
+passed over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment,
+she might be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the
+whole bevy of them.  The studious ones admired her for her facility
+of learning, and her extraordinary appetite for every form of
+instruction, and the showy girls, who were only enduring school as
+the purgatory that opened into the celestial world of society,
+recognized in her a very handsome young person, who would be like to
+make a sensation sooner or later.
+
+There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered
+themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who
+submitted her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.
+
+"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe."
+We keep nine, and a pony for Edgar."
+
+Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not
+keep any horses.  Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to
+form an acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-
+bonnet-maker) that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--
+they were letting in persons one knew nothing about.
+
+Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate
+used in the household from which Myrtle came.  Her father had just
+bought a complete silver service.  Myrtle had to own that they used a
+good deal of china at her own home,--old china, which had been a
+hundred years in the family, some of it.
+
+"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clare Browne.  "What queer-
+looking stuff it must be!  Why, everything in our house is just as
+new and bright!  Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for
+us.  Have you got any handsome pictures in your house?"
+
+"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said,
+"some of them older than the china."
+
+"How very very odd!  What do the dear old things look like?"
+
+"One was a great beauty in her time."
+
+"How jolly!"
+
+"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her religion,
+--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."
+
+"How very very wicked!  It was n't nice a bit, was it?  Ain't you
+telling me stories?  Was that a hundred years ago?--But you 've got
+some new pictures and things, have n't you?  Who furnished your
+parlors?"
+
+"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense.  I don't believe it.  What color are your
+carriage-horses?"
+
+"Our woman, Kitty Fagan, told somebody once we didn't keep any horse
+but a cow."
+
+" Not keep any horses!  Do for pity's sake let me look at your feet."
+
+Myrtle put out as neat a little foot as a shoemaker ever fitted with
+a pair of number two.  What she would have been tempted to do with
+it, if she had been a boy, we will not stop to guess.  After all, the
+questions amused her quite as much as the answers instructed Miss
+Clara Browne.  Of that young lady's ancestral claims to distinction
+there is no need of discoursing.  Her "papaa" commonly said sir in
+talking with a gentleman, and her "mammaa" would once in a while
+forget, and go down the area steps instead of entering at the proper
+door; but they lived behind a brown stone front, which veneers
+everybody's antecedents with a facing of respectability.
+
+Miss Clara Browne wrote home to her mother in the same terms as Miss
+Florence Smythe,--that the school was getting dreadful common, and
+they were letting in very queer folks.
+
+Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
+thousand would have been so unprepared to meet.  She knew absolutely
+nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young
+persons were quite familiar.
+
+There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens
+and Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and
+occasionally, perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have let
+alone.  One of the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle
+one day.
+
+"Oh, is n't 'Pickwick' nice?" she asked.
+
+"I don't know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."
+
+The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature.  "Tasted any!
+Why, I mean the 'Pickwick Papers,' Dickens's story.  Don't you think
+they're nice."
+
+Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and did n't
+know anything about them.
+
+"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.
+
+"Oh, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the
+great trunk and its contents.  "I have read 'Caleb Williams,' and
+'Evelina,' and 'Tristram Shandy'" (naughty girl!), "and the 'Castle
+of Otranto,' and the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and the 'Vicar of
+Wakefield,' and 'Don Quixote'--"
+
+The young lady burst out laughing.  "Stop! stop! for mercy's sake,"
+she cried.  "You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and
+come back to life again.  Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat!
+You ought to powder your hair and wear patches."
+
+"We've got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home.  "She
+has n't read any book that is n't a thousand years old.  One of the
+girls says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old
+stone, I believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago.  Her name,
+she says, is Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."
+
+Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled
+to lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a
+few young gentlemen were admitted.  One of these took place about a
+month after Myrtle had joined the school.  The girls were all in
+their best, and by and by they were to have a tableau.  Myrtle came
+out in all her force.  She dressed herself as nearly as she dared
+like the handsome woman of the past generation whom she resembled.
+The very spirit of the dead beauty seemed to animate every feature
+and every movement of the young girl whose position in the school was
+assured from that moment.  She had a good solid foundation to build
+upon in the jealousy of two or three of the leading girls of the
+style of pretensions illustrated by some of their talk which has been
+given.  There is no possible success without some opposition as a
+fulcrum: force is always aggressive, and crowds something or other,
+if it does not hit or trample on it.
+
+The cruelest cut of all was the remark attributed to Mr. Livingston
+Jerkins, who was what the opposition girls just referred to called
+the great "swell" among the privileged young gentlemen who were
+present at the gathering.
+
+"Rip Van Myrtle, you call that handsome girl, do you, Miss Clara?  By
+Jove, she's the stylishest of the whole lot, to say nothing of being
+a first-class beauty.  Of course you know I except one, Miss Clara.
+If a girl can go to sleep and wake up after twenty years looking like
+that, I know a good many who had better begin their nap without
+waiting.  If I were Florence Smythe, I'd try it, and begin now,--eh,
+Clara?"
+
+Miss Browne felt the praise of Myrtle to be slightly alleviated by
+the depreciation of Miss Smythe, who had long been a rival of her
+own.  A little later in the evening Miss Smythe enjoyed almost
+precisely the same sensation, produced in a very economical way by
+Mr. Livingston Jenkins's repeating pretty nearly the same sentiments
+to her, only with a change in the arrangement of the proper names.
+The two young ladies were left feeling comparatively comfortable with
+regard to each other, each intending to repeat Mr. Livingston
+Jenkins's remark about her friend to such of her other friends as
+enjoyed clever sayings, but not at all comfortable with reference to
+Myrtle Hazard, who was evidently considered by the leading "swell" of
+their circle as the most noticeable personage of the assembly.  The
+individual exception in each case did very well as a matter of
+politeness, but they knew well enough what he meant.
+
+It seemed to Myrtle Hazard, that evening, that she felt the bracelet
+on her wrist glow with a strange, unaccustomed warmth.  It was as if
+it had just been unclasped from the arm of a yohng woman full of red
+blood and tingling all over with swift nerve-currents.  Life had
+never looked to her as it did that evening.  It was the swan's first
+breasting the water,--bred on the desert sand, with vague dreams of
+lake and river, and strange longings as the mirage came and
+dissolved, and at length afloat upon the sparkling wave.  She felt as
+if she had for the first time found her destiny.  It was to please,
+and so to command, to rule with gentle sway in virtue of the royal
+gift of beauty,--to enchant with the commonest exercise of speech,
+through the rare quality of a voice which could not help being always
+gracious and winning, of a manner which came to her as an inheritance
+of which she had just found the title.  She read in the eyes of all
+that she was more than any other the centre of admiration.  Blame her
+who may, the world was a very splendid vision as it opened before her
+eyes in its long vista of pleasures and of triumphs.  How different
+the light of these bright saloons from the glimmer of the dim chamber
+at The Poplars!  Silence Withers was at that very moment looking at
+the portraits of Anne Holyoake and of Judith Pride.  "The old picture
+seems to me to be fading faster than ever," she was thinking.  But
+when she held her lamp before the other, it seemed to her that the
+picture never was so fresh before, and that the proud smile upon its
+lips was more full of conscious triumph than she remembered it.  A
+reflex, doubtless, of her own thoughts, for she believed that the
+martyr was weeping even in heaven over her lost descendant, and that
+the beauty, changed to the nature of the malignant spiritual company
+with which she had long consorted in the under-world, was pleasing
+herself with the thought that Myrtle was in due time to bring her
+news from the Satanic province overhead, where she herself had so
+long indulged in the profligacy of embonpoint and loveliness.
+
+The evening at the school-party was to terminate with some tableaux.
+The girl who had suggested that Myrtle would look "stunning" or
+"gorgeous" or "jolly," or whatever the expression was, as Pocahontas,
+was not far out of the way, and it was so evident to the managing
+heads that she would make a fine appearance in that character, that
+the "Rescue of Captain John Smith" was specially got up to show her
+off.
+
+Myrtle had sufficient reason to believe that there was a hint of
+Indian blood in her veins.  It was one of those family legends which
+some of the members are a little proud of, and others are willing to
+leave uninvestigated.  But with Myrtle it was a fixed belief that she
+felt perfectly distinct currents of her ancestral blood at intervals,
+and she had sometimes thought there were instincts and vague
+recollections which must have come from the old warriors and hunters
+and their dusky brides.  The Indians who visited the neighborhood
+recognized something of their own race in her dark eyes, as the
+reader may remember they told the persons who were searching after
+her.  It had almost frightened her sometimes to find how like a wild
+creature she felt when alone in the woods.  Her senses had much of
+that delicacy for which the red people are noted, and she often
+thought she could follow the trail of an enemy, if she wished to
+track one through the forest, as unerringly as if she were a Pequot
+or a Mohegan.
+
+It was a strange feeling that came over Myrtle, as they dressed her
+for the part she was to take.  Had she never worn that painted robe
+before?  Was it the first time that these strings of wampum had ever
+rattled upon her neck and arms?  And could it be that the plume of
+eagle's feathers with which they crowned her dark, fast-lengthening
+locks had never shadowed her forehead until now?  She felt herself
+carried back into the dim ages when the wilderness was yet untrodden
+save by the feet of its native lords.  Think of her wild fancy as we
+may, she felt as if that dusky woman of her midnight vision on the
+river were breathing for one hour through her lips.  If this belief
+had lasted, it is plain enough where it would have carried her.  But
+it came into her imagination and vivifying consciousness with the
+putting on of her unwonted costume, and might well leave her when she
+put it off.  It is not for us, who tell only what happened, to solve
+these mysteries of the seeming admission of unhoused souls into the
+fleshly tenements belonging to air-breathing personalities.  A very
+little more, and from that evening forward the question would have
+been treated in full in all the works on medical jurisprudence
+published throughout the limits of Christendom.  The story must be
+told or we should not be honest with the reader.
+
+TABLEAU 1.  Captain John Smith (Miss Euphrosyne de Lacy) was to be
+represented prostrate and bound, ready for execution; Powhatan (Miss
+Florence Smythe) sitting upon a log; savages with clubs (Misses Clara
+Browne, A. Van Boodle, E. Van Boodle, Heister, Booster, etc., etc.)
+standing around; Pocahontas holding the knife in her hand, ready to
+cut the cords with which Captain John Smith is bound.--Curtain.
+
+TABLEAU 2.  Captain John Smith released and kneeling before
+Pocahontas, whose hand is extended in the act of raising him and
+presenting him to her father.  Savages in various attitudes of
+surprise.  Clubs fallen from their hands.  Strontian flame to be
+kindled.--Curtain.
+
+This was a portion of the programme for the evening, as arranged
+behind the scenes.  The first part went off with wonderful eclat, and
+at its close there were loud cries for Pocahontas.  She appeared for
+a moment.  Bouquets were flung to her; and a wreath, which one of the
+young ladies had expected for herself in another part, was tossed
+upon the stage, and laid at her feet.  The curtain fell.
+
+"Put the wreath on her for the next tableau," some of them whispered,
+just as the curtain was going to rise, and one of the girls hastened
+to place it upon her head.
+
+The disappointed young lady could not endure it, and, in a spasm of
+jealous passion, sprang at Myrtle, snatched it from her head, and
+trampled it under her feet at the very instant the curtain was
+rising.  With a cry which some said had the blood-chilling tone of an
+Indian's battle-shriek, Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her
+arm against the girl who had thus rudely assailed her.  The girl sank
+to the ground, covering her eyes in her terror.  Myrtle, with her arm
+still lifted, and the blade glistening in her hand, stood over her,
+rigid as if she had been suddenly changed to stone.  Many of those
+looking on thought all this was a part of the show, and were thrilled
+with the wonderful acting.  Before those immediately around her had
+had time to recover from the palsy of their fright Myrtle had flung
+the knife away from her, and was kneeling, her head bowed and her
+hands crossed upon her breast.  The audience went into a rapture of
+applause as the curtain came suddenly down; but Myrtle had forgotten
+all but the dread peril she had just passed, and was thanking God
+that his angel--her own protecting spirit, as it seemed to her had
+stayed the arm which a passion such as her nature had never known,
+such as she believed was alien to her truest self, had lifted with
+deadliest purpose.  She alone knew how extreme the danger had been.
+"She meant to scare her,--that 's all," they said.  But Myrtle tore
+the eagle's feathers from her hair, and stripped off her colored
+beads, and threw off her painted robe.  The metempsychosis was far
+too real for her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from
+whom, as she believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of
+which her soul recoiled in horror.
+
+"Pocahontas has got a horrid headache," the managing young ladies
+gave it out, "and can't come to time for the last tableau."  So this
+all passed over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with
+no small addition to her local fame,--for it must have been acting;
+"and was n't it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if
+she was going to stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?"
+
+As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with
+new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact
+with those who were least agreeable to meet.  The low-bred youth who
+amuse themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls
+who try to show off their gentility to those whom they think less
+important than themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but
+they make themselves odiously prominent before the quiet and modest
+young people have had time to gain the new scholar's confidence.
+Myrtle found friends in due time, some of them daughters of rich
+people, some poor girls, who came with the same sincerity of purpose
+as herself.  But not one was her match in the facility of acquiring
+knowledge.  Not one promised to make such a mark in society, if she
+found an opening into its loftier circles.  She was by no means
+ignorant of her natural gifts, and she cultivated them with the
+ambition which would not let her rest.
+
+During her stay at the great school, she made but one visit to Oxbow
+Village.  She did not try to startle the good people with her
+accomplishments, but they were surprised at the change which had
+taken place in her.  Her dress was hardly more showy, for she was but
+a school-girl, but it fitted her more gracefully.  She had gained a
+softness of expression, and an ease in conversation, which produced
+their effect on all with whom she came in contact.  Her aunt's voice
+lost something of its plaintiveness in talking with her.  Miss
+Cynthia listened with involuntary interest to her stories of school
+and school-mates.  Master Byles Gridley accepted her as the great
+success of his life, and determined to make her his chief heiress, if
+there was any occasion for so doing.  Cyprian told Bathsheba that
+Myrtle must come to be a great lady.  Gifted Hopkins confessed to
+Susan Posey that he was afraid of her, since she had been to the
+great city school.  She knew too much and looked too much like a
+queen, for a village boy to talk with.
+
+Mr. William Murray Bradshaw tried all his fascinations upon her, but
+she parried compliments so well, and put off all his nearer advances
+so dexterously, that he could not advance beyond the region of florid
+courtesy, and never got a chance, if so disposed, to risk a question
+which he would not ask rashly, believing that, if Myrtle once said
+No, there would be little chance of her ever saying Yes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+MUSTERING OF FORCES.
+
+Not long after the tableau performance had made Myrtle Hazard's name
+famous in the school and among the friends of the scholars, she
+received the very flattering attention of a call from Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum, of 24 Carat Place.  This was in consequence of a suggestion
+from Mr. Livingston Jenkins, a particular friend of the family.
+
+"They've got a demonish splendid school-girl over there," he said to
+that lady, "made the stunningest looking Pocahontas at the show there
+the other day.  Demonish plucky looking filly as ever you saw. Had a
+row with another girl,--gave the war-whoop, and went at her with a
+knife.  Festive,--hey?  Say she only meant to scare her,--looked as
+if she meant to stick her, anyhow.  Splendid style.  Why can't you go
+over to the shop and make 'em trot her out?"
+
+The lady promised Mr. Livingston Jenkins that she certainly would,
+just as soon as she could find a moment's leisure,--which, as she had
+nothing in the world to do, was not likely to be very soon.  Myrtle
+in the mean time was busy with her studies, little dreaming what an
+extraordinary honor was awaiting her.
+
+That rare accident in the lives of people who have nothing to do, a
+leisure morning, did at last occur.  An elegant carriage, with a
+coachman in a wonderful cape, seated on a box lofty as a throne, and
+wearing a hat-band as brilliant as a coronet, stopped at the portal
+of Madam Delacoste's establishment.  A card was sent in bearing the.
+open sesame of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, the great lady of 24 Carat Place.
+Miss Myrtle Hazard was summoned as a matter of course, and the
+fashionable woman and the young girl sat half an hour together in
+lively conversation.
+
+Myrtle was fascinated by her visitor, who had that flattering manner
+which, to those not experienced in the world's ways, seems to imply
+unfathomable depths of disinterested devotion.  Then it was so
+delightful to look upon a perfectly appointed woman,--one who was as
+artistically composed as a poem or an opera,--in whose costume a kind
+of various rhythm undulated in one fluent harmony, from the spray
+that nodded on her bonnet to the rosette that blossomed on her
+sandal.  As for the lady, she was captivated with Myrtle.  There is
+nothing that your fashionable woman, who has ground and polished her
+own spark of life into as many and as glittering social facets as it
+will bear, has a greater passion for than a large rough diamond,
+which knows nothing of the sea of light it imprisons, and which it
+will be her pride to have cut into a brilliant under her own eye, and
+to show the world for its admiration and her own reflected glory.
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum had taken the entire inventory of Myrtle's
+natural endowments before the interview was over.  She had no
+marriageable children, and she was thinking what a killing bait
+Myrtle would be at one of her stylish parties.
+
+She soon got another letter from Mr. William Murray Bradshaw, which
+explained the interest he had taken in Madam Delacoste's school,--all
+which she knew pretty nearly beforehand, for she had found out a good
+part of Myrtle's history in the half-hour they had spent in company.
+
+"I had a particular reason for my inquiries about the school," he
+wrote.  "There is a young girl there I take an interest in.  She is
+handsome and interesting; and--though it is a shame to mention such a
+thing has possibilities in the way of fortune not to be undervalued.
+Why can't you make her acquaintance and be civil to her?  A country
+girl, but fine old stock, and will make a figure some time or other,
+I tell you.  Myrtle Hazard,--that's her name.  A mere schoolgirl.
+Don't be malicious and badger me about her, but be polite to her.
+Some of these country girls have got 'blue blood' in them, let me
+tell you, and show it plain enough."
+
+("In huckleberry season!") said Mrs. Ciymer Ketchum, in a
+parenthesis,--and went on reading.
+
+"Don't think I'm one of your love-in-a-cottage sort, to have my head
+turned by a village beauty.  I've got a career before me, Mrs. K.,
+and I know it.  But this is one of my pets, and I want you to keep an
+eye on her.  Perhaps when she leaves school you wouldn't mind asking
+her to come and stay with you a little while.  Possibly I may come
+and see how she is getting on if you do,--won't that tempt you, Mrs.
+C. K.?"
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum wrote back to her relative how she had already
+made the young lady's acquaintance.
+
+"Livingston Jerkins (you remember him) picked her out of the whole
+lot of girls as the 'prettiest filly in the stable.'  That's his
+horrid way of talking.  But your young milkmaid is really charming,
+and will come into form like a Derby three-year-old.  There, now,
+I've caught that odious creature's horse-talk, myself.  You're dead
+in love with this girl, Murray, you know you are.
+
+"After all, I don't know but you're right.  You would make a good
+country lawyer enough, I don't doubt.  I used to think you had your
+ambitions, but never mind.  If you choose to risk yourself on
+'possibilities,' it is not my affair, and she's a beauty, there's no
+mistake about that.
+
+"There are some desirable partis at the school with your dulcinea.
+There 's Rose Bugbee.  That last name is a good one to be married
+from.  Rose is a nice girl,--there are only two of them.  The estate
+will cut up like one of the animals it was made out of, you know,--
+the sandwich-quadruped.  Then there 's Berengaria.  Old Topping owns
+the Planet Hotel among other things,--so big, they say, there's
+always a bell ringing from somebody's room day and night the year
+round.  Only child--unit and six ciphers carries diamonds loose in
+her pocket--that's the story--good-looking--lively--a little slangy
+called Livingston Jerkins 'Living Jingo' to his face one day.  I want
+you to see my lot before you do anything serious.  You owe something
+to the family, Mr. William Murray Bradshaw!  But you must suit
+yourself, after all: if you are contented with a humble position in
+life, it is nobody's business that I know of.  Only I know what life
+is, Murray B.  Getting married is jumping overboard, any way you look
+at it, and if you must save some woman from drowning an old maid, try
+to find one with a cork jacket, or she 'll carry you down with her."
+
+Murray Bradshaw was calculating enough, but he shook his head over
+this letter.  It was too demonish cold-blooded for him, he said to
+himself.  (Men cannot pardon women for saying aloud what they do not
+hesitate to think in silence themselves.)  Never mind,--he must have
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's house and influence for his own purposes.
+Myrtle Hazard must become her guest, and then if circumstances were
+favorable, he was certain obtaining her aid in his project.
+
+The opportunity to invite Myrtle to the great mansion presented
+itself unexpectedly.  Early in the spring of 1861 there were some
+cases of sickness in Madam Delacoste's establishment, which led to
+closing the school for a while.  Mrs. Clymer Ketchum took advantage
+of the dispersion of the scholars to ask Myrtle to come and spend
+some weeks with her.  There were reasons why this was more agreeable
+to the young girl than returning to Oxbow Village, and she very
+gladly accepted the invitation.
+
+It was very remarkable that a man living as Master Byles Gridley had
+lived for so long a time should all at once display such liberality
+as he showed to a young woman who had no claim upon him, except that
+he had rescued her from the consequences of her own imprudence and
+warned her against impending dangers.  Perhaps he cared more for her
+than if the obligation had been the other way,--students of human
+nature say it is commonly so.  At any rate, either he had ampler
+resources than it was commonly supposed, or he was imprudently giving
+way to his generous impulses, or he thought he was making advances
+which would in due time be returned to him.  Whatever the reason was,
+he furnished her with means, not only for her necessary expenses, but
+sufficient to afford her many of the elegances which she would be
+like to want in the fashionable society with which she was for a
+short time to mingle.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was so well pleased with the young lady she was
+entertaining, that she thought it worth while to give a party while
+Myrtle was staying with her.  She had her jealousies and rivalries,
+as women of the world will, sometimes, and these may have had their
+share in leading her to take the trouble a large party involved.  She
+was tired of the airs of Mrs. Pinnikle, who was of the great Apex
+family, and her terribly accomplished daughter Rhadamartha, and
+wanted to crush the young lady, and jaundice her mother, with a girl
+twice as brilliant and ten times handsomer.  She was very willing,
+also, to take the nonsense out of the Capsheaf girls, who thought
+themselves the most stylish personages of their city world, and would
+bite their lips well to see themselves distanced by a country miss.
+
+In the mean time circumstances were promising to bring into Myrtle's
+neighborhood several of her old friends and admirers.  Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum had written to Murray Bradshaw that she had asked his pretty
+milkmaid to come and stay awhile with her, but he had been away on
+business, and only arrived in the city a day or two before the party.
+But other young fellows had found out the attractions of the girl who
+was "hanging out at the Clymer Ketchum concern," and callers were
+plenty, reducing tete-a-tetes in a corresponding ratio.  He did get
+one opportunity, however, and used it well.  They had so many things
+to talk about in common, that she could not help finding him good
+company.  She might well be pleased, for he was an adept in the
+curious art of being agreeable, as other people are in chess or
+billiards, and had made a special study of her tastes, as a physician
+studies a patient's constitution.  What he wanted was to get her
+thoroughly interested in himself, and to maintain her in a receptive
+condition until such time as he should be ready for a final move.
+Any day might furnish the decisive motive; in the mean time he wished
+only to hold her as against all others.
+
+It was well for her, perhaps, that others had flattered her into a
+certain consciousness of her own value.  She felt her veins full of
+the same rich blood as that which had flushed the cheeks of handsome
+Judith in the long summer of her triumph.  Whether it was vanity, or
+pride, or only the instinctive sense of inherited force and
+attraction, it was the best of defences.  The golden bracelet on her
+wrist seemed to have brought as much protection with it as if it had
+been a shield over her heart.
+
+
+But far away in Oxbow Village other events were in preparation.  The
+"fugitive pieces" of Mr. Gifted Hopkins had now reached a number so
+considerable, that, if collected and printed in large type, with
+plenty of what the unpleasant printers call "fat,"--meaning thereby
+blank spaces,--upon a good, substantial, not to say thick paper, they
+might perhaps make a volume which would have substance enough to bear
+the title, printed lengthwise along the back, "Hopkins's Poems."
+Such a volume that author had in contemplation.  It was to be the
+literary event of the year 1861.
+
+He could not mature such a project, one which he had been for some
+time contemplating, without consulting Mr. Byles Gridley, who, though
+he had not unfrequently repressed the young poet's too ardent
+ambition, had yet always been kind and helpful.
+
+Mr. Gridley was seated in his large arm-chair, indulging himself in
+the perusal of a page or two of his own work before repeatedly
+referred to.  His eye was glistening, for it had dust rested on the
+following passage:
+
+"There is infinite pathos in unsuccessful authorship.  The book that
+perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature.  The great asylum of
+Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in
+leaky garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves."
+
+He shut the book, for the page grew a little dim as he finished this
+elegiac sentence, and sighed to think how much more keenly he felt
+its truth than when it was written,--than on that memorable morning
+when he saw the advertisement in all the papers, "This day published,
+'Thoughts on the Universe.' By Byles Gridley, A. M."
+
+At that moment he heard a knock at his door.  He closed his eyelids
+forcibly for ten seconds, opened them, and said cheerfully,
+"Come in!"
+
+Gifted Hopkins entered.  He had a collection of manuscripts in his
+hands which it seemed to him would fill a vast number of pages.  He
+did not know that manuscript is to type what fresh dandelions are to
+the dish of greens that comes to table, of which last Nurse Byloe,
+who considered them very wholesome spring grazing for her patients,
+used to say that they "biled down dreadful."
+
+"I have brought the autographs of my poems, Master Gridley, to
+consult you about making arrangements for publication.  They have
+been so well received by the public and the leading critics of this
+part of the State, that I think of having them printed in a volume.
+I am going to the city for that purpose.  My mother has given her
+consent.  I wish to ask you several business questions.  Shall I part
+with the copyright for a downright sum of money, which I understand
+some prefer doing, or publish on shares, or take a percentage on the
+sales?  These, I believe, are the different ways taken by authors."
+
+Mr. Gridley was altogether too considerate to reply with the words
+which would most naturally have come to his lips.  He waited as if he
+were gravely pondering the important questions just put to him, all
+the while looking at Gifted with a tenderness which no one who had
+not buried one of his soul's children could have felt for a young
+author trying to get clothing for his new-born intellectual
+offspring.
+
+"I think," he said presently, "you had better talk with an
+intelligent and liberal publisher, and be guided by his advice.  I
+can put you in correspondence with such a person, and you had better
+trust him than me a great deal.  Why don't you send your manuscript
+by mail?"
+
+"What, Mr. Gridley?  Trust my poems, some of which are unpublished,
+to the post-office?  No, sir, I could never make up my mind to such a
+risk.  I mean to go to the city myself, and read them to some of the
+leading publishers.  I don't want to pledge myself to any one of
+them.  I should like to set them bidding against each other for the
+copyright, if I sell it at all."
+
+Mr. Gridley gazed upon the innocent youth with a sweet wonder in his
+eyes that made him look like an angel, a little damaged in the
+features by time, but full of celestial feelings.
+
+"It will cost you something to make this trip, Gifted.  Have you the
+means to pay for your journey and your stay at a city hotel?"
+
+Gifted blushed.  "My mother has laid by a small sum for me," he said.
+"She knows some of my poems by heart, and she wants to see them all
+in print."
+
+Master Gridley closed his eyes very firmly again, as if thinking, and
+opened them as soon as the foolish film had left them.  He had read
+many a page of "Thoughts on the Universe" to his own old mother,
+long, long years ago, and she had often listened with tears of modest
+pride that Heaven had favored her with a son so full of genius.
+
+"I 'll tell you what, Gifted," he said.  "I have been thinking for a
+good while that I would make a visit to the city, and if you have
+made up your mind to try what you can do with the publishers, I will
+take you with me as a companion.  It will be a saving to you and your
+good mother, for I shall bear the expenses of the expedition."
+
+Gifted Hopkins came very near going down on his knees.  He was so
+overcome with gratitude that it seemed as if his very coattails
+wagged with his emotion.
+
+"Take it quietly," said Master Gridley.  "Don't make a fool of
+yourself.  Tell your mother to have some clean shirts and things
+ready for you, and we will be off day after to-morrow morning."
+
+Gifted hastened to impart the joyful news to his mother, and to break
+the fact to Susan Posey that he was about to leave them for a while,
+and rush into the deliriums and dangers of the great city.
+
+Susan smiled.  Gifted hardly knew whether to be pleased with her
+sympathy, or vexed that she did not take his leaving more to heart.
+The smile held out bravely for about a quarter of a minute.  Then
+there came on a little twitching at the corners of the mouth.  Then.
+the blue eyes began to shine with a kind of veiled glimmer.  Then the
+blood came up into her cheeks with a great rush, as if the heart had
+sent up a herald with a red flag from the citadel to know what was
+going on at the outworks.  The message that went back was of
+discomfiture and capitulation.  Poor Susan was overcome, and gave
+herself up to weeping and sobbing.
+
+The sight was too much for the young poet.  In a wild burst of
+passion he seized her hand, and pressed it to his lips, exclaiming,
+"Would that you could be mine forever!" and Susan forgot all that she
+ought to have remembered, and, looking half reproachfully but half
+tenderly through her tears, said, in tones of infinite sweetness, "O
+Gifted!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+THE POET AND THE PUBLISHER.
+
+It was settled that Master Byles Gridley and Mr. Gifted Hopkins
+should leave early in the morning of the day appointed, to take the
+nearest train to the city.  Mrs. Hopkins labored hard to get them
+ready, so that they might make a genteel appearance among the great
+people whom they would meet in society.  She brushed up Mr. Gridley's
+best black suit, and bound the cuffs of his dress-coat, which were
+getting a little worried.  She held his honest-looking hat to the
+fire, and smoothed it while it was warm, until one would have thought
+it had just been ironed by the hatter himself.  She had his boots and
+shoes brought into a more brilliant condition than they had ever
+known: if Gifted helped, it was to his credit as much as if he had
+shown his gratitude by polishing off a copy of verses in praise of
+his benefactor.
+
+When she had got Mr. Gridley's encumbrances in readiness for the
+journey, she devoted herself to fitting out her son Gifted.  First,
+she had down from the garret a capacious trunk, of solid wood, but
+covered with leather, and adorned with brass-headed nails, by the
+cunning disposition of which, also, the paternal initials stood out
+on the rounded lid, in the most conspicuous manner.  It was his
+father's trunk, and the first thing that went into it, as the widow
+lifted the cover, and the smothering shut-up smell struck an old
+chord of associations, was a single tear-drop.  How well she
+remembered the time when she first unpacked it for her young husband,
+and the white shirt bosoms showed their snowy plaits!  O dear, dear!
+
+But women decant their affection, sweet and sound, out of the old
+bottles into the new ones,--off from the lees of the past generation,
+clear and bright, into the clean vessels just made ready to receive
+it.  Gifted Hopkins was his mother's idol, and no wonder.  She had
+not only the common attachment of a parent for him, as her offspring,
+but she felt that her race was to be rendered illustrious by his
+genius, and thought proudly of the time when some future biographer
+would mention her own humble name, to be held in lasting remembrance
+as that of the mother of Hopkins.
+
+So she took great pains to equip this brilliant but inexperienced
+young man with everything he could by any possibility need during his
+absence.  The great trunk filled itself until it bulged with its
+contents like a boa-constrictor who has swallowed his blanket.  Best
+clothes and common clothes, thick clothes and thin clothes, flannels
+and linens, socks and collars, with handkerchiefs enough to keep the
+pickpockets busy for a week, with a paper of gingerbread and some
+lozenges for gastralgia, and "hot drops," and ruled paper to write
+letters on, and a little Bible, and a phial with hiera picra, and
+another with paregoric, and another with "camphire" for sprains and
+bruises,
+
+--Gifted went forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the
+pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster.  He carried
+also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large
+pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution,
+pinned into his breast-pocket.  He talked about having a pistol, in
+case he were attacked by any of the ruffians who are so numerous in
+the city, but Mr. Gridley told him, No! he would certainly shoot
+himself, and he shouldn't think of letting him take a pistol.
+
+They went forth, Mentor and Telemachus, at the appointed time, to
+dare the perils of the railroad and the snares of the city.  Mrs.
+Hopkins was firm up to near the last moment, when a little quiver in
+her voice set her eyes off, and her face broke up all at once, so
+that she had to hide it behind her handkerchief.  Susan Posey showed
+the truthfulness of her character in her words to Gifted at parting.
+"Farewell," she said, "and think of me sometimes while absent.  My
+heart is another's, but my friendship, Gifted--my friendship--"
+
+Both were deeply affected.  He took her hand and would have raised it
+to his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it,
+exclaiming, "O Gifted!" this time with a tone of tender reproach
+which made him feel like a profligate.  He tore himself away, and
+when at a safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with a
+tearful smile.
+
+Master Byles Gridley must have had some good dividends from some of
+his property of late.  There is no other way of accounting for the
+handsome style in which he did things on their arrival in the city.
+He went to a tailor's and ordered a new suit to be sent home as soon
+as possible, for he knew his wardrobe was a little rusty.  He looked
+Gifted over from head to foot, and suggested such improvements as
+would recommend him to the fastidious eyes of the selecter sort of
+people, and put him in his own tailor's hands, at the same time
+saying that all bills were to be sent to him, B. Gridley, Esq.,
+parlor No. 6, at the Planet Hotel.  Thus it came to pass that in
+three days from their arrival they were both in an eminently
+presentable condition.  In the mean time the prudent Mr. Gridley had
+been keeping the young man busy, and amusing himself by showing him
+such of the sights of the city and its suburbs as he thought would
+combine instruction with entertainment.
+
+When they were both properly equipped and ready for the best company,
+Mr. Gridley said to the young poet, who had found it very hard to
+contain his impatience, that they would now call together on the
+publisher to whom he wished to introduce him, and they set out
+accordingly.
+
+"My name is Gridley," he said with modest gravity, as he entered the
+publisher's private room.  "I have a note of introduction here from
+one of your authors, as I think he called himself, a very popular
+writer for whom you publish."
+
+The publisher rose and came forward in the most cordial and
+respectful manner.  "Mr. Gridley?  Professor Byles Gridley,--author
+of 'Thoughts on the Universe'?"
+
+The brave-hearted old man colored as if he had been a young girl.
+His dead book rose before him like an apparition.  He groped in
+modest confusion for an answer.  "A child I buried long ago, my dear
+sir," he said.  "Its title-page was its tombstone.  I have brought
+this young friend with me,--this is Mr. Gifted Hopkins of Oxbow
+Village,--who wishes to converse with you about--"
+
+"I have come, sir--" the young poet began, interrupting him.
+
+"Let me look at your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Popkins," said
+the publisher, interrupting in his turn.
+
+"Hopkins, if you please, sir," Gifted suggested mildly, proceeding to
+extract the manuscript, which had got wedged into his pocket, and
+seemed to be holding on with all its might.  He was wondering all the
+time over the extraordinary clairvoyance of the publisher, who had
+looked through so many thick folds, broadcloth, lining, brown paper,
+and seen his poems lying hidden in his breast-pocket.  The idea that
+a young person coming on such an errand should have to explain his
+intentions would have seemed very odd to the publisher.  He knew the
+look which belongs to this class of enthusiasts just as a horse-
+dealer knows the look of a green purchaser with the equine fever
+raging in his veins.  If a young author had come to him with a scrap
+of manuscript hidden in his boots, like Major Andre's papers, the
+publisher would have taken one glance at him and said, "Out with it!"
+
+While he was battling for the refractory scroll with his pocket,
+which turned half wrong side out, and acted as things always do when
+people are nervous and in a hurry, the publisher directed his
+conversation again to Master Byles Gridley.
+
+"A remarkable book, that of yours, Mr. Gridley, would have a great
+run if it were well handled.  Came out twenty years too soon,--that
+was the trouble.  One of our leading scholars was speaking of it to
+me the other day.  'We must have a new edition,' he said; people are
+just ripe for that book.'  Did you ever think of that?  Change the
+form of it a little, and give it a new title, and it will be a
+popular book.  Five thousand or more, very likely."
+
+Mr. Gridley felt as if he had been rapidly struck on the forehead
+with a dozen distinct blows from a hammer not quite big enough to
+stun him.  He sat still without saying a word.  He had forgotten for
+the moment all about poor Gifted Hopkins, who had got out his
+manuscript at last, and was calming the disturbed corners of it.
+Coming to himself a little, he took a large and beautiful silk
+handkerchief, one of his new purchases, from his pocket, and applied
+it to his face, for the weather seemed to have grown very warm all at
+once.  Then he remembered the errand on which he had come, and
+thought of this youth, who had got to receive his first hard lesson
+in life, and whom he had brought to this kind man that it should be
+gently administered.
+
+"You surprise me," he said,--"you surprise me.  Dead and buried.
+Dead and buried.  I had sometimes thought that--at some future
+period, after I was gone, it might--but I hardly know what to say
+about your suggestions.  But here is my young friend, Mr. Hopkins,
+who would like to talk with you, and I will leave him in your hands.
+I am at the Planet Hotel, if you should care to call upon me.  Good
+morning.  Mr. Hopkins will explain everything to you more at his
+ease, without me, I am confident."
+
+Master Gridley could not quite make up his mind to stay through the
+interview between the young poet and the publisher.  The flush of
+hope was bright in Gifted's eye and cheek, and the good man knew that
+young hearts are apt to be over-sanguine, and that one who enters a
+shower-bath often feels very differently from the same person when he
+has pulled the string.
+
+"I have brought you my Poems in the original autographs, sir," said
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins.
+
+He laid the manuscript on the table, caressing the leaves still with
+one hand, as loath to let it go.
+
+"What disposition had you thought of making of them?" the publisher
+asked, in a pleasant tone.  He was as kind a man as lived, though he
+worked the chief engine in a chamber of torture.
+
+"I wish to read you a few specimens of the poems," he said, "with
+reference to their proposed publication in a volume."
+
+"By all means," said the kind publisher, who determined to be very
+patient with the protege of the hitherto little-known, but remarkable
+writer, Professor Gridley.  At the same time he extended his foot in
+an accidental sort of way, and pressed it on the right hand knob of
+three which were arranged in a line beneath the table.  A little bell
+in a distant apartment--the little bell marked C--gave one slight
+note; loud enough to start a small boy up, who looked at the clock,
+and knew that he was to go and call the publisher in just twenty-five
+minutes.  "A, five minutes; B, ten minutes; C, twenty-five minutes
+";--that was the youngster's working formula.  Mr. Hopkins was
+treated to the full allowance of time, as being introduced by
+Professor Gridley.
+
+The young man laid open the manuscript so that the title-page,
+written out very handsomely in his own hand, should win the eye of
+the publisher.
+
+
+               BLOSSOMS OF THE SOUL.
+           A WREATH OF VERSE; Original.
+
+               BY GIFTED HOPKINS.
+
+"a youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown."--Gray.
+
+"Shall I read you some of the rhymed pieces first, or some of the
+blank-verse poems, sir?" Gifted asked.
+
+"Read what you think is best,--a specimen of your first-class style
+of composition."
+
+"I will read you the very last poem I have written," he said, and he
+began:
+
+     "THE TRIUMPH OF SONG.
+
+"I met that gold-haired maiden, all too dear;
+And I to her: Lo!  thou art very fair,
+Fairer than all the ladies in the world
+That fan the sweetened air with scented fans,
+And I am scorched with exceeding love,
+Yea, crisped till my bones are dry as straw.
+Look not away with that high-arched brow,
+But turn its whiteness that I may behold,
+And lift thy great eyes till they blaze on mine,
+And lay thy finger on thy perfect mouth,
+And let thy lucent ears of careen pearl
+Drink in the murmured music of my soul,
+As the lush grass drinks in the globed dew;
+For I have many scrolls of sweetest rhyme
+I will unroll and make thee glad to hear.
+
+"Then she: O shaper of the marvellous phrase
+That openeth woman's heart as Both a key,
+I dare not hear thee--lest the bolt should slide
+That locks another's heart within my own.
+Go, leave me,--and she let her eyelids fall,
+And the great tears rolled from her large blue eyes.
+
+"Then I: If thou not hear me, I shall die,
+Yea, in my desperate mood may lift my hand
+And do myself a hurt no leach can mend;
+For poets ever were of dark resolve,
+And swift stern deed
+
+"That maiden heard no more,
+But spike: Alas! my heart is very weak,
+And but for--Stay!  And if some dreadful morn,
+After great search and shouting thorough the wold,
+We found thee missing,--strangled,--drowned i' the mere,
+Then should I go distraught and be clean mad!
+
+"O poet, read!  read all thy wondrous scrolls.
+Yea, read the verse that maketh glad to hear!
+Then I began and read two sweet, brief hours,
+And she forgot all love save only mine!"
+
+"Is all this from real life?" asked the publisher.
+
+"It--no, sir--not exactly from real life--that is, the leading female
+person is not wholly fictitious--and the incident is one which might
+have happened.  Shall I read you the poems referred to in the one you
+have just heard, sir?"
+
+"Allow me, one moment.  Two hours' reading, I think, you said.  I
+fear I shall hardly be able to spare quite time to hear them a11.
+Let me ask what you intend doing with these productions, Mr.--- rr
+Poplins."
+
+"Hopkins, if you please, sir, not Poplins," said Gifted, plaintively.
+He expressed his willingness to dispose of the copyright, to publish
+on shares, or perhaps to receive a certain percentage on the profits.
+
+"Suppose we take a glass of wine together, Mr.--Hopkins, before we
+talk business," the publisher said, opening a little cupboard and
+taking therefrom a decanter and two glasses.  He saw the young man
+was looking nervous.  He waited a few minutes, until the wine had
+comforted his epigastrium, and diffused its gentle glow through his
+unspoiled and consequently susceptible organisation.
+
+"Come with me," he said.
+
+Gifted followed him into a dingy apartment in the attic, where one
+sat at a great table heaped and piled with manuscripts.  By him was a
+huge basket, ha'f full of manuscripts also.  As they entered he
+dropped another manuscript into the basket and looked up.
+
+"Tell me," said Gifted, "what are these papers, and who is he that
+looks upon them and drops them into the basket?"
+
+"These are the manuscript poems that we receive, and the one sitting
+at the table is commonly spoken of among us as 'The Butcher'.  The
+poems he drops into the basket are those rejected as of no account"
+
+"But does he not read the poems before he rejects them?"
+
+"He tastes them.  Do you eat a cheese before you buy it?"
+
+"And what becomes of all those that he drops into the basket?"
+
+"If they are not claimed by their author in proper season, they go to
+the devil."
+
+"What!" said Gifted, with his eyes stretched very round.
+
+"To the paper factory, where they have a horrid machine they call the
+devil, that tears everything to bits,--as the critics treat our
+authors, sometimes, sometimes, Mr. Hopkins."
+
+Gifted devoted a moment to silent reflection.
+
+After this instructive sight they returned together to the
+publisher's private room.  The wine had now warmed the youthful
+poet's praecordia, so that he began to feel a renewed confidence in
+his genius and his fortunes.
+
+"I should like to know what that critic of yours would say to my
+manuscript," he said boldly.
+
+"You can try it if you want to," the publisher replied, with an
+ominous dryness of manner which the sanguine youth did not perceive,
+or, perceiving, did not heed.
+
+"How can we manage to get an impartial judgment?"
+
+"Oh, I'll arrange that.  He always goes to his luncheon about this
+time.  Raw meat and vitriol punch,--that 's what the authors say.
+Wait till we hear him go, and then I will lay your manuscript so that
+he will come to it among the first after he gets back.  You shall see
+with your own eyes what treatment it gets.  I hope it may please him,
+but you shall see."
+
+They went back to the publisher's private room and talked awhile.
+Then the little office-boy came up with some vague message about a
+gentleman--business--wants to see you, sir, etc., according to the
+established programme; all in a vacant, mechanical sort of way, as if
+he were a talking-machine just running down.
+
+The publisher told the boy that he was engaged, and the gentleman
+must wait.  Very soon they heard The Butcher's heavy footstep as he
+went out to get his raw meat and vitriol punch.
+
+Now, then," said the publisher, and led forth the confiding literary
+lamb once more, to enter the fatal door of the critical shambles.
+
+"Hand me your manuscript, if you please, Mr. Hopkins.  I will lay it
+so that it shall be the third of these that are coming to hand.  Our
+friend here is a pretty good judge of verse, and knows a merchantable
+article about as quick as any man in his line of business.  If he
+forms a favorable opinion of your poems, we will talk over your
+propositions."
+
+Gifted was conscious of a very slight tremor as he saw his precious
+manuscript deposited on the table, under two others, and over a pile
+of similar productions.  Still he could not help feeling that the
+critic would be struck by his title.  The quotation from Gray must
+touch his feelings.  The very first piece in the collection could not
+fail to arrest him.  He looked a little excited, but he was in good
+spirits.
+
+"We will be looking about here when our friend comes back," the
+publisher said."  He is a very methodical person, and will sit down
+and go right to work just as if we were not here.  We can watch him,
+and if he should express any particular interest in your poems, I
+will, if you say so, carry you up to him and reveal the fact that you
+are the author of the works that please him."
+
+They waited patiently until The Butcher returned, apparently
+refreshed by his ferocious refection, and sat down at his table.  He
+looked comforted, and not in ill humor.  The publisher and the poet
+talked in low tones, as if on business of their own, and watched him
+as he returned to his labor.
+
+The Butcher took the first manuscript that came to hand, read a
+stanza here and there, turned over the leaves, turned back and tried
+again,--shook his head--held it for an instant over the basket, as if
+doubtful,--and let it softly drop.  He took up the second manuscript,
+opened it in several places, seemed rather pleased with what he read,
+and laid it aside for further examination.
+
+He took up the third.  "Blossoms of the Soul," etc.  He glared at it
+in a dreadfully ogreish way.  Both the lockers-on held their breath.
+Gifted Hopkins felt as if half a glass more of that warm sherry would
+not hurt him.  There was a sinking at the pit of his stomach, as if
+he was in a swing, as high as he could go, close up to the swallows'
+nests and spiders' webs.  The Butcher opened the manuscript at
+random, read ten seconds, and gave a short low grunt.  He opened
+again, read ten seconds, and gave another grunt, this time a little
+longer and louder.  He opened once more, read five seconds, and, with
+something that sounded like the snort of a dangerous animal, cast it
+impatiently into the basket, and took up the manuscript that came
+next in order.
+
+Gifted Hopkins stood as if paralyzed for a moment.
+
+"Safe, perfectly safe," the publisher said to him in a whisper."
+I'll get it for you presently.  Come in and take another glass of
+wine," he said, leading him back to his own office.
+
+"No, I thank you," he said faintly, "I can bear it.  But this is
+dreadful, sir.  Is this the way that genius is welcomed to the world
+of letters?"
+
+The publisher explained to him, in the kindest manner, that there was
+an enormous over-production of verse, and that it took a great part
+of one man's time simply to overhaul the cart-loads of it that were
+trying to get themselves into print with the imprimatur of his famous
+house.  "You are young, Mr. Hopkins.  I advise you not to try to
+force your article of poetry on the market.  The B---, our friend,
+there, that is, knows a thing that will sell as soon as he sees it.
+You are in independent circumstances, perhaps?  If so, you can print
+--at your own expense--whatever you choose.  May I take the liberty
+to ask your--profession?"
+
+Gifted explained that he was "clerk" in a "store," where they sold
+dry goods and West India goods, and goods promiscuous.
+
+"Oh, well, then," the publisher said, "you will understand me.  Do
+you know a good article of brown sagas when you see it?"
+
+Gifted Hopkins rather thought he did.  He knew at sight whether it
+was a fair, salable article or not.
+
+"Just so.  Now our friend, there, knows verses that are salable and
+unsalable as well as you do brown sugar.--Keep quiet now, and I will
+go and get your manuscript for you.
+
+"There, Mr. Hopkins, take your poems,--they will give you a
+reputation in your village, I don't doubt, which, is pleasant, but it
+will cost you a good deal of money to print them in a volume.  You
+are very young: you can afford to wait.  Your genius is not ripe yet,
+I am confident, Mr. Hopkins.  These verses are very well for a
+beginning, but a man of promise like you, Mr. Hopkins, must n't throw
+away his chance by premature publication!  I should like to make you
+a present of a few of the books we publish.  By and by, perhaps, we
+can work you into our series of poets; but the best pears ripen
+slowly, and so with genius.--Where shall I send the volumes?"
+
+Gifted answered, to parlor No. 6, Planet Hotel, where he soon
+presented himself to Master Gridley, who could guess pretty well what
+was coming.  But he let him tell his story.
+
+"Shall I try the other publishers?" said the disconsolate youth.
+
+"I would n't, my young friend, I would n't.  You have seen the best
+one of them--all.  He is right about it, quite right: you are young,
+and had better wait.  Look here, Gifted, here is something to please
+you.  We are going to visit the gay world together.  See what has
+been left here this forenoon."
+
+He showed him two elegant notes of invitation requesting the pleasure
+of Professor Byles Gridley's and of Mr. Gifted Hopkins's company on
+Thursday evening, as the guests of Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, of 24 Carat
+Place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+MRS. CLYMER KETCHUM'S PARTY.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had flowered out as beyond question the handsomest girl
+of the season, There were hints from different quarters that she
+might possibly be an heiress.  Vague stories were about of some
+contingency which might possibly throw a fortune into her lap.  The
+young men about town talked of her at the clubs in their free-and-
+easy way, but all agreed that she was the girl of the new crop,--"
+best filly this grass," as Livingston Jenkins put it.  The general
+understanding seemed to be that the young lawyer who had followed her
+to the city was going to capture her.  She seemed to favor him
+certainly as much as anybody.  But Myrtle saw many young men now, and
+it was not so easy as it would once have been to make out who was an
+especial favorite.
+
+There had been times when Murray Bradshaw would have offered his
+heart and hand to Myrtle at once, if he had felt sure that she would
+accept him.  But he preferred playing the safe game now, and only
+wanted to feel sure of her.  He had done his best to be agreeable,
+and could hardly doubt that he had made an impression.  He dressed
+well when in the city,--even elegantly,--he had many of the lesser
+social accomplishments, was a good dancer, and compared favorably in
+all such matters with the more dashing young fellows in society.  He
+was a better talker than most of them, and he knew more about the
+girl he was dealing with than they could know.  "You have only got to
+say the word, Murray," Mrs. Clymer Ketchum said to her relative, "and
+you can have her.  But don't be rash.  I believe you can get
+Berengaria if you try; and there 's something better there than
+possibilities."  Murray Bradshaw laughed, and told Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum not to worry about him; he knew what he was doing.
+
+It so happened that Myrtle met Master Byles Gridley walking with Mr.
+Gifted Hopkins the day before the party.  She longed to have a talk
+with her old friend, and was glad to have a chance of pleasing her
+poetical admirer.  She therefore begged her hostess to invite them
+both to her party to please her, which she promised to do at once.
+Thus the two elegant notes were accounted for.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum, though her acquaintances were chiefly in the
+world of fortune and of fashion, had yet a certain weakness for what
+she called clever people.  She therefore always variegated her
+parties with a streak of young artists and writers, and a literary
+lady or two; and, if she could lay hands on a first-class celebrity,
+was as happy as an Amazon who had captured a Centaur.
+
+"There's a demonish clever young fellow by the name of Lindsay,"
+Mr. Livingston Jenkins said to her a little before the day of the
+party.  "Better ask him.  They say he 's the rising talent in his
+line, architecture mainly, but has done some remarkable things in the
+way of sculpture.  There's some story about a bust he made that was
+quite wonderful.  I'll find his address for you."  So Mr. Clement
+Lindsay got his invitation, and thus Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party
+promised to bring together a number of persons with whom we are
+acquainted, and who were acquainted with each other.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum knew how to give a party.  Let her only have
+carte blanche for flowers, music, and champagne, she used to tell her
+lord, and she would see to the rest,--lighting the rooms, tables, and
+toilet.  He needn't be afraid: all he had to do was to keep out of
+the way.
+
+Subdivision of labor is one of the triumphs of modern civilization.
+Labor was beautifully subdivided in this lady's household.  It was
+old Ketchum's business to make money, and he understood it.  It was
+Mrs. K.'s business to spend money, and she knew how to do it.  The
+rooms blazed with light like a conflagration; the flowers burned like
+lamps of many-colored flame; the music throbbed into the hearts of
+the promenaders and tingled through all the muscles of the dancers.
+
+Mrs. Clymer Ketchum was in her glory.  Her point d'Alenyon must have
+spoiled ever so many French girls' eyes.  Her bosom heaved beneath a
+kind of breastplate glittering with a heavy dew of diamonds.  She
+glistened and sparkled with every movement, so that the admirer
+forgot to question too closely whether the eyes matched the
+brilliants, or the cheeks glowed like the roses.  Not far from the
+great lady stood Myrtle Hazard.  She was dressed as the fashion of
+the day demanded, but she had added certain audacious touches of her
+own, reminiscences of the time when the dead beauty had flourished,
+and which first provoked the question and then the admiration of the
+young people who had a natural eye for effect.  Over the long white
+glove on her left arm was clasped a rich bracelet, of so quaint an
+antique pattern that nobody had seen anything like it, and as some
+one whispered that it was "the last thing out," it was greatly
+admired by the fashion-plate multitude, as well as by the few who had
+a taste of their own.  If the soul of Judith Pride, long divorced
+from its once beautifully moulded dust, ever lived in dim
+consciousness through any of those who inherited her blood, it was
+then and there that she breathed through the lips of Myrtle Hazard.
+The young girl almost trembled with the ecstasy of this new mode of
+being, soliciting every sense with light, with perfume, with melody,
+--all that could make her feel the wonderful complex music of a fresh
+life when all its chords first vibrate together in harmony.  Miss
+Rhadamantha Pinnikle, whose mother was an Apex (of whose race it was
+said that they always made an obeisance when the family name was
+mentioned, and had all their portraits painted with halos round their
+heads), found herself extinguished in this new radiance.  Miss
+Victoria Capsheaf stuck to the wall as if she had been a fresco on
+it.  The fifty-year-old dynasties were dismayed and dismounted.
+Myrtle fossilized them as suddenly as if she had been a Gorgon
+instead of a beauty.
+
+The guests in whom we may have some interest were in the mean time
+making ready for the party, which was expected to be a brilliant one;
+for 24 Carat Place was well known for the handsome style of its
+entertainments.
+
+Clement Lindsay was a little surprised by his invitation.  He had,
+however, been made a lion of several times of late, and was very
+willing to amuse himself once in a while with a peep into the great
+world.
+
+It was but an empty show to him at best, for his lot was cast, and he
+expected to lead a quiet domestic life after his student days were
+over.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had known what society was in his earlier time,
+and understood very well that all a gentleman of his age had to do
+was to dress himself in his usual plain way, only taking a little
+more care in his arrangements than was needed in the latitude of
+Oxbow Village.  But Gifted must be looked after, that he should not
+provoke the unamiable comments of the city youth by any defect or
+extravagance of costume.  The young gentleman had bought a light sky-
+blue neckerchief, and a very large breast-pin containing a gem which
+he was assured by the vender was a genuine stone.  He considered that
+both these would be eminently effective articles of dress, and Mr.
+Gridley had some trouble to convince him that a white tie and plain
+shirt-buttons would be more fitted to the occasion.
+
+On the morning of the day of the great party Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw received a brief telegram, which seemed to cause him great
+emotion, as he changed color, uttered a forcible exclamation, and
+began walking up and down his room in a very nervous kind of way.  It
+was a foreshadowing of a certain event now pretty sure to happen.
+Whatever bearing this telegram may have had upon his plans, he made
+up his mind that he would contrive an opportunity somehow that very
+evening to propose himself as a suitor to Myrtle Hazard.  He could
+not say that he felt as absolutely certain of getting the right
+answer as he had felt at some previous periods.  Myrtle knew her
+price, he said to himself, a great deal better than when she was a
+simple country girl.  The flatteries with which she had been
+surrounded, and the effect of all the new appliances of beauty, which
+had set her off so that she could not help seeing her own
+attractions, rendered her harder to please and to satisfy.  A little
+experience in society teaches a young girl the arts and the phrases
+which all the Lotharios have in common.  Murray Bradshaw was ready to
+land his fish now, but he was not quite sure that she was yet hooked,
+and he had a feeling that by this time she knew every fly in his
+book.  However, as he had made up his mind not to wait another day,
+he addressed himself to the trial before him with a determination to
+succeed, if any means at his command would insure success.  He
+arrayed himself with faultless elegance: nothing must be neglected on
+such an occasion.  He went forth firm and grave as a general going
+into a battle where all is to be lost or won.  He entered the blazing
+saloon with the unfailing smile upon his lips, to which he set them
+as he set his watch to a particular hour and minute.
+
+The rooms were pretty well filled when he arrived and made his bow
+before the blazing, rustling, glistening, waving, blushing appearance
+under which palpitated, with the pleasing excitement of the magic
+scene over which its owner presided, the heart of Mrs. Clymer
+Ketchum.  He turned to Myrtle Hazard, and if he had ever doubted
+which way his inclinations led him, he could doubt no longer.  How
+much dress and how much light can a woman bear?  That is the way to
+measure her beauty.  A plain girl in a simple dress, if she has only
+a pleasant voice, may seem almost a beauty in the rosy twilight.  The
+nearer she comes to being handsome, the more ornament she will bear,
+and the more she may defy the sunshine or the chandelier.
+
+Murray Bradshaw was fairly dazzled with the brilliant effect of
+Myrtle in full dress.  He did not know before what handsome arms she
+had,--Judith Pride's famous arms--which the high-colored young men in
+top-boots used to swear were the handsomest pair in New England--
+right over again.  He did not know before with what defiant effect
+she would light up, standing as she did directly under a huge lustre,
+in full flower of flame, like a burning azalea.  He was not a man who
+intended to let his sentiments carry him away from the serious
+interests of his future, yet, as he looked upon Myrtle Hazard, his
+heart gave one throb which made him feel in every pulse that this way
+a woman who in her own right, simply as a woman, could challenge the
+homage of the proudest young man of her time.  He hardly knew till
+this moment how much of passion mingled with other and calmer motives
+of admiration.  He could say I love you as truly as such a man could
+ever speak these words, meaning that he admired her, that he was
+attracted to her, that he should be proud of her as his wife, that he
+should value himself always as the proprietor of so rare a person,
+that no appendage to his existence would take so high a place in his
+thoughts.  This implied also, what is of great consequence to a young
+woman's happiness in the married state, that she would be treated
+with uniform politeness, with satisfactory evidences of affection,
+and with a degree of confidence quite equal to what a reasonable
+woman should expect from a very superior man, her husband.
+
+If Myrtle could have looked through the window in the breast against
+which only authors are privileged to flatten their features, it is
+for the reader to judge how far the programme would have satisfied
+her.
+
+Less than this, a great deal less, does appear to satisfy many young
+women; and it may be that the interior just drawn, fairly judged,
+belongs to a model lover and husband.  Whether it does or not, Myrtle
+did not see this picture.  There was a beautifully embroidered shirt-
+bosom in front of that window through which we have just looked, that
+intercepted all sight of what was going on within.  She only saw a
+man, young, handsome, courtly, with a winning tongue, with an
+ambitious spirit, whose every look and tone implied his admiration of
+herself, and who was associated with her past life in such a way that
+they alone appeared like old friends in the midst of that cold alien
+throng.  It seemed as if he could not have chosen a more auspicious
+hour than this; for she never looked so captivating, and her presence
+must inspire his lips with the eloquence of love.  And she--was not
+this delirious atmosphere of light and music just the influence to
+which he would wish to subject her before trying the last experiment
+of all which can stir the soul of a woman?  He knew the mechanism of
+that impressionable state which served Coleridge so excellently
+well,--
+
+    "All impulses of soul and sense
+     Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve
+     The music, and the doleful tale,
+     The rich and balmy eve,"--
+
+though he hardly expected such startling results as happened in that
+case,--which might be taken as an awful warning not to sing moving
+ballads to young ladies of susceptible feelings, unless one is
+prepared for very serious consequences.  Without expecting that
+Myrtle would rush into his arms, he did think that she could not help
+listening to him in the intervals of the delicious music, in some
+recess where the roses and jasmines and heliotropes made the air
+heavy with sweetness, and the crimson curtains drooped in heavy folds
+that half hid their forms from the curious eyes all round them.  Her
+heart would swell like Genevieve's as he told her in simple phrase
+that she was his life, his love, his all,--for in some two or three
+words like these he meant to put his appeal, and not in fine poetical
+phrases: that would do for Gifted Hopkins and rhyming tom-tits of
+that feather.
+
+Full of his purpose, involving the plans of his whole life, implying,
+as he saw clearly, a brilliant future or a disastrous disappointment,
+with a great unexploded mine of consequences under his feet, and the
+spark ready to fall into it, he walked about the gilded saloon with a
+smile upon his lips so perfectly natural and pleasant, that one would
+have said he was as vacant of any aim, except a sort of superficial
+good-matured disposition to be amused, as the blankest-eyed simpleton
+who had tied himself up in a white cravat and come to bore and be
+bored.
+
+Yet under this pleasant smile his mind was so busy with its thoughts
+that he had forgotten all about the guests from Oxbow Village who, as
+Myrtle had told him, were to come this evening.  His eye was all at
+once caught by a familiar figure, and he recognized Master Byles
+Gridley, accompanied by Mr. Gifted Hopkins, at the door of the
+saloon.  He stepped forward at once to meet, and to present them.
+
+Mr. Gridley in evening costume made an eminently dignified and
+respectable appearance.  There was an unusual lock of benignity upon
+his firmly moulded features, and an air of ease which rather
+surprised Mr. Bradshaw, who did not know all the social experiences
+which had formed a part of the old Master's history.  The greeting
+between them was courteous, but somewhat formal, as Mr. Bradshaw was
+acting as one of the masters of ceremony.  He nodded to Gifted in an
+easy way, and led them both into the immediate Presence.
+
+"This is my friend Professor Gridley, Mrs. Ketchum, whom I have the
+honor of introducing to you,--a very distinguished scholar, as I have
+no doubt you are well aware.  And this is my friend Mr. Gifted
+Hopkins, a young poet of distinction, whose fame will reach you by
+and by, if it has not come to your ears already."
+
+The two gentlemen went through the usual forms, the poet a little
+crushed by the Presence, but doing his best.  While the lady was
+making polite speeches to them, Myrtle Hazard came forward.  She was
+greatly delighted to meet her old friend, and even looked upon the
+young poet with a degree of pleasure she would hardly have expected
+to receive from his company.  They both brought with them so many
+reminiscences of familiar scenes and events, that it was like going
+back for the moment to Oxbow Village.  But Myrtle did not belong to
+herself that evening, and had no opportunity to enter into
+conversation just then with either of them.  There was to be dancing
+by and by, and the younger people were getting impatient that it
+should begin.  At last the music sounded the well-known summons, and
+the floors began to ring to the tread of the dancers.  As usual on
+such occasions there were a large number of noncombatants, who stood
+as spectators around those who were engaged in the campaign of the
+evening.  Mr. Byles Gridley looked on gravely, thinking of the
+minuets and the gavots of his younger days.  Mr. Gifted Hopkins, who
+had never acquired the desirable accomplishment of dancing, gazed
+with dazzled and admiring eyes at the wonderful evolutions of the
+graceful performers.  The music stirred him a good deal; he had also
+been introduced to one or two young persons as Mr. Hopkins, the poet,
+and he began to feel a kind of excitement, such as was often the
+prelude of a lyric burst from his pen.  Others might have wealth and
+beauty, he thought to himself, but what were these to the gift of
+genius?  In fifty years the wealth of these people would have passed
+into other hands.  In fifty years all these beauties would be dead,
+or wrinkled and double-wrinkled great-grandmothers.  And when they
+were all gone and forgotten, the name of Hopkins would be still fresh
+in the world's memory.  Inspiring thought!  A smile of triumph rose
+to his lips; he felt that the village boy who could look forward to
+fame as his inheritance was richer than all the millionnaires, and
+that the words he should set in verse would have an enduring lustre
+to which the whiteness of pearls was cloudy, and the sparkle of
+diamonds dull.
+
+He raised his eyes, which had been cast down in reflection, to look
+upon these less favored children of Fortune, to whom she had given
+nothing but perishable inheritances.  Two or three pairs of eyes, he
+observed, were fastened upon him.  His mouth perhaps betrayed a
+little self-consciousness, but he tried to show his features in an
+aspect of dignified self-possession.  There seemed to be remarks and
+questionings going on, which he supposed to be something like the
+following:--
+
+Which is it?  Which is it?--Why, that one, there,--that young
+fellow,--don't you see?--What young fellow are you two looking at?
+Who is he?  What is he?--Why, that is Hopkins, the poet.--Hopkins,
+the poet!  Let me see him!  Let me see him!  Hopkins?  What!  Gifted
+Hopkins?  etc., etc.
+
+Gifted Hopkins did not hear these words except in fancy, but he did
+unquestionably find a considerable number of eyes concentrated upon
+him, which he very naturally interpreted as an evidence that he had
+already begun to enjoy a foretaste of the fame of which he should
+hereafter have his full allowance.  Some seemed to be glancing
+furtively, some appeared as if they wished to speak, and all the time
+the number of those looking at him seemed to be increasing.  A vision
+came through his fancy of himself as standing on a platform, and
+having persons who wished to look upon him and shake hands with him
+presented, as he had heard was the way with great people when going
+about the country.  But this was only a suggestion, and by no means a
+serious thought, for that would have implied infatuation.
+
+Gifted Hopkins was quite right in believing that he attracted many
+eyes.  At last those of Myrtle Hazard were called to him, and she
+perceived that an accident was making him unenviably conspicuous.
+The bow of his rather large white neck-tie had slid round and got
+beneath his left ear.  A not very good-natured or well-bred young
+fellow had pointed out the subject of this slight misfortune to one
+or two others of not much better taste or breeding, and thus the
+unusual attention the youthful poet was receiving explained itself.
+Myrtle no sooner saw the little accident of which her rural friend
+was the victim than she left her place in the dance with a simple
+courage which did her credit.
+
+"I want to speak to you a minute," she said.  "Come into this
+alcove."
+
+And the courageous young lady not only told Gifted what had happened
+to him, but found a pin somehow, as women always do on a pinch, and
+had him in presentable condition again almost before the bewildered
+young man knew what was the matter.  On reflection it occurred to
+him, as it has to other provincial young persons going to great
+cities, that he might perhaps have been hasty in thinking himself an
+object of general curiosity as yet.  There had hardly been time for
+his name to have become very widely known.  Still, the feeling had
+been pleasant for the moment, and had given him an idea of what the
+rapture would be, when, wherever he went, the monster digit (to hint
+a classical phrase) of the collective admiring public would be lifted
+to point him out, and the whisper would pass from one to another,
+"That's him!  That's Hopkins!"
+
+Mr. Murray Bradshaw had been watching the opportunity for carrying
+out his intentions, with his pleasant smile covering up all that was
+passing in his mind, and Master Byles Gridley, looking equally
+unconcerned, had been watching him.  The young man's time came at
+last.  Some were at the supper-table, some were promenading, some
+were talking, when he managed to get Myrtle a little apart from the
+rest, and led her towards one of the recesses in the apartment, where
+two chairs were invitingly placed.  Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes
+were sparkling,--the influences to which he had trusted had not been
+thrown away upon her.  He had no idea of letting his purpose be seen
+until he was fully ready.  It required all his self-mastery to avoid
+betraying himself by look or tone, but he was so natural that Myrtle
+was thrown wholly off her guard.  He meant to make her pleased with
+herself at the outset, and that not by point-blank flattery, of which
+she had had more than enough of late, but rather by suggestion and
+inference, so that she should find herself feeling happy without
+knowing how.  It would be easy to glide from that to the impression
+she had produced upon him, and get the two feelings more or less
+mingled in her mind.  And so the simple confession he meant to make
+would at length evolve itself logically, and hold by a natural
+connection to the first agreeable train of thought which he had
+called up.  Not the way, certainly, that most young men would arrange
+their great trial scene; but Murray Bradshaw was a lawyer in love as
+much as in business, and considered himself as pleading a cause
+before a jury of Myrtle Hazard's conflicting motives.  What would any
+lawyer do in a jury case but begin by giving the twelve honest men
+and true to understand, in the first place, that their intelligence
+and virtue were conceded by all, and that he himself had perfect
+confidence in them, and leave them to shape their verdict in
+accordance with these propositions and his own side of the case?
+
+Myrtle had, perhaps, never so seriously inclined her ear to the
+honeyed accents of the young pleader.  He flattered her with so much
+tact, that she thought she heard an unconscious echo through his lips
+of an admiration which he only shared with all around him.  But in
+him he made it seem discriminating, deliberate, not blind, but very
+real.  This it evidently was which had led him to trust her with his
+ambitions and his plans,--they might be delusions, but he could never
+keep them from her, and she was the one woman in the world to whom he
+thought he could safely give his confidence.
+
+The dread moment was close at hand.  Myrtle was listening with an
+instinctive premonition of what was coming,--ten thousand mothers and
+grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and so on, had passed through it
+all in preceding generations until time reached backwards to the
+sturdy savage who asked no questions of any kind, but knocked down
+the primeval great-grandmother of all, and carried her off to his
+hole in the rock, or into the tree where he had made his nest.  Why
+should not the coming question announce itself by stirring in the
+pulses and thrilling in the nerves of the descendant of all these
+grandmothers?
+
+She was leaning imperceptibly towards him, drawn by the mere blind
+elemental force, as the plummet was attracted to the side of
+Schehallion.  Her lips were parted, and she breathed a little faster
+than so healthy a girl ought to breathe in a state of repose.  The
+steady nerves of William Murray Bradshaw felt unwonted thrills and
+tremors tingling through them, as he came nearer and nearer the few
+simple words with which he was to make Myrtle Hazard the mistress' of
+his destiny.  His tones were becoming lower and more serious; there
+were slight breaks once or twice in the conversation; Myrtle had cast
+down her eyes.
+
+"There is but one word more to add," he murmured softly, as he bent
+towards her
+
+A grave voice interrupted him.  "Excuse me, Mr. Bradshaw," said
+Master Bytes Gridley, "I wish to present a young gentleman to my
+friend here.  I promised to show him the most charming young person I
+have the honor to be acquainted with, and I must redeem my pledge.
+Miss Hazard, I have the pleasure of introducing to your acquaintance
+my distinguished young friend, Mr. Clement Lindsay."
+
+Once mere, for the third time, these two young persons stood face to
+face.  Myrtle was no longer liable to those nervous seizures which
+any sudden impression was liable to produce when she was in her half-
+hysteric state of mind and body.  She turned to the new-comer, who
+found himself unexpectedly submitted to a test which he would never
+have risked of his own will.  He must go through it, cruel as it was,
+with the easy self-command which belongs to a gentleman in the most
+trying social exigencies.  He addressed her, therefore, in the usual
+terms of courtesy, and then turned and greeted Mr. Bradshaw, whom he
+had never met since their coming together at Oxbow Village.  Myrtle
+was conscious, the instant she looked upon Clement Lindsay, of the
+existence of some peculiar relation between them; but what, she could
+not tell.  Whatever it was, it broke the charm which had been weaving
+between her and Murray Bradshaw.  He was not foolish enough to make a
+scene.  What fault could he find with Clement Lindsay, who had only
+done as any gentleman would do with a lady to whom he had just been
+introduced, addressed a few polite words to her?  After saying those
+words, Clement had turned very courteously to him, and they had
+spoken with each other.  But Murray Bradshaw could not help seeing
+that Myrtle had transferred her attention, at least for the moment,
+from him to the new-comer.  He folded his arms and waited,--but he
+waited in vain.  The hidden attraction which drew Clement to the
+young girl with whom he had passed into the Valley of the Shadow of
+Death overmastered all other feelings, and he gave himself up to the
+fascination of her presence.
+
+The inward rage of Murray Bradshaw at being interrupted just at the
+moment when he was, as he thought, about to cry checkmate and finish
+the first great game he had ever played may well be imagined.  But it
+could not be helped.  Myrtle had exercised the customary privilege of
+young ladies at parties, and had turned from talking with one to
+talking with another,--that was all.  Fortunately, for him the young
+man who had been introduced at such a most critical moment was not
+one from whom he need apprehend any serious interference.  He felt
+grateful beyond measure to pretty Susan Posey, who, as he had good
+reason for believing, retained her hold upon her early lover, and was
+looking forward with bashful interest to the time when she should
+become Mrs. Lindsay.  It was better to put up quietly with his
+disappointment; and, if he could get no favorable opportunity that
+evening to resume his conversation at the interesting point where he
+left it off, he would call the next day and bring matters to a
+conclusion.
+
+He called accordingly the next morning, but was disappointed in not
+seeing Myrtle.  She had hardly slept that night, and was suffering
+from a bad headache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing
+company.
+
+He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had
+just left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village:
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+MINE AND COUNTERMINE.
+
+What the nature of the telegram was which had produced such an effect
+on the feelings and plans of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw nobody
+especially interested knew but himself.  We may conjecture that it
+announced some fact, which had leaked out a little prematurely,
+relating to the issue of the great land-case in which the firm was
+interested.  However that might be, Mr. Bradshaw no sooner heard
+that Myrtle had suddenly left the city for Oxbow Village,--for what
+reason he puzzled himself to guess,--than he determined to follow her
+at once, and take up the conversation he had begun at the party where
+it left off.  And as the young poet had received his quietus for the
+present at the publisher's, and as Master Gridley had nothing
+specially to detain him, they too returned at about the same time,
+and so our old acquaintances were once more together within the
+familiar precincts where we have been accustomed to see them.
+
+Master Gridley did not like playing the part of a spy, but it must be
+remembered that he was an old college officer, and had something of
+the detective's sagacity, and a certain cunning derived from the
+habit of keeping an eye on mischievous students.  If any underhand
+contrivance was at work, involving the welfare of any one in whom he
+was interested, he was a dangerous person for the plotters, for he
+had plenty of time to attend to them, and would be apt to take a kind
+of pleasure in matching his wits against another crafty person's,
+--such a one, for instance, as Mr. Macchiavelli Bradshaw.
+
+Perhaps he caught some words of that gentleman's conversation at the
+party; at any rate, he could not fail to observe his manner.  When he
+found that the young man had followed Myrtle back to the village, he
+suspected something more than a coincidence.  When he learned that he
+was assiduously visiting The Poplars, and that he was in close
+communication with Miss Cynthia Badlam, he felt sure that he was
+pressing the siege of Myrtle's heart.  But that there was some
+difficulty in the way was equally clear to him, for he ascertained,
+through channels which the attentive reader will soon have means of
+conjecturing, that Myrtle had seen him but once in the week following
+his return, and that in the presence of her dragons.  She had various
+excuses when he called,--headaches, perhaps, among the rest, as these
+are staple articles on such occasions.  But Master Gridley knew his
+man too well to think that slight obstacles would prevent his going
+forward to effect his purpose.
+
+"I think he will get her; if he holds on," the old man said to
+himself, "and he won't let go in a hurry, if there were any real love
+about it--but surely he is incapable of such a human weakness as the
+tender passion.  What does all this sudden concentration upon the
+girl mean?  He knows something about her that we don't know,--that
+must be it.  What did he hide that paper for, a year ago and more?
+Could that have anything to do with his pursuit of Myrtle Hazard
+today?"
+
+Master Gridley paused as he asked this question of himself, for a
+luminous idea had struck him.  Consulting daily with Cynthia Badlam,
+was he?  Could there be a conspiracy between these two persons to
+conceal some important fact, or to keep something back until it would
+be for their common interest to have it made known?
+
+Now Mistress Kitty Fagan was devoted, heart and soul, to Myrtle
+Hazard, and ever since she had received the young girl from Mr.
+Gridley's hands, when he brought her back safe and sound after her
+memorable adventure, had considered him as Myrtle's best friend and
+natural protector.  These simple creatures, whose thoughts are not
+taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great
+museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which
+are going on about them.  Mr. Gridley had met her, more or less
+accidentally, several times of late, and inquired very particularly
+about Myrtle, and how she got along at the house since her return,
+and whether she was getting over her headaches, and how they treated
+her in the family.
+
+"Bliss your heart, Mr. Gridley," Kitty said to him on one of these
+occasions, "it's ahltogither changed intirely.  Sure Miss Myrtle does
+jist iverythin' she likes, an' Miss Withers niver middles with her at
+ahl, excip' jist to roll up her eyes an' look as if she was the hid-
+moorner at a funeril whiniver Miss Myrtle says she wants to do this
+or that, or to go here or there.  It's Miss Badlam that's ahlwiz
+after her, an' a-watchin' her,--she thinks she's cunnin'er than a
+cat, but there 's other folks that's got eyes an' ears as good as
+hers.  It's that Mr. Bridshaw that's a puttin' his head together with
+Miss Badlam for somethin' or other, an' I don't believe there's no
+good in it, for what does the fox an' the cat be a whisperin' about,
+as if they was thaves an' incind'ries, if there ain't no mischief
+hatchin'?"
+
+"Why, Kitty," he said, "what mischief do you think is going on, and
+who is to be harmed?"
+
+"O Mr. Gridley," she answered, "if there ain't somebody to be chated
+somehow, then I don't know an honest man and woman from two rogues.
+An' have n't I heard Miss Myrtle's name whispered as if there was
+somethin' goin' on agin' her, an' they was afraid the tahk would go
+out through the doors, an' up through the chimbley?  I don't want to
+tell no tales, Mr. Gridley, nor to hurt no honest body, for I'm a
+poor woman, Mr. Gridley, but I comes of dacent folks, an' I vallies
+my repitation an' character as much as if I was dressed in silks and
+satins instead of this mane old gown, savin' your presence, which is
+the best I 've got, an' niver a dollar to buy another.  But if I iver
+I hears a word, Mr. Gridley, that manes any kind of a mischief to
+Miss Myrtle,--the Lard bliss her soul an' keep ahl the divils away
+from her!--I'll be runnin' straight down here to tell ye ahl about
+it,--be right sure o' that, Mr. Gridley."
+
+"Nothing must happen to Myrtle," he said," that we can help.  If you
+see anything more that looks wrong, you had better come down here at
+once and let me know, as you say you will.  At once, you understand.
+And, Kitty, I am a little particular about the dress of people who
+come to see me, so that if you would just take the trouble to get you
+a tidy pattern of gingham or calico, or whatever you like of that
+sort for a gown, you would please me; and perhaps this little trifle
+will be a convenience to you when you come to pay for it."
+
+Kitty thanked him with all the national accompaniments, and trotted
+off to the store, where Mr. Gifted Hopkins displayed the native
+amiability of his temper by fumbling down everything in the shape of
+ginghams and calicoes they had on the shelves, without a murmur at
+the taste of his customer, who found it hard to get a pattern
+sufficiently emphatic for her taste.  She succeeded at last, and laid
+down a five-dollar bill as if she were as used to the pleasing figure
+on its face as to the sight of her own five digits.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had struck a spade deeper than he knew into his
+first countermine, for Kitty had none of those delicate scruples
+about the means of obtaining information which might have embarrassed
+a diplomatist of higher degree.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+MR. BRADSHAW CALLS ON MISS BADLAM
+
+"Is Miss Hazard in, Kitty?"
+
+"Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, but she won't see nobody."
+
+"What's the meaning of that, Kitty?  Here is the third time within
+three days you've told me I could n't see her.  She saw Mr. Gridley
+yesterday, I know; why won't she see me to-day?"
+
+"Y' must ask Miss Myrtle what the rason is, it's none o' my business,
+Mr. Bridshaw.  That's the order she give me."
+
+"Is Miss Badlam in?"
+
+Indade she's in, Mr. Bridshaw, an' I 'll go cahl her."
+
+"Bedad," said Kitty Fagan to herself, "the cat an' the fox is goin'
+to have another o' thim big tahks togither, an' sure the old hole for
+the stove-pipe has niver been stopped up yet."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Cynthia went into the parlor together, and
+Mistress Kitty retired to her kitchen.  There was a deep closet
+belonging to this apartment, separated by a partition from the
+parlor.  There was a round hole high up in this partition through
+which a stove-pipe had once passed.  Mistress Kitty placed a stool
+just under this opening, upon which, as on a, pedestal, she posed
+herself with great precaution in the attitude of the goddess of other
+people's secrets, that is to say, with her head a little on one side,
+so as to bring her liveliest ear close to the opening.  The
+conversation which took place in the hearing of the invisible third
+party began in a singularly free-and-easy manner on Mr. Bradshaw's
+part.
+
+"What the d--- is the reason I can't see Myrtle, Cynthia?"
+
+"That's more than I can tell you, Mr. Bradshaw.  I can watch her
+goings on, but I can't account for her tantrums."
+
+"You say she has had some of her old nervous whims,--has the doctor
+been to see her?"
+
+"No indeed.  She has kept to herself a good deal, but I don't think
+there's anything in particular the matter with her.  She looks well
+enough, only she seems a little queer,--as girls do that have taken a
+fancy into their heads that they're in love, you know,--absent-
+minded,--does n't seem to be interested in things as you would expect
+after being away so long."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw looked as if this did not please him particularly.  If
+he was the object of her thoughts she would not avoid him, surely.
+
+"Have you kept your eye on her steadily?"
+
+"I don't believe there is an hour we can't account for,--Kitty and I
+between us."
+
+"Are you sure you can depend on Kitty?"
+
+["Depind on Kitty, is it?  Oh, an' to be sure ye can depind on Kitty
+to kape watch at the stove-pipe hole, an' to tell all y'r plottin's
+an' contrivin's to them that'll get the cheese out o' y'r mousetrap
+for ye before ye catch any poor cratur in it."  This was the
+inaudible comment of the unseen third party.]
+
+"Of course I can depend on her as far as I trust her.  All she knows
+is that she must look out for the girl to see that she does not run
+away or do herself a mischief.  The Biddies don't know much, but they
+know enough to keep a watch on the--"
+
+"Chickens."  Mr. Bradshaw playfully finished the sentence for Miss
+Cynthia.
+
+[" An' on the foxes, an' the cats, an' the wazels, an' the hen-hahks,
+an' ahl the other bastes," added the invisible witness, in unheard
+soliloquy.]
+
+"I ain't sure whether she's quite as stupid as she looks," said the
+suspicious young lawyer.  "There's a little cunning twinkle in her
+eye sometimes that makes me think she might be up to a trick on
+occasion.  Does she ever listen about to hear what people are
+saying?"
+
+"Don't trouble yourself about Kitty Fagan,' for pity's sake, Mr.
+Bradshaw.  The Biddies are all alike, and they're all as stupid as
+owls, except when you tell 'em just what to do, and how to do it.  A
+pack of priest-ridden fools!"
+
+The hot Celtic blood in Kitty Fagan's heart gave a leap.  The stout
+muscles gave an involuntary jerk.  The substantial frame felt the
+thrill all through, and the rickety stool on which she was standing
+creaked sharply under its burden.
+
+Murray Bradshaw started.  He got up and opened softly all the doors
+leading from the room, one after another, and looked out.
+
+"I thought I heard a noise as if somebody was moving, Cynthia.  It's
+just as well to keep our own matters to ourselves."
+
+"If you wait till this old house keeps still, Mr. Bradshaw, you might
+as well wait till the river has run by.  It's as full of rats and
+mice as an old cheese is of mites.  There's a hundred old rats in
+this house, and that's what you hear."
+
+["An' one old cat; that's what I hear."  Third party.]
+
+"I told you, Cynthia, I must be off on this business to-morrow.  I
+want to know that everything is safe before I go.  And, besides, I
+have got something to say to you that's important, very important,
+mind you."
+
+He got up once more and opened every door softly and looked out.  He
+fixed his eye suspiciously on a large sofa at the other side of the
+room, and went, looking half ashamed of his extreme precaution, and
+peeped under it, to see if there was any one hidden thereto listen.
+Then he came back and drew his chair close up to the table at which
+Miss Badlam had seated herself.  The conversation which followed was
+in a low tone, and a portion of it must be given in another place in
+the words of the third party.  The beginning of it we are able to
+supply in this connection.
+
+"Look here, Cynthia; you know what I am going for.  It's all right, I
+feel sure, for I have had private means of finding out.  It's a sure
+thing; but I must go once more to see that the other fellows don't
+try any trick on us.  You understand what is for my advantage is for
+yours, and, if I go wrong, you go overboard with me.  Now I must
+leave the--you know--behind me.  I can't leave it in the house or the
+office: they might burn up.  I won't have it about me when I am
+travelling.  Draw your chair a little more this way.  Now listen."
+
+["Indade I will," said the third party to herself.  The reader will
+find out in due time whether she listened to any purpose or not.]
+
+In the mean time Myrtle, who for some reason was rather nervous and
+restless, had found a pair of half-finished slippers which she had
+left behind her.  The color came into her cheeks when she remembered
+the state of mind she was in when she was working on them for the
+Rev. Mr. Stoker.  She recollected Master Gridley's mistake about
+their destination, and determined to follow the hint he had given.
+It would please him better if she sent them to good Father Pemberton,
+she felt sure, than if he should get them himself.  So she enlarged
+them somewhat, (for the old man did not pinch his feet, as the
+younger clergyman was in the habit of doing, and was, besides, of
+portly dimensions, as the old orthodox three-deckers were apt to be,)
+and worked E. P. very handsomely into the pattern, and sent them to
+him with her love and respect, to his great delight; for old
+ministers do not have quite so many tokens of affection from fair
+hands as younger ones.
+
+What made Myrtle nervous and restless?  Why had she quitted the city
+so abruptly, and fled to her old home, leaving all the gayeties
+behind her which had so attracted and dazzled her?
+
+She had not betrayed herself at the third meeting with the young man
+who stood in such an extraordinary relation to her,--who had actually
+given her life from his own breath,--as when she met him for the
+second time.  Whether his introduction to her at the party, just at
+the instant when Murray Bradshaw was about to make a declaration,
+saved her from being in another moment the promised bride of that
+young gentleman, or not, we will not be so rash as to say.  It
+looked, certainly, as if he was in a fair way to carry his point; but
+perhaps she would have hesitated, or shrunk back, when the great
+question came to stare her in the face.
+
+She was excited, at any rate, by the conversation, so that, when
+Clement was presented to her, her thoughts could not at once be all
+called away from her other admirer, and she was saved from all danger
+of that sudden disturbance which had followed their second meeting.
+Whatever impression he made upon her developed itself gradually,
+--still, she felt strangely drawn towards him.  It was not simply in
+his good looks, in his good manners, in his conversation, that she
+found this attraction, but there was a singular fascination which she
+felt might be dangerous to her peace, without explaining it to
+herself in words.  She could hardly be in love with this young
+artist; she knew that his affections were plighted to another, a fact
+which keeps most young women from indulging unruly fancies; yet her
+mind was possessed by his image to such an extent that it left little
+room for that of Mr. William Murray Bradshaw.
+
+Myrtle Hazard had been just ready to enter on a career of worldly
+vanity and ambition.  It is hard to blame her, for we know how she
+came by the tendency.  She had every quality, too, which fitted her
+to shine in the gay world; and the general law is, that those who
+have the power have the instinct to use it.  We do not suppose that
+the bracelet on her arm was an amulet, but it was a symbol.  It
+reminded her of her descent; it kept alive the desire to live over
+the joys and excitements of a bygone generation.  If she had accepted
+Murray Bradshaw, she would have pledged herself to a worldly life.
+If she had refused him, it would perhaps have given her a taste of
+power that might have turned her into a coquette.
+
+This new impression saved her for the time.  She had come back to her
+nest in the village like a frightened bird; her heart was throbbing,
+her nerves were thrilling, her dreams were agitated; she wanted to be
+quiet, and could not listen to the flatteries or entreaties of her
+old lover.
+
+It was a strong will and a subtle intellect that had arrayed their
+force and skill against the ill-defended citadel of Myrtle's heart.
+Murray Bradshaw was perfectly determined, and not to be kept back by
+any trivial hindrances, such as her present unwillingness to accept
+him, or even her repugnance to him, if a freak of the moment had
+carried her so far.  It was a settled thing: Myrtle Hazard must
+become Mrs. Bradshaw; and nobody could deny that, if he gave her his
+name, they had a chance, at least, for a brilliant future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+MISTRESS KITTY FAGAN CALLS ON MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY.
+
+"I 'd like to go down to the store this mornin', Miss Withers, plase.
+Sure I've niver a shoe to my fut, only jist these two that I've got
+on, an' one other pair, and thim is so full of holes that whin I 'm
+standin' in 'em I'm outside of 'em intirely."
+
+"You can go, Kitty," Miss Silence answered, funereally.
+
+Thereupon Kitty Fagan proceeded to array herself in her most tidy
+apparel, including a pair of shoes not exactly answering to her
+description, and set out straight for the house of the Widow Hopkins.
+Arrived at that respectable mansion, she inquired for Mr. Gridley,
+and was informed that he was at home.  Had a message for him,--could
+she see him in his study?  She could if she would wait a little
+while.  Mr. Gridley was busy just at this minute.  Sit down, Kitty,
+and warm yourself at the cooking-stove.
+
+Mistress Kitty accepted Mrs. Hopkins's hospitable offer, and
+presently began orienting herself, and getting ready to make herself
+agreeable.  The kindhearted Mrs. Hopkins had gathered about her
+several other pensioners besides the twins.  These two little people,
+it may be here mentioned, were just taking a morning airing in charge
+of Susan Posey, who strolled along in company with Gifted Hopkins on
+his way to the store.
+
+Mistress Kitty soon began the conversational blandishments so natural
+to her good-humored race.  "It's a little blarney that'll jist suit
+th' old lady," she said to herself, as she made her first
+conciliatory advance.
+
+"An' sure an' it's a beautiful kitten you've got there, Mrs. Hopkins.
+An' it's a splendid mouser she is, I'll be bound.  Does n't she look
+as if she'd clans the house out o'them little bastes, bad luck to em."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked benignantly upon the more than middle-aged tabby,
+slumbering as if she had never known an enemy, and turned smiling to
+Mistress Kitty.  "Why, bless your heart, Kitty, our old puss would
+n't know a mouse by sight, if you showed her one.  If I was a mouse,
+I'd as lieves have a nest in one of that old cat's ears as anywhere
+else.  You couldn't find a safer place for one."
+
+"Indade, an' to be sure she's too big an' too handsome a pussy to be
+after wastin' her time on them little bastes.  It's that little
+tarrier dog of yours, Mrs. Hopkins, that will be after worryin' the
+mice an' the rats, an' the thaves too, I 'll warrant.  Is n't he a
+fust-rate-lookin' watch-dog, an' a rig'ler rat-hound?"
+
+Mrs. Hopkins looked at the little short-legged and short-winded
+animal of miscellaneous extraction with an expression of contempt and
+affection, mingled about half and half.  "Worry 'em!  If they wanted
+to sleep, I rather guess he would worry 'em!  If barkin' would do
+their job for 'em, nary a mouse nor rat would board free gratis in my
+house as they do now.  Noisy little good-for-nothing tike,--ain't
+you, Fret?"
+
+Mistress Kitty was put back a little by two such signal failures.
+There was another chance, however, to make her point, which she
+presently availed herself of,--feeling pretty sure this time that she
+should effect a lodgement.  Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing
+Kitty, first with one eye and then with the other, evidently
+preparing to make a remark, but awkward with a stranger.  "That 's a
+beautiful part y 've got there," Kitty said, buoyant with the
+certainty that she was on safe ground this time; "and tahks like a
+book, I 'll be bound.  Poll!  Poll!  Poor Poll!"
+
+She put forth her hand to caress the intelligent and affable bird,
+which, instead of responding as expected, "squawked," as our phonetic
+language has it, and, opening a beak imitated from a tooth-drawing
+instrument of the good old days, made a shrewd nip at Kitty's
+forefinger.  She drew it back with a jerk.
+
+"An' is that the way your part tahks, Mrs. Hopkins?"
+
+"Talks, bless you, Kitty!  why, that parrot hasn't said a word this
+ten year.  He used to say Poor Poll!  when we first had him, but he
+found it was easier to squawk, and that's all he ever does nowadays,
+--except bite once in a while."
+
+"Well, an' to be sure," Kitty answered, radiant as she rose from her
+defeats, "if you'll kape a cat that does n't know a mouse when she
+sees it, an' a dog that only barks for his livin', and a part that
+only squawks an' bites an' niver spakes a word, ye must be the best-
+hearted woman that's alive, an' bliss ye, if ye was only a good
+Catholic, the Holy Father 'd make a saint of ye in less than no
+time!"
+
+So Mistress Kitty Fagan got in her bit of Celtic flattery, in spite
+of her three successive discomfitures.
+
+"You may come up now, Kitty," said Mr. Gridley over the stairs.  He
+had just finished and sealed a letter.
+
+"Well, Kitty, how are things going on up at The Poplars?  And how
+does our young lady seem to be of late?"
+
+"Whisht!  whisht!  your honor."
+
+Mr. Bradshaw's lessons had not been thrown away on his attentive
+listener.  She opened every door in the room, "by your lave," as she
+said.  She looked all over the walls to see if there was any old
+stovepipe hole or other avenue to eye or ear.  Then she went, in her
+excess of caution, to the window.  She saw nothing noteworthy except
+Mr. Gifted Hopkins and the charge he convoyed, large and small, in
+the distance.  The whole living fleet was stationary for the moment,
+he leaning on the fence with his cheek on his hand, in one of the
+attitudes of the late Lord Byron; she, very near him, listening,
+apparently, in the pose of Mignon aspirant au ciel, as rendered by
+Carlo Dolce Scheffer.
+
+Kitty came back, apparently satisfied, and stood close to Mr.
+Gridley, who told her to sit down, which she did, first making a
+catch at her apron to dust the chair with, and then remembering that
+she had left that part of her costume at home.--Automatic movements,
+curious.
+
+Mistress Kitty began telling in an undertone of the meeting between
+Mr. Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, and of the arrangements she made for
+herself as the reporter of the occasion.  She then repeated to him,
+in her own way, that part of the conversation which has been already
+laid before the reader.  There is no need of going over the whole of
+this again in Kitty's version, but we may fit what followed into the
+joints of what has been already told.
+
+"He cahled her Cynthy, d' ye see, Mr. Gridley, an' tahked to her jist
+as asy as if they was two rogues, and she knowed it as well as he
+did.  An' so, says he, I'm goin' away, says he, an' I'm goin' to be
+gahn siveral days, or perhaps longer, says he, an' you'd better kape
+it, says he."
+
+"Keep what, Kitty?  What was it he wanted her to keep?" said Mr.
+Gridley, who no longer doubted that he was on the trail of a plot,
+and meant to follow it.  He was getting impatient with the "says
+he's" with which Kitty double-leaded her discourse.
+
+"An' to be sure ain't I tellin' you, Mr. Gridley, jist as fast as my
+breath will let me?  An' so, says he, you'd better kape it, says he,
+mixed up with your other paupers, says he," (Mr. Gridley started,)
+"an' thin we can find it in the garret, says he, whinever we want it,
+says he.  An' if it all goes right out there, says he, it won't be
+lahng before we shall want to find it, says he.  And I can dipind on
+you, says he, for we're both in the same boat, says he, an' you knows
+what I knows, says he, an' I knows what you knows, says be.  And thin
+he taks a stack o' paupers out of his pocket, an' he pulls out one of
+'em, an' he says to her, says he, that's the pauper, says he, an' if
+you die, says be, niver lose sight of that day or night, says he, for
+it's life an' dith to both of us, says he.  An' thin he asks her if
+she has n't got one o' them paupers--what is 't they cahls 'em?--
+divilops, or some sich kind of a name--that they wraps up their
+letters in; an' she says no, she has n't got none that's big enough
+to hold it.  So he says, give me a shate o' pauper, says he.  An'
+thin he takes the pauper that she give him, an' he folds it up like
+one o' them--divilops, if that's the name of 'em; and thin he pulls a
+stick o' salin'-wax out of his pocket, an' a stamp, an' he takes the
+pauper an' puts it into th' other pauper, along with the rest of the
+paupers, an' thin he folds th' other pauper over the paupers, and
+thin he lights a candle, an' he milts the salin'-wax, and he sales up
+the pauper that was outside th' other paupers, an' he writes on the
+back of the pauper, an' thin he hands it to Miss Badlam."
+
+"Did you see the paper that he showed her before he fastened it up
+with the others, Kitty?"
+
+"I did see it, indade, Mr. Gridley, and it's the truth I'm tellin'
+ye."
+
+"Did you happen to notice anything about it, Kitty?"
+
+"I did, indade, Mr. Gridley.  It was a longish kind of a pauper, and
+there was some blotches of ink on the back of it,--an' they looked
+like a face without any mouth, for, says I, there's two spots for the
+eyes, says I, and there's a spot for the nose, says I, and there's
+niver a spot for the mouth, says I"
+
+This was the substance of what Master Byles Gridley got out of Kitty
+Fagan.  It was enough, yes, it was too much.  There was some deep-
+laid plot between Murray Bradshaw and Cynthia Badlam, involving the
+interests of some of the persons connected with the late Malachi
+Withers; for that the paper described by Kitty was the same that he
+had seen the young man conceal in the Corpus Juris Civilis, it was
+impossible to doubt.  If it had been a single spot an the back of it,
+or two, he might have doubted.  But three large spots "blotches" she
+had called them, disposed thus *.*--would not have happened to be on
+two different papers, in all human probability.
+
+After grave consultation of all his mental faculties in committee of
+the whole, he arrived at the following conclusion,--that Miss Cynthia
+Badlam was the depositary of a secret involving interests which he
+felt it his business to defend, and of a document which was
+fraudulently withheld and meant to be used for some unfair purpose.
+And most assuredly, Master Gridley said to himself, he held a master-
+key, which, just so certainly as he could make up his mind to use it,
+would open any secret in the keeping of Miss Cynthia Badlam.
+
+He proceeded, therefore, without delay, to get ready for a visit to
+that lady at The Poplars.  He meant to go thoroughly armed, for he
+was a very provident old gentleman.  His weapons were not exactly of
+the kind which a housebreaker would provide himself with, but of a
+somewhat peculiar nature.
+
+Weapon number one was a slip of paper with a date and a few words
+written upon it.  "I think this will fetch the document," he said to
+himself, "if it comes to the worst.  Not if I can help it,--not if I
+can help it.  But if I cannot get at the heart of this thing
+otherwise, why, I must come to this.  Poor woman!--Poor woman!"
+
+Weapon number two was a small phial containing spirits of hartshorn,
+sal volatile, very strong, that would stab through the nostrils, like
+a stiletto, deep into the gray kernels that lie in the core of the
+brain.  Excellent in cases of sudden syncope or fainting, such as
+sometimes require the opening of windows, the dashing on of cold
+water, the cutting of stays, perhaps, with a scene of more or less
+tumultuous perturbation and afflux of clamorous womanhood.
+
+So armed, Byles Gridley, A. M., champion of unprotected innocence,
+grasped his ivory-handled cane and sallied forth on his way to The
+Poplars.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CALLS ON MISS CYNTHIA BADLAM.
+
+MISS Cynthia Badlam was seated in a small parlor which she was
+accustomed to consider her own during her long residences at The
+Poplars.  The entry stove warmed it but imperfectly, and she looked
+pinched and cold, for the evenings were still pretty sharp, and the
+old house let in the chill blasts, as old houses are in the habit of
+doing.  She was sitting at her table, with a little trunk open before
+her.  She had taken some papers from it, which she was looking over,
+when a knock at her door announced a visitor, and Master Byles
+Gridley entered the parlor.
+
+As he came into the room, she gathered the papers together and
+replaced them in the trunk, which she locked, throwing an unfinished
+piece of needle-work over it, putting the key in her pocket, and
+gathering herself up for company.  Something of all this Master
+Gridley saw through his round spectacles, but seemed not to see, and
+took his seat like a visitor making a call of politeness.
+
+A visitor at such an hour, of the male sex, without special
+provocation, without social pretext, was an event in the life of the
+desolate spinster.  Could it be--No, it could not--and yet--and yet!
+Miss Cynthia threw back the rather common-looking but comfortable
+shawl which covered her shoulders, and showed her quite presentable
+figure, arrayed with a still lingering thought of that remote
+contingency which might yet offer itself at some unexpected moment;
+she adjusted the carefully plaited cap, which was not yet of the
+lasciate ogni speranza pattern, and as she obeyed these instincts of
+her sex, she smiled a welcome to the respectable, learned, and
+independent bachelor.  Mr. Gridley had a frosty but kindly age before
+him, with a score or so of years to run, which it was after all not
+strange to fancy might be rendered more cheerful by the companionship
+of a well-conserved and amiably disposed woman, if any such should
+happen to fall in his way.
+
+That smile came very near disconcerting the plot of Master Byles
+Gridley.  He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as
+he thought, against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down
+all resistance.  He had come armed with an instrument of torture
+worse than the thumb-screw, worse than the pulleys which attempt the
+miracle of adding a cubit to the stature, worse than the brazier of
+live coals brought close to the naked soles of the feet,--an
+instrument which, instead of trifling with the nerves, would clutch
+all the nerve-centres and the heart itself in its gripe, and hold
+them until it got its answer, if the white lips had life enough left
+to shape one.  And here was this unfortunate maiden lady smiling at
+him, setting her limited attractions in their best light, pleading
+with him in that natural language which makes any contumacious
+bachelor feel as guilty as Cain before any single woman.  If Mr.
+Gridley had been alone, he would have taken a good sniff at his own
+bottle of sal volatile; for his kind heart sunk within him as he
+thought of the errand upon which he had come.  It would not do to
+leave the subject of his vivisection under any illusion as to the
+nature of his designs.
+
+"Good evening, Miss Badlam," he said, "I have come to visit you on a
+matter of business."
+
+What was the internal panorama which had unrolled itself at the
+instant of his entrance, and which rolled up as suddenly at the sound
+of his serious voice and the look of his grave features?  It cannot
+be reproduced, though pages were given to it; for some of the
+pictures were near, and some were distant; some were clearly seen,
+and some were only hinted; some were not recognized in the intellect
+at all, and yet they were implied, as it were, behind the others.
+Many times we have all found ourselves glad or sorry, and yet we
+could not tell what thought it was that reflected the sunbeam or cast
+the shadow.  Took into Cynthia's suddenly exalted consciousness and
+see the picture, actual and potential, unroll itself in all its
+details of the natural, the ridiculous, the selfish, the pitiful, the
+human.  Glimpses, hints, echoes, suggestions, involving tender
+sentiments hitherto unknown, we may suppose, to that unclaimed
+sister's breast,--pleasant excitement of receiving congratulations
+from suddenly cordial friends; the fussy delights of buying furniture
+and shopping for new dresses,--(it seemed as if she could hear
+herself saying, "Heavy silks,--best goods, if you please,")--with
+delectable thumping down of flat-sided pieces of calico, cambric,
+"rep," and other stiffs, and rhythmic evolution of measured yards,
+followed by sharp snip of scissors, and that cry of rending tissues
+dearer to woman's ear than any earthly sound until she hears the
+voice of her own first-born,(much of this potentially, remember,)--
+thoughts of a comfortable settlement, an imposing social condition, a
+cheerful household, and by and by an Indian summer of serene
+widowhood,--all these, and infinite other involved possibilities had
+mapped themselves in one long swift flash before Cynthia's inward
+eye, and all vanished as the old man spoke those few words.  The look
+on his face, and the tone of his cold speech, had instantly swept
+them all away, like a tea-set sliding in a single crash from a
+slippery tray.
+
+What could be the "business" on which he had come to her with that
+solemn face?--she asked herself, as she returned his greeting and
+offered him a chair.  She was conscious of a slight tremor as she put
+this question to her own intelligence.
+
+"Are we like to be alone and undisturbed?" Mr. Gridley asked.  It was
+a strange question,--men do act strangely sometimes.  She hardly
+knew.  whether to turn red or white.
+
+"Yes, there is nobody like to come in at present," she answered.  She
+did not know what to make of it.  What was coming next,
+--a declaration, or an accusation of murder?
+
+"My business," Mr. Gridley said, very gravely, "relates to this.  I
+wish to inspect papers which I have reason to believe exist, and
+which have reference to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers.  Can
+you help me to get sight of any of these papers not to be found at
+the Registry of Deeds or the Probate Office?"
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Gridley, but may I ask you what particular concern
+you have with the affairs of my relative, Cousin Malachi Withers,
+that's been dead and buried these half-dozen years?"
+
+"Perhaps it would take some time to answer that question fully, Miss
+Badlam.  Some of these affairs do concern those I am interested in,
+if not myself directly."
+
+"May I ask who the person or persons may be on whose account you wish
+to look at papers belonging to my late relative, Malachi Withers?"
+
+"You can ask me almost anything, Miss Badlam, but I should really be
+very much obliged if you would answer my question first.  Can you
+help me to get a sight of any papers relating to the estate of
+Malachi Withers, not to be found at the Registry of Deeds or the
+Probate Office,--any of which you may happen to have any private and
+particular knowledge?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Gridley; but I don't understand why you come
+to me with such questions.  Lawyer Penhallow is the proper person, I
+should think, to go to.  He and his partner that was--Mr. Wibird, you
+know--settled the estate, and he has got the papers, I suppose, if
+there are any, that ain't to be found in the offices you mention."
+
+Mr. Gridley moved his chair a little, so as to bring Miss Badlam's
+face a little more squarely in view.
+
+"Does Mr. William Murray Bradshaw know anything about any papers,
+such as I am referring to, that may have been sent to the office?"
+
+The lady felt a little moisture stealing through all her pores, and
+at the same time a certain dryness of the vocal organs, so that her
+answer came in a slightly altered tone which neither of them could
+help noticing.
+
+"You had better ask Mr. William Murray Bradshaw yourself about that,"
+she answered.  She felt the hook now, and her spines were rising,
+partly with apprehension, partly with irritation.
+
+"Has that young gentleman ever delivered into your hands any papers
+relating to the affairs of the late Malachi Withers, for your safe
+keeping?"
+
+"What do you mean by asking me these questions, Mr. Gridley?  I don't
+choose to be catechised about Murray Bradshaw's business.  Go to him,
+if you please, if you want to find out about it."
+
+"Excuse my persistence, Miss Badlam, but I must prevail upon you to
+answer my question.  Has Mr. William Murray Bradshaw ever delivered
+into your hands any papers relating to the affairs of the late
+Malachi Withers, for your safe keeping?"
+
+"Do you suppose I am going to answer such questions as you are
+putting me because you repeat them over, Mr. Gridley?  Indeed I
+cha'n't.  Ask him, if you please, whatever you wish to know about his
+doings."
+
+She drew herself up and looked savagely at him.  She had talked
+herself into her courage.  There was a color in her cheeks and a
+sparkle in her eye; she looked dangerous as a cobra.
+
+"Miss Cynthia Badlam," Master Gridley said, very deliberately, "I am
+afraid we do not entirely understand each other.  You must answer my
+question precisely, categorically, point-blank, and on the instant.
+Will you do this at once, or will you compel me to show you the
+absolute necessity of your doing it, at the expense of pain to both
+of us?  Six words from me will make you answer all my questions."
+
+"You can't say six words, nor sixty, Mr. Gridley, that will make me
+answer one question I do not choose to.  I defy you!"
+
+"I will not say one, Miss Cynthia Badlam.  There are some things one
+does not like to speak in words.  But I will show you a scrap of
+paper, containing just six words and a date; not one word more nor
+one less.  You shall read them.  Then I will burn the paper in the
+flame of your lamp.  As soon after that as you feel ready, I will ask
+the same question again."
+
+Master Gridley took out from his pocket-book a scrap of paper, and
+handed it to Cynthia Badlam.  Her hand shook as she received it, for
+she was frightened as well as enraged, and she saw that Mr. Gridley
+was in earnest and knew what he was doing.
+
+She read the six words, he looking at her steadily all the time, and
+watching her as if he had just given her a drop of prussic acid.
+
+No cry.  No sound from her lips.  She stared as if half stunned for
+one moment, then turned her head and glared at Mr. Gridley as if she
+would have murdered him if she dared.  In another instant her face
+whitened, the scrap of paper fluttered to the floor, and she would
+have followed it but for the support of both Mr. Gridley's arms.  He
+disengaged one of them presently, and felt in his pocket for the sal
+volatile.  It served him excellently well, and stung her back again
+to her senses very quickly.  All her defiant aspect had gone.
+
+"Look!" he said, as he lighted the scrap of paper in the flame."
+You understand me, and you see that I must be answered the next time
+I ask my question."
+
+She opened her lips as if to speak.  It was as when a bell is rung in
+a vacuum,--no words came from them,--only a faint gasping sound, an
+effort at speech.  She was caught tight in the heart-screw.
+
+"Don't hurry yourself, Miss Cynthia," he said, with a certain
+relenting tenderness of manner.  "Here, take another sniff of the
+smelling-salts.  Be calm, be quiet,--I am well disposed towards you,
+--I don't like to give you trouble.  There, now, I must have the
+answer to that question; but take your time, take your time."
+
+"Give me some water,--some water!" she said, in a strange hoarse
+whisper.  There was a pitcher of water and a tumbler on an old marble
+sideboard near by.  He filled the tumbler, and Cynthia emptied it as
+if she had just been taken from the rack, and could have swallowed a
+bucketful.
+
+"What do you want to know?" she asked.
+
+"I wish to know all that you can tell me about a certain paper, or
+certain papers, which I have reason to believe Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw committed to your keeping."
+
+"There is only one paper of any consequence.  Do you want to make him
+kill me? or do you want to make me kill myself?"
+
+"Neither, Miss Cynthia, neither.  I wish to see that paper, but not
+for any bad purpose.  Don't you think, on the whole, you have pretty
+good reason to trust me?  I am a very quiet man, Miss Cynthia.  Don't
+be afraid of me; only do what I ask,--it will be a great deal better
+for you in the end."
+
+She thrust her trembling hand into her pocket, and took out the key
+of the little trunk.  She drew the trunk towards her, put the key in
+the lock, and opened it.  It seemed like pressing a knife into her
+own bosom and turning the blade.  That little trunk held all the
+records of her life the forlorn spinster most cherished;--a few
+letters that came nearer to love-letters than any others she had ever
+received; an album, with flowers of the summers of 1840 and 1841
+fading between its leaves; two papers containing locks of hair, half
+of a broken ring, and other insignificant mementos which had their
+meaning, doubtless, to her,--such a collection as is often priceless
+to one human heart, and passed by as worthless in the auctioneer's
+inventory.  She took the papers out mechanically, and laid them on
+the table.  Among them was an oblong packet, sealed with what
+appeared to be the office seal of Messrs. Penhallow and Bradshaw.
+
+"Will you allow me to take that envelope containing papers, Miss
+Badlam?  "Mr. Gridley asked, with a suavity and courtesy in his tone
+and manner that showed how he felt for her sex and her helpless
+position.
+
+She seemed to obey his will as if she had none of her own left.  She
+passed the envelope to him, and stared at him vacantly while he
+examined it.  He read on the back of the package: "Withers Estate--
+old papers--of no importance apparently.  Examine hereafter."
+
+"May I ask when, where, and of whom you obtained these papers, Miss
+Badlam?"
+
+"Have pity on me, Mr. Gridley,--have pity on me.  I am a lost woman
+if you do not.  Spare me! for God's sake, spare me!  There will no
+wrong come of all this, if you will but wait a little while.  The
+paper will come to light when it is wanted, and all will be right.
+But do not make me answer any more questions, and let me keep this
+paper.  O Mr. Gridley!  I am in the power of a dreadful man--"
+
+"You mean Mr. William Murray Bradshaw?"
+
+"I mean him."
+
+"Has there not been some understanding between you that he should
+become the approved suitor of Miss Myrtle Hazard?"
+
+Cynthia wrung her hands and rocked herself backward and forward in
+her misery, but answered not a word.  What could she answer, if she
+had plotted with this "dreadful man" against a young and innocent
+girl, to deliver her over into his hands, at the risk of all her
+earthly hopes and happiness?
+
+Master Gridley waited long and patiently for any answer she might
+have the force to make.  As she made none, he took upon himself to
+settle the whole matter without further torture of his helpless
+victim.
+
+"This package must go into the hands of the parties who had the
+settlement of the estate of the late Malachi Withers.  Mr. Penhallow
+is the survivor of the two gentlemen to whom that business was
+intrusted.  How long is Mr. William Murray Bradshaw like to be away?"
+
+"Perhaps a few days,--perhaps weeks,--and then he will come back and
+kill me,--or--or--worse!  Don't take that paper, Mr. Gridley,--he
+isn't like you! you would n't--but he would--he would send me to
+everlasting misery to gain his own end, or to save himself.  And yet
+he is n't every way bad, and if he did marry Myrtle she'd think there
+never was such a man,--for he can talk her heart out of her, and the
+wicked in him lies very deep and won't ever come out, perhaps, if the
+world goes right with him."  The last part of this sentence showed
+how Cynthia talked with her own conscience; all her mental and moral
+machinery lay open before the calm eyes of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+His thoughts wandered a moment from the business before him; he had
+just got a new study of human nature, which in spite of himself would
+be shaping itself into an axiom for an imagined new edition of
+"Thoughts on the Universe," something like this, "The greatest saint
+may be a sinner that never got down to "hard pan."  It was not the
+time to be framing axioms.
+
+"Poh!  poh!" he said to himself; "what are you about making phrases,
+when you have got a piece of work like this in hand?"  Then to
+Cynthia, with great gentleness and kindness of manner: "Have no fear
+about any consequences to yourself.  Mr. Penhallow must see that
+paper--I mean those papers.  You shall not be a loser nor a sufferer
+if you do your duty now in these premises."
+
+Master Gridley, treating her, as far as circumstances permitted, like
+a gentleman, had shown no intention of taking the papers either
+stealthily or violently.  It must be with her consent.  He had laid
+the package down upon the table, waiting for her to give him leave to
+take it.  But just as he spoke these last words, Cynthia, whose eye
+had been glancing furtively at it while he was thinking out his
+axiom, and taking her bearings to it pretty carefully, stretched her
+hand out, and, seizing the package, thrust it into the sanctuary of
+her bosom.
+
+"Mr. Penhallow must see those papers, Miss Cynthia Badlam," Mr.
+Gridley repeated calmly.  "If he says they or any of them can be
+returned to your keeping, well and good.  But see them he must, for
+they have his office seal and belong in his custody, and, as you see
+by the writing on the back, they have not been examined.  Now there
+may be something among them which is of immediate importance to the
+relatives of the late deceased Malachi Withers, and therefore they
+must be forthwith submitted to the inspection of the surviving
+partner of the firm of Wibird and Penhallow.  This I propose to do,
+with your consent, this evening.  It is now twenty-five minutes past
+eight by the true time, as my watch has it.  At half past eight
+exactly I shall have the honor of bidding you good evening, Miss
+Cynthia Badlam, whether you give me those papers or not.  I shall go
+to the office of Jacob Penhallow, Esquire, and there make one of two
+communications to him; to wit, these papers and the facts connected
+therewith, or another statement, the nature of which you may perhaps
+conjecture."
+
+There is no need of our speculating as to what Mr. Byles Gridley, an
+honorable and humane man, would have done, or what would have been
+the nature of that communication which he offered as an alternative
+to the perplexed woman.  He had not at any rate miscalculated the
+strength of his appeal, which Cynthia interpreted as he expected.
+She bore the heart-screw about two minutes.  Then she took the
+package from her bosom, and gave it with averted face to Master Byles
+Gridley, who, on receiving it, made her a formal but not unkindly
+bow, and bade her good evening.
+
+"One would think it had been lying out in the dew," he said, as he
+left the house and walked towards Mr. Penhallow's residence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+
+MASTER BYLES GRIDLEY CONSULTS WITH JACOB PENHALLOW, ESQUIRE
+
+Lawyer Penhallow was seated in his study, his day's work over, his
+feet in slippers, after the comfortable but inelegant fashion which
+Sir Walter Scott reprobates, amusing himself with a volume of old
+Reports.  He was a knowing man enough, a keen country lawyer but
+honest, and therefore less ready to suspect the honesty of others.
+He had a great belief in his young partner's ability, and, though he
+knew him to be astute, did not think him capable of roguery.
+
+It was at his request that Mr. Bradshaw had undertaken his journey,
+which, as he believed,--and as Mr. Bradshaw had still stronger
+evidence of a strictly confidential nature which led him to feel
+sure,--would end in the final settlement of the great land claim in
+favor of their client.  The case had been dragging along from year to
+year, like an English chancery suit; and while courts and lawyers and
+witnesses had been sleeping, the property had been steadily growing.
+A railroad had passed close to one margin of the township, some mines
+had been opened in the county, in which a village calling itself a
+city had grown big enough to have a newspaper and Fourth of July
+orations.  It was plain that the successful issue of the long process
+would make the heirs of the late Malachi Withers possessors of an
+ample fortune, and it was also plain that the firm of Penhallow and
+Bradshaw were like to receive, in such case, the largest fee that had
+gladdened the professional existence of its members.
+
+Mr. Penhallow had his book open before him, but his thoughts were
+wandering from the page.  He was thinking of his absent partner, and
+the probable results of his expedition.  What would be the
+consequence if all this property came into the possession of Silence
+Withers?  Could she have any liberal intentions with reference to
+Myrtle Hazard, the young girl who had grown up with her, or was the
+common impression true, that she was bent on endowing an institution,
+and thus securing for herself a favorable consideration in the higher
+courts, where her beneficiaries would be, it might be supposed,
+influential advocates?  He could not help thinking that Mr. Bradshaw
+believed that Myrtle Hazard would eventually come to apart at least
+of this inheritance.  For the story was, that he was paying his court
+to the young lady whenever he got an opportunity, and that he was
+cultivating an intimacy with Miss Cynthia Badlam.  "Bradshaw would
+n'tmake a move in that direction," Mr. Penhallow said to himself,
+"until he felt pretty sure that it was going to be a paying business.
+If he was only a young minister now, there'd be no difficulty about
+it.  Let any man, young or old, in a clerical white cravat, step up
+to Myrtle Hazard, and ask her to be miserable in his company through
+this wretched life, and aunt Silence would very likely give them her
+blessing, and add something to it that the man in the white cravat
+would think worth even more than that was.  But I don't know what
+she'll say to Bradshaw.  Perhaps he 'd better have a hint to go to
+meeting a little more regularly.  However, I suppose he knows what
+he's about."
+
+He was thinking all this over when a visitor was announced, and Mr.
+Byles Gridley entered the study.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley said, wiping his forehead.
+"Quite warm, is n't it, this evening?"
+
+"Warm!" said Mr. Penhallow, "I should think it would freeze pretty
+thick to-night.  I should have asked you to come up to the fire and
+warm yourself.  But take off your coat, Mr. Gridley,--very glad to
+see you.  You don't come to the house half as often as you come to
+the office.  Sit down, sit down."
+
+Mr. Gridley took off his outside coat and sat down.  "He does look
+warm, does n't he?" Mr. Penhallow thought.  "Wonder what has heated
+up the old gentleman so.  Find out quick enough, for he always goes
+straight to business."
+
+"Mr. Penhallow," Mr. Gridley began at once, "I have come on a very
+grave matter, in which you are interested as well as myself, and I
+wish to lay the whole of it before you as explicitly as I can, so
+that we may settle this night before I go what is to be done.  I am
+afraid the good standing of your partner, Mr. William Murray
+Bradshaw, is concerned in the matter.  Would it be a surprise to you,
+if he had carried his acuteness in some particular case like the one
+I am to mention beyond the prescribed limits?"
+
+The question was put so diplomatically that there was no chance for
+an indignant denial of the possibility of Mr. Bradshaw's being
+involved in any discreditable transaction.
+
+"It is possible," he answered, "that Bradshaw's keen wits may have
+betrayed him into sharper practice than I should altogether approve
+in any business we carried on together.  He is a very knowing young
+man, but I can't think he is foolish enough, to say nothing of his
+honesty, to make any false step of the kind you seem to hint.  I
+think he might on occasion go pretty near the line, but I don't
+believe he would cross it."
+
+"Permit me a few questions, Mr. Penhallow.  You settled the estate of
+the late Malachi Withers, did you not?"
+
+"Mr. Wibird and myself settled it together."
+
+"Have you received any papers from any of the family since the
+settlement of the estate?"
+
+"Let me see.  Yes; a roll of old plans of the Withers Place, and so
+forth,--not of much use, but labelled and kept.  An old trunk with
+letters and account-books, some of them in Dutch,--mere curiosities.
+A year ago or more, I remember that Silence sent me over some papers
+she had found in an odd corner,--the old man hid things like a
+magpie.  I looked over most of them,--trumpery not worth keeping,--
+old leases and so forth."
+
+"Do you recollect giving some of them to Mr. Bradshaw to look over?"
+
+"Now I come to think of it, I believe I did; but he reported to me,
+if I remember right, that they amounted to nothing."
+
+"If any of those papers were of importance, should you think your
+junior partner ought to keep them from your knowledge?"
+
+"I need not answer that question, Mr. Gridley.  Will you be so good
+as to come at once to the facts on which you found your suspicions,
+and which lead you to put these questions to me?"
+
+Thereupon Mr. Gridley proceeded to state succinctly the singular
+behavior of Murray Bradshaw in taking one paper from a number handed
+to him by Mr. Penhallow, and concealing it in a volume.  He related
+how he was just on the point of taking out the volume which contained
+the paper, when Mr. Bradshaw entered and disconcerted him.  He had,
+however, noticed three spots on the paper by which he should know it
+anywhere.  He then repeated the substance of Kitty Fagan's story,
+accenting the fact that she too noticed three remarkable spots on the
+paper which Mr. Bradshaw had pointed out to Miss Badlam as the one so
+important to both of them.  Here he rested the case for the moment.
+
+Mr. Penhallow looked thoughtful.  There was something questionable in
+the aspect of this business.  It did obviously suggest the idea of an
+underhand arrangement with Miss Cynthia, possibly involving some very
+grave consequences.  It would have been most desirable, he said, to
+have ascertained what these papers, or rather this particular paper,
+to which so much importance was attached, amounted to.  Without that
+knowledge there was nothing, after all, which it might not be
+possible to explain.  He might have laid aside the spotted paper to
+examine for some object of mere curiosity.  It was certainly odd that
+the one the Fagan woman had seen should present three spots so like
+those on the other paper, but people did sometimes throw treys at
+backgammon, and that which not rarely happened with two dice of six
+faces might happen if they had sixty or six hundred faces.  On the
+whole, he did not see that there was any ground, so far, for anything
+more than a vague suspicion.  He thought it not unlikely that Mr.
+Bradshaw was a little smitten with the young lady up at The Poplars,
+and that he had made some diplomatic overtures to the duenna, after
+the approved method of suitors.  She was young for Bradshaw,--very
+young,--but he knew his own affairs.  If he chose to make love to a
+child, it was natural enough that he should begin by courting her
+nurse.
+
+Master Byles Gridley lost himself for half a minute in a most
+discreditable inward discussion as to whether Laura Penhallow was
+probably one or two years older than Mr. Bradshaw.  That was his way,
+he could not help it.  He could not think of anything without these
+mental parentheses.  But he came back to business at the end of his
+half-minute.
+
+"I can lay the package before you at this moment, Mr. Penhallow.  I
+have induced that woman in whose charge it was left to intrust it to
+my keeping, with the express intention of showing it to you.  But it
+is protected by a seal, as I have told you, which I should on no
+account presume to meddle with."
+
+Mr. Gridley took out the package of papers.
+
+"How damp it is!" Mr. Penhallow said; "must have been lying in some
+very moist neighborhood."
+
+"Very," Mr. Gridley answered, with a peculiar expression which said,
+"Never mind about that."
+
+"Did the party give you possession of these documents without making
+any effort to retain them?" the lawyer asked.
+
+"Not precisely.  It cost some effort to induce Miss Badlam to let
+them go out of her hands.  I hope you think I was justified in making
+the effort I did, not without a considerable strain upon my feelings,
+as well as her own, to get hold of the papers?"
+
+"That will depend something on what the papers prove to be, Mr.
+Gridley.  A man takes a certain responsibility in doing just what you
+have done.  If, for instance, it should prove that this envelope
+contained matters relating solely to private transactions between Mr.
+Bradshaw and Miss Badlam, concerning no one but themselves,--and if
+the words on the back of the envelope and the seal had been put there
+merely as a protection for a package containing private papers of a
+delicate but perfectly legitimate character--"
+
+The lawyer paused, as careful experts do, after bending the bow of an
+hypothesis, before letting the arrow go.  Mr. Gridley felt very warm
+indeed, uncomfortably so, and applied his handkerchief to his face.
+Could n't be anything in such a violent supposition as that, and yet
+such a crafty fellow as that Bradshaw,--what trick was he not up to?
+Absurd!  Cynthia was not acting,--Rachel would n't be equal to such a
+performance!--" why then, Mr. Gridley," the lawyer continued, "I
+don't see but what my partner would have you at an advantage, and, if
+disposed to make you uncomfortable, could do so pretty effectively.
+But this, you understand, is only a supposed case, and not a very
+likely one.  I don't think it would have been prudent in you to
+meddle with that seal.  But it is a very different matter with regard
+to myself.  It makes no difference, so far as I am concerned, where
+this package came from, or how it was obtained.  It is just as
+absolutely within my control as any piece of property I call my own.
+I should not hesitate, if I saw fit, to break this seal at once, and
+proceed to the examination of any papers contained within the
+envelope.  If I found any paper of the slightest importance relating
+to the estate, I should act as if it had never been out of my
+possession.
+
+"Suppose, however, I chose to know what was in the package, and,
+having ascertained, act my judgment about returning it to the party
+from whom you obtained it.  In such case I might see fit to restore
+or cause it to be restored, to the party, without any marks of
+violence having been used being apparent.  If everything is not
+right, probably no questions would be asked by the party having
+charge of the package.  If there is no underhand work going on, and
+the papers are what they profess to be, nobody is compromised but
+yourself, so far as I can see, and you are compromised at any rate,
+Mr. Gridley, at least in the good graces of the party from whom you
+obtained the documents.  Tell that party that I took the package
+without opening it, and shall return it, very likely, without
+breaking the seal.  Will consider of the matter, say a couple of
+days.  Then you shall hear from me, and she shall hear from you.  So.
+So.  Yes, that's it.  A nice business.  A thing to sleep on.  You had
+better leave the whole matter of dealing with the package to me.  If
+I see fit to send it back with the seal unbroken, that is my affair.
+But keep perfectly quiet, if you please, Mr. Gridley, about the whole
+matter.  Mr. Bradshaw is off, as you know, and the business on which
+he is gone is important,--very important.  He can be depended on for
+that; he has acted all along as if he had a personal interest in the
+success of our firm beyond his legal relation to it."
+
+Mr. Penhallow's light burned very late in the office that night, and
+the following one.  He looked troubled and absent-minded, and when
+Miss Laura ventured to ask him how long Mr. Bradshaw was like to be
+gone, he answered her in such a way that the girl who waited at table
+concluded that he did n't mean to have Miss Laury keep company with
+Mr. Bradshaw, or he'd never have spoke so dreadful hash to her when
+she asked about him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+SUSAN POSEY'S TRIAL.
+
+A day or two after Myrtle Hazard returned to the village, Master
+Byles Gridley, accompanied by Gifted Hopkins, followed her, as has
+been already mentioned, to the same scene of the principal events of
+this narrative.  The young man had been persuaded that it would be
+doing injustice to his talents to crowd their fruit prematurely upon
+the market.  He carried his manuscript back with him, having
+relinquished the idea of publishing for the present.  Master Byles
+Gridley, on the other hand, had in his pocket a very flattering
+proposal, from the same publisher to whom he had introduced the young
+poet, for a new and revised edition of his work, "Thoughts on the
+Universe," which was to be remodelled in some respects, and to have a
+new title not quite so formidable to the average reader.
+
+It would be hardly fair to Susan Posey to describe with what delight
+and innocent enthusiasm she welcomed back Gifted Hopkins.  She had
+been so lonely since he was away?  She had read such of his poems as
+she possessed--duplicates of his printed ones, or autographs which he
+had kindly written out for her--over and over again, not without the
+sweet tribute of feminine sensibility, which is the most precious of
+all testimonials to a poet's power over the heart.  True, her love
+belonged to another,--but then she was so used to Gifted!  She did so
+love to hear him read his poems,--and Clement had never written that
+"little bit of a poem to Susie," which she had asked him for so long
+ago!  She received him therefore with open arms,--not literally, of
+course, which would have been a breach of duty and propriety, but in
+a figurative sense, which it is hoped no reader will interpret to her
+discredit.
+
+The young poet was in need of consolation.  It is true that he had
+seen many remarkable sights during his visit to the city; that he had
+got "smarted up," as his mother called it, a good deal; that he had
+been to Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's party, where he had looked upon life in
+all its splendors; and that he brought back many interesting
+experiences, which would serve to enliven his conversation for a long
+time.  But he had failed in the great enterprise he had undertaken.
+He was forced to confess to his revered parent, and his esteemed
+friend Susan Posey, that his genius, which was freely acknowledged,
+was not thought to be quite ripe as yet.  He told the young lady some
+particulars of his visit to the publisher, how he had listened with
+great interest to one of his poems, "The Triumph of Song,"--how he
+had treated him with marked and flattering attention; but that he
+advised him not to risk anything prematurely, giving him the hope
+that by and by he would be admitted into that series of illustrious
+authors which it was the publisher's privilege to present to the
+reading public.  In short, he was advised not to print.  That was the
+net total of the matter, and it was a pang to the susceptible heart
+of the poet.  He had hoped to have come home enriched by the sale of
+his copyright, and with the prospect of seeing his name before long
+on the back of a handsome volume.
+
+Gifted's mother did all in her power to console him in his
+disappointment.  There was plenty of jealous people always that
+wanted to keep young folks from rising in the world.  Never mind, she
+did n't believe but what Gifted could make jest as good verses as any
+of them that they kept such a talk about.  She had a fear that he
+might pine away in consequence of the mental excitement he had gone
+through, and solicited his appetite with her choicest appliances,--of
+which he partook in a measure which showed that there was no
+immediate cause of alarm.
+
+But Susan Posey was more than a consoler,--she was an angel to him in
+this time of his disappointment.  "Read me all the poems over again,"
+she said,--"it is almost the only pleasure I have left, to hear you
+read your beautiful verses."  Clement Lindsay had not written to
+Susan quite so often of late as at some former periods of the history
+of their love.  Perhaps it was that which had made her look paler
+than usual for some little time.  Something was evidently preying on
+her.  Her only delight seemed to be in listening to Gifted as he
+read, sometimes with fine declamatory emphasis, sometimes in low,
+tremulous tones, the various poems enshrined in his manuscript.  At
+other times she was sad, and more than once Mrs. Hopkins had seen a
+tear steal down her innocent cheek, when there seemed to be no
+special cause for grief.  She ventured to speak of it to Master Byles
+Gridley.
+
+"Our Susan's in trouble, Mr. Gridley, for some reason or other that's
+unbeknown to me, and I can't help wishing you could jest have a few
+words with her.  You're a kind of a grandfather, you know, to all the
+young folks, and they'd tell you pretty much everything about
+themselves.  I calc'late she is n't at ease in her mind about
+somethin' or other, and I kind o' think, Mr. Gridley, you could coax
+it out of her."
+
+"Was there ever anything like it?" said Master Byles Gridley to
+himself.  "I shall have all the young folks in Oxbow Village to take
+care of at this rate.  Susan Posey in trouble, too!  Well, well,
+well, it's easier to get a birch-bark canoe off the shallows than a
+big ship off the rocks.  Susan Posey's trouble will be come at easily
+enough; but Myrtle Hazard floats in deeper water.  We must make Susan
+Posey tell her own story, or let her tell it, for it will all come
+out of itself."
+
+"I am going to dust the books in the open shelves this morning.  I
+wonder if Miss Susan Posey would n't like to help for half an hour or
+so," Master Gridley remarked at the breakfast-table.
+
+The amiable girl's very pleasant countenance lighted up at the
+thought of obliging the old man who had been so kind to her and so
+liberal to her friend, the poet.  She would be delighted to help him;
+she would dust them all for him, if he wanted her to.  No, Master
+Gridley said, he always wanted to have a hand in it; and, besides,
+such a little body as she was could not lift those great folios out
+of the lower shelves without overstraining herself; she might handle
+the musketry and the light artillery, but he must deal with the heavy
+guns himself.  "As low down as the octavos, Susan Posey, you shall
+govern; below that, the Salic law."
+
+Susan did not low much about the Salic law; but she knew he meant
+that he would dust the big books and she would attend to the little
+ones.
+
+A very young and a very pretty girl is sometimes quite charming in a
+costume which thinks of nothing less than of being attractive.  Susan
+appeared after breakfast in the study, her head bound with a kerchief
+of bright pattern, a little jacket she had outgrown buttoned, in
+spite of opposition, close about her up to the throat, round which a
+white handkerchief was loosely tied, and a pair of old gauntlets
+protecting her hands, so that she suggested something between a
+gypsy, a jaunty soubrette, and the fille du regiment.
+
+Master Gridley took out a great volume from the lower shelf,--a folio
+in massive oaken covers with clasps Like prison hinges, bearing the
+stately colophon, white on a ground of vermilion, of Nicholas Jenson
+and his associates.  He opened the volume,--paused over its blue, and
+scarlet initial letter,--he turned page after page, admiring its
+brilliant characters, its broad, white marginal rivers, and the
+narrower white creek that separated the black-typed twin-columns, he
+turned back to the beginning and read the commendatory paragraph,"
+Nam ipsorum omnia fidgent tum correctione dignissima, tum cura
+imprimendo splendida ac miranda,' and began reading, "Incipit
+proemium super apparatum decretalium...." when it suddenly occurred
+to him that this was not exactly doing what he had undertaken to do,
+and he began whisking an ancient bandanna about the ears of the
+venerable volume.  All this time Miss Susan Posey was catching the
+little books by the small of their backs, pulling them out, opening
+them, and clapping them together, 'p-'p-'p!  'p-'p-'p!  and carefully
+caressing all their edges with a regular professional dusting-cloth,
+so persuasively that they yielded up every particle that a year had
+drifted upon them, and came forth refreshed and rejuvenated.  This
+process went on for a while, until Susan had worked down among
+the octavos and Master Gridley had worked up among the quartos.  He
+had got hold of Calmet's Dictionary, and was caught by the article
+Solomon, so that he forgot his occupation again.  All at once it
+struck him that everything was very silent,--the 'p-'p-'p!  of
+clapping the books had ceased, and the light rustle of Susan's dress
+was no longer heard.  He looked up and saw her standing perfectly
+still, with a book in one hand and her duster in the other.  She was
+lost in thought, and by the shadow on her face and the glistening of
+her blue eyes he knew it was her hidden sorrow that had just come
+back to her.  Master Gridley shut up his book, leaving Solomon to his
+fate, like the worthy Benedictine he was reading, without discussing
+the question whether he was saved or not.
+
+"Susan Posey, child, what is your trouble?"
+
+Poor Susan was in the state of unstable equilibrium which the least
+touch upsets, and fell to crying.  It took her some time to get down
+the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them.  At last it
+ventured out,--showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the
+billow, sinking into the hollow, and climbing again into notice.
+
+"O Mr. Grid-ley--I can't--I can't--tell you or--any-body--what 's the
+mat-mat-matter.  My heart will br-br-break."
+
+"No, no, no, child," said Mr. Gridley, sympathetically stirred a
+little himself by the sight of Susan in tears and sobbing and
+catching her breath, "that mustn't be, Susan Posey.  Come off the
+steps, Susan Posey, and stop dusting the books,--I can finish them,--
+and tell me all abort your troubles.  I will try 'to help you out of
+them, and I have begun to think I know how to help young people
+pretty well.  I have had some experience at it."
+
+But Susan cried and sobbed all the more uncontrollably and
+convulsively.  Master Gridley thought he had better lead her at once
+to what he felt pretty sure was the source of her grief, and that,
+when she had had her cry out, she would probably make the hole in the
+ice he had broken big enough in a very few minutes.
+
+"I think something has gone wrong between you and your friend, the
+young gentleman with whom you are in intimate relations, my child,
+and I think you had better talk freely with me, for I can perhaps
+give you a little counsel that will be of service."
+
+Susan cried herself quiet at last.  "There's nobody in the world like
+you, Mr. Gridley," she said, "and I've been wanting to tell you
+something ever so long.  My friend--Mr. Clem--Clement Lindsay does
+n't care for me as he used to,--I know he does n't.  He hasn't
+written to me for--I don't know but it's a month.  And O Mr. Gridley!
+he's such a great man, and I am such a simple person,--I can't help
+thinking--he would be happier with somebody else than poor little
+Susan Posey!"
+
+This last touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do
+those who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly,
+as a horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before
+she recovered her conversational road-gait.
+
+"O Mr. Gridley," she began again, at length, "if I only dared to tell
+him what I think,--that perhaps it would be happier for us both--if
+we could forget each other!  Ought I not to tell him so?  Don't you
+think he would find another to make him happy?  Wouldn't he forgive
+me for telling him he was free?  Were we not too young to know each
+other's hearts when we promised each other that we would love as long
+as we lived?  Sha'n't I write him a letter this very day and tell him
+all?  Do you think it would be wrong in me to do it?  O Mr. Gridley,
+it makes me almost crazy to think about it.  Clement must be free!  I
+cannot, cannot hold him to a promise he does n't want to keep."
+
+There were so many questions in this eloquent rhapsody of Susan's
+that they neutralized each other, as one might say, and Master
+Gridley had time for reflection.  His thoughts went on something in
+this way:
+
+"Pretty clear case!  Guess Mr. Clement can make up his mind to it.
+Put it well, did n't she?  Not a word about our little Gifted!
+That's the trouble.  Poets!  how they do bewitch these schoolgirls!
+And having a chance every day, too, how could you expect her to stand
+it?"  Then aloud: "Susan Posey, you are a good, honest little girl as
+ever was.  I think you and Clement were too hasty in coming together
+for life before you knew what life meant.  I think if you write
+Clement a letter, telling him that you cannot help fearing that you
+two are not perfectly adapted to each other, on account of certain
+differences for which neither of you is responsible, and that you
+propose that each should release the other from the pledge given so
+long ago,--in that case, I say, I believe he will think no worse of
+you for so doing, and may perhaps agree that it is best for both of
+you to seek your happiness elsewhere than in each other."
+
+The book-dusting came to as abrupt a close as the reading of
+Lancelot.  Susan went straight to her room, dried her tears so as to
+write in a fair hand, but had to stop every few lines and take a turn
+at the "dust-layers," as Mrs. Clymer Ketchum's friend used to call
+the fountains of sensibility.  It would seem like betraying Susan's
+confidence to reveal the contents of this letter, but the reader may
+be assured that it was simple and sincere and very sweetly written,
+without the slightest allusion to any other young man, whether of the
+poetical or cheaper human varieties.
+
+It was not long before Susan received a reply from Clement Lindsay.
+It was as kind and generous and noble as she could have asked.  It
+was affectionate, as a very amiable brother's letter might be, and
+candidly appreciative of the reasons Susan had assigned for her
+proposal.  He gave her back her freedom, not that he should cease to
+feel an interest in her, always.  He accepted his own release, not
+that he would ever think she could be indifferent to his future
+fortunes.  And within a very brief period of time after sending his
+answer to Susan Posey, whether he wished to see her in person, or
+whether he had some other motive, he had packed his trunk, and made
+his excuses for an absence of uncertain length at the studio, and was
+on his way to Oxbow Village.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+JUST AS YOU EXPECTED.
+
+The spring of 1861 had now arrived,--that eventful spring which was
+to lift the curtain and show the first scene of the first act in the
+mighty drama which fixed the eyes of mankind during four bloody
+years.  The little schemes of little people were going on in all our
+cities and villages without thought of the fearful convulsion which
+was soon coming to shatter the hopes and cloud the prospects of
+millions.  Our little Oxbow Village, which held itself by no means
+the least of human centres, was the scene of its own commotions, as
+intense and exciting to those concerned as if the destiny of the
+nation had been involved in them.
+
+Mr. Clement Lindsay appeared suddenly in that important locality, and
+repaired to his accustomed quarters at the house of Deacon Rumrill.
+That worthy person received him with a certain gravity of manner,
+caused by his recollections of the involuntary transgression into
+which Mr. Lindsay had led him by his present of "Ivanhoe."--He was,
+on the whole, glad to see him, for his finances were not yet wholly
+recovered from the injury inflicted on them by the devouring element.
+But he could not forget that his boarder had betrayed him into a
+breach of the fourth commandment, and that the strict eyes of his
+clergyman had detected him in the very commission of the offence.  He
+had no sooner seen Mr. Clement comfortably installed, therefore, than
+he presented himself at the door of his chamber with the book,
+enveloped in strong paper and very securely tied round with a stout
+string.
+
+"Here is your vollum, Mr. Lindsay," the Deacon said.  "I understand
+it is not the work of that great and good mahn who I thought wrote
+it.  I did not see anything immoral in it as fur as I read, but it
+belongs to what I consider a very dangerous class of publications.
+These novels and romances are awfully destructive to our youth.  I
+should recommend you, as a young man of principle, to burn the
+vollum.  At least I hope you will not leave it about anywhere unless
+it is carefully tied up.  I have written upon the paper round it to
+warn off all the young persons of my household from meddling with
+it."
+
+True enough, Mr. Clement saw in strong black letters on the back of
+the paper wrapping his unfortunate "Ivanhoe,"---
+
+"DANGEROUS READING FOR CHRISTIAN YOUTH.
+
+"TOUCH NOT THE UNCLEAN THING."
+
+"I thought you said you had Scott's picture hung up in your parlor,
+Deacon Rumrill," he said, a little amused with the worthy man's fear
+and precautions.
+
+"It is the great Scott's likeness that I have in my parlor," he said;
+"I will show it to you if you will come with me."
+
+Mr. Clement followed the Deacon into that sacred apartment.
+
+"That is the portrait of the great Scott," he said, pointing to an
+engraving of a heavy-looking person whose phrenological developments
+were a somewhat striking contrast to those of the distinguished Sir
+Walter.
+
+"I will take good care that none of your young people see this
+volume," Mr. Clement said; "I trust you read it yourself, however,
+and found something to please you in it.  I am sure you are safe from
+being harmed by any such book.  Did n't you have to finish it,
+Deacon, after you had once begun?"
+
+"Well, I--I--perused a consid'able portion of the work," the Deacon
+answered, in a way that led Mr. Clement to think he had not stopped
+much short of Finis.  "Anything new in the city?"
+
+"Nothing except what you've all had,--Confederate States establishing
+an army and all that,--not very new either.  What has been going on
+here lately, Deacon?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Lindsay, not a great deal.  My new barn is pretty nigh
+done.  I've got as fine a litter of pigs as ever you see.  I don't
+know whether you're a judge of pigs or no.  The Hazard gal's come
+back, spilt, pooty much, I guess.  Been to one o' them fashionable
+schools,--I 've heerd that she 's learnt to dance.  I've heerd say
+that that Hopkins boy's round the Posey gal, come to think, she's the
+one you went with some when you was here,--I 'm gettin' kind o'
+forgetful.  Old Doctor Hurlbut's pretty low,--ninety-four year old,--
+born in '67,--folks ain't ginerally very spry after they're ninety,
+but he held out wonderful."
+
+"How's Mr. Bradshaw?"
+
+"Well, the young squire, he's off travellin' somewhere in the West,
+or to Washin'ton, or somewhere else,--I don't jestly know where.
+They say that he's follerin' up the courts in the business about old
+Malachi's estate.  I don' know much about it."
+
+The news got round Oxbow Village very speedily that Mr. Clement
+Lindsay, generally considered the accepted lover of Miss Susan Posey,
+had arrived in that place.  Now it had come to be the common talk of
+the village that young Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were getting to
+be mighty thick with each other, and the prevailing idea was that
+Clement's visit had reference to that state of affairs.  Some said
+that Susan had given her young man the mitten, meaning thereby that
+she had signified that his services as a suitor were dispensed with.
+Others thought there was only a wavering in her affection for her
+lover, and that he feared for her constancy, and had come to
+vindicate his rights.
+
+Some of the young fellows, who were doubtless envious of Gifted's
+popularity with the fair sex, attempted in the most unjustifiable
+manner to play upon his susceptible nature.  One of them informed him
+that he had seen that Lindsay fellah raound taown with the darndest
+big stick y' ever did see.  Looked kind o' savage and wild like.
+Another one told him that perhaps he'd better keep a little shady;
+that are chap that had got the mittin was praowlin' abaout--with a
+pistil,--one o' them Darringers,--abaout as long as your thumb, an'
+fire a bullet as big as a p'tatah-ball,--'a fellah carries one in his
+breeches-pocket, an' shoots y' right threugh his own pahnts, withaout
+ever takin' on it aout of his pocket.  The stable-keeper, who, it may
+be remembered, once exchanged a few playful words with Mr. Gridley,
+got a hint from some of these unfeeling young men, and offered the
+resources of his stable to the youth supposed to be in peril.
+
+"I 've got a faast colt, Mr. Hopkins, that 'll put twenty mild
+betwixt you an' this here village, as quick as any four huffs 'll dew
+it in this here caounty, if you should want to get away suddin.  I've
+heern tell there was some lookin' raound here that wouldn't be
+wholesome to meet,--jest say the word, Mr. Hopkins, an' I 'll have ye
+on that are colt's back in less than no time, an' start ye off full
+jump.  There's a good many that's kind o' worried for fear something
+might happen to ye, Mr. Hopkins,--y' see fellahs don't like to have
+other chaps cuttin' on 'em aout with their gals."
+
+Gifted Hopkins had become excessively nervous by this time.  It is
+true that everything in his intimacy with Susan Posey, so far, might
+come under the general head of friendship; but he was conscious that
+something more was in both their thoughts.  Susan had given him
+mysterious hints that her relations with Clement had undergone a
+change, but had never had quite courage enough, perhaps had too much
+delicacy, to reveal the whole truth.
+
+Gifted was walking home, deeply immersed in thoughts excited by the
+hints which hail been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his
+imagination, when all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement
+Lindsay coming straight towards him.  Gifted was unarmed, except with
+a pair of blunt scissors, which he carried habitually in his pocket.
+What should he do?  Should he fly?  But he was never a good runner,
+being apt to find himself scant o' breath, like Hamlet, after violent
+exercise.  His demeanor on the occasion did credit to his sense of
+his own virtuous conduct and his self-possession.  He put his hand
+out, while yet at a considerable distance, and marched up towards
+Clement, smiling with all the native amiability which belonged to
+him.
+
+To his infinite relief, Clement put out his hand to grasp the one
+offered him, and greeted the young poet in the most frank and cordial
+manner.
+
+"And how is Miss Susan Posey, Mr. Hopkins?" asked Clement, in the
+most cheerful tone.  "It is a long while since I have seen her, and
+you must tell her that I hope I shall not leave the village without
+finding time to call upon her.  She and I are good friends always,
+Mr. Hopkins, though perhaps I shall not be quite so often at your
+mother's as I was during my last visit to Oxbow Village."
+
+Gifted felt somewhat as the subject of one of those old-fashioned
+forms of argument, formerly much employed to convince men of error in
+matters of religion, must have felt when the official who
+superintended the stretching-machine said, "Slack up!"
+
+He told Mr. Clement all about Susan, and was on the point of saying
+that if he, Mr. Clement, did not claim any engrossing interest in
+her, he, Gifted, was ready to offer her the devotion of a poet's
+heart.  Mr. Clement, however, had so many other questions to ask him
+about everybody in the village, more particularly concerning certain
+young persons in whom he seemed to be specially interested, that
+there was no chance to work in his own revelations of sentiment.
+
+Clement Lindsay had come to Oxbow Village with a single purpose.  He
+could now venture to trust himself in the presence of Myrtle Hazard.
+He was free, and he knew nothing to show that she had lost the
+liberty of disposing of her heart.  But after an experience such as
+he had gone through, he was naturally distrustful of himself, and
+inclined to be cautious and reserved in yielding to a new passion.
+Should he tell her the true relations in which they stood to each
+other,--that she owed her life to him, and that he had very nearly
+sacrificed his own in saving hers?  Why not?  He had a claim on her
+gratitude for what he had done in her behalf, and out of this
+gratitude there might naturally spring a warmer feeling.
+
+No, he could not try to win her affections by showing that he had
+paid for them beforehand.  She seemed to be utterly unconscious of
+the fact that it was he who had been with her in the abyss of waters.
+If the thought came to her of itself, and she ever asked him, it
+would be time enough to tell her the story.  If not, the moment might
+arrive when he could reveal to her the truth that he was her
+deliverer, without accusing himself of bribing her woman's heart to
+reward him for his services.  He would wait for that moment.
+
+It was the most natural thing in the world that Mr. Lindsay, a young
+gentleman from the city, should call to see Miss Hazard, a young lady
+whom he had met recently at a party.  To that pleasing duty he
+addressed himself the evening after his arrival.
+
+"The young gentleman's goin' a courtin', I calc'late," was the remark
+of the Deacon's wife when she saw what a comely figure Mr. Clement
+showed at the tea-table.
+
+"A very hahnsome young mahn," the Deacon replied, "and looks as if he
+might know consid'able.  An architect, you know,--a sort of a
+builder.  Wonder if he has n't got any good plans for a hahnsome
+pigsty.  I suppose he 'd charge somethin' for one, but it couldn't be
+much, an' he could take it out in board."
+
+"Better ask him," his wife--said; "he looks mighty pleasant; there's
+nothin' lost by askin', an' a good deal got sometimes, grandma used
+to say."
+
+The Deacon followed her advice.  Mr. Clement was perfectly good-
+natured about it, asked the Deacon the number of snouts in his
+menagerie, got an idea of the accommodations required, and sketched
+the plaza of a neat, and appropriate edifice for the Porcellarium, as
+Master Gridley afterwards pleasantly christened it, which was carried
+out by the carpenter, and stands to this day a monument of his
+obliging disposition, and a proof that there is nothing so humble
+that taste cannot be shown in it.
+
+"What'll be your charge for the plan of the pigsty, Mr. Lindsay?" the
+Deacon inquired with an air of interest,--he might have become
+involved more deeply than he had intended.  "How much should you call
+about right for the picter an' figgerin'?"
+
+"Oh, you're quite welcome to my sketch of a plan, Deacon.  I've seen
+much showier buildings tenanted by animals not very different from
+those your edifice is meant for."
+
+Mr. Clement found the three ladies sitting together in the chill, dim
+parlor at The Poplars.  They had one of the city papers spread out on
+the table, and Myrtle was reading aloud the last news from Charleston
+Harbor.  She rose as Mr. Clement entered, and stepped forward to meet
+him.  It was a strange impression this young man produced upon her,--
+not through the common channels of the intelligence, not exactly that
+"magnetic" influence of which she had had experience at a former
+time.  It did not over come her as at the moment of their second
+meeting.  But it was something she must struggle against, and she had
+force and pride and training enough now to maintain her usual
+tranquillity, in spite of a certain inward commotion which seemed to
+reach her breathing and her pulse by some strange, inexplicable
+mechanism.
+
+Myrtle, it must be remembered, was no longer the simple country girl
+who had run away at fifteen, but a young lady of seventeen, who had
+learned all that more than a year's diligence at a great school could
+teach her, who had been much with girls of taste and of culture, and
+was familiar with the style and manners of those who came from what
+considered itself the supreme order in the social hierarchy.  Her
+natural love for picturesque adornment was qualified by a knowledge
+of the prevailing modes not usual in so small a place as Oxbow
+Village.  All this had not failed to produce its impression on those
+about her.  Persons who, like Miss Silence Withers, believe, not in
+education, inasmuch as there is no healthy nature to be educated, but
+in transformation, worry about their charges up to a certain period
+of their lives.  Then, if the transformation does not come, they seem
+to think their cares and duties are at an end, and, considering their
+theories of human destiny, usually accept the situation with
+wonderful complacency.  This was the stage which Miss Silence Withers
+had reached with reference to Myrtle.  It made her infinitely more
+agreeable, or less disagreeable, as the reader may choose one or the
+other statement, than when she was always fretting about her
+"responsibility."  She even began to take an interest in some of
+Myrtle's worldly experiences, and something like a smile would now
+and then disarrange the chief-mourner stillness of her features, as
+Myrtle would tell some lively story she had brought away from the gay
+society she had frequented.
+
+Cynthia Badlam kept her keen eyes on her like a hawk.  Murray
+Bradshaw was away, and here was this handsome and agreeable youth
+coming in to poach on the preserve of which she considered herself
+the gamekeeper.  What did it mean?  She had heard the story about
+Susan's being off with her old love and on with a new one.  Ah ha!
+this is the game, is it?
+
+Clement Lindsay passed not so much a pleasant evening, as one of
+strange, perplexed, and mingled delight and inward conflict.  He had
+found his marble once more turned to flesh and blood, and breathing
+before him.  This was the woman he was born for; her form was fit to
+model his proudest ideal from, her eyes melted him when they rested
+for an instant on his face,--her voice reached the hidden
+sensibilities of his inmost nature; those which never betray their
+existence until the outward chord to which they vibrate in response
+sends its message to stir them.  But was she not already pledged to
+that other,--that cold-blooded, contriving, venal, cynical, selfish,
+polished, fascinating man of the world, whose artful strategy would
+pass with nine women out of ten for the most romantic devotion?
+
+If he had known the impression he made, he would have felt less
+anxiety with reference to this particular possibility.  Miss Silence
+expressed herself gratified with his appearance, and thought he
+looked like a good young man,--he reminded her of a young friend of
+hers who--[It was the same who had gone to one of the cannibal
+islands as a missionary,--and stayed there.] Myrtle was very quiet.
+She had nothing to say about Clement, except that she had met him at
+a party in the city, and found him agreeable.  Miss Cynthia wrote a
+letter to Murray Bradshaw that very evening, telling him that he had
+better come back to Oxbow Village as quickly as he could, unless he
+wished to find his place occupied by an intruder.
+
+In the mean time, the country was watching the garrison in Charleston
+Harbor.  All at once the first gun of the four years' cannonade
+hurled its ball against the walls of Fort Sumter.  There was no
+hamlet in the land which the reverberations of that cannon-roar did
+not reach.  There was no valley so darkened by overshadowing hills
+that it did not see the American flag hauled down on the 13th of
+April.  There was no loyal heart in the North that did not answer to
+the call of the country to its defenders which went forth two days
+later.  The great tide of feeling reached the locality where the
+lesser events of our narrative were occurring.  A meeting of the
+citizens was instantly called.  The venerable Father Pemberton opened
+it with a prayer that filled every soul with courage and high
+resolve.  The young farmers and mechanics of that whole region joined
+the companies to which they belonged, or organized in squads and
+marched at once, or got ready to march, to the scene of conflict.
+
+The contagion of warlike patriotism reached the most peacefully
+inclined young persons.
+
+"My country calls me," Gifted Hopkins said to Susan Posey, "and I am
+preparing to obey her summons.  If I can pass the medical
+examination, which it is possible I may, though I fear my
+constitution may be thought too weak, and if no obstacle impedes me,
+I think of marching in the ranks of the Oxbow Invincibles.  If I go,
+Susan, and I fall, will you not remember me .  .  .  as one who .  .
+.  cherished the tenderest .  .  .  sentiments .  .  .  towards you .
+.  .  and who had looked forward to the time when .  .  .  when .  ."
+
+His eyes told the rest.  He loved!
+
+Susan forgot all the rules of reserve to which she had been trained.
+What were cold conventionalities at such a moment?  "Never!  never!"
+she said, throwing her arms about his neck and mingling her tears
+with his, which were flowing freely.  "Your country does not need
+your sword ....  but it does need .  .  .  your pen.  Your poems will
+inspire .  .  .  our soldiers.  .  .  .  The Oxbow Invincibles will
+march to victory, singing your songs .  .  .  .  If you go .  .  .
+and if you..  .  fall .  .  .  O Gifted!  .  .  .  I .  .  .  I .  .
+.  . yes, I shall die too!"
+
+His love was returned.  He was blest!
+
+"Susan," he said, "my own Susan, I yield to your wishes at every
+sacrifice.  Henceforth they will be my law.  Yes, I will stay and
+encourage my brave countrymen to go forward to the bloody field.  My
+voice shall urge them on to the battle-ground.  I will give my
+dearest breath to stimulate their ardor.
+
+"O Susan!  My own, own Susan!"
+
+While these interesting events had been going on beneath the modest
+roof of the Widow Hopkins, affairs had been rapidly hastening to a
+similar conclusion under the statelier shadow of The Poplars.
+Clement Lindsay was so well received at his first visit that he
+ventured to repeat it several times, with so short intervals that it
+implied something more than a common interest in one of the members
+of the household.  There was no room for doubt who this could be, and
+Myrtle Hazard could not help seeing that she was the object of his
+undisguised admiration.  The belief was now general in the village
+that Gifted Hopkins and Susan Posey were either engaged or on the
+point of being so; and it was equally understood that, whatever might
+be the explanation, she and her former lover had parted company in an
+amicable manner.
+
+Love works very strange transformations in young women.  Sometimes it
+leads them to try every mode of adding to their attractions,--their
+whole thought is how to be most lovely in the eyes they would fill so
+as to keep out all other images.  Poor darlings!  We smile at their
+little vanities, as if they were very trivial things compared with
+the last Congressman's speech or the great Election Sermon; but
+Nature knows well what she is about.  The maiden's ribbon or ruffle
+means a great deal more for her than the judge's wig or the priest's
+surplice.
+
+It was not in this way that the gentle emotion awaking in the breast
+of Myrtle Hazard betrayed itself.  As the thought dawned in her
+consciousness that she was loved, a change came over her such as the
+spirit that protected her, according to the harmless fancy she had
+inherited, might have wept for joy to behold, if tears could flow
+from angelic eyes.  She forgot herself and her ambitions,--the
+thought of shining in the great world died out in the presence of new
+visions of a future in which she was not to be her own,--of feelings
+in the depth of which the shallow vanities which had drawn her young
+eyes to them for a while seemed less than nothing.  Myrtle had not
+hitherto said to herself that Clement was her lover, yet her whole
+nature was expanding and deepening in the light of that friendship
+which any other eye could have known at a glance for the great
+passion.
+
+Cynthia Badlam wrote a pressing letter to Murray Bradshaw.  "There is
+no time to be lost; she is bewitched, and will be gone beyond hope if
+this business is not put a stop to."
+
+Love moves in an accelerating ratio; and there comes a time when the
+progress of the passion escapes from all human formulae, and brings
+two young hearts, which had been gradually drawing nearer and nearer
+together, into complete union, with a suddenness that puts an
+infinity between the moment when all is told and that which went just
+before.
+
+They were sitting together by themselves in the dimly lighted parlor.
+They had told each other many experiences of their past lives, very
+freely, as two intimate friends of different sex might do.  Clement
+had happened to allude to Susan, speaking very kindly and tenderly of
+her.  He hoped this youth to whom she was attached would make her
+life happy.  "You know how simple-hearted and good she is; her image
+will always be a pleasant one in my memory,--second to but one
+other."
+
+Myrtle ought, according to the common rules of conversation, to have
+asked, What other?  but she did not.  She may have looked as if she
+wanted to ask,--she may have blushed or turned pale, perhaps she
+could not trust her voice; but whatever the reason was, she sat
+still, with downcast eyes.  Clement waited a reasonable time, but,
+finding it was of no use, began again.
+
+"Your image is the one other,--the only one, let me say, for all else
+fades in its presence,--your image fills all my thought.  Will you
+trust your life and happiness with one who can offer you so little
+beside his love?  You know my whole heart is yours."
+
+Whether Myrtle said anything in reply or not, whether she acted like
+Coleridge's Genevieve,--that is, "fled to him and wept," or suffered
+her feelings to betray themselves in some less startling confession,
+we will leave untold.  Her answer, spoken or silent, could not have
+been a cruel one, for in another moment Clement was pressing his lips
+to hers, after the manner of accepted lovers.
+
+"Our lips have met to-day for the second time," he said, presently.
+
+She looked at him in wonder.  What did he mean?  The second time!
+How assuredly he spoke!  She looked him calmly in the face, and
+awaited his explanation.
+
+"I have a singular story to tell you.  On the morning of the 16th of
+June, now nearly two years ago, I was sitting in my room at
+Alderbank, some twenty miles down the river, when I heard a cry for
+help coming from the river.  I ran down to the bank, and there I saw
+a boy in an old boat--"
+
+When it came to the "boy" in the old boat, Myrtle's cheeks flamed so
+that she could not bear it, and she covered her face with both her
+hands.  But Clement told his story calmly through to the end, sliding
+gently over its later incidents, for Myrtle's heart was throbbing
+violently, and her breath a little catching and sighing, as when she
+had first lived with the new life his breath had given her.
+
+
+"Why did you ask me for myself, when you could have claimed me?" she
+said.
+
+"I wanted a free gift, Myrtle," Clement answered, "and I have it."
+
+They sat in silence, lost in the sense of that new life which had
+suddenly risen on their souls.
+
+The door-bell rang sharply.  Kitty Fagan answered its summons, and
+presently entered the parlor and announced that Mr. Bradshaw was in
+the library, and wished to see the ladies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+MURRAY BRADSHAW PLAYS HIS LAST CARD.
+
+"How can I see that man this evening, Mr. Lindsay?"
+
+"May I not be Clement, dearest?  I would not see him at all, Myrtle.
+I don't believe you will find much pleasure in listening to his fine
+speeches."
+
+"I cannot endure it.--Kitty, tell him I am engaged, and cannot see
+him this evening.  No, no!  don't say engaged, say very much
+occupied."
+
+Kitty departed, communing with herself in this wise:--" Ockipied, is
+it?  An' that's what ye cahl it when ye 're kapin' company with one
+young gintleman an' don't want another young gintleman to come in an'
+help the two of ye?  Ye won't get y'r pigs to market to-day, Mr.
+Bridshaw, no, nor to-morrow, nayther, Mr. Bridshaw.  It's Mrs.
+Lindsay that Miss Myrtle is goin' to be,--an' a big cake there'll be
+at the weddin' frosted all over,--won't ye be plased with a slice o'
+that, Mr. Bridshaw?"
+
+With these reflections in her mind, Mistress Kitty delivered her
+message, not without a gleam of malicious intelligence in her look
+that stung Mr. Bradshaw sharply.  He had noticed a hat in the entry,
+and a little stick by it which he remembered well as one he had seen
+carried by Clement Lindsay.  But he was used to concealing his
+emotions, and he greeted the two older ladies who presently came into
+the library so pleasantly, that no one who had not studied his face
+long and carefully would have suspected the bitterness of heart that
+lay hidden far down beneath his deceptive smile.  He told Miss
+Silence, with much apparent interest, the story of his journey.  He
+gave her an account of the progress of the case in which the estate
+of which she inherited the principal portion was interested.  He did
+not tell her that a final decision which would settle the right to
+the great claim might be expected at any moment, and he did not tell
+her that there was very little doubt that it would be in favor of the
+heirs of Malachi Withers.  He was very sorry he could not see Miss
+Hazard that evening,--hoped he should be more fortunate to-morrow
+forenoon, when he intended to call again,--had a message for her from
+one of her former school friends, which he was anxious to give her.
+He exchanged certain looks and hints with Miss Cynthia, which led her
+to withdraw and bring down the papers he had entrusted to her.  At
+the close of his visit, she followed him into the entry with a lamp,
+as was her common custom.
+
+"What's the meaning of all this, Cynthia?  Is that fellow making love
+to Myrtle?"
+
+"I'm afraid so, Mr. Bradshaw.  He's been here several times, and they
+seem to be getting intimate.  I couldn't do anything to stop it."
+
+"Give me the papers,--quick!"
+
+Cynthia pulled the package from her pocket.  Murray Bradshaw looked
+sharply at it.  A little crumpled,--crowded into her pocket.  Seal
+unbroken.  All safe.
+
+"I shall come again to-morrow forenoon.  Another day and it will be
+all up.  The decision of the court will be known.  It won't be my
+fault if one visit is not enough.--You don't suppose Myrtle is in
+love with this fellow?"
+
+"She acts as--if she might be.  You know he's broke with Susan Posey,
+and there's nothing to hinder.  If you ask my opinion, I think it's
+your last chance: she is n't a girl to half do things, and if she has
+taken to this man it will be hard to make her change her mind.  But
+she's young, and she has had a liking for you, and if you manage it
+well there's no telling."
+
+Two notes passed between Myrtle Hazard and Master Byles Gridley that
+evening.  Mistress Kitty Fagan, who had kept her ears pretty wide
+open, carried them.
+
+Murray Bradshaw went home in a very desperate state of feeling.  He
+had laid his plans, as he thought, with perfect skill, and the
+certainty of their securing their end.  These papers were to have
+been taken from the envelope, and found in the garret just at the
+right moment, either by Cynthia herself or one of the other members
+of the family, who was to be led on, as it were accidentally, to the
+discovery.  The right moment must be close at hand.  He was to offer
+his hand--and heart, of course--to Myrtle, and it was to be accepted.
+As soon as the decision of the land case was made known, or not long
+afterwards, there was to be a search in the garret for papers, and
+these were to be discovered in a certain dusty recess, where, of
+course, they would have been placed by Miss Cynthia.
+
+And now the one condition which gave any value to these arrangements
+seemed like to fail.  This obscure youth--this poor fool, who had
+been on the point of marrying a simpleton to whom he had made a
+boyish promise--was coming between him and the object of his long
+pursuit,--the woman who had every attraction to draw him to herself.
+It had been a matter of pride with Murray Bradshaw that he never lost
+his temper so as to interfere with the precise course of action which
+his cool judgment approved; but now he was almost beside himself with
+passion.  His labors, as he believed, had secured the favorable issue
+of the great case so long pending.  He had followed Myrtle through
+her whole career, if not as her avowed lover, at least as one whose
+friendship promised to flower in love in due season.  The moment had
+come when the scene and the characters in this village drama were to
+undergo a change as sudden and as brilliant as is seen in those fairy
+spectacles where the dark background changes to a golden palace and
+the sober dresses are replaced by robes of regal splendor.  The
+change was fast approaching; but he, the enchanter, as he had thought
+himself, found his wand broken, and his power given to another.
+
+He could not sleep during that night.  He paced his room, a prey to
+jealousy and envy and rage, which his calm temperament had kept him
+from feeling in their intensity up to this miserable hour.  He
+thought of all that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own
+intolerable anguish.  Of revenge.  If Myrtle rejected his suit,
+should he take her life on the spot, that she might never be
+another's,--that neither man nor woman should ever triumph over him,
+--the proud ambitious man, defeated, humbled, scorned?  No! that was
+a meanness of egotism which only the most vulgar souls could be
+capable of.  Should he challenge her lover?  It was not the way of
+the people and time, and ended in absurd complications, if anybody
+was foolish enough to try it.  Shoot him?  The idea floated through
+his mind, for he thought of everything; but he was a lawyer, and not
+a fool, and had no idea of figuring in court as a criminal.  Besides,
+he was not a murderer,--cunning was his natural weapon, not violence.
+He had a certain admiration of desperate crime in others, as showing
+nerve and force, but he did not feel it to be his own style of doing
+business.
+
+During the night he made every arrangement for leaving the village
+the next day, in case he failed to make any impression on Myrtle
+Hazard and found that his chance was gone.  He wrote a letter to his
+partner, telling him that he had left to join one of the regiments
+forming in the city.  He adjusted all his business matters so that
+his partner should find as little trouble as possible.  A little
+before dawn he threw himself on the bed, but he could not sleep; and
+he rose at sunrise, and finished his preparations for his departure
+to the city.
+
+The morning dragged along slowly.  He could not go to the office, not
+wishing to meet his partner again.  After breakfast he dressed
+himself with great care, for he meant to show himself in the best
+possible aspect.  Just before he left the house to go to The Poplars,
+he took the sealed package from his trunk, broke open the envelope,
+took from it a single paper,--it had some spots on it which
+distinguished it from all the rest,--put it separately in his pocket,
+and then the envelope containing the other papers.  The calm smile be
+wore on his features as he set forth cost him a greater effort than
+he had ever made before to put it on.  He was moulding his face to
+the look with which he meant to present himself; and the muscles had
+been sternly fixed so long that it was a task to bring them to their
+habitual expression in company,--that of ingenuous good-nature.
+
+He was shown into the parlor at The Poplars; and Kitty told Myrtle
+that he had called and inquired for her and was waiting down stairs.
+
+"Tell him I will be down presently," she said.  "And, Kitty, now mind
+just what I tell you.  Leave your kitchen door open, so that you can
+hear anything fall in the parlor.  If you hear a book fall,--it will
+be a heavy one, and will make some noise,--run straight up here to my
+little chamber, and hang this red scarf out of the window.  The left-
+hand side-sash, mind, so that anybody can see it from the road.  If
+Mr. Gridley calls, show him into the parlor, no matter who is there."
+
+Kitty Fagan looked amazingly intelligent, and promised that she would
+do exactly as she was told.  Myrtle followed her down stairs almost
+immediately, and went into the parlor, where Mr. Bradshaw was
+waiting.
+
+Never in his calmest moments had he worn a more insinuating smile on
+his features than that with which he now greeted Myrtle.  So gentle,
+so gracious, so full of trust, such a completely natural expression
+of a kind, genial character did it seem, that to any but an expert it
+would have appeared impossible that such an effect could be produced
+by the skilful balancing of half a dozen pairs of little muscles that
+manage the lips and the corners of the mouth.  The tones of his voice
+were subdued into accord with the look of his features; his whole
+manner was fascinating, as far as any conscious effort could make it
+so.  It was just one of those artificially pleasing effects that so
+often pass with such as have little experience of life for the
+genuine expression of character and feeling.  But Myrtle had learned
+the look that shapes itself on the features of one who loves with a
+love that seeketh not its own, and she knew the difference between
+acting and reality.  She met his insinuating approach with a courtesy
+so carefully ordered that it was of itself a sentence without appeal.
+Artful persons often interpret sincere ones by their own standard.
+Murray Bradshaw thought little of this somewhat formal address,--a
+few minutes would break this thin film to pieces.  He was not only a
+suitor with a prize to gain, he was a colloquial artist about to
+employ all the resources of his specialty.
+
+He introduced the conversation in the most natural and easy way, by
+giving her the message from a former school-mate to which he had
+referred, coloring it so delicately, as he delivered it, that it
+became an innocent-looking flattery.  Myrtle found herself in a rose-
+colored atmosphere, not from Murray Bradshaw's admiration, as it
+seemed, but only reflected by his mind from another source.  That was
+one of his arts, always, if possible, to associate himself
+incidentally, as it appeared, and unavoidably, with an agreeable
+impression.
+
+So Myrtle was betrayed into smiling and being pleased before he had
+said a word about himself or his affairs.  Then he told her of the
+adventures and labors of his late expedition; of certain evidence
+which at the very last moment he had unearthed, and which was very
+probably the turning-point in the case.  He could not help feeling
+that she must eventually reap some benefit from the good fortune with
+which his efforts had been attended.  The thought that it might yet
+be so had been a great source of encouragement to him,--it would
+always be a great happiness to him to remember that he had done
+anything to make her happy.
+
+Myrtle was very glad that he had been so far successful,--she did not
+know that it made much difference to her, but she was obliged to him
+for the desire of serving her that he had expressed.
+
+"My services are always yours, Miss Hazard.  There is no sacrifice I
+would not willingly make for your benefit.  I have never had but one
+feeling toward you.  You cannot be ignorant of what that feeling is."
+
+"I know, Mr. Bradshaw, it has been one of kindness.  I have to thank
+you for many friendly attentions, for which I hope I have never been
+ungrateful."
+
+"Kindness is not all that I feel towards you, Miss Hazard.  If that
+were all, my lips would not tremble as they do now in telling you my
+feelings.--I love you."
+
+He sprang the great confession on Myrtle a little sooner than he had
+meant.  It was so hard to go on making phrases!  Myrtle changed color
+a little, for she was startled.
+
+The seemingly involuntary movement she made brought her arm against a
+large dictionary, which lay very near the edge of the table on which
+it was resting.  The book fell with a loud noise to the floor.
+
+There it lay.  The young man awaited her answer; he did not think of
+polite forms at such a moment.
+
+"It cannot be, Mr. Bradshaw,--it must not be.  I have known you long,
+and I am not ignorant of all your brilliant qualities, but you must
+not speak to me of love.  Your regard,--your friendly interest, tell
+me that I shall always have these, but do not distress me with
+offering more than these."
+
+"I do not ask you to give me your love in return; I only ask you not
+to bid me despair.  Let me believe that the time may come' when you
+will listen to me,--no matter how distant.  You are young,--you have
+a tender heart,--you would not doom one who only lives for you to
+wretchedness,--so long that we have known each other.  It cannot be
+that any other has come between us--"
+
+Myrtle blushed so deeply that there was no need of his finishing his
+question.
+
+"Do you mean, Myrtle Hazard, that you have cast me aside for another?
+--for this stranger--this artist--who was with you yesterday when I
+came, bringing with me the story of all I had done for you, yes, for
+you,--and was ignominiously refused the privilege of seeing you?"
+Rage and jealousy had got the better of him this time.  He rose as he
+spoke, and looked upon her with such passion kindling in his eyes
+that he seemed ready for any desperate act.
+
+"I have thanked you for any services you may have rendered me, Mr.
+Bradshaw," Myrtle answered, very calmly, "and I hope you will add one
+more to them by sparing me this rude questioning.  I wished to treat
+you as a friend; I hope you will not render that impossible."
+
+He had recovered himself for one more last effort.  "I was impatient
+overlook it, I beg you.  I was thinking of all the happiness I have
+labored to secure for you, and of the ruin to us both it would be if
+you scornfully rejected the love I offer you,--if you refuse to leave
+me any hope for the future,--if you insist on throwing yourself away
+on this man, so lately pledged to another.  I hold the key of all
+your earthly fortunes in my hand.  My love for you inspired me in all
+that I have done, and, now that I come to lay the result of my labors
+at your feet, you turn from me, and offer my reward to a stranger.
+I do not ask you to say this day that you will be mine,--I would not
+force your inclinations,--but I do ask you that you will hold
+yourself free of all others, and listen to me as one who may yet be
+more than a friend.  Say so much as this, Myrtle, and you shall have
+such a future as you never dreamed of.  Fortune, position, all that
+this world can give, shall be yours."
+
+"Never!  never!  If you could offer me the whole world, or take away
+from me all that the world can give, it would make no difference to
+me.  I cannot tell what power you hold over me, whether of life and
+death, or of wealth and poverty; but after talking to me of love, I
+should not have thought you would have wronged me by suggesting any
+meaner motive.  It is only because we have been on friendly terms so
+long that I have listened to you as I have done.  You have said more
+than enough, and I beg you will allow me to put an end to this
+interview."
+
+She rose to leave the room.  But Murray Bradshaw had gone too far to
+control himself,--he listened only to the rage which blinded him.
+
+"Not yet!" he said.  "Stay one moment, and you shall know what your
+pride and self-will have cost you!"
+
+Myrtle stood, arrested, whether by fear, or curiosity, or the passive
+subjection of her muscles to his imperious will, it would be hard to
+say.
+
+Murray Bradshaw took out the spotted paper from his breast-pocket,
+and held it up before her.  "Look here!" he exclaimed.  "This would
+have made you rich,--it would have crowned you a queen in society,--
+it would have given you all, and more than all, that you ever dreamed
+of luxury, of splendor, of enjoyment; and I, who won it for you,
+would have taught you how to make life yield every bliss it had in
+store to your wishes.  You reject my offer unconditionally?"
+
+Myrtle expressed her negative only by a slight contemptuous movement.
+
+Murray Bradshaw walked deliberately to the fireplace, and laid the
+spotted paper upon the burning coals.  It writhed and curled,
+blackened, flamed, and in a moment was a cinder dropping into ashes.
+He folded his arms, and stood looking at the wreck of Myrtle's
+future, the work of his cruel hand.  Strangely enough, Myrtle herself
+was fascinated, as it were, by the apparent solemnity of this
+mysterious sacrifice.  She had kept her eyes steadily on him all the
+time, and was still gazing at the altar on which her happiness had
+been in some way offered up, when the door was opened by Kitty Fagan,
+and Master Byles Gridley was ushered into the parlor.
+
+"Too late, old man!  "Murray Bradshaw exclaimed, in a hoarse and
+savage voice, as he passed out of the room, and strode through the
+entry and down the avenue.  It was the last time the old gate of The
+Poplars was to open or close for him.  The same day he left the
+village; and the next time his name was mentioned it was as an
+officer in one of the regiments just raised and about marching to the
+seat of war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+THE SPOTTED PAPER.
+
+What Master Gridley may have said to Myrtle Hazard that served to
+calm her after this exciting scene cannot now be recalled.  That
+Murray Bradshaw thought he was inflicting a deadly injury on her was
+plain enough.  That Master Gridley did succeed in convincing her that
+no great harm had probably been done her is equally certain.
+
+Like all bachelors who have lived a lonely life, Master Byles Gridley
+had his habits, which nothing short of some terrestrial convulsion--
+or perhaps, in his case, some instinct that drove him forth to help
+somebody in trouble--could possibly derange.  After his breakfast, he
+always sat and read awhile,--the paper, if a new one came to hand, or
+some pleasant old author,--if a little neglected by the world of
+readers, he felt more at ease with him, and loved him all the better.
+
+But on the morning after his interview with Myrtle Hazard, he had
+received a letter which made him forget newspapers, old authors,
+almost everything, for the moment.  It was from the publisher with
+whom he had had a conversation, it may be remembered, when he visited
+the city, and was to this effect: That Our Firm propose to print and
+stereotype the work originally published under the title of "Thoughts
+on the Universe"; said work to be remodelled according to the plan
+suggested by the Author, with the corrections, alterations,
+omissions, and additions proposed by him; said work to be published
+under the following title, to wit: ________ _________: said work to
+be printed in 12mo, on paper of good quality, from new types, etc.,
+etc., and for every copy thereof printed the author to receive, etc.,
+etc.
+
+Master Gridley sat as in a trance, reading this letter over and over,
+to know if it could be really so.  So it really was.  His book had
+disappeared from the market long ago, as the elm seeds that carpet
+the ground and never germinate disappear.  At last it had got a
+certain value as a curiosity for book-hunters.  Some one of them,
+keener-eyed than the rest, had seen that there was a meaning and
+virtue in this unsuccessful book, for which there was a new audience
+educated since it had tried to breathe before its time.  Out of this
+had grown at last the publisher's proposal.  It was too much: his
+heart swelled with joy, and his eyes filled with tears.
+
+How could he resist the temptation?  He took down his own particular
+copy of the book, which was yet to do him honor as its parent, and
+began reading.  As his eye fell on one paragraph after another, he
+nodded approval of this sentiment or opinion, he shook his head as if
+questioning whether this other were not to be modified or left out,
+he condemned a third as being no longer true for him as when it was
+written, and he sanctioned a fourth with his hearty approval.  The
+reader may like a few specimens from this early edition, now a
+rarity.  He shall have them, with Master Gridley's verbal comments.
+The book, as its name implied, contained "Thoughts" rather than
+consecutive trains of reasoning or continuous disquisitions.  What he
+read and remarked upon were a few of the more pointed statements
+which stood out in the chapters he was turning over.  The worth of
+the book must not be judged by these almost random specimens.
+
+"THE BEST THOUGHT, LIKE THE MOST PERFECT DIGESTION, IS DONE
+UNCONSCIOUSLY.--Develop that.--Ideas at compound interest in the
+mind.--Be aye sticking in an idea,--while you're sleeping it'll be
+growing.  Seed of a thought to-day,--flower to-morrow--next week--ten
+years from now, etc.--Article by and by for the....
+
+"CAN THE INFINITE BE SUPPOSED TO SHIFT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE
+ULTIMATE DESTINY OF ANY CREATED THING TO THE FINITE?  OUR THEOLOGIANS
+PRETEND THAT IT CAN.  I DOUBT.--Heretical.  Stet.
+
+"PROTESTANTISM MEANS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.  BUT IT IS AFRAID OF ITS
+OWN LOGIC.--Stet.  No logical resting-place short of None of your
+business.
+
+"THE SUPREME SELF-INDULGENCE IS TO SURRENDER THE WILL TO A SPIRITUAL
+DIRECTOR.--Protestantism gave up a great luxury.--Did it though?
+
+"ASIATIC MODES OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH DO NOT EXPRESS THE 'RELATIONS IN
+WHICH THE AMERICAN FEELS HIM SELF TO STAND TO HIS SUPERIORS IN THIS
+OR ANY OTHER SPHERE OF BEING.  REPUBLICANISM MUST HAVE ITS OWN
+RELIGIOUS PHRASEOLOGY, WHICH IS NOT THAT BORROWED FROM ORIENTAL
+DESPOTISMS.
+
+"IDOLS AND DOGMAS IN PLACE OF CHARACTER; PILLS AND THEORIES IN PLACE
+OF WHOLESOME LIVING.  SEE THE HISTORIES OF THEOLOGY AND MEDICINE
+PASSIM.--Hits 'em.
+
+"'OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.' DO YOU MEAN TO SAY JEAN CHAUVIN,
+THAT
+          'HEAVEN LIES ABOUT US IN OUR INFANCY'?
+
+"WHY DO YOU COMPLAIN OF YOUR ORGANIZATION?  YOUR SOUL WAS IN A HURRY,
+AND MADE A RUSH FOR A BODY.  THERE ARE PATIENT SPIRITS THAT HAVE
+WAITED FROM ETERNITY, AND NEVER FOUND PARENTS FIT TO BE BORN OF.
+--How do you know anything about all that?  Dele.
+
+"WHAT SWEET, SMOOTH VOICES THE NEGROES HAVE!  A HUNDRED GENERATIONS
+FED ON BANANAS.--COMPARE THEM WITH OUR APPLE-EATING WHITE FOLKS!--It
+won't do.  Bananas came from the West Indies.
+
+"TO TELL A MAN'S TEMPERAMENT BY HIS HANDWRITING.  SEE IF THE DOTS OF
+HIS I'S RUN AHEAD OR NOT, AND IF THEY DO, HOW FAR.--I have tried
+that--on myself.
+
+"MARRYING INTO SOME FAMILIES IS THE NEXT THING TO BEING CANONIZED.
+--Not so true now as twenty or thirty years ago.  As many bladders,
+but more pins.
+
+"FISH AND DANDIES ONLY KEEP ON ICE.--Who will take?  Explain in note
+how all warmth approaching blood heat spoils fops and flounders.
+
+"FLYING IS A LOST ART AMONG MEN AND REPTILES.  BATS FLY, AND MEN
+OUGHT TO.  TRY A LIGHT TURBINE.  RISE A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A
+MILE SLANTING,--RISE HALF A MILE STRAIGHT, FALL HALF A MILE SLANTING,
+AND SO ON.  OR SLANT UP AND SLANT DOWN.--Poh!  You ain't such a fool
+as to think that is new,--are you?
+
+"Put in my telegraph project.  Central station.  Cables with
+insulated wires running to it from different quarters of the city.
+These form the centripetal system.  From central station, wires to
+all the livery stables, messenger stands, provision shops, etc., etc.
+These form the centrifugal system.  Any house may have a wire in the
+nearest cable at small cost.
+
+"DO YOU WANT TO BE REMEMBERED AFTER THE CONTINENTS HAVE GONE UNDER,
+AND COME UP AGAIN, AND DRIED, AND BRED NEW RACES?  HAVE YOUR NAME
+STAMPED ON ALL YOUR PLATES AND CUPS AND SAUCERS.  NOTHING OF YOU OR
+YOURS WILL LAST LIKE THOSE.  I NEVER SIT DOWN AT MY TABLE WITHOUT
+LOOKING AT THE CHINA SERVICE, AND SAYING, 'HERE ARE MY MONUMENTS.
+THAT BUTTER-DISH IS MY URN.  THIS SOUP-PLATE IS MY MEMORIAL TABLET.'
+NO NEED OF A SKELETON AT MY BANQUETS!  I FEED FROM MY TOMBSTONE AND
+READ MY EPITAPH AT THE BOTTOM OF EVERY TEACUP.--Good."
+
+He fell into a revery as he finished reading this last sentence.  He
+thought of the dim and dread future,--all the changes that it would
+bring to him, to all the living, to the face of the globe, to the
+order of earthly things.  He saw men of a new race, alien to all that
+had ever lived, excavating with strange, vast engines the old
+ocean-bed now become habitable land.  And as the great scoops turned
+out the earth they had fetched up from the unexplored depths, a relic
+of a former simple civilization revealed the fact that here a tribe
+of human beings had lived and perished.--Only the coffee-cup he had
+in his hand half an hour ago.--Where would he be then? and Mrs.
+Hopkins, and Gifted, and Susan, and everybody? and President
+Buchanan? and the Boston State-House? and Broadway?--O Lord, Lord,
+Lord! And the sun perceptibly smaller, according to the astronomers,
+and the earth cooled down a number of degrees, and inconceivable arts
+practised by men of a type yet undreamed of, and all the fighting
+creeds merged in one great universal
+
+A knock at his door interrupted his revery.  Miss Susan Posey
+informed him that a gentleman was waiting below who wished to see
+him.
+
+"Show him up to my study, Susan Posey, if you please," said Master
+Gridley.
+
+Mr. Penhallow presented himself at Mr. Gridley's door with a
+countenance expressive of a very high state of excitement.
+
+"You have heard the news, Mr. Gridley, I suppose?"
+
+"What news, Mr. Penhallow?"
+
+"First, that my partner has left very unexpectedly to enlist in a
+regiment just forming.  Second, that the great land case is decided
+in favor of the heirs of the late Malachi Withers."
+
+"Your partner must have known about it yesterday?"
+
+"He did, even before I knew it.  He thought himself possessed of a
+very important document, as you know, of which he has made, or means
+to make, some use.  You are aware of the artifice I employed to
+prevent any possible evil consequences from any action of his.
+I have the genuine document, of course.  I wish you to go over with
+me to The Poplars, and I should be glad to have good old Father
+Pemberton go with us; for it is a serious matter, and will be a great
+surprise to more than one of the family."
+
+They walked together to the old house, where the old clergyman had
+lived for more than half a century.  He was used to being neglected
+by the people who ran after his younger colleague; and the attention
+paid him in asking him to be present on an important occasion, as he
+understood this to be, pleased him greatly.  He smoothed his long
+white locks, and called a grand-daughter to help make him look fitly
+for such an occasion, and, being at last got into his grandest Sunday
+aspect, took his faithful staff, and set out with the two gentlemen
+for The Poplars.  On the way, Mr. Penhallow explained to him the
+occasion of their visit, and the general character of the facts he
+had to announce.  He wished the venerable minister to prepare Miss
+Silence Withers for a revelation which would materially change her
+future prospects.  He thought it might be well, also, if he would say
+a few words to Myrtle Hazard, for whom a new life, with new and
+untried temptations, was about to open.  His business was, as a
+lawyer, to make known to these parties the facts just come to his own
+knowledge affecting their interests.  He had asked Mr. Gridley to go
+with him, as having intimate relations with one of the parties
+referred to, and as having been the principal agent in securing to
+that party the advantages which were to accrue to her from the new
+turn of events.  "You are a second parent to her, Mr. Gridley," he
+said.  "Your vigilance, your shrewdness, and your-spectacles have
+saved her.  I hope she knows the full extent of her obligations to
+you, and that she will always look to you for counsel in all her
+needs.  She will want a wise friend, for she is to begin the world
+anew."
+
+What had happened, when she saw the three grave gentlemen at the door
+early in the forenoon, Mistress Kitty Fagan could not guess.
+Something relating to Miss Myrtle, no doubt: she wasn't goin' to be
+married right off to Mr. Clement,--was she,--and no church, nor cake,
+nor anything?  The gentlemen were shown into the parlor.  "Ask Miss
+Withers to go into the library, Kitty," said Master Gridley.
+"Dr. Pemberton wishes to speak with her."  The good old man was
+prepared for a scene with Miss Silence.  He announced to her, in a
+kind and delicate way, that she must make up her mind to the
+disappointment of certain expectations which she had long
+entertained, and which, as her lawyer, Mr. Penhallow, had come to
+inform her and others, were to be finally relinquished from this
+hour.
+
+To his great surprise, Miss Silence received this communication
+almost cheerfully.  It seemed more like a relief to her than anything
+else.  Her one dread in this world was her "responsibility "; and the
+thought that she might have to account for ten talents hereafter,
+instead of one, had often of late been a positive distress to her.
+There was also in her mind a secret disgust at the thought of the
+hungry creatures who would swarm round her if she should ever be in a
+position to bestow patronage.  This had grown upon her as the habits
+of lonely life gave her more and more of that fastidious dislike to
+males in general, as such, which is not rare in maidens who have seen
+the roses of more summers than politeness cares to mention.
+
+Father Pemberton then asked if he could see Miss Myrtle Hazard a few
+moments in the library before they went into the parlor, where they
+were to meet Mr. Penhallow and Mr. Gridley, for the purpose of
+receiving the lawyer's communication.
+
+What change was this which Myrtle had undergone since love had
+touched her heart, and her visions of worldly enjoyment had faded
+before the thought of sharing and ennobling the life of one who was
+worthy of her best affections,--of living for another, and of finding
+her own noblest self in that divine office of woman?  She had laid
+aside the bracelet which she had so long worn as a kind of charm as
+well as an ornament.  One would have said her features had lost
+something of that look of imperious beauty which had added to her
+resemblance to the dead woman whose glowing portrait hung upon her
+wall.  And if it could be that, after so many generations, the blood
+of her who had died for her faith could show in her descendants
+veins, and the soul of that elect lady of her race look out from her
+far-removed offspring's dark eyes, such a transfusion of the martyr's
+life and spiritual being might well seem to manifest itself in Myrtle
+Hazard.
+
+The large-hearted old man forgot his scholastic theory of human
+nature as he looked upon her face.  He thought he saw in her the
+dawning of that grace which some are born with; which some, like
+Myrtle, only reach through many trials and dangers; which some seem
+to show for a while and then lose; which too many never reach while
+they wear the robes of earth, but which speaks of the kingdom of
+heaven already begun in the heart of a child of earth.  He told her
+simply the story of the occurrences which had brought them together
+in the old house, with the message the lawyer was to deliver to its
+inmates.  He wished to prepare her for what might have been too
+sudden a surprise.
+
+But Myrtle was not wholly unprepared for some such revelation.  There
+was little danger that any such announcement would throw her mind
+from its balance after the inward conflict through which she had been
+passing.  For her lover had left her almost as soon as he had told
+her the story of his passion, and the relation in which he stood to
+her.  He, too, had gone to answer his country's call to her children,
+not driven away by crime and shame and despair, but quitting all--his
+new-born happiness, the art in which he was an enthusiast, his
+prospects of success and honor--to obey the higher command of duty.
+War was to him, as to so many of the noble youth who went forth, only
+organized barbarism, hateful but for the sacred cause which alone
+redeemed it from the curse that blasted the first murderer.  God only
+knew the sacrifice such young men as he made.
+
+How brief Myrtle's dream had been!  She almost doubted, at some
+moments, whether she would not awake from it, as from her other
+visions, and find it all unreal.  There was no need of fearing any
+undue excitement of her mind after the alternations of feeling she
+had just experienced.  Nothing seemed of much moment to her which
+could come from without,--her real world was within, and the light of
+its day and the breath of its life came from her love, made holy by
+the self-forgetfulness on both sides which was born with it.
+
+Only one member of the household was in danger of finding the
+excitement more than she could bear.  Miss Cynthia knew that all
+Murray Bradshaw's plans, in which he had taken care that she should
+have a personal interest, had utterly failed.  What he had done with
+the means of revenge in his power,--if, indeed, they were still in
+his power,--she did not know.  She only knew that there had been a
+terrible scene, and that he had gone, leaving it uncertain whether he
+would ever return.  It was with fear and trembling that she heard the
+summons which went forth, that the whole family should meet in the
+parlor to listen to a statement from Mr. Penhallow.  They all
+gathered as requested, and sat round the room, with the exception of
+Mistress Kitty Fagan, who knew her place too well to be sittin' down
+with the likes o' them, and stood with attentive ears in the doorway.
+
+Mr. Penhallow then read from a printed paper the decision of the
+Supreme Court in the land case so long pending, where the estate of
+the late Malachi Withers was the claimant, against certain parties
+pretending to hold under an ancient grant.  The decision was in favor
+of the estate.
+
+"This gives a great property to the heirs," Mr. Penhallow remarked,
+"and the question as to who these heirs are has to be opened.  For
+the will under which Silence Withers, sister of the deceased, has
+inherited is dated some years previous to the decease, and it was not
+very strange that a will of later date should be discovered.  Such a
+will has been discovered.  It is the instrument I have here."
+
+Myrtle Hazard opened her eyes very widely, for the paper Mr.
+Penlallow held looked exactly like that which Murray Bradshaw had
+burned, and, what was curious, had some spots on it just like some
+she had noticed on that.
+
+"This will," Mr. Penhallow said, "signed by witnesses dead or absent
+from this place, makes a disposition of the testator's property in
+some respects similar to that of the previous one, but with a single
+change, which proves to be of very great importance."
+
+Mr. Penhallow proceeded to read the will.  The important change in
+the disposition of the property was this: in case the land claim was
+decided in favor of the estate, then, in addition to the small
+provision made for Myrtle Hazard, the property so coming to the
+estate should all go to her.  There was no question about the
+genuineness and the legal sufficiency of this instrument.  Its date
+was not very long after the preceding one, at a period when, as was
+well known, he had almost given up the hope of gaining his case,
+and when the property was of little value compared to that which it
+had at present.
+
+A long silence followed this reading.  Then, to the surprise of all,
+Miss Silence Withers rose, and went to Myrtle Hazard, and wished her
+joy with every appearance of sincerity.  She was relieved of a great
+responsibility.  Myrtle was young and could bear it better.  She
+hoped that her young relative would live long to enjoy the blessings
+Providence had bestowed upon her, and to use them for the good of the
+community, and especially the promotion of the education of deserving
+youth.  If some fitting person could be found to advise Myrtle, whose
+affairs would require much care, it would be a great relief to her.
+
+They all went up to Myrtle and congratulated her on her change of
+fortune.  Even Cynthia Badlam got out a phrase or two which passed
+muster in the midst of the general excitement.  As for Kitty Fagan,
+she could not say a word, but caught Myrtle's hand and kissed it as
+if it belonged to her own saint; and then, suddenly applying her
+apron to her eyes, retreated from a scene which was too much for her,
+in a state of complete mental beatitude and total bodily
+discomfiture.
+
+Then Silence asked the old minister to make a prayer, and he
+stretched his hands up to Heaven, and called down all the blessings
+of Providence upon all the household, and especially upon this young
+handmaiden, who was to be tried with prosperity, and would need all
+aid from above to keep her from its dangers.
+
+Then Mr. Penhallow asked Myrtle if she had any choice as to the
+friend who should have charge of her affairs.  Myrtle turned to
+Master Byles Gridley, and said, "You have been my friend and
+protector so far, will you continue to be so hereafter?"
+
+Master Gridley tried very hard to begin a few words of thanks to her
+for her preference, but finding his voice a little uncertain,
+contented himself with pressing her hand and saying, "Most willingly,
+my dear daughter!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+The same day the great news of Myrtle Hazard's accession to fortune
+came out, the secret was told that she had promised herself in
+marriage to Mr. Clement Lindsay.  But her friends hardly knew how to
+congratulate her on this last event.  Her lover was gone, to risk his
+life, not improbably to lose it, or to come home a wreck, crippled by
+wounds, or worn out with disease.
+
+Some of them wondered to see her so cheerful in such a moment of
+trial.  They could not know how the manly strength of Clement's
+determination had nerved her for womanly endurance.  They had not
+learned that a great cause makes great souls, or reveals them to
+themselves,--a lesson taught by so many noble examples in the times
+that followed.  Myrtle's only desire seemed to be to labor in some
+way to help the soldiers and their families.  She appeared to have
+forgotten everything for this duty; she had no time for regrets, if
+she were disposed to indulge them, and she hardly asked a question as
+to the extent of the fortune which had fallen to her.
+
+The next number of the "Banner and Oracle" contained two
+announcements which she read with some interest when her attention
+was called to them.  They were as follows:
+
+"A fair and accomplished daughter of this village comes, by the late
+decision of the Supreme Court, into possession of a property
+estimated at a million of dollars or more.  It consists of a large
+tract of land purchased many years ago by the late Malachi Withers,
+now become of immense value by the growth of a city in its
+neighborhood, the opening of mines, etc., etc.  It is rumored that
+the lovely and highly educated heiress has formed a connection
+looking towards matrimony with a certain distinguished artist."
+
+"Our distinguished young townsman, William Murray Bradshaw, Esq., has
+been among the first to respond to the call of the country for
+champions to defend her from traitors.  We understand that he has
+obtained a captaincy in the _th regiment, about to march to the
+threatened seat of war.  May victory perch on his banners!"
+
+The two lovers, parted by their own self-sacrificing choice in the
+very hour that promised to bring them so much happiness, labored for
+the common cause during all the terrible years of warfare, one in the
+camp and the field, the other in the not less needful work which the
+good women carried on at home, or wherever their services were
+needed.  Clement--now Captain Lindsay--returned at the end of his
+first campaign charged with a special office.  Some months later,
+after one of the great battles, he was sent home wounded.  He wore
+the leaf on his shoulder which entitled him to be called Major
+Lindsay.  He recovered from his wound only too rapidly, for Myrtle
+had visited him daily in the military hospital where he had resided
+for treatment; and it was bitter parting.  The telegraph wires were
+thrilling almost hourly with messages of death, and the long pine
+boxes came by almost every train,--no need of asking what they held.
+
+Once more he came, detailed on special duty, and this time with the
+eagle on his shoulder,--he was Colonel Lindsay.  The lovers could not
+part again of their own free will.  Some adventurous women had
+followed their husbands to the camp, and Myrtle looked as if she
+could play the part of the Maid of Saragossa on occasion.  So Clement
+asked her if she would return with him as his wife; and Myrtle
+answered, with as much willingness to submit as a maiden might fairly
+show under such circumstances, that she would do his bidding.
+Thereupon, with the shortest possible legal notice, Father Pemberton
+was sent for, and the ceremony was performed in the presence of a few
+witnesses in the large parlor at The Poplars, which was adorned with
+flowers, and hung round with all the portraits of the dead members of
+the family, summoned as witnesses to the celebration.  One witness
+looked on with unmoved features, yet Myrtle thought there was a more
+heavenly smile on her faded lips than she had ever seen before
+beaming from the canvas,--it was Ann Holyoake, the martyr to her
+faith, the guardian spirit of Myrtle's visions, who seemed to breathe
+a holier benediction than any words--even those of the good old
+Father Pemberton himself--could convey.
+
+They went back together to the camp.  From that period until the end
+of the war, Myrtle passed her time between the life of the tent and
+that of the hospital.  In the offices of mercy which she performed
+for the sick and the wounded and the dying, the dross of her nature
+seemed to be burned away.  The conflict of mingled lives in her blood
+had ceased.  No lawless impulses usurped the place of that serene
+resolve which had grown strong by every exercise of its high
+prerogative.  If she had been called now to die for any worthy cause,
+her race would have been ennobled by a second martyr, true to the
+blood of her who died under the cruel Queen.
+
+Many sad sights she saw in the great hospital where she passed some
+months at intervals,--one never to be forgotten.  An officer was
+brought into the ward where she was in attendance.  "Shot through the
+lungs,--pretty nearly gone."
+
+She went softly to his bedside.  He was breathing with great
+difficulty; his face was almost convulsed with the effort, but she
+recognized him in a moment; it was Murray Bradshaw,--Captain
+Bradshaw, as she knew by the bars on his coat flung upon the bed
+where he had just been laid.
+
+She addressed him by name, tenderly as if he had been a dear brother;
+she saw on his face that hers were to be the last kind words he would
+ever hear.
+
+He turned his glazing eyes upon her.  "Who are you?" he said in a
+feeble voice.
+
+"An old friend," she answered; "you knew me as Myrtle Hazard."
+
+He started.  "You by my bedside!  You caring for me!--for me, that
+burned the title to your fortune to ashes before your eyes!  You
+can't forgive that,--I won't believe it!  Don't you hate me, dying as
+I am?"
+
+Myrtle was used to maintaining a perfect calmness of voice and
+countenance, and she held her feelings firmly down.  "I have nothing
+to forgive you, Mr. Bradshaw.  You may have meant to do me wrong, but
+Providence raised up a protector for me.  The paper you burned was
+not the original,--it was a copy substituted for it--"
+
+"And did the old man outwit me after all?" he cried out, rising
+suddenly in bed, and clasping his hands behind his head to give him a
+few more gasps of breath.  "I knew he was cunning, but I thought I
+was his match.  It must have been Byles Gridley,--nobody else.  And
+so the old man beat me after all, and saved you from ruin!  Thank God
+that it came out so!  Thank God!  I can die now.  Give me your hand,
+Myrtle."
+
+She took his hand, and held it until it gently loosed its hold, and
+he ceased to breathe.  Myrtle's creed was a simple one, with more of
+trust and love in it than of systematized articles of belief.  She
+cherished the fond hope that these last words of one who had erred so
+miserably were a token of some blessed change which the influences of
+the better world might carry onward until he should have outgrown the
+sins and the weaknesses of his earthly career.
+
+Soon after this she rejoined her husband in the camp.  From time to
+time they received stray copies of the "Banner and Oracle," which, to
+Myrtle especially, were full of interest, even to the last
+advertisement.  A few paragraphs may be reproduced here which relate
+to persons who have figured in this narrative.
+
+
+                    "TEMPLE OF HYMEN.
+
+"Married, on the 6th instant, Fordyce Hurlbut, M. D., to Olive, only
+daughter of the Rev. Ambrose Eveleth.  The editor of this paper
+returns his acknowledgments for a bountiful slice of the wedding-
+cake.  May their shadows never be less!"
+
+Not many weeks after this appeared the following:
+
+"Died in this place, on the 28th instant, the venerable Lemuel
+Hurlbut, M. D., at the great age of XCVI years.
+
+"'With the ancient is wisdom, and in length of days understanding.'"
+
+
+Myrtle recalled his kind care of her in her illness, and paid the
+tribute of a sigh to his memory,--there was nothing in a death like
+his to call for any aching regret.
+
+The usual routine of small occurrences was duly recorded in the
+village paper for some weeks longer, when she was startled and
+shocked by receiving a number containing the following paragraph:
+
+
+                    CALAMITOUS ACCIDENT
+
+"It is known to our readers that the steeple of the old meeting-house
+was struck by lightning about a month ago.  The frame of the building
+was a good deal jarred by the shock, but no danger was apprehended
+from the injury it had received.  On Sunday last the congregation
+came together as usual.  The Rev. Mr. Stoker was alone m the pulpit,
+the Rev. Doctor Pemberton having been detained by slight
+indisposition.  The sermon was from the text, "The wolf also shall
+dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid."
+(Isaiah xi. 6.) The pastor described the millennium as--the reign of
+love and peace, in eloquent and impressive language.  He was in the
+midst of the prayer which follows the sermon, and had jest put up a
+petition that the spirit of affection and faith and trust might grow
+up and prevail among the flock of which he was the shepherd, more
+especially those dear lambs whom he gathered with his arm, and
+carried in his bosom, when the old sounding-board, which had hung
+safely for nearly a century,--loosened, no doubt by the bolt which
+had fallen on the church,--broke from its fastenings, and fell with a
+loud crash upon the pulpit, crushing the Rev. Mr. Stoker under its
+ruins.  The scene that followed beggars description.  Cries and
+shrieks resounded through the horse.  Two or three young women
+fainted entirely away.  Mr. Penhallow, Deacon Rumrill, Gifted
+Hopkins, Esq., and others, came forward immediately, and after much
+effort succeeded in removing the wreck of the sounding-board, and
+extricating their unfortunate pastor.  He was not fatally injured, it
+is hoped; but, sad to relate, he received such a violent blow upon
+the spine of the back, that palsy of the lower extremities is like to
+ensue.  He is at present lying entirely helpless.  Every attention is
+paid to him by his affectionately devoted family."
+
+Myrtle had hardly got over the pain which the reading of this
+unfortunate occurrence gave her, when her eyes were gladdened by the
+following pleasing piece of intelligence, contained in a subsequent
+number of the village paper:
+
+                    IMPOSING CEREMONY.
+
+"The Reverend Doctor Pemberton performed the impressive rite of
+baptism upon the first-born child of our distinguished townsman,
+Gifted Hopkins, Esq., the Bard of Oxbow Village, and Mrs. Susan P.
+Hopkins, his amiable and respected lady.  The babe conducted himself
+with singular propriety on this occasion.  He received the Christian
+name of Byron Tennyson Browning.  May be prove worthy of his name and
+his parentage!"
+
+
+The end of the war came at last, and found Colonel Lindsay among its
+unharmed survivors.  He returned with Myrtle to her native village,
+and they established themselves, at the request of Miss Silence
+Withers, in the old family mansion.  Miss Cynthia, to whom Myrtle
+made a generous allowance, had gone to live in a town not many miles
+distant, where she had a kind of home on sufferance, as well as at
+The Poplars.  This was a convenience just then, because Nurse Byloe
+was invited to stay with them for a month or two; and one nurse and
+two single women under the same roof keep each other in a stew all
+the time, as the old dame somewhat sharply remarked.
+
+Master Byles Gridley had been appointed Myrtle's legal protector,
+and, with the assistance of Mr. Penhallow, had brought the property
+she inherited into a more manageable and productive form; so that,
+when Clement began his fine studio behind the old mansion, he felt
+that at least he could pursue his art, or arts, if he chose to give
+himself to sculpture, without that dreadful hag, Necessity, standing
+by him to pinch the features of all his ideals, and give them
+something of her own likeness.
+
+Silence Withers was more cheerful now that she had got rid of her
+responsibility.  She embellished her spare person a little more than
+in former years.  These young people looked so happy!  Love was not
+so unendurable, perhaps, after all.  No woman need despair,--
+especially if she has a house over her, and a snug little property.
+A worthy man, a former missionary, of the best principles, but of a
+slightly jocose and good-humored habit, thought that he could piece
+his widowed years with the not insignificant, fraction of life left
+to Miss Silence, to their mutual advantage.  He came to the village,
+therefore, where Father Pemberton was very glad to have him supply
+the pulpit in the place of his unfortunate disabled colleague.  The
+courtship soon began, and was brisk enough; for the good man knew
+there was no time to lose at his period of life,--or hers either, for
+that matter.  It was a rather odd specimen of love-making; for he was
+constantly trying to subdue his features to a gravity which they were
+not used to, and she was as constantly endeavoring to be as lively as
+possible, with the innocent desire of pleasing her light-hearted
+suitor.
+
+"Vieille fille fait jeune mariee."  Silence was ten years younger as
+a bride than she had seemed as a lone woman.  One would have said she
+had got out of the coach next to the hearse, and got into one some
+half a dozen behind it,--where there is often good and reasonably
+cheerful conversation going on about the virtues of the deceased, the
+probable amount of his property, or the little slips he may have
+committed, and where occasionally a subdued pleasantry at his expense
+sets the four waistcoats shaking that were lifting with sighs a half-
+hour ago in the house of mourning.  But Miss Silence, that was,
+thought that two families, with all the possible complications which
+time might bring, would be better in separate establishments.  She
+therefore proposed selling The Poplars to Myrtle and her husband, and
+removing to a house in the village, which would be large enough for
+them, at least for the present.  So the young folks bought the old
+house, and paid a mighty good price for it; and enlarged it, and
+beautified and glorified it, and one fine morning went together down
+to the Widow Hopkins's, whose residence seemed in danger of being a
+little crowded,--for Gifted lived there with his Susan,--and what had
+happened might happen again,--and gave Master Byles Gridley a formal
+and most persuasively worded invitation to come up and make his home
+with them at The Poplars.
+
+Now Master Gridley has been betrayed into palpable and undisguised
+weakness at least once in the presence of this assembly, who are
+looking upon him almost for the last time before they part from him,
+and see his face no more.  Let us not inquire too curiously, then,
+how he received this kind proposition.  It is enough, that, when he
+found that a new study had been built on purpose for him, and a
+sleeping-room attached to it so that he could live there without
+disturbing anybody if he chose, he consented to remove there for a
+while, and that he was there established amidst great rejoicing.
+
+Cynthia Badlam had fallen of late into poor health.  She found at
+last that she was going; and as she had a little property of her
+own,--as almost all poor relations have, only there is not enough of
+it,--she was much exercised in her mind as to the final arrangements
+to be made respecting its disposition.  The Rev. Dr. Pemberton was
+one day surprised by a message, that she wished to have an interview
+with him.  He rode over to the town in which she was residing, and
+there had a long conversation with her upon this matter.  When this
+was settled, her mind seemed too be more at ease.  She died with a
+comfortable assurance that she was going to a better world, and with
+a bitter conviction that it would be hard to find one that would
+offer her a worse lot than being a poor relation in this.
+
+Her little property was left to Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton and Jacob
+Penhallow, Esq., to be by them employed for such charitable purposes
+as they should elect, educational or other.  Father Pemberton
+preached an admirable funeral sermon, in which he praised her
+virtues, known to this people among whom she had long lived, and
+especially that crowning act by which she devoted all she had to
+purposes of charity-and benevolence.
+
+The old clergyman seemed to have renewed his youth since the
+misfortune of his colleague had incapacitated him from labor.  He
+generally preached in the forenoon now, and to the great acceptance
+of the people,--for the truth was that the honest minister who had
+married Miss Silence was not young enough or good-looking enough to
+be an object of personal attentions like the Rev. Joseph Bellamy
+Stoker, and the old minister appeared to great advantage contrasted
+with him in the pulpit.  Poor Mr. Stoker was now helpless, faithfully
+and tenderly waited upon by his own wife, who had regained her health
+and strength,--in no small measure, perhaps, from the great need of
+sympathy and active aid which her unfortunate husband now
+experienced.  It was an astonishment to herself when she found that
+she who had so long been served was able to serve another.  Some who
+knew his errors thought his accident was a judgment; but others
+believed that it was only a mercy in disguise,--it snatched him
+roughly from his sin, but it opened his heart to gratitude towards
+her whom his neglect could not alienate, and through gratitude to
+repentance and better thoughts.  Bathsheba had long ago promised
+herself to Cyprian Eveleth; and, as he was about to become the rector
+of a parish in the next town, the marriage was soon to take place.
+
+How beautifully serene Master Byles Gridley's face was growing!
+Clement loved to study its grand lines, which had so much strength
+and fine humanity blended in them.  He was so fascinated by their
+noble expression that he sometimes seemed to forget himself, and
+looked at him more like an artist taking his portrait than like an
+admiring friend.  He maintained that Master Gridley had a bigger bump
+of benevolence and as large a one of cautiousness as the two people
+most famous for the size of these organs on the phrenological chart
+he showed him, and proved it, or nearly proved it, by careful
+measurements of his head.  Master Gridley laughed, and read him a
+passage on the pseudo-sciences out of his book.
+
+The disposal of Miss Cynthia's bequest was much discussed in the
+village.  Some wished the trustees would use it to lay the
+foundations of a public library.  Others thought it should be applied
+for the relief of the families of soldiers who had fallen in the war.
+Still another set would take it to build a monument to the memory of
+those heroes.  The trustees listened with the greatest candor to all
+these gratuitous hints.  It was, however, suggested, in a well-
+written anonymous article which appeared in the village paper, that
+it was desirable to follow the general lead of the testator's
+apparent preference.  The trustees were at liberty to do as they saw
+fit; but, other things being equal, same educational object should be
+selected.
+
+If there were any orphan children in the place, it would seem to be
+very proper to devote the moderate sum bequeathed to educating them.
+The trustees recognized the justice of this suggestion.  Why not
+apply it to the instruction and maintenance of those two pretty and
+promising children, virtually orphans, whom the charitable Mrs.
+Hopkins had cared for so long without any recompense, and at a cost
+which would soon become beyond her means?  The good people of the
+neighborhood accepted this as the best solution of the difficulty.
+It was agreed upon at length by the trustees, that the Cynthia Badlam
+Fund for Educational Purposes should be applied for the benefit of
+the two foundlings, known as Isosceles and Helminthia Hopkins.
+
+Master Bytes Gridley was greatly exercised about the two
+"preposterous names," as he called them, which in a moment of
+eccentric impulse he had given to these children of nature.  He
+ventured to hint as much to Mrs. Hopkins.  The good dame was vastly
+surprised.  She thought they was about as pooty names as anybody had
+had given 'em in the village.  And they was so handy, spoke short,
+Sossy and Minthy,--she never should know how to call 'em anything
+else.
+
+"But my dear Mrs. Hopkins," Master Gridley urged, "if you knew the
+meaning they have to the ears of scholars, you would see that I did
+very wrong to apply such absurd names to my little fellow-creatures,
+and that I am bound to rectify my error.  More than that, my dear
+madam, I mean to consult you as to the new names; and if we can fix
+upon proper and pleasing ones, it is my intention to leave a pretty
+legacy in my will to these interesting children."
+
+"Mr. Gridley," said Mrs. Hopkins, "you're the best man I ever see, or
+ever shall see, .  .  .  except my poor dear Ammi .  .  .  .  I 'll
+do jest as you say about that, or about anything else in all this
+livin' world."
+
+"Well, then, Mrs. Hopkins, what shall be the boy's name?"
+
+"Byles Gridley Hopkins!" she answered instantly.
+
+"Good Lord!" said Mr. Gridley, "think a minute, my dear madam.  I
+will not say one word,--only think a minute, and mention some name
+that will not suggest quite so many winks and whispers."
+
+She did think something less than a minute, and then said aloud,
+"Abraham Lincoln Hopkins."
+
+"Fifteen thousand children have been so christened during the past
+year, on a moderate computation."
+
+"Do think of some name yourself, Mr. Gridley; I shall like anything
+that you like.  To think of those dear babes having a fund--if that's
+the right name--on purpose for 'em, and a promise of a legacy, I hope
+they won't get that till they're a hundred year old!"
+
+"What if we change Isosceles to Theodore, Mrs. Hopkins?  That means
+the gift of God, and the child has been a gift from Heaven, rather
+than a burden."
+
+Mrs. Hopkins seized her apron, and held it to her eyes.  She was
+weeping.  "Theodore!" she said, "Theodore!  My little brother's name,
+that I buried when I was only eleven year old.  Drownded.  The
+dearest little child that ever you see.  I have got his little mug
+with Theodore on it now.  Kep' o' purpose.  Our little Sossy shall
+have it.  Theodore P. Hopkins,--sha'n't it be, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Well, if you say so; but why that P., Mrs. Hopkins?  Theodore
+Parker, is it?"
+
+"Doesn't P.  stand for Pemberton, and isn't Father Pemberton the best
+man in the world--next to you, Mr. Gridley?"
+
+"Well, well, Mrs. Hopkins, let it be so, if you are suited, I am.
+Now about Helminthia; there can't be any doubt about what we ought to
+call her,--surely the friend of orphans should be remembered in
+naming one of the objects of her charity."
+
+"Cynthia Badlam Fund Hopkins," said the good woman triumphantly,--"is
+that what you mean?"
+
+"Suppose we leave out one of the names,--four are too many.  I think
+the general opinion will be that Hehninthia should unite the names of
+her two benefactresses,--Cynthia Badlam Hopkins."
+
+"Why, law!  Mr. Gridley, is n't that nice?--Minthy and Cynthy,--there
+ain't but one letter of difference!  Poor Cynthy would be pleased if
+she could know that one of our babes was to be called after her.  She
+was dreadful fond of children."
+
+On one of the sweetest Sundays that ever made Oxbow Village lovely,
+the Rev. Dr. Eliphalet Pembertan was summoned to officiate at three
+most interesting ceremonies,--a wedding and two christenings, one of
+the latter a double one.
+
+The first was celebrated at the house of the Rev. Mr. Stoker, between
+the Rev. Cyprian Eveleth and Bathsheba, daughter of the first-named
+clergyman.  He could not be present on account of his great
+infirmity, but the door of his chamber was left open that he might
+hear the marriage service performed.  The old, white-haired minister,
+assisted, as the papers said, by the bridegroom's father, conducted
+the ceremony according to the Episcopal form.  When he came to those
+solemn words in which the husband promises fidelity to the wife so
+long as they both shall live, the nurse, who was watching, near the
+poor father, saw him bury his face in his pillow, and heard him
+murmur the words, "God be merciful to me a sinner!"
+
+The christenings were both to take place at the same service, in the
+old meeting-house.  Colonel Clement Lindsay and Myrtle his wife came
+in, and stout Nurse Byloe bore their sturdy infant in her arms.  A
+slip of paper was handed to the Reverend Doctor on which these words
+were written:--"The name is Charles Hazard."
+
+The solemn and touching rite was then performed; and Nurse Byloe
+disappeared with the child, its forehead glistening with the dew of
+its consecration.
+
+Then, hand in hand, like the babes in the wood, marched up the
+broad aisle--marshalled by Mrs. Hopkins in front, and Mrs. Gifted
+Hopkins bringing up the rear--the two children hitherto known as
+Isosceles and Helminthia.  They had been well schooled, and, as the
+mysterious and to them incomprehensible ceremony was enacted,
+maintained the most stoical aspect of tranquillity.  In Mrs.
+Hopkins's words, "They looked like picters, and behaved like angels."
+
+That evening, Sunday evening as it was, there was a quiet meeting of
+some few friends at The Poplars.  It was such a great occasion that
+the Sabbatical rules, never strict about Sunday evening,--which was,
+strictly speaking, secular time,--were relaxed.  Father Pemberton was
+there, and Master Byles Gridley, of course, and the Rev. Ambrose
+Eveleth, with his son and his daughter-in-law, Bathsheba, and her
+mother, now in comfortable health, aunt Silence and her husband,
+Doctor Hurlbut and his wife (Olive Eveleth that was), Jacob
+Penhallow, Esq., Mrs. Hopkins, her son and his wife (Susan Posey that
+was), the senior deacon of the old church (the admirer of the great
+Scott), the Editor-in-chief of the "Banner and Oracle," and in the
+background Nurse Byloe and the privileged servant, Mistress Kitty
+Fagan, with a few others whose names we need not mention.
+
+The evening was made pleasant with sacred music, and the fatigues of
+two long services repaired by such simple refections as would not
+turn the holy day into a day of labor.  A large paper copy of the new
+edition of Byles Gridley's remarkable work was lying on the table.
+He never looked so happy,--could anything fill his cup fuller?  In
+the course of the evening Clement spoke of the many trials through
+which they had passed in common with vast numbers of their
+countrymen, and some of those peculiar dangers which Myrtle had had
+to encounter in the course of a life more eventful, and attended with
+more risks, perhaps, than most of them imagined.  But Myrtle, he
+said, had always been specially cared for.  He wished them to look
+upon the semblance of that protecting spirit who had been faithful to
+her in her gravest hours of trial and danger.  If they would follow
+him into one of the lesser apartments up stairs they would have an
+opportunity to do so.
+
+Myrtle wondered a little, but followed with the rest.  They all
+ascended to the little projecting chamber, through the window of
+which her scarlet jacket caught the eyes of the boys paddling about
+on the river in those early days when Cyprian Eveleth gave it the
+name of the Fire-hang-bird's Nest.
+
+The light fell softly but clearly on the dim and faded canvas from
+which looked the saintly features of the martyred woman, whose
+continued presence with her descendants was the old family legend.
+But underneath it Myrtle was surprised to see a small table with some
+closely covered object upon it.  It was a mysterious arrangement,
+made without any knowledge on her part.
+
+"Now, then, Kitty!" Mr. Lindsay said.
+
+Kitty Fagan, who had evidently been taught her part, stepped forward,
+and removed the cloth which concealed the unknown object.  It was a
+lifelike marble bust of Master Byles Gridley.
+
+"And this is what you have been working at so long,--is it, Clement?"
+Myrtle said.
+
+"Which is the image of your protector, Myrtle?", he answered,
+smiling.
+
+Myrtle Hazard Lindsay walked up to the bust and kissed its marble
+forehead, saying, "This is the face of my Guardian Angel."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Guardian Angel, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
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