He who should have enjoyed the privilege of
looking upon Mr. Bernard Langdon the next
morning, when his toilet was about half finished,
would have had a very pleasant gratuitous exhibition.
First he buckled the strap of his trousers
pretty tightly. Then he took up a pair of heavy
dumb-bells, and swung them for a few minutes;
then two great “Indian clubs,” with which he enacted
all sorts of impossible-looking feats. His
limbs were not very large, nor his shoulders remarkably
broad; but if you knew as much of
the muscles as all persons who look at statues
and pictures with a critical eye ought to have
learned, — if you knew the trapezius, lying diamond-shaped
over the back and shoulders like
a monk's cowl, — or the deltoid, which caps the
shoulder like an epaulette, — or the triceps, which
furnishes the calf of the upper arm, — or the hardknotted
biceps, — any of the great sculptural landmarks,
in fact, — you would have said there was
a pretty show of them, beneath the white satiny
skin of Mr. Bernard Langdon. And if you had
seen him, when he had laid down the Indian
clubs, catch hold of a leather strap that hung
from the beam of the old-fashioned ceiling, and
lift and lower himself over and over again by his
left hand alone, you might have thought it a very
simple and easy thing to do, until you tried to do
it yourself. — Mr. Bernard looked at himself with
the eye of an expert. “Pretty well!” he said;—
“not so much fallen off as I expected.” Then

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

he set up his bolster in a very knowing sort of
way, and delivered two or three blows straight
as rulers and swift as winks. “That will do,”
he said. Then, as if determined to make a certainty
of his condition, he took a dynamometer
from one of the drawers in his old veneered
bureau. First he squeezed it with his two hands.
Then he placed it on the floor and lifted, steadily,
strongly. The springs creaked and cracked; the
index swept with a great stride far up into the
high figures of the scale; it was a good lift.
He was satisfied. He sat down on the edge of
his bed and looked at his cleanly-shaped arms.
“If I strike one of those boobies, I am afraid I
shall spoil him,” he said. Yet this young man,
when weighed with his class at the college,
could barely turn one hundred and forty-two
pounds in the scale, — not a heavy weight,
surely; but some of the middle weights, as the
present English champion, for instance, seem to
be of a far finer quality of muscle than the bulkier
fellows.

The master took his breakfast with a good
appetite that morning, but was perhaps rather
more quiet than usual. After breakfast he went
up-stairs and put on a light loose frock, instead
of his usual dress-coat, which was a close-fitting
and rather stylish one. On his way to school
he met Alminy Cutterr, who happened to be
walking in the other direction. “Good morning,
Miss Cutter,” he said; for she and another

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

young lady had been introduced to him, on a
former occasion, in the usual phrase of polite society
in presenting ladies to gentlemen, — “Mr.
Langdon, let me make y' acquainted with Miss
Cutterr; — let me make y' acquainted with Miss
Braowne.” So he said, “Good morning”; to
which she replied, “Good mornin', Mr. Langdon.
Haow's your haälth?” The answer to
this question ought naturally to have been the
end of the talk; but Alminy Cutterr lingered
and looked as if she had something more on
her mind.

A young fellow does not require a great experience
to read a simple country-girl's face as
if it were a signboard. Alminy was a good soul,
with red cheeks and bright eyes, kind-hearted as
she could be, and it was out of the question for
her to hide her thoughts or feelings like a fine
lady. Her bright eyes were moist and her red
cheeks paler than their wont, as she said, with
her lips quivering, — “Oh, Mr. Langdon, them
boys 'll be the death of ye, if ye don't take
caär!”

“Why, what's the matter, my dear?” said Mr.
Bernard. — Don't think there was anything very
odd in that “my dear,” at the second interview
with a village belle; — some of these woman-tamers
call a girl “My dear,” after five minutes'
acquaintance, and it sounds all right as they say
it. But you had better not try it at a venture.

It sounded all right to Alminy, as Mr. Bernard

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

said it. — “I 'll tell ye what's the mahtterr,” she
said, in a frightened voice. “Ahbner's go'n' to
car' his dog, 'n' he 'll set him on ye 'z sure 'z y' 'r'
alive. 'T 's the same cretur that haäf ēat up
Eben Squires's little Jo, a year come nex' Faastday.”

Now this last statement was undoubtedly overcolored;
as little Jo Squires was running about
the village, — with an ugly scar on his arm, it is
true, where the beast had caught him with his
teeth, on the occasion of the child's taking liberties
with him, as he had been accustomed to do
with a good-tempered Newfoundland dog, who
seemed to like being pulled and hauled round by
children. After this the creature was commonly
muzzled, and, as he was fed on raw meat chiefly,
was always ready for a fight, — which he was
occasionally indulged in, when anything stout
enough to match him could be found in any of
the neighboring villages.

Tiger, or, more briefly, Tige, the property of
Abner Briggs, Junior, belonged to a species not
distinctly named in scientific books, but well
known to our country-folks under the name
“Yallah dog.” They do not use this expression
as they would say black dog or white dog,
but with almost as definite a meaning as when
they speak of a terrier or a spaniel. A “yallah
dog,” is a large canine brute, of a dingy old-flannel
color, of no particular breed except his
own, who hangs round a tavern or a butcher's

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

shop, or trots alongside of a team, looking as if
he were disgusted with the world, and the world
with him. Our inland population, while they
tolerate him, speak of him with contempt. Old—,
of Meredith Bridge, used to twit the sun
for not shining on cloudy days, swearing, that,
if he hung up his “yallah dog,” he would make
a better show of daylight. A country fellow,
abusing a horse of his neighbor's, vowed, that,
“if he had such a hoss, he'd swap him for a
`yallah dog,' — and then shoot the dog.”

Tige was an ill-conditioned brute by nature,
and art had not improved him by cropping his
ears and tail and investing him with a spiked
collar. He bore on his person, also, various not
ornamental scars, marks of old battles; for Tige
had fight in him, as was said before, and as might
be guessed by a certain bluntness about the muzzle,
with a projection of the lower jaw, which
looked as if there might be a bull-dog stripe
among the numerous bar-sinisters of his lineage.

It was hardly fair, however, to leave Alminy
Cutterr waiting while this piece of natural history
was telling. — As she spoke of little Jo, who
had been “haäf ēat up” by Tige, she could not
contain her sympathies, and began to cry.

“Why, my dear little soul,” said Mr. Bernard,
“what are you worried about? I used to play
with a bear when I was a boy; and the bear
used to hug me, and I used to kiss him, —
so!”

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

It was too bad of Mr. Bernard, only the second
time he had seen Alminy; but her kind feelings
had touched him, and that seemed the most natural
way of expressing his gratitude. Alminy
looked round to see if anybody was near; she
saw nobody, so of course it would do no good
to “holler.” She saw nobody; but a stout young
fellow, leading a yellow dog, muzzled, saw her
through a crack in a picket fence, not a great
way off the road. Many a year he had been
“hangin' 'raoun'” Alminy, and never did he see
any encouraging look, or hear any “Behave,
naow!” or “Come, naow, a'n't ye 'shamed?”
or other forbidding phrase of acquiescence, such
as village belles understand as well as ever did
the nymph who fled to the willows in the eclogue
we all remember.

No wonder he was furious, when he saw the
schoolmaster, who had never seen the girl until
within a week, touching with his lips those rosy
cheeks which he had never dared to approach.
But that was all; it was a sudden impulse; and
the master turned away from the young girl,
laughing, and telling her not to fret herself about
him, — he would take care of himself.

So Master Langdon walked on toward his
schoolhouse, not displeased, perhaps, with his little
adventure, nor immensely elated by it; for he
was one of the natural class of the sex-subduers,
and had had many a smile without asking, which
had been denied to the feeble youth who try to

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

win favor by pleading their passion in rhyme, and
even to the more formidable approaches of young
officers in volunteer companies, considered by
many to be quite irresistible to the fair who
have once beheld them from their windows in the
epaulettes and plumes and sashes of the “Pigwacket
Invincibles,” or the “Hackmatack Rangers.”

Master Langdon took his seat and began the
exercises of his school. The smaller boys recited
their lessons well enough, but some of the larger
ones were negligent and surly. He noticed one
or two of them looking toward the door, as if expecting
somebody or something in that direction.
At half past nine o'clock, Abner Briggs, Junior,
who had not yet shown himself, made his appearance.
He was followed by his “yallah dog,”
without his muzzle, who squatted down very
grimly near the door, and gave a wolfish look
round the room, as if he were considering which
was the plumpest boy to begin with. The young
butcher, meanwhile, went to his seat, looking
somewhat flushed, except round the lips, which
were hardly as red as common, and set pretty
sharply.

“Put out that dog, Abner Briggs!” — The
master spoke as the captain speaks to the helmsman,
when there are rocks foaming at the lips,
right under his lee.

Abner Briggs answered as the helmsman answers,
when he knows he has a mutinous crew

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

round him that mean to run the ship on the reef,
and is one of the mutineers himself. “Put him
aout y'rself, 'f ye a'n't afeard on him!”

The master stepped into the aisle. The great
cur showed his teeth, — and the devilish instincts
of his old wolf-ancestry looked out of his eyes,
and flashed from his sharp tusks, and yawned in
his wide mouth and deep red gullet.

The movements of animals are so much quicker
than those of human beings commonly are, that
they avoid blows as easily as one of us steps out
of the way of an ox-cart. It must be a very stupid
dog that lets himself be run over by a fast
driver in his gig; he can jump out of the wheel's
way after the tire has already touched him. So,
while one is lifting a stick to strike or drawing
back his foot to kick, the beast makes his spring,
and the blow or the kick comes too late.

It was not so this time. The master was a
fencer, and something of a boxer; he had played
at single-stick, and was used to watching an adversary's
eye and coming down on him without
any of those premonitory symptoms by which
unpractised persons show long beforehand what
mischief they meditate.

“Out with you!” he said, fiercely, — and explained
what he meant by a sudden flash of his
foot that clashed the yellow dog's white teeth together
like the springing of a bear-trap. The cur
knew he had found his master at the first word
and glance, as low animals on four legs, or a

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

smaller number, always do; and the blow took
him so by surprise, that it curled him up in an
instant, and he went bundling out of the open
schoolhouse-door with a most pitiable yelp, and
his stump of a tail shut down as close as his
owner ever shut the short, stubbed blade of his
jack-knife.

It was time for the other cur to find who his
master was.

“Follow your dog, Abner Briggs!” said Master
Langdon.

The stout butcher-youth looked round, but the
rebels were all cowed and sat still.

“I'll go when I'm ready,” he said, — “'n' I
guess I won't go afore I'm ready.”

“You're ready now,” said Master Langdon,
turning up his cuffs so that the little boys noticed
the yellow gleam of a pair of gold sleeve-buttons,
once worn by Colonel Percy Wentworth, famous
in the Old French War.

Abner Briggs, Junior, did not apparently think
he was ready, at any rate; for he rose up in his
place, and stood with clenched fists, defiant, as
the master strode towards him. The master
knew the fellow was really frightened, for all his
looks, and that he must have no time to rally.
So he caught him suddenly by the collar, and,
with one great pull, had him out over his desk
and on the open floor. He gave him a sharp
fling backwards and stood looking at him.

The rough-and-tumble fighters all clinch, as

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

everybody knows; and Abner Briggs, Junior, was
one of that kind. He remembered how he had
floored Master Weeks, and he had just “spunk”
enough left in him to try to repeat his former
successful experiment on the new master. He
sprang at him, open-handed, to clutch him. So
the master had to strike, — once, but very hard,
and just in the place to tell. No doubt, the authority
that doth hedge a schoolmaster added to
the effect of the blow; but the blow was itself a
neat one, and did not require to be repeated.

“Now go home,” said the master, “and don't
let me see you or your dog here again.” And he
turned his cuffs down over the gold sleeve-buttons.

This finished the great Pigwacket Centre School
rebellion. What could be done with a master
who was so pleasant as long as the boys behaved
decently, and such a terrible fellow when he got
“riled,” as they called it? In a week's time,
everything was reduced to order, and the school-committee
were delighted. The master, however,
had received a proposition so much more agreeable
and advantageous, that he informed the committee
he should leave at the end of his month,
having in his eye a sensible and energetic young
college-graduate who would be willing and fully
competent to take his place.

So, at the expiration of the appointed time,
Bernard Langdon, late master of the School District
No. 1, Pigwacket Centre, took his departure

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

from that place for another locality, whither we
shall follow him, carrying with him the regrets
of the committee, of most of the scholars, and
of several young ladies; also two locks of hair,
sent unbeknown to payrents, one dark and one
warmish auburn, inscribed with the respective initials
of Alminy Cutterr and Arvilly Braowne.

p606-065 CHAPTER IV. THE MOTH FLIES INTO THE CANDLE.

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

The invitation which Mr. Bernard Langdon
had accepted came from the Board of Trustees
of the “Apollinean Female Institute,” a school
for the education of young ladies, situated in the
flourishing town of Rockland. This was an establishment
on a considerable scale, in which a
hundred scholars or thereabouts were taught the
ordinary English branches, several of the modern
languages, something of Latin, if desired, with a
little natural philosophy, metaphysics, and rhetoric,
to finish off with in the last year, and music
at any time when they would pay for it. At the
close of their career in the Institute, they were
submitted to a grand public examination, and received
diplomas tied in blue ribbons, which proclaimed
them with a great flourish of capitals to
be graduates of the Apollinean Female Institute.

Rockland was a town of no inconsiderable pretensions.
It was ennobled by lying at the foot
of a mountain, — called by the working-folks of
the place “the Maounting,” — which sufficiently
showed that it was the principal high land of the

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

district in which it was situated. It lay to the
south of this, and basked in the sunshine as Italy
stretches herself before the Alps. To pass from
the town of Tamarack on the north of the mountain
to Rockland on the south was like crossing
from Coire to Chiavenna.

There is nothing gives glory and grandeur and
romance and mystery to a place like the impending
presence of a high mountain. Our beautiful
Northampton with its fair meadows and noble
stream is lovely enough, but owes its surpassing
attraction to those twin summits which brood
over it like living presences, looking down into its
streets as if they were its tutelary divinities, dressing
and undressing their green shrines, robing
themselves in jubilant sunshine or in sorrowing
clouds, and doing penance in the snowy shroud
of winter, as if they had living hearts under their
rocky ribs and changed their mood like the children
of the soil at their feet, who grow up under
their almost parental smiles and frowns. Happy
is the child whose first dreams of heaven are
blended with the evening glories of Mount Holyoke,
when the sun is firing its treetops, and gilding
the white walls that mark its one human
dwelling! If the other and the wilder of the
two summits has a scowl of terror in its overhanging
brows, yet is it a pleasing fear to look
upon its savage solitudes through the barred
nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet, companionable
village. — And how the mountains

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

love their children! The sea is of a facile virtue,
and will run to kiss the first comer in any port he
visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and
show their faces only in the midst of their own
families.

The Mountain which kept watch to the north of
Rockland lay waste and almost inviolate through
much of its domain. The catamount still glared
from the branches of its old hemlocks on the
lesser beasts that strayed beneath him. It was
not long since a wolf had wandered down, famished
in the winter's dearth, and left a few bones
and some tufts of wool of what had been a lamb
in the morning. Nay, there were broad-footed
tracks in the snow only two years previously,
which could not be mistaken; — the black bear
alone could have set that plantigrade seal, and
little children must come home early from school
and play, for he is an indiscriminate feeder when
he is hungry, and a little child would not come
amiss when other game was wanting.

But these occasional visitors may have been
mere wanderers, which, straying along in the
woods by day, and perhaps stalking through the
streets of still villages by night, had worked their
way along down from the ragged mountain-spurs
of higher latitudes. The one feature of The
Mountain that shed the brownest horror on its
woods was the existence of the terrible region
known as Rattlesnake Ledge, and still tenanted
by those damnable reptiles, which distil a fiercer

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

venom under our cold northern sky than the
cobra himself in the land of tropical spices and
poisons.

From the earliest settlement of the place, this
fact had been, next to the Indians, the reigning
nightmare of the inhabitants. It was easy
enough, after a time, to drive away the savages;
for “a screeching Indian Divell,” as our fathers
called him, could not crawl into the crack of a
rock to escape from his pursuers. But the venomous
population of Rattlesnake Ledge had a
Gibraltar for their fortress that might have defied
the siege-train dragged to the walls of Sebastopol.
In its deep embrasures and its impregnable
casemates they reared their families, they met in
love or wrath, they twined together in family
knots, they hissed defiance in hostile clans, they
fed, slept, hybernated, and in due time died in
peace. Many a foray had the town's-people made,
and many a stuffed skin was shown as a trophy,—
nay, there were families where the children's
first toy was made from the warning appendage
that once vibrated to the wrath of one of these
“cruel serpents.” Sometimes one of them, coaxed
out by a warm sun, would writhe himself
down the hillside into the roads, up the walks
that led to houses, — worse than this, into the
long grass, where the bare-footed mowers would
soon pass with their swinging scythes, — more
rarely into houses, — and on one memorable occasion,
early in the last century, into the

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

meetinghouse, where he took a position on the pulpitstairs, —
as is narrated in the “Account of Some
Remarkable Providences,” etc., where it is suggested
that a strong tendency of the Rev. Didymus
Bean, the Minister at that time, towards the
Arminian Heresy may have had something to do
with it, and that the Serpent supposed to have
been killed on the Pulpit-Stairs was a false show
of the Dæmon's Contrivance, he having come
in to listen to a Discourse which was a sweet
Savour in his Nostrils, and, of course, not being
capable of being killed Himself. Others said,
however, that, though there was good Reason
to think it was a Dæmon, yet he did come with
Intent to bite the Heel of that faithful Servant,—
etc.

One Gilson is said to have died of the bite of
a rattlesnake in this town early in the present
century. After this there was a great snake-hunt,
in which very many of these venomous beasts
were killed, — one in particular, said to have been
as big round as a stout man's arm, and to have
had no less than forty joints to his rattle, — indicating,
according to some, that he had lived
forty years, but, if we might put any faith in
the Indian tradition, that he had killed forty
human beings, — an idle fancy, clearly. This
hunt, however, had no permanent effect in keeping
down the serpent population. Viviparous
creatures are a kind of specie-paying lot, but
oviparous ones only give their notes, as it were,

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

for a future brood, — an egg being, so to speak,
a promise to pay a young one by-and-by, if
nothing happen. Now the domestic habits
of the rattlesnake are not studied very closely,
for obvious reasons; but it is, no doubt, to
all intents and purposes oviparous. Consequently
it has large families, and is not easy
to kill out.

In the year 184—, a melancholy proof was
afforded to the inhabitants of Rockland, that the
brood which infested The Mountain was not
extirpated. A very interesting young married
woman, detained at home at the time by the
state of her health, was bitten in the entry of
her own house by a rattlesnake which had found
its way down from The Mountain. Owing to
the almost instant employment of powerful remedies,
the bite did not prove immediately fatal;
but she died within a few months of the time
when she was bitten.

All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of
shadow over The Mountain. Yet, as many
years passed without any accident, people grew
comparatively careless, and it might rather be
said to add a fearful kind of interest to the romantic
hillside, that the banded reptiles, which
had been the terror of the red men for nobody
knows how many thousand years, were there still,
with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at
the white men's service, if they meddled with
them.

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

The other natural features of Rockland were
such as many of our pleasant country-towns can
boast of. A brook came tumbling down the
mountain-side and skirted the most thickly settled
portion of the village. In the parts of its
course where it ran through the woods, the water
looked almost as brown as coffee flowing from
its urn, — to say like smoky quartz would perhaps
give a better idea, — but in the open plain
it sparkled over the pebbles white as a queen's
diamonds. There were huckleberry-pastures on
the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty
of the sweet-scented bayberry mingled with the
other bushes. In other fields grew great store of
high-bush blackberries. Along the road-side were
barberry-bushes, hung all over with bright red
coral pendants in autumn and far into the winter.
Then there were swamps set thick with dingy
alders, where the three-leaved arum and the
skunk's-cabbage grew broad and succulent, —
shelving down into black boggy pools here and
there, at the edge of which the green frog, stupidest
of his tribe, sat waiting to be victimized by
boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy and
agile leopard-frog had taken the six-foot spring
that plumped him into the middle of the pool.
And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair
spread its flat disk of embroidered fronds on the
wire-like stem that glistened polished and brown
as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets,
cheated by the cold skies of their hues and

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

perfume, sunned themselves like white-cheeked invalids.
Over these rose the old forest-trees, —
the maple, scarred with the wounds which had
drained away its sweet life-blood, — the beech, its
smooth gray bark mottled so as to look like the
body of one of those great snakes of old that
used to frighten armies, — always the mark of
lovers' knives, as in the days of Musidora and her
swain, — the yellow birch, rough as the breast of
Silenus in old marbles, — the wild cherry, its little
bitter fruit lying unheeded at its foot, — and, soaring
over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed,
dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of
whose aerial solitudes the crow brooded on her
nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived unharmed
till his incisors grew to look like ram's-horns.

Rockland would have been but half a town
without its pond; Quinnepeg Pond was the
name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean
Institute were very anxious that it should
be called Crystalline Lake. It was here that the
young folks used to sail in summer and skate in
winter; here, too, those queer, old, rum-scented,
good-for-nothing, lazy, story-telling, half-vagabonds,
who sawed a little wood or dug a few
potatoes now and then under the pretence of
working for their living, used to go and fish
through the ice for pickerel every winter. And
here those three young people were drowned, a
few summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of
these smiling ponds which has not devoured more
youths and maidens than any of those monsters
the ancients used to tell such lies about. But
it was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent—
so the native “bard” of Rockland said
in his elegy — than on the morning when they
found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria floating
among the lily-pads.

The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it
was more commonly called, was, in the language
of its Prospectus, a “first-class Educational Establishment.”
It employed a considerable corps
of instructors to rough out and finish the hundred
young lady scholars it sheltered beneath its roof.
First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the Principal and
the Matron of the school. Silas Peckham was
a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of the
coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish. Everybody
knows the type of Yankee produced by this climate
and diet: thin, as if he had been split and
dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like
the tint of the food he is made of; and about as
sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal with as
the other is to the taste. Silas Peckham kept a
young ladies' school exactly as he would have
kept a hundred head of cattle, — for the simple,
unadorned purpose of making just as much
money in just as few years as could be safely
done. Mr. Peckham gave very little personal attention
to the department of instruction, but was

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

always busy with contracts for flour and potatoes,
beef and pork, and other nutritive staples,
the amount of which required for such an establishment
was enough to frighten a quartermaster.
Mrs. Peckham was from the West, raised on Indian
corn and pork, which give a fuller outline
and a more humid temperament, but may perhaps
be thought to render people a little coarsefibred.
Her specialty was to look after the
feathering, cackling, roosting, rising, and general
behavior of these hundred chicks. An honest,
ignorant woman, she could not have passed an
examination in the youngest class. So this distinguished
institution was under the charge of a
commissary and a housekeeper, and its real business
was making money by taking young girls in
as boarders.

Connected with this, however, was the incidental
fact, which the public took for the principal
one, namely, the business of instruction.
Mr. Peckham knew well enough that it was just
as well to have good instructors as bad ones, so
far as cost was concerned, and a great deal better
for the reputation of his feeding-establishment.
He tried to get the best he could without paying
too much, and, having got them, to screw all
the work out of them that could possibly be extracted.

There was a master for the English branches,
with a young lady assistant. There was another
young lady who taught French, of the ahvahng

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

and pahndahng style, which does not exactly
smack of the asphalt of the Boulevards. There
was also a German teacher of music, who sometimes
helped in French of the ahfaung and bauntaung
style, — so that, between the two, the young
ladies could hardly have been mistaken for Parisians,
by a Committee of the French Academy.
The German teacher also taught a Latin class
after his fashion, — benna, a ben, gahboot, a head,
and so forth.

The master for the English branches had lately
left the school for private reasons, which need not
be here mentioned, — but he had gone, at any
rate, and it was his place which had been offered
to Mr. Bernard Langdon. The offer came just
in season, — as, for various causes, he was willing
to leave the place where he had begun his new
experience.

It was on a fine morning, that Mr. Bernard,
ushered in by Mr. Peckham, made his appearance
in the great schoolroom of the Apollinean Institute.
A general rustle ran all round the seats
when the handsome young man was introduced.
The principal carried him to the desk of the
young lady English assistant, Miss Darley by
name, and introduced him to her.

There was not a great deal of study done that
day. The young lady assistant had to point out
to the new master the whole routine in which the
classes were engaged when their late teacher left,
and which had gone on as well as it could since.

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

Then Master Langdon had a great many questions
to ask, some relating to his new duties, and
some, perhaps, implying a degree of curiosity not
very unnatural under the circumstances. The
truth is, the general effect of the schoolroom,
with its scores of young girls, all their eyes
naturally centring on him with fixed or furtive
glances, was enough to bewilder and confuse a
young man like Master Langdon, though he
was not destitute of self-possession, as we have
already seen.

You cannot get together a hundred girls, taking
them as they come, from the comfortable and
affluent classes, probably anywhere, certainly not
in New England, without seeing a good deal of
beauty. In fact, we very commonly mean by
beauty the way young girls look when there is
nothing to hinder their looking as Nature meant
them to. And the great schoolroom of the Apollinean
Institute did really make so pretty a show
on the morning when Master Langdon entered
it, that he might be pardoned for asking Miss
Darley more questions about his scholars than
about their lessons.

There were girls of all ages: little creatures,
some pallid and delicate-looking, the offspring
of invalid parents, — much given to books, not
much to mischief, commonly spoken of as particularly
good children, and contrasted with another
sort, girls of more vigorous organization, who
were disposed to laughing and play, and

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

required a strong hand to manage them; — then
young growing misses of every shade of Saxon
complexion, and here and there one of more
Southern hue: blondes, some of them so translucent-looking,
that it seemed as if you could see
the souls in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if
souls were objects of sight; brunettes, some with
rose-red colors, and some with that swarthy hue
which often carries with it a heavily-shaded lip,
and which with pure outlines and outspoken reliefs,
gives us some of our handsomest women,—
the women whom ornaments of plain gold
adorn more than any other parures; and again,
but only here and there, one with dark hair and
gray or blue eyes, a Celtic type, perhaps, but
found in our native stock occasionally; rarest
of all, a light-haired girl with dark eyes, hazel,
brown, or of the color of that mountain-brook
spoken of in this chapter, where it ran through
shadowy woodlands. With these were to be
seen at intervals some of maturer years, full-blown
flowers among the opening buds, with
that conscious look upon their faces which so
many women wear during the period when they
never meet a single man without having his monosyllable
ready for him, — tied as they are, poor
things! on the rock of expectation, each of them
an Andromeda waiting for her Perseus.

“Who is that girl in ringlets, — the fourth in
the third row on the right?” said Master Langdon.

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

“Charlotte Ann Wood,” said Miss Darley; —
“writes very pretty poems.”

“Oh! — And the pink one, three seats from
her? Looks bright; anything in her?”

“Emma Dean, — day-scholar, — Squire Dean's
daughter, — nice girl, — second medal last year.”

The master asked these two questions in a
careless kind of way, and did not seem to pay
any too much attention to the answers.

“And who and what is that,” he said, — “sitting
a little apart there, — that strange, wild-looking
girl?”

This time he put the real question he wanted
answered; — the other two were asked at random,
as masks for the third.

The lady-teacher's face changed; — one would
have said she was frightened or troubled. She
looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear
the master's question and its answer. But the
girl did not look up; — she was winding a gold
chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if
in a kind of reverie.

Miss Darley drew close to the master and
placed her hand so as to hide her lips. “Don't
look at her as if we were talking about her,” she
whispered softly; — “that is Elsie Venner.”

p606-079 CHAPTER V. AN OLD-FASHIONED DESCRIPTIVE CHAPTER.

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

It was a comfort to get to a place with something
like society, with residences which had pretensions
to elegance, with people of some breeding,
with a newspaper, and “stores” to advertise in it,
and with two or three churches to keep each
other alive by wholesome agitation. Rockland
was such a place.

Some of the natural features of the town have
been described already. The Mountain, of course,
was what gave it its character, and redeemed it
from wearing the commonplace expression which
belongs to ordinary country-villages. Beautiful,
wild, invested with the mystery which belongs to
untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to
give it dignity, it had yet closer relations with
the town over which it brooded than the passing
stranger knew of. Thus, it made a local climate
by cutting off the northern winds and holding the
sun's heat like a garden-wall. Peach-trees, which,
on the northern side of the mountain, hardly ever
came to fruit, ripened abundant crops in Rockland.

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

But there was still another relation between
the mountain and the town at its foot, which
strangers were not likely to hear alluded to, and
which was oftener thought of than spoken of by
its inhabitants. Those high-impending forests, —
“hangers,” as White of Selborne would have
called them, — sloping far upward and backward
into the distance, had always an air of menace
blended with their wild beauty. It seemed as if
some heaven-scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy
robe over the bare, precipitous flanks of the
rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide
like a garment flung carelessly on the nearest
chance-support, and, so sliding, crush the village
out of being, as the Rossberg when it tumbled
over on the valley of Goldau.

Persons have been known to remove from the
place, after a short residence in it, because they
were haunted day and night by the thought of
this awful green wall piled up into the air over
their heads. They would lie awake of nights,
thinking they heard the muffled snapping of
roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side
were tugging to break away, like the snow
from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees
were clinging with all their fibres to hold back
the soil just ready to peel away and crash down
with all its rocks and forest-growths. And yet,
by one of those strange contradictions we are
constantly finding in human nature, there were
natives of the town who would come back thirty

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

or forty years after leaving it, just to nestle under
this same threatening mountain-side, as old men
sun themselves against southward-facing walls.
The old dreams and legends of danger added to
the attraction. If the mountain should ever slide,
they had a kind of feeling as if they ought to be
there. It was a fascination like that which the
rattlesnake is said to exert.

This comparison naturally suggests the recollection
of that other source of danger which was
an element in the every-day life of the Rockland
people. The folks in some of the neighboring
towns had a joke against them, that a Rocklander
couldn't hear a bean-pod rattle without
saying, “The Lord have mercy on us!” It is
very true, that many a nervous old lady has had
a terrible start, caused by some mischievous
young rogue's giving a sudden shake to one of
these noisy vegetable products in her immediate
vicinity. Yet, strangely enough, many persons
missed the excitement of the possibility of a fatal
bite in other regions, where there were nothing
but black and green and striped snakes, mean
ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent
without his venom, — poor crawling creatures,
whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag.
Many natives of Rockland did unquestionably
experience a certain gratification in this infinitesimal
sense of danger. It was noted that the old
people retained their hearing longer than in other
places. Some said it was the softened climate,

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

but others believed it was owing to the habit of
keeping their ears open whenever they were walking
through the grass or in the woods. At any
rate, a slight sense of danger is often an agreeable
stimulus. People sip their crême de noyau
with a peculiar tremulous pleasure, because there
is a bare possibility that it may contain prussic
acid enough to knock them over; in which case
they will lie as dead as if a thunder-cloud had
emptied itself into the earth through their brain
and marrow.

But Rockland had other features which helped
to give it a special character. First of all, there
was one grand street which was its chief glory.
Elm Street it was called, naturally enough, for its
elms made a long, pointed-arched gallery of it
through most of its extent. No natural Gothic
arch compares, for a moment, with that formed
by two American elms, where their lofty jets
of foliage shoot across each other's ascending
curves, to intermingle their showery flakes of
green. When one looks through a long double
row of these, as in that lovely avenue which the
poets of Yale remember so well, —


“O, could the vista of my life but now as bright appear
As when I first through Temple Street looked down thine espalier!”
he beholds a temple not built with hands, fairer
than any minster, with all its clustered stems and
flowering capitals, that ever grew in stone.

Nobody knows New England who is not on
terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other
vegetable creature among us. It loves man as
man loves it. It is modest and patient. It has
a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere
and makes arrangements for coming up
by-and-by. So, in spring, one finds a crop of
baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very
weak and small compared to those succulent
vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them,
slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe,
as meekly as Herod's innocents. One of them
gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has established
a kind of right to stay. Three generations of
carrot and parsnip-consumers have passed away,
yourself among them, and now let your greatgrandson
look for the baby-elm. Twenty-two
feet of clean girth, three hundred and sixty feet
in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it covers
the boy with such a canopy as neither glossyleafed
oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted
into the summer skies.

Elm Street was the pride of Rockland, but not
only on account of its Gothic-arched vista. In
this street were most of the great houses, or
“mansion-houses,” as it was usual to call them.
Along this street, also, the more nicely kept and
neatly painted dwellings were chiefly congregated.
It was the correct thing for a Rockland
dignitary to have a house in Elm Street.

A New England “mansion-house” is naturally
square, with dormer windows projecting from the

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

roof, which has a balustrade with turned posts
round it. It shows a good breadth of front-yard
before its door, as its owner shows a respectable
expanse of clean shirt-front. It has a lateral
margin beyond its stables and offices, as its master
wears his white wrist-bands showing beyond
his coat-cuffs. It may not have what can properly
be called grounds, but it must have elbowroom,
at any rate. Without it, it is like a man
who is always tight-buttoned for want of any
linen to show. The mansion-house which has
had to button itself up tight in fences, for want
of green or gravel margin, will be advertising for
boarders presently. The old English pattern of
the New England mansion-house, only on a
somewhat grander scale, is Sir Thomas Abney's
place, where dear, good Dr. Watts said prayers
for the family, and wrote those blessed hymns of
his that sing us into consciousness in our cradles,
and come back to us in sweet, single verses, between
the moments of wandering and of stupor,
when we lie dying, and sound over us when we
can no longer hear them, bringing grateful tears
to the hot, aching eyes beneath the thick, black
veils, and carrying the holy calm with them
which filled the good man's heart, as he prayed
and sung under the shelter of the old English
mansion-house.

Next to the mansion-houses, came the two-story,
trim, white-painted, “genteel” houses, which, being
more gossipy and less nicely bred, crowded

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

close up to the street, instead of standing back
from it with arms akimbo, like the mansion-houses.
Their little front-yards were very commonly
full of lilac and syringa and other bushes,
which were allowed to smother the lower story
almost to the exclusion of light and air, so that,
what with small windows and small window-panes,
and the darkness made by these choking
growths of shrubbery, the front parlors of some
of these houses were the most tomb-like, melancholy
places that could be found anywhere
among the abodes of the living. Their garnishing
was apt to assist this impression. Largepatterned
carpets, which always look discontented
in little rooms, hair-cloth furniture, black and
shiny as beetles' wing-cases, and centre-tables,
with a sullen oil-lamp of the kind called astral
by our imaginative ancestors, in the centre, —
these things were inevitable. In set piles round
the lamp was ranged the current literature of the
day, in the form of Temperance Documents, unbound
numbers of one of the Unknown Public's
Magazines with worn-out steel engravings and
high-colored fashion-plates, the Poems of a distinguished
British author whom it is unnecessary
to mention, a volume of sermons, or a novel or
two, or both, according to the tastes of the family,
and the Good Book, which is always Itself in the
cheapest and commonest company. The father
of the family with his hand in the breast of his
coat, the mother of the same in a wide-bordered

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

cap, sometimes a print of the Last Supper, by no
means Morghen's, or the Father of his Country,
or the old General, or the Defender of the Constitution,
or an unknown clergyman with an open book
before him, — these were the usual ornaments
of the walls, the first two a matter of rigor, the
others according to politics and other tendencies.

This intermediate class of houses, wherever
one finds them in New England towns, are very
apt to be cheerless and unsatisfactory. They
have neither the luxury of the mansion-house nor
the comfort of the farm-house. They are rarely
kept at an agreeable temperature. The mansion-house
has large fireplaces and generous chimneys,
and is open to the sunshine. The farm-house
makes no pretensions, but it has a good warm
kitchen, at any rate, and one can be comfortable
there with the rest of the family, without fear
and without reproach. These lesser country-houses
of genteel aspirations are much given to
patent subterfuges of one kind and another to get
heat without combustion. The chilly parlor and
the slippery hair-cloth seat take the life out of the
warmest welcome. If one would make these
places wholesome, happy, and cheerful, the first
precept would be, — The dearest fuel, plenty of
it, and let half the heat go up the chimney. If
you can't afford this, don't try to live in a “genteel”
fashion, but stick to the ways of the honest
farm-house.

There were a good many comfortable

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

farmhouses scattered about Rockland. The best of
them were something of the following pattern,
which is too often superseded of late by a more
pretentious, but infinitely less pleasing kind of
rustic architecture. A little back from the road,
seated directly on the green sod, rose a plain
wooden building, two stories in front, with a long
roof sloping backwards to within a few feet of
the ground. This, like the “mansion-house,” is
copied from an old English pattern. Cottages
of this model may be seen in Lancashire, for instance,
always with the same honest, homely
look, as if their roofs acknowledged their relationship
to the soil out of which they sprung.
The walls were unpainted, but turned by the
slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet
dove- or slate-color. An old broken mill-stone at
the door, — a well-sweep pointing like a finger
to the heavens, which the shining round of water
beneath looked up at like a dark unsleeping eye,—
a single large elm a little at one side, — a barn
twice as big as the house, — a cattle-yard, with

“The white horns tossing above the wall,”—

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

in the borders, and woodbine and hops and
morning-glories climbing as they got a chance,—
these were the features by which the Rockland-born
children remembered the farm-house,
when they had grown to be men. Such are the
recollections that come over poor sailor-boys
crawling out on reeling yards to reef topsails as
their vessels stagger round the stormy Cape; and
such are the flitting images that make the eyes
of old country-born merchants look dim and
dreamy, as they sit in their city palaces, warm
with the after-dinner flush of the red wave out
of which Memory arises, as Aphrodite arose from
the green waves of the ocean.

Two meeting-houses stood on two eminences,
facing each other, and looking like a couple of
fighting-cocks with their necks straight up in the
air, — as if they would flap their roofs, the next
thing, and crow out of their upstretched steeples,
and peck at each other's glass eyes with their
sharp-pointed weathercocks.

The first was a good pattern of the real old-fashioned
New England meeting-house. It was
a large barn with windows, fronted by a square
tower crowned with a kind of wooden bell inverted
and raised on legs, out of which rose a
slender spire with the sharp-billed weathercock at
its summit. Inside, tall, square pews with flapping
seats, and a gallery running round three
sides of the building. On the fourth side the
pulpit, with a huge, dusty sounding-board

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

hanging over it. Here preached the Reverend Pierrepont
Honeywood, D. D., successor, after a number
of generations, to the office and the parsonage
of the Reverend Didymus Beau, before mentioned,
but not suspected of any of his alleged
heresies. He held to the old faith of the Puritans,
and occasionally delivered a discourse which
was considered by the hard-headed theologians
of his parish to have settled the whole matter
fully and finally, so that now there was a good
logical basis laid down for the Millennium, which
might begin at once upon the platform of his
demonstrations. Yet the Reverend Dr. Honeywood
was fonder of preaching plain, practical
sermons about the duties of life, and showing his
Christianity in abundant good works among his
people. It was noticed by some few of his flock,
not without comment, that the great majority of
his texts came from the Gospels, and this more
and more as he became interested in various benevolent
enterprises which brought him into relations
with ministers and kind-hearted laymen
of other denominations. He was in fact a man
of a very warm, open, and exceedingly human
disposition, and, although bred by a clerical
father, whose motto was “Sit anima mea cum
Puritanis,” he exercised his human faculties in
the harness of his ancient faith with such freedom
that the straps of it got so loose they did
not interfere greatly with the circulation of the
warm blood through his system. Once in a

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

while he seemed to think it necessary to come
out with a grand doctrinal sermon, and then he
would lapse away for a while into preaching on
men's duties to each other and to society, and hit
hard, perhaps, at some of the actual vices of the
time and place, and insist with such tenderness
and eloquence on the great depth and breadth
of true Christian love and charity, that his oldest
deacon shook his head, and wished he had shown
as much interest when he was preaching, three
Sabbaths back, on Predestination, or in his discourse
against the Sabellians. But he was sound
in the faith; no doubt of that. Did he not preside
at the council held in the town of Tamarack,
on the other side of the mountain, which
expelled its clergyman for maintaining heretical
doctrines? As presiding officer, he did not vote,
of course, but there was no doubt that he was all
right; he had some of the Edwards blood in him,
and that couldn't very well let him go wrong.

The meeting-house on the other and opposite
summit was of a more modern style, considered
by many a great improvement on the old New
England model, so that it is not uncommon for a
country parish to pull down its old meeting-house,
which has been preached in for a hundred years
or so, and put up one of these more elegant edifices.
The new building was in what may be
called the florid shingle-Gothic manner. Its pinnacles
and crockets and other ornaments were,
like the body of the building, all of pine wood,

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

— an admirable material, as it is very soft and
easily worked, and can be painted of any color
desired. Inside, the walls were stuccoed in imitation
of stone, — first a dark-brown square, then
two light-brown squares, then another dark-brown
square, and so on, to represent the accidental differences
of shade always noticeable in the real
stones of which walls are built. To be sure, the
architect could not help getting his party-colored
squares in almost as regular rhythmical order as
those of a chess-board; but nobody can avoid
doing things in a systematic and serial way; indeed,
people who wish to plant trees in natural
clumps know very well that they cannot keep
from making regular lines and symmetrical figures,
unless by some trick or other, as that one of
throwing a peck of potatoes up into the air and
sticking in a tree wherever a potato happens to
fall. The pews of this meeting-house were the
usual oblong ones, where people sit close together
with a ledge before them to support their hymnbooks,
liable only to occasional contact with the
back of the next pew's heads or bonnets, and a
place running under the seat of that pew where
hats could be deposited, — always at the risk
of the owner, in case of injury by boots or
crickets.

In this meeting-house preached the Reverend
Chauncy Fairweather, a divine of the “Liberal”
school, as it is commonly called, bred at that famous
college which used to be thought, twenty

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

or thirty years ago, to have the monopoly of training
young men in the milder forms of heresy.
His ministrations were attended with decency,
but not followed with enthusiasm. “The beauty
of virtue” got to be an old story at last. “The
moral dignity of human nature” ceased to excite
a thrill of satisfaction, after some hundred repetitions.
It grew to be a dull business, this preaching
against stealing and intemperance, while he
knew very well that the thieves were prowling
round orchards and empty houses, instead of being
there to hear the sermon, and that the drunkards,
being rarely church-goers, get little good by
the statistics and eloquent appeals of the preacher.
Every now and then, however, the Reverend Mr.
Fairweather let off a polemic discourse against
his neighbor opposite, which waked his people up
a little; but it was a languid congregation, at
best, — very apt to stay away from meeting in
the afternoon, and not at all given to extra evening
services. The minister, unlike his rival of
the other side of the way, was a down-hearted
and timid kind of man. He went on preaching
as he had been taught to preach, but he had misgivings
at times. There was a little Roman
Catholic church at the foot of the hill where his
own was placed, which he always had to pass on
Sundays. He could never look on the thronging
multitudes that crowded its pews and aisles or
knelt bare-headed on its steps, without a longing
to get in among them and go down on his knees

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

and enjoy that luxury of devotional contact which
makes a worshipping throng as different from the
same numbers praying apart as a bed of coals is
from a trail of scattered cinders.

“Oh, if I could but huddle in with those poor
laborers and working-women!” he would say to
himself. “If I could but breathe that atmosphere,
stifling though it be, yet made holy by ancient
litanies, and cloudy with the smoke of hallowed
incense, for one hour, instead of droning over
these moral precepts to my half-sleeping congregation!”
The intellectual isolation of his sect
preyed upon him; for, of all terrible things to
natures like his, the most terrible is to belong to
a minority. No person that looked at his thin
and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye, his
tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who
heard his querulous, though not unmusical voice,
could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one,
that he was engaged in some inward conflict.
His dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his
seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more
striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing
a belief which made him a passenger on
board a shipwrecked planet, was yet a most good-humored
and companionable gentleman, whose
laugh on week-days did one as much good to
listen to as the best sermon he ever delivered on
a Sunday.

A mile or two from the centre of Rockland was
a pretty little Episcopal church, with a roof like a

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

wedge of cheese, a square tower, a stained window,
and a trained rector, who read the service
with such ventral depth of utterance and rrreduplication
of the rrresonant letter, that his own
mother would not have known him for her son,
if the good woman had not ironed his surplice
and put it on with her own hands.

There were two public-houses in the place:
one dignified with the name of the Mountain
House, somewhat frequented by city-people in
the summer months, large-fronted, three-storied,
balconied, boasting a distinct ladies'-drawing-room,
and spreading a table d'hôte of some pretensions;
the other, “Pollard's Tahvern,” in the
common speech, — a two-story building, with a
bar-room, once famous, where there was a great
smell of hay and boots and pipes and all other
bucolic-flavored elements, — where games of
checkers were played on the back of the bellows
with red and white kernels of corn, or with
beans and coffee, — where a man slept in a boxsettle
at night, to wake up early passengers, —
where teamsters came in, with wooden-handled
whips and coarse frocks, reinforcing the bucolic
flavor of the atmosphere, and middle-aged male
gossips, sometimes including the squire of the
neighboring law-office, gathered to exchange a
question or two about the news, and then fall
into that solemn state of suspended animation
which the temperance bar-rooms of modern days
produce in human beings, as the Grotta del Cane

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

does in dogs in the well-known experiments related
by travellers. This bar-room used to be
famous for drinking and story-telling, and sometimes
fighting, in old times. That was when
there were rows of decanters on the shelf behind
the bar, and a hissing vessel of hot water ready,
to make punch, and three or four loggerheads
(long irons clubbed at the end) were always lying
in the fire in the cold season, waiting to be
plunged into sputtering and foaming mugs of
flip, — a goodly compound, speaking according
to the flesh, made with beer and sugar, and a
certain suspicion of strong waters, over which a
little nutmeg being grated, and in it the hot iron
being then allowed to sizzle, there results a peculiar
singed aroma, which the wise regard as a
warning to remove themselves at once out of the
reach of temptation.

But the bar of Pollard's Tahvern no longer
presented its old attractions, and the loggerheads
had long disappeared from the fire. In place of
the decanters, were boxes containing “lozengers,”
as they were commonly called, sticks of candy in
jars, cigars in tumblers, a few lemons, grown
hard-skinned and marvellously shrunken by long
exposure, but still feebly suggestive of possible
lemonade, — the whole ornamented by festoons
of yellow and blue cut fly-paper. On the front
shelf of the bar stood a large German-silver
pitcher of water, and scattered about were ill-conditioned
lamps, with wicks that always wanted

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

picking, which burned red and smoked a good
deal, and were apt to go out without any obvious
cause, leaving strong reminiscences of the whalefishery
in the circumambient air.

The common school-houses of Rockland were
dwarfed by the grandeur of the Apollinean Institute.
The master passed one of them, in a walk
he was taking, soon after his arrival at Rockland.
He looked in at the rows of desks, and recalled
his late experiences. He could not help laughing,
as he thought how neatly he had knocked the
young butcher off his pins.

“`A little science is a dangerous thing,'

p606-097 CHAPTER VI. THE SUNBEAM AND THE SHADOW.

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

The virtue of the world is not mainly in its
leaders. In the midst of the multitude which
follows there is often something better than in the
one that goes before. Old generals wanted to
take Toulon, but one of their young colonels
showed them how. The junior counsel has been
known not unfrequently to make a better argument
than his senior fellow, — if, indeed, he did
not make both their arguments. Good ministers
will tell you they have parishioners who beat
them in the practice of the virtues. A great
establishment, got up on commercial principles,
like the Apollinean Institute, might yet be well
carried on, if it happened to get good teachers.
And when Master Langdon came to see its management,
he recognized that there must be fidelity
and intelligence somewhere among the instructors.
It was only necessary to look for a moment
at the fair, open forehead, the still, tranquil eye of
gentle, habitual authority, the sweet gravity that
lay upon the lips, to hear the clear answers to the
pupils' questions, to notice how every request had

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

the force without the form of a command, and
the young man could not doubt that the good
genius of the school stood before him in the person
of Helen Darley.

It was the old story. A poor country-clergyman
dies, and leaves a widow and a daughter.
In Old England the daughter would have eaten
the bitter bread of a governess in some rich family.
In New England she must keep a school.
So, rising from one sphere to another, she at
length finds herself the prima donna in the department
of instruction in Mr. Silas Peckham's
educational establishment.

What a miserable thing it is to be poor!
She was dependent, frail, sensitive, conscientious.
She was in the power of a hard, grasping,
thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator,
who neither knew nor cared for a tender woman's
sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have
his money's worth out of her brains, and as much
more than his money's worth as he could get.
She was consequently, in plain English, overworked,
and an overworked woman is always a
sad sight, — sadder a great deal than an overworked
man, because she is so much more fertile
in capacities of suffering than a man. She has
so many varieties of headache, — sometimes as
if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera
into her temples, — sometimes letting her work
with half her brain while the other half throbs as
if it would go to pieces, — sometimes tightening

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

round the brows as if her cap-band were a ring
of iron, — and then her neuralgias, and her backaches,
and her fits of depression, in which she
thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and
those paroxysms which men speak slightingly of
as hysterical, — convulsions, that is all, only not
commonly fatal ones, — so many trials which
belong to her fine and mobile structure, — that
she is always entitled to pity, when she is placed
in conditions which develop her nervous tendencies.

The poor young lady's work had, of course,
been doubled since the departure of Master Langdon's
predecessor. Nobody knows what the weariness
of instruction is, as soon as the teacher's
faculties begin to be overtasked, but those who
have tried it. The relays of fresh pupils, each
new set with its exhausting powers in full action,
coming one after another, take out all the
reserved forces and faculties of resistance from
the subject of their draining process.

The day's work was over, and it was late in
the evening, when she sat down, tired and faint,
with a great bundle of girls' themes or compositions
to read over before she could rest her
weary head on the pillow of her narrow trundlebed,
and forget for a while the treadmill stair of
labor she was daily climbing.

How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a
teacher's tasks! She was conscientious in her
duties, and would insist on reading every

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

sentence, — there was no saying where she might
find faults of grammar or bad spelling. There
might have been twenty or thirty of these themes
in the bundle before her. Of course she knew
pretty well the leading sentiments they could contain:
that beauty was subject to the accidents
of time; that wealth was inconstant, and existence
uncertain; that virtue was its own reward;
that youth exhaled, like the dewdrop from the
flower, ere the sun had reached its meridian; that
life was o'ershadowed with trials; that the lessons
of virtue instilled by our beloved teachers were to
be our guides through all our future career. The
imagery employed consisted principally of roses,
lilies, birds, clouds, and brooks, with the celebrated
comparison of wayward genius to a meteor.
Who does not know the small, slanted,
Italian hand of these girls'-compositions, — their
stringing together of the good old traditional
copy-book phrases, their occasional gushes of
sentiment, their profound estimates of the world,
sounding to the old folks that read them as
the experience of a bantam-pullet's last-hatched
young one with the chips of its shell on its head
would sound to a Mother Cary's chicken, who
knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and
tornadoes? Yet every now and then one is liable
to be surprised with strange clairvoyant flashes,
that can hardly be explained, except by the mysterious
inspiration which every now and then
seizes a young girl and exalts her intelligence,

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

just as hysteria in other instances exalts the sensibility, —
a little something of that which made
Joan of Arc, and the Burney girl who prophesied
“Evelina,” and the Davidson sisters. In the
midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss
Darley read over so carefully were two or three
that had something of individual flavor about
them, and here and there there was an image
or an epithet which showed the footprint of a
passionate nature, as a fallen scarlet feather
marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.

The young lady teacher read them with a certain
indifference of manner, as one reads proofs,—
noting defects of detail, but not commonly
arrested by the matters treated of. Even Miss
Charlotte Ann Wood's poem, beginning

“How sweet at evening's balmy hour,”

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

Such odd fancies are common enough in young
persons in her nervous state. Many of these
young people will jump up twenty times a day
and run to dabble the tips of their fingers in
water, after touching the most inoffensive objects.

This composition was written in a singular,
sharp-pointed, long, slender hand, on a kind
of wavy, ribbed paper. There was something
strangely suggestive about the look of it, — but
exactly of what, Miss Darley either could not or
did not try to think. The subject of the paper
was The Mountain, — the composition being a
sort of descriptive rhapsody. It showed a startling
familiarity with some of the savage scenery
of the region. One would have said that the
writer must have threaded its wildest solitudes
by the light of the moon and stars as well as by
day. As the teacher read on, her color changed,
and a kind of tremulous agitation came over her.
There were hints in this strange paper she did not
know what to make of. There was something in
its descriptions and imagery that recalled, — Miss
Darley could not say what, — but it made her
frightfully nervous. Still she could not help
reading, till she came to one passage which so
agitated her, that the tired and overwearied girl's
self-control left her entirely. She sobbed once or
twice, then laughed convulsively, and flung herself
on the bed, where she worked out a set hysteric
spasm as she best might, without anybody
to rub her hands and see that she did not hurt

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

herself. By-and-by she got quiet, rose and went
to her book-case, took down a volume of Coleridge,
and read a short time, and so to bed, to
sleep and wake from time to time with a sudden
start out of uneasy dreams.

Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it
was in the composition which set her off into
this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a
state that almost any slight agitation would
have brought on the attack, and it was the accident
of her transient excitability, very probably,
which made a trifling cause the seeming occasion
of so much disturbance. The theme was
signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand,
E. Venner, and was, of course, written by that
wild-looking girl who had excited the master's
curiosity and prompted his question, as before
mentioned.

The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale
and wearied, naturally enough, but she was in her
place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon
in his own. The girls had not yet entered the
school-room.

“You have been ill, I am afraid,” said Mr.
Bernard.

“I was not well yesterday,” she answered. “I
had a worry and a kind of fright. It is so dreadful
to have the charge of all these young souls
and bodies! Every young girl ought to walk,
locked close, arm in arm, between two guardian
angels. Sometimes I faint almost with

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

the thought of all that I ought to do, and of my
own weakness and wants. — Tell me, are there
not natures born so out of parallel with the lines
of natural law that nothing short of a miracle can
bring them right?”

Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all
thoughtful persons of his profession are forced
to do, on the innate organic tendencies with
which individuals, families, and races are born.
He replied, therefore, with a smile, as one to
whom the question suggested a very familiar
class of facts.

“Why, of course. Each of us is only the footing-up
of a double column of figures that goes
back to the first pair. Every unit tells, — and
some of them are plus, and some minus. If the
columns don't add up right, it is commonly because
we can't make out all the figures. I don't
mean to say that something may not be added
by Nature to make up for losses and keep the
race to its average, but we are mainly nothing
but the answer to a long sum in addition and
subtraction. No doubt there are people born
with impulses at every possible angle to the
parallels of Nature, as you call them. If they
happen to cut these at right angles, of course
they are beyond the reach of common influences.
Slight obliquities are what we have most
to do with in education. Penitentiaries and in-sane
asylums take care of most of the right-angle
cases. — I am afraid I have put it too much like

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

a professor, and I am only a student, you know.
Pray, what set you to asking me this? Any
strange cases among the scholars?”

The meek teacher's blue eyes met the luminous
glance that came with the question. She,
too, was of gentle blood, — not meaning by that
that she was of any noted lineage, but that she
came of a cultivated stock, never rich, but long
trained to intellectual callings. A thousand decencies,
amenities, reticences, graces, which no
one thinks of until he misses them, are the traditional
right of those who spring from such
families. And when two persons of this exceptional
breeding meet in the midst of the common
multitude, they seek each other's company
at once by the natural law of elective affinity.
It is wonderful how men and women know their
peers. If two stranger queens, sole survivors of
two shipwrecked vessels, were cast, half-naked,
on a rock together, each would at once address
the other as “Our Royal Sister.”

Helen Darley looked into the dark eyes of
Bernard Langdon glittering with the light which
flashed from them with his question. Not as
those foolish, innocent country-girls of the small
village did she look into them, to be fascinated
and bewildered, but to sound them with a calm,
steadfast purpose. “A gentleman,” she said to
herself, as she read his expression and his features
with a woman's rapid, but exhausting
glance. “A lady,” he said to himself, as he

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

met her questioning look, — so brief, so quiet,
yet so assured, as of one whom necessity had
taught to read faces quickly without offence, as
children read the faces of parents, as wives read
the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was
but a few seconds' work, and yet the main point
was settled. If there had been any vulgar curiosity
or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression,
she would have detected it. If she had
not lifted her eyes to his face so softly and kept
them there so calmly and withdrawn them so
quietly, he would not have said to himself,
“She is a lady,” for that word meant a good
deal to the descendant of the courtly Wentworths
and the scholarly Langdons.

“There are strange people everywhere, Mr.
Langdon,” she said, “and I don't think our
school-room is an exception. I am glad you
believe in the force of transmitted tendencies.
It would break my heart, if I did not think that
there are faults beyond the reach of everything
but God's special grace. I should die, if I
thought that my negligence or incapacity was
alone responsible for the errors and sins of those
I have charge of. Yet there are mysteries I do
not know how to account for.” She looked all
round the school-room, and then said, in a whisper,
“Mr. Langdon, we had a girl that stole, in
the school, not long ago. Worse than that, we
had a girl who tried to set us on fire. Children
of good people, both of them. And we have a
girl now that frightens me so” —

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

The door opened, and three misses came in to
take their seats: three types, as it happened, of
certain classes, into which it would not have been
difficult to distribute the greater number of the
girls in the school. — Hannah Martin. Fourteen
years and three months old. Short-necked,
thick-waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead,
large, dull eyes. Looks good-natured, with
little other expression. Three buns in her bag,
and a large apple. Has a habit of attacking
her provisions in school-hours. — Rosa Milburn.
Sixteen. Brunette, with a rareripe flush in her
cheeks. Color comes and goes easily. Eyes
wandering, apt to be downcast. Moody at
times. Said to be passionate, if irritated. Finished
in high relief. Carries shoulders well back
and walks well, as if proud of her woman's life,
with a slight rocking movement, being one of the
wide-flanged pattern, but seems restless, — a hard
girl to look after. Has a romance in her pocket,
which she means to read in school-time. — Charlotte
Ann Wood. Fifteen. The poetess before
mentioned. Long, light ringlets, pallid complexion,
blue eyes. Delicate child, half unfolded.
Gentle, but languid and despondent. Does
not go much with the other girls, but reads a
good deal, especially poetry, underscoring favorite
passages. Writes a great many verses, very
fast, not very correctly; full of the usual human
sentiments, expressed in the accustomed phrases.
Undervitalized. Sensibilities not covered with

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

their normal integuments. A negative condition,
often confounded with genius, and sometimes
running into it. Young people who fall
out of line through weakness of the active faculties
are often confounded with those who step out
of it through strength of the intellectual ones.

The girls kept coming in, one after another, or
in pairs or groups, until the school-room was
nearly full. Then there was a little pause, and a
light step was heard in the passage. The ladyteacher's
eyes turned to the door, and the master's
followed them in the same direction.

A girl of about seventeen entered. She was
tall and slender, but rounded, with a peculiar undulation
of movement, such as one sometimes
sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom
Nature, the queen of graces, has taken in hand,
but more commonly in connection with the very
highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained
society. She was a splendid scowling beauty,
black-browed, with a flash of white teeth which
was always like a surprise when her lips parted.
She wore a checkered dress, of a curious pattern,
and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little fantastically
about her. She went to her seat, which she
had moved a short distance apart from the rest,
and, sitting down, began playing listlessly with
her gold chain, as was a common habit with her,
coiling it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist,
and braiding it in with her long, delicate fingers.
Presently she looked up. Black, piercing eyes, not

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

large, — a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie
in the Townley bust, — black hair, twisted in
heavy braids, — a face that one could not help
looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to
look away from for something in its expression,
and could not for those diamond eyes. They
were fixed on the lady-teacher now. The latter
turned her own away, and let them wander over
the other scholars. But they could not help coming
back again for a single glance at the wild
beauty. The diamond eyes were on her still.
She turned the leaves of several of her books, as
if in search of some passage, and, when she
thought she had waited long enough to be safe,
once more stole a quick look at the dark girl.
The diamond eyes were still upon her. She put
her kerchief to her forehead, which had grown
slightly moist; she sighed once, almost shivered,
for she felt cold; then, following some ill-defined
impulse, which she could not resist, she left her
place and went to the young girl's desk.

“What do you want of me, Elsie Venner?” It
was a strange question to put, for the girl had
not signified that she wished the teacher to come
to her.

“Nothing,” she said. “I thought I could make
you come.” The girl spoke in a low tone, a kind
of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her articulation
of one or two consonants was not absolutely
perfect.

“Where did you get that flower, Elsie?” said

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

Miss Darley. It was a rare alpine flower, which
was found only in one spot among the rocks of
The Mountain.

“Where it grew,” said Elsie Venner. “Take
it.” The teacher could not refuse her. The girl's
finger-tips touched hers as she took it. How cold
they were for a girl of such an organization!

The teacher went back to her seat. She made
an excuse for quitting the school-room soon afterwards.
The first thing she did was to fling the
flower into her fireplace and rake the ashes over
it. The second was to wash the tips of her fingers,
as if she had been another Lady Macbeth.
A poor, overtasked, nervous creature, — we must
not think too much of her fancies.

After school was done, she finished the talk
with the master which had been so suddenly interrupted.
There were things spoken of which
may prove interesting by-and-by, but there are
other matters we must first attend to.

p606-111 CHAPTER VII. THE EVENT OF THE SEASON.

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

“Mr. and Mrs. Colonel Sprowle's compliments
to Mr. Langdon and requests the pleasure of his
company at a social entertainment on Wednesday
evening next.

“Elm St. Monday.”

On paper of a pinkish color and musky smell,
with a large S at the top, and an embossed border.
Envelop adherent, not sealed. Addressed,

— Langdon Esq.

Present.

Brought by H. Frederic Sprowle, youngest son
of the Colonel, — the H. of course standing for the
paternal Hezekiah, put in to please the father, and
reduced to its initial to please the mother, she
having a marked preference for Frederic. Boy
directed to wait for an answer.

“Mr. Langdon has the pleasure of accepting
Mr. and Mrs. Colonel Sprowle's polite invitation
for Wednesday evening.”

On plain paper, sealed with an initial.

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

In walking along the main street, Mr. Bernard
had noticed a large house of some pretensions to
architectural display, namely, unnecessarily projecting
eaves, giving it a mushroomy aspect,
wooden mouldings at various available points,
and a grandiose arched portico. It looked a little
swaggering by the side of one or two of the mansion-houses
that were not far from it, was painted
too bright for Mr. Bernard's taste, had rather too
fanciful a fence before it, and had some fruit-trees
planted in the front-yard, which to this fastidious
young gentleman implied a defective sense of the
fitness of things, not promising in people who
lived in so large a house, with a mushroom roof
and a triumphal arch for its entrance.

This place was known as “Colonel Sprowle's
villa,” (genteel friends,) — as “the elegant residence
of our distinguished fellow-citizen, Colonel
Sprowle,” (Rockland Weekly Universe,) — as “the
neew haouse,” (old settlers,) — as “Spraowle's
Folly,” (disaffected and possibly envious neighbors,) —
and in common discourse, as “the Colonel's.”

Hezekiah Sprowle, Esquire, Colonel Sprowle
of the Commonwealth's Militia, was a retired
“merchant.” An India merchant he might, perhaps,
have been properly called; for he used to
deal in West India goods, such as coffee, sugar,
and molasses, not to speak of rum, — also in tea,
salt fish, butter and cheese, oil and candles, dried
fruit, agricultural “p'dóose” generally, industrial

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

products, such as boots and shoes, and various
kinds of iron and wooden ware, and at one end
of the establishment in calicoes and other stuffs,—
to say nothing of miscellaneous objects of the
most varied nature, from sticks of candy, which
tempted in the smaller youth with coppers in
their fists, up to ornamental articles of apparel,
pocket-books, breast-pins, gilt-edged Bibles, stationery, —
in short, everything which was like to
prove seductive to the rural population. The
Colonel had made money in trade, and also by
matrimony. He had married Sarah, daughter
and heiress of the late Tekel Jordan, Esq., an old
miser, who gave the town-clock, which carries his
name to posterity in large gilt letters as a generous
benefactor of his native place. In due time
the Colonel reaped the reward of well-placed affections.
When his wife's inheritance fell in, he
thought he had money enough to give up trade,
and therefore sold out his “store,” called in some
dialects of the English language shop, and his
business.

Life became pretty hard work to him, of course,
as soon as he had nothing particular to do. Country
people with money enough not to have to
work are in much more danger than city people
in the same condition. They get a specific look
and character, which are the same in all the villages
where one studies them. They very commonly
fall into a routine, the basis of which is
going to some lounging-place or other, a bar-room,

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

a reading-room, or something of the kind. They
grow slovenly in dress, and wear the same hat forever.
They have a feeble curiosity for news perhaps,
which they take daily as a man takes his
bitters, and then fall silent and think they are
thinking. But the mind goes out under this regimen,
like a fire without a draught; and it is not
very strange, if the instinct of mental self-preservation
drives them to brandy-and-water, which
makes the hoarse whisper of memory musical for
a few brief moments, and puts a weak leer of
promise on the features of the hollow-eyed future.
The Colonel was kept pretty well in hand as yet
by his wife, and though it had happened to him
once or twice to come home rather late at night
with a curious tendency to say the same thing
twice and even three times over, it had always
been in very cold weather, — and everybody
knows that no one is safe to drink a couple of
glasses of wine in a warm room and go suddenly
out into the cold air.

Miss Matilda Sprowle, sole daughter of the
house, had reached the age at which young ladies
are supposed in technical language to have come
out, and thereafter are considered to be in company.

“There's one piece o' goods,” said the Colonel
to his wife, “that we ha'n't disposed of, nor got a
customer for yet. That's Matildy. I don't mean
to set her up at vaandoo. I guess she can have
her pick of a dozen.”

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

“She 's never seen anybody yet,” said Mrs.
Sprowle, who had had a certain project for some
time, but had kept quiet about it. “Let 's have a
party, and give her a chance to show herself and
see some of the young folks.”

The Colonel was not very clear-headed, and he
thought, naturally enough, that the party was his
own suggestion, because his remark led to the
first starting of the idea. He entered into the
plan, therefore, with a feeling of pride as well as
pleasure, and the great project was resolved upon
in a family council without a dissentient voice.
This was the party, then, to which Mr. Bernard
was going. The town had been full of it for a
week. “Everybody was asked.” So everybody
said that was invited. But how in respect of
those who were not asked? If it had been one
of the old mansion-houses that was giving a
party, the boundary between the favored and the
slighted families would have been known pretty
well beforehand, and there would have been no
great amount of grumbling. But the Colonel,
for all his title, had a forest of poor relations and
a brushwood swamp of shabby friends, for he had
scrambled up to fortune, and now the time was
come when he must define his new social position.

This is always an awkward business in town
or country. An exclusive alliance between two
powers is often the same thing as a declaration
of war against a third. Rockland was soon

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

split into a triumphant minority, invited to Mrs.
Sprowle's party, and a great majority, uninvited,
of which the fraction just on the border line between
recognized “gentility” and the level of the
ungloved masses was in an active state of excitement
and indignation.

“Who is she, I should like to know?” said
Mrs. Saymore, the tailor's wife. “There was
plenty of folks in Rockland as good as ever Sally
Jordan was, if she had managed to pick up a merchant.
Other folks could have married merchants,
if their families wasn't as wealthy as them old
skinflints that willed her their money,” etc. etc.
Mrs. Saymore expressed the feeling of many beside
herself. She had, however, a special right to
be proud of the name she bore. Her husband was
own cousin to the Saymores of Freestone Avenue
(who write the name Seymour, and claim to
be of the Duke of Somerset's family, showing a
clear descent from the Protector to Edward Seymour,
(1630,) — then a jump that would break a
herald's neck to one Seth Saymore, (1783,) —
from whom to the head of the present family the
line is clear again). Mrs. Saymore, the tailor's
wife, was not invited, because her husband mended
clothes. If he had confined himself strictly to
making them, it would have put a different face
upon the matter.

The landlord of the Mountain House and his
lady were invited to Mrs. Sprowle's party. Not
so the landlord of Pollard's Tahvern and his lady.

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

Whereupon the latter vowed that they would
have a party at their house too, and made arrangements
for a dance of twenty or thirty couples,
to be followed by an entertainment. Tickets to
this “Social Ball” were soon circulated, and,
being accessible to all at a moderate price, admission
to the “Elegant Supper” included, this
second festival promised to be as merry, if not as
select, as the great party.

Wednesday came. Such doings had never
been heard of in Rockland as went on that day
at the “villa.” The carpet had been taken up in
the long room, so that the young folks might have
a dance. Miss Matilda's piano had been moved
in, and two fiddlers and a clarionet-player engaged
to make music. All kinds of lamps had
been put in requisition, and even colored waxcandles
figured on the mantel-pieces. The costumes
of the family had been tried on the day
before: the Colonel's black suit fitted exceedingly
well; his lady's velvet dress displayed her contours
to advantage; Miss Matilda's flowered silk
was considered superb; the eldest son of the family,
Mr. T. Jordan Sprowle, called affectionately
and elegantly “Geordie,” voted himself “stunnin'”;
and even the small youth who had borne
Mr. Bernard's invitation was effective in a new
jacket and trousers, buttony in front, and baggy
in the reverse aspect, as is wont to be the case
with the home-made garments of inland youngsters.

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]