, uttered a few simple words of
gratitude, very quietly,--much to the satisfaction of some of the guests,
who had expected one of those elaborate effusions, with rolling up of the
eyes and rhetorical accents, so frequent with eloquent divines when they
address their Maker in genteel company.

Everybody began talking with the person sitting next at hand. Mr.
Bernard naturally enough turned his attention first to the Widow; but
somehow or other the right side of the Widow seemed to be more wide awake
than the left side, next him, and he resigned her to the courtesies of
Mr. Dudley Venner, directing himself, not very unwillingly, to the young
girl next him on the other side. Miss Letty Forrester, the granddaughter
of the Reverend Doctor, was city-bred, as anybody might see, and
city-dressed, as any woman would know at sight; a man might only feel the
general effect of clear, well-matched colors, of harmonious proportions,
of the cut which makes everything cling like a bather's sleeve where a
natural outline is to be kept, and ruffle itself up like the hackle of a
pitted fighting-cock where art has a right to luxuriate in silken
exuberance. How this citybred and city-dressed girl came to be in
Rockland Mr. Bernard did not know, but he knew at any rate that she was
his next neighbor and entitled to his courtesies. She was handsome, too,
when he came to look, very handsome when he came to look again,--endowed
with that city beauty which is like the beauty of wall-fruit, something
finer in certain respects than can be reared off the pavement.

The miserable routinists who keep repeating invidiously Cowper's

"God made the country and man made the town,"

as if the town were a place to kill out the race in, do not know what
they are talking about. Where could they raise such Saint-Michael pears,
such Saint-Germains, such Brown-Beurres, as we had until within a few
years growing within the walls of our old city-gardens? Is the dark and
damp cavern where a ragged beggar hides himself better than a
town-mansion which fronts the sunshine and backs on its own cool shadow,
with gas and water and all appliances to suit all needs? God made the
cavern and man made the house! What then?

There is no doubt that the pavement keeps a deal of mischief from coming
up out of the earth, and, with a dash off of it in summer, just to cool
the soles of the feet when it gets too hot, is the best place for many
constitutions, as some