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