butter and cheese are
in some silent and mysterious manner there brought into existence.

* _The Ancient History_, ten volumes (1730-1738), by the
French historian Charles Rollin (1661-1741).

** _Scott's Family Bible_ (1788-1792), edited with notes by
the English Biblical commentator, Thomas Scott (1747-1821).

On such a farm, in such a house and family, Miss Ophelia had spent a
quiet existence of some forty-five years, when her cousin invited her to
visit his southern mansion. The eldest of a large family, she was still
considered by her father and mother as one of "the children," and the
proposal that she should go to _Orleans_ was a most momentous one to the
family circle. The old gray-headed father took down Morse's Atlas* out
of the book-case, and looked out the exact latitude and longitude; and
read Flint's Travels in the South and West,** to make up his own mind as
to the nature of the country.

* _The Cerographic Atlas of the United States_ (1842-1845),
by Sidney Edwards Morse (1794-1871), son of the geographer,
Jedidiah Morse, and brother of the painter-inventor, Samuel
F. B. Morse.

** _Recollections of the Last Ten Years_ (1826) by Timothy
Flint (1780-1840), missionary of Presbyterianism to the
trans-Allegheny West.

The good mother inquired, anxiously, "if Orleans wasn't an awful wicked
place," saying, "that it seemed to her most equal to going to the
Sandwich Islands, or anywhere among the heathen."

It was known at the minister's and at the doctor's, and at Miss
Peabody's milliner shop, that Ophelia St. Clare was "talking about"
going away down to Orleans with her cousin; and of course the whole
village could do no less than help this very important process of
_taking about_ the matter. The minister, who inclined strongly to
abolitionist views, was quite doubtful whether such a step might not
tend somewhat to encourage the southerners in holding on to their
slaves; while the doctor, who was a stanch colonizationist, inclined to
the opinion that Miss Ophelia ought to go, to show the Orleans people
that we don't think hardly of them, after all. He was of opinion, in
fact, that southern people needed encouraging. When however, the fact
that she had resolved to go was fully before the public mind, she was
solemnly invited out to tea by all her friends and neighbors for the
space of a fortnight, and her prospects and plans duly canvassed and
inqu