fe were awakening in the
dawn of a blessed future.

With all the alleviations which have been hinted at, Mr. Dudley Venner
thought that the days and the weeks had never moved so slowly as through
the last period of the autumn that was passing. Elsie had been a
perpetual source of anxiety to him, but still she had been a companion.
He could not mourn for her; for he felt that she was safer with her
mother, in that world where there are no more sorrows and dangers, than
she could have been with him. But as he sat at his window and looked at
the three mounds, the loneliness of the great house made it seem more
like the sepulchre than these narrow dwellings where his beloved and her
daughter lay close to each other, side by side,--Catalina, the bride
of his youth, and Elsie, the child whom he had nurtured, with poor Old
Sophy, who had followed them like a black shadow, at their feet, under
the same soft turf, sprinkled with the brown autumnal leaves. It was not
good for him to be thus alone. How should he ever live through the long
months of November and December?

The months of November and December did, in some way or other, get
rid of themselves at last, bringing with them the usual events of
village-life and a few unusual ones. Some of the geologists had been up
to look at the great slide, of which they gave those prolix accounts
which everybody remembers who read the scientific journals of the time.
The engineers reported that there was little probability of any further
convulsion along the line of rocks which overhung the more thickly
settled part of the town. The naturalists drew up a paper on the
"Probable Extinction of the _Crotalus Durissus_ in the Township of
Rockland." The engagement of the Widow Rowens to a Little Millionville
merchant was announced,--"Sudding 'n' onexpected," Widow Leech
said,--"waaelthy, or she wouldn't ha' looked at him,--fifty year old, if
he is a day, _'n' ha'n't got a white hair in his head."_ The Reverend
Chauncy Fairweather had publicly announced that he was going to join the
Roman Catholic communion,--not so much to the surprise or consternation
of the religious world as he had supposed. Several old ladies forthwith
proclaimed their intention of following him; but, as one or two of them
were deaf, and another had been threatened with an attack of that mild,
but obstinate complaint, _dementia senilis_, many thought it was not so
much the force of his arguments as a kind of tendency to