ithal; for, as her brother
told her, "God administered to you the sacrement of beauty in your
childhood, and you will walk all your life in the loveliness thereof."

Uncle Nathan had been an India merchant from his twenty-fifth to about
his fiftieth year, and had now, for some years, been living with his
sister in his fine, large house,--rich and well educated, devoting his
life to study, works of benevolence, to general reform and progress. It
was he who had the first anti-slavery lecture delivered in the town,
and actually persuaded Mr. Homer, the old minister, to let Mr. Garrison
stand in the pulpit on a Wednesday night and preach deliverance unto
the captives; but it could be done only once, for the clergymen of the
neighborhood thought anti-slavery a desecration of their new wooden
meeting-houses. It was he, too, who asked Lucy Stone to lecture on
woman's rights, but the communicants thought it would not do to let a
"woman speak in the church," and so he gave it up. All the country knew
and loved him, for he was a natural overseer of the poor, and guardian
of the widow and the orphan. How many a girl in the Normal School every
night put up a prayer of thanksgiving for him; how many a bright boy
in Hanover and Cambridge was equally indebted for the means of high
culture, and if not so thankful, why, Uncle Nathan knew that gratitude
is too nice and delicate a plant to grow on common soil. Once, when
he was twenty-two or three, he was engaged to a young woman of Boston,
while he was a clerk in a commission store. But her father, a skipper
from Beverly or Cape Cod, who continued vulgar while he became rich,
did not like the match. "It won't do," said he, "for a poor young man to
marry into one of our fust families; what is the use of aristocracy if
no distinction is to be made, and our daughters are to marry Tom, Dick,
and Harry?" But Amelia took the matter sorely to heart; she kept her
love, yet fell into a consumption, and so wasted away; or, as one of
the neighbors said, "she was executed on the scaffold of an upstart's
vulgarity." Nathan loved no woman in like manner afterwards, but after
her death went to India, and remained years long. When he returned and
established his business in Boston, he looked after her relations, who
had fallen into poverty. Nay, out of the mire of infamy he picked up
what might have been his nephews and nieces, and, by generous breeding,
wiped off from them the stain of their illicit bir