and finds such variety to feed upon that it is
rarely--except in the case of great political or public
scandal--personal in its attentions; and what we too freely reckon a
perverted and impertinent country taste is but an ordinary appetite of
humanity, which, by the limitation of its feeding-ground, seems to
attach itself perversely to private relations.

There were some invidious persons in the town who had remarked that Miss
Almira Tourtelot had brought quite a new fervor to her devotional
exercises in the parish within the last year, as well as a new set of
ribbons to her hat; and two maiden ladies opposite, of distinguished
pretensions and long experience of life, had observed that the young
Reuben, on his passage back and forth from the Elderkins, had sometimes
been decoyed within the Tourtelot yard, and presented by the admiring
Dame Tourtelot with fresh doughnuts. The elderly maiden ladies were
perhaps uncharitable in their conclusions; yet it is altogether probable
that the Deacon and his wife may have considered, in the intimacy of
their fireside talk, the possibility of some time claiming the minister
as a son-in-law. Questions like this are discussed in a great many
families even now.

Dame Tourtelot had crowned with success all her schemes in life, save
one. Almira, her daughter, now verging upon her thirty-second year, had
long been upon the anxious-seat as regarded matrimony; and with a
sentimental turn that incited much reading of Cowper and Montgomery and
(if it must be told) "Thaddeus of Warsaw," the poor girl united a
sickly, in-door look, and a peaked countenance, which had not attracted
wooers. The wonderful executive capacity of the mother had unfortunately
debarred her from any active interest in the household; and though the
Tourtelots had actually been at the expense of providing a piano for
Almira, (the only one in Ashfield,)--upon which the poor girl thrummed,
thinking of "Thaddeus," and, we trust, of better things,--this had not
won a roseate hue to her face, or quickened in any perceptible degree
the alacrity of her admirers.

Upon a certain night of later October, after Almira has retired, and
when the Tourtelots are seated by the little fire, which the autumn
chills have rendered necessary, and into the embers of which the Deacon
has cautiously thrust the leg of one of the fire-dogs, preparatory to a
modest mug of flip, (with which, by his wife's permission, he
occasionally indulges hims