as he would have been styled by persons acquainted
with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a schoolmaster,
a college tutor, and afterwards for many years professor,--a man of
learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such as are hardly to be
found, except in old, unmarried students,--the double flowers of college
culture, their stamina all turned to petals, their stock in the life
of the race all funded in the individual. Being a man of letters, Byles
Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary acquirements of the
good people of the rural district where he resided, and, having known
much of college and something of city life, was apt to smile at the
importance they attached to their little local concerns. He was, of
course, quite as much an object of rough satire to the natural observers
and humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,--perhaps
not in any village where a score or two of families are brought
together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
characters of a real-life stock company.

The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire,
whose handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored
lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely groomed
willow--hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were, monumental
parlor. Her household consisted of herself, her son, nineteen years of
age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small children, twins, left upon
her doorstep when little more than mere marsupial possibilities, taken
in for the night, kept for a week, and always thereafter cherished by
the good soul as her own; also of Miss Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at
school at the "Academy" in another part of the same town, a distant
relative, boarding with her.

What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to
guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly to
hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of the
old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not believe a
word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as to growl to
himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the way about it.

The leading article of the "Banner and Oracle" for June 18th must have
been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked, several of
the "metropolitan" journals of