t not too wise--was Dorcas Fox.

It is no proof that Dorcas was a beauty, that she looked often in the
little mirror. Ugliness is quite as anxious as beauty on that point,
and is even oftener found gazing with sad solicitude at itself, if
haply there may be found some mollifying or mitigating circumstance,
either in outline or expression. But Dorcas's face pleased herself and
everybody else.

A certain freedom and ease, the result partly of a symmetrical form,
and partly of conscious good-looks, gave the grace of movement to
Dorcas which attracted all eyes. Almost every one has a sense of
harmony, and old and young loved to watch the musical motion of Dorcas
Fox, whatever she might be doing,--whether she queened it at the
"Thanksgiving Ball," and from heel-and-toe, pigeon-wing, or mazy
double-shuffle, evolved the finest and subtlest intricacies of muscle,
or whether, on the Sabbath, walking behind her parents to meeting,
she married the movement to the solemnity of the day, and, as it were,
walked in long metre.

She always was in Hallelujah metre to the Blacks, Whites, Grays,
Greens, and Browns that color so largely every New-England community;
and the youths who were wont to form the crowd that invariably settled
at the corner of the meeting-house waited only till Dorcas Fox went up
the "broad-oil" to express open-mouthed admiration. After her fashion,
she was as much wondered at as the Duchess of Hamilton in her time,
and with much more reason, since Dorcas was composed of real roses and
lilies.

On Sunday, though the Puritanic doctrine prevailed, as far as doctrine
can, of not speaking week-day thoughts, or having them, if they would
keep away, yet inevitably, among the younger portion of the flock, the
day of "meeting" was one of more than religious importance; and many
lads and lasses who were never attracted by Father Boardman's eloquent
sedatives still made it a point to be regular in their attendance at
meeting twice on every Sunday. From far and near came open one-horse
wagons, piled high with weekly shaven and dressed humanity,--young
and old with solemn and demure faces, with brown-ribboned queues, and
garments of domestic making. Fresh, strong, tall girls of five feet
ten, dressed in straw bonnets of their own handiwork, and sometimes
with scarlet cardinals lightly flung over their shoulders, sprang over
the wagon-thills to the ground. Now and then the more remote dwellers
came on horseback, each Jack