In addition to elevating the tone of our intellectual life, however, Mrs. Potts found it necessary to support herself and her son.  That she could devise a way to merge these important duties will perhaps be surmised.  Comfortably installed in a cottage at the south end of town with her household belongings, including a chair once sat in by the Adams-husband of her heaven-favored second cousin, she lost no time in prosecuting her double mission.  The title of the work with which she began her task of uplifting our masses was “Gaskell’s Compendium of Forms,” a meritorious production of amazing and quite infinite scope, elegantly illustrated.  The book weighed five pounds and cost three dollars, which was sixty cents a pound, as Westley Keyts took the trouble to ascertain.  But it was indeed a work admirably calculated for a community of diversified interests.  While Solon Denney might occupy himself with the “Aid to English Composition,” including “common errors corrected, good taste, figures of speech, and sentence building,” the Eubanks ladies could further inform themselves upon grave affairs of “The Home and Family,—­Life, Health, Happiness, Human Love,” etc., or upon more frivolous concerns, such as “Introductions and Salutations, Carriage and Horseback Riding, Croquet, Archery, and Matinee parties, and the Art of Conversation.”  While Asa Bundy interested himself in “History of Banking, Forms of Notes, Checks and Drafts, Interest and Usury Tables, etc.,” Truman Baird, who meant some day to go to Congress, might perfect himself in Parliamentary law and oratory, an exposition of the latter art being illumined by wood-cuts of a bearded and handsome gentleman in evening dress who assumed the various positions of emotion or passion, as, in “Figure 8.—­This gesture is used in concession, submission, humility,” or, in Figure 9, which diagrams reproach, scorn, and contempt.  While Truman sought to copy these attitudes, to place the feet aright for Earnest Appeal or Bold Assertion, or to clasp the hands as directed for Supplication and Earnest Entreaty, the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club conned the chapter on American literature, “containing choice proverbs and literary selections and quotations from the poets of the old and new worlds.”  Our merchants found information as to “Jobbing, Importing and Other Business,” and our young ladies could observe the correct forms for “Letters of Love and Courtship,” “Apology for a Broken Engagement,” “French Terms used in Dancing,” “Rights of Married Women,” “The Necessity and Sweetness of Home,” and “Marriage—­Happiness or Woe may come of It.”

Again, Westley Keyts could read how to cut up meats.  He knew already, but this chapter, illustrated with neat carcasses marked off into numbered squares, convinced him that the book was not so light as some of its other chapters indicated, and determined him to its purchase.