There is but little incident in a New-England village of the Deerfield style and size,—­full of commonplace people, who live commonplace lives, in the same white and brown and red houses they were born in, and die respectably in their beds, and are quietly buried among the mulleins and dewberry-vines in the hill-side graveyard.  Mary Scranton’s life and death, though they possessed the elements of a tragedy, were divested of their tragic interest by this calm and pensive New-England atmosphere.  Nothing so romantic had happened there for many years, or did occur again for more; yet nobody knew a romance had come and gone.  People in Deerfield lived their lives with a view to this world and the next, after the old Puritanic fashion somewhat modified, and so preserved the equilibrium.  No special beauty of the town attracted summer-visitors.  It was a village of one street, intended to be straight, crossing a decorous brook that turned the mill, and parting itself just below the church and the “store,” to accommodate a small “green,” where the geese waddled, hissed, and nibbled Mayweed all summer, and the boys played ball sometimes after school.  There was a post-office in the “store,” beside boots, sugar, hams, tape, rake-tails, ploughs, St. Croix molasses, lemons, calico, cheese, flour, straw hats, candles, lamp-oil, crackers, and rum,—­a good assortment of needles and thread, a shelf of school-books, a seed-drawer, tinware strung from the ceiling, apples in a barrel, coffee-mills and brooms in the windows, and hanging over the counter, framed and glazed, the following remarkable placard, copied out in a running hand:—­

No Credit Will be Given in This Store after This Date.  Under no circumstances whatever.  My Reasons

I cannot buy goods or do business without cash, and as the bulk of my capital is now trusted out with the promise to pay which that promise has never been full filled I deem it a duty to myself and my Cash paying customers to sell goods for cash at the lowest market price.

I shall indeavor make it an interest of my customers to pay cash for all goods purchas by them.  I shall offer goods at reduced rates as an inducement for all to pay cash.

If I am asked if I give credit I want this to be my answer

No Never.

ELKANAH MILLS.

Distrust not, O reader!  This is verbatim et literatim a copy.

In front of the “store” was a hay-scale, across the way a tavern, and, at respectful distances along the street, white or red houses, with the inevitable front-door, south-door, kitchen-and shed-floor, lilacs and altheas before the windows, fennel, tiger-lilies, sweet-brier, and Bar_gun_dy rosebushes, with red “pinies” and livid hydrangeas, or now and then a mat of stonecrop and “voilets” along the posy-bed that edged cabbage and potato-plots, while, without the fence, Bouncing-Bets adorned the road-side, or blue sea-pinks from the pasture-lot strayed beyond its rails.