With all the alleviations which have been hinted at, Mr. Dudley Venner thought that the days and the weeks had never moved so slowly as through the last period of the autumn that was passing.  Elsie had been a perpetual source of anxiety to him, but still she had been a companion.  He could not mourn for her; for he felt that she was safer with her mother, in that world where there are no more sorrows and dangers, than she could have been with him.  But as he sat at his window and looked at the three mounds, the loneliness of the great house made it seem more like the sepulchre than these narrow dwellings where his beloved and her daughter lay close to each other, side by side,—­Catalina, the bride of his youth, and Elsie, the child whom he had nurtured, with poor Old Sophy, who had followed them like a black shadow, at their feet, under the same soft turf, sprinkled with the brown autumnal leaves.  It was not good for him to be thus alone.  How should he ever live through the long months of November and December?

The months of November and December did, in some way or other, get rid of themselves at last, bringing with them the usual events of village-life and a few unusual ones.  Some of the geologists had been up to look at the great slide, of which they gave those prolix accounts which everybody remembers who read the scientific journals of the time.  The engineers reported that there was little probability of any further convulsion along the line of rocks which overhung the more thickly settled part of the town.  The naturalists drew up a paper on the “Probable Extinction of the Crotalus Durissus in the Township of Rockland.”  The engagement of the Widow Rowens to a Little Millionville merchant was announced,—­“Sudding ‘n’ onexpected,” Widow Leech said,—­“waaelthy, or she wouldn’t ha’ looked at him,—­fifty year old, if he is a day, ’n’ ha’n’t got a white hair in his head." The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had publicly announced that he was going to join the Roman Catholic communion,—­not so much to the surprise or consternation of the religious world as he had supposed.  Several old ladies forthwith proclaimed their intention of following him; but, as one or two of them were deaf, and another had been threatened with an attack of that mild, but obstinate complaint, dementia senilis, many thought it was not so much the force of his arguments as a kind of tendency to jump as the bellwether jumps, well known in flocks not included in the Christian fold.  His bereaved congregation immediately began pulling candidates on and off, like new boots, on trial.  Some pinched in tender places; some were too loose; some were too square-toed; some were too coarse, and didn’t please; some were too thin, and wouldn’t last;—­in short, they couldn’t possibly find a fit.  At last people began to drop in to hear old Doctor Honeywood.  They were quite surprised to find what a human old gentleman he was, and went back and told the others, that, instead of being a