So matters were all arranged.  After dinner, the rusty, dusty, old carriage appeared at the door, with the farm-horses harnessed thereto, jingling, and creaking, and snapping, as if oil and use were strange to its dry joints and stiff straps.  Mrs. Griswold mounted to the back seat, after kissing Lizzy with hearty regret and tenderness,—­her old gray pelisse and green winter bonnet harmonizing with the useful age of her conveyance.  “Father,” in a sturdy great-coat and buckskin mittens, took the reins; and Sam, whose blue jacket was at that moment crushing his mother’s Sunday cap in a bandbox that sat where Lizzy should have been, clambered over the front wheel, to the great detriment of the despised butternut suit, and, seizing the whip, applied it so suddenly to Tom and Jerry that they started off down the Coventry road at a pace that threatened a solution of continuity to bones and sinews, as well as wood and leather.

Lizzy turned away sadly from the door.  Who can say that just at that minute she did not wish she had gone, too?  But nobody heard her say so.  She went up-stairs to her room, and tried to read, but couldn’t attach any ideas to the words; she was half an hour over a page of a very good book, and then flung it upon the bed with an expression of disgust, as if it were the book’s fault.  Poor authors! toil your fingers off, and spin your brains out! be as wise as Solomon, or witty as Sheridan! your work is vanity and vexation of spirit, unless the reader’s brain choose to receive and vivify the hieroglyphs of your ideas; think yourselves successful because a great man praises you, and to-morrow that man is twisted with dyspepsia, or some woman passes him without a smile, and your sparkling sketch, your pathetic poem are declared trash!  Such is fame!  Of which little homily the moral is,—­Write for money!  What a thing it is to be worldly-wise!  So was not Lizzy; if she had been, she would now be at Coventry, kissed and caressed by grandfather, aunts, uncles, cousins, and——­But we won’t anticipate.

Lizzy flung down the book, and went to her closet for another; but it was as good (or as bad) as Bluebeard’s closet, for there hung the pretty crimson merino, with delicate lace at the throat and round the short sleeves, in which Miss Lizzy Griswold once intended to electrify Mr. John Boynton this very evening.  True it is that short sleeves are not the most sensible things for November; but Lizzy was twenty, and had such round, white arms, that she liked to wear short sleeves, as any girl would; and who is going to blame her?  Not I!  A girl doesn’t know her privileges who was never just a little vain,—­just a little glad to be pretty when John is by.  Lizzy looked at the crimson merino, and at the smart slippers on the door with a shining black bow on each instep.  There, too, on a little low table, was a green box; somebody had left it open,—­mother, perhaps,—­so she saw on its cotton bed a red coral bracelet, that came from Roxbury, or thereabout, last year at this time.  Lizzy shut up the box, and went down-stairs to get tea.