After driving round the town we stopped at the Academy.  Morning prayers were over, and the scholars, some sixty boys and girls, were coming downstairs from the hall, to go into the rooms, each side of a great door.  Dr. Price was behind them.  He stopped when he saw us, an introduction took place, and he inquired for Dr. Snell, as an old college friend.  Locke Morgeson sounded familiarly, he said; a member of his mother’s family named Somers had married a gentleman of that name.  He remembered it from an old ivory miniature which his mother had shown him, telling him it was the likeness of her cousin Rachel’s husband.  I replied we knew that grandfather had married a Rachel Somers.  Cousin Charles was surprised and a little vexed that the doctor had never told him, when he must have known that he had been anxiously looking up the Morgeson pedigree; but the doctor declared he had not thought of it before, and that only the name of Locke had recalled it to his mind.  He then proposed our going to Miss Prior, the lady who had charge of the girls’ department, and we followed him to her school-room.

I was at once interested and impressed by the appearance of my teacher that was to be.  She was a dignified, kind-looking woman, who asked me a few questions in such a pleasant, direct manner that I frankly told her I was eighteen years old, very ignorant, and averse from learning; but I did not speak loud enough for anybody beside herself to hear.

“Now,” said mother, when we came away, “think how much greater your advantages are than mine have ever been.  How miserable was my youth!  It is too late for me to make any attempt at cultivation.  I have no wish that way.  Yet now I feel sometimes as if I were leaving the confines of my old life to go I know not whither, to do I know not what.”

But her countenance fell when she heard that Dr. Price had been a Unitarian minister, and that there was no Congregational church in Rosville.

She went to Boston that Friday afternoon, anxious to get safely home with Veronica.  We parted with many a kiss and shake of the hand and last words.  I cried when I went up to my room, for I found a present there—­a beautiful workbox, and in it was a small Bible with my name and hers written on the fly-leaf in large print-like, but tremulous letters.  I composed my feelings by putting it away carefully and unpacking my trunk.

CHAPTER XV.

Rosville was a county town.  The courts were held there, and its society was adorned with several lawyers of note who had law students, which fact was to the lawyers’ daughters the most agreeable feature of their fathers’ profession.  It had a weekly market day and an annual cattle show.  I saw a turnout of whips and wagons about the hitching-posts round the green of a Tuesday the year through, and going to and from school met men with a bovine smell.  Caucuses were prevalent, and occasionally a State Convention was held, when Rosville paid honor to some political hero of the day with banners and brass bands.  It was a favorite spot for the rustication of naughty boys from Harvard or Yale.  Dr. Price had one or two at present who boarded in his house so as to be immediately under his purblind eyes, and who took Greek and Latin at the Academy.