Beside the white-covered cot there stood a straight-backed, list-seated oaken chair, a mahogany chest of drawers that reached from floor to ceiling, and a little three-legged light-stand.  Everything was covered with white, and the room was fragrant with the lavender and dried rose-leaves with which every drawer was scrupulously perfumed.  There was no toilet-table, for Dorcas had use neither for perfumes nor ointment.  No Kalydors and no Glycerines came within the category of her healthful experience.  Alert and graceful, she neither burnt her fingers nor cut her hands, and had need therefore of no soothing salves or sirups; and as she did not totter in scrimped shoes or tight laces, and so did not fall and break her bones, she had no need even of that modern necessity in all well-regulated families, “Prepared Glue.”  There was no medicine-chest in Colonel Fox’s house.  Healthy, occupied, active, and wise—­but not too wise—­was Dorcas Fox.

It is no proof that Dorcas was a beauty, that she looked often in the little mirror.  Ugliness is quite as anxious as beauty on that point, and is even oftener found gazing with sad solicitude at itself, if haply there may be found some mollifying or mitigating circumstance, either in outline or expression.  But Dorcas’s face pleased herself and everybody else.

A certain freedom and ease, the result partly of a symmetrical form, and partly of conscious good-looks, gave the grace of movement to Dorcas which attracted all eyes.  Almost every one has a sense of harmony, and old and young loved to watch the musical motion of Dorcas Fox, whatever she might be doing,—­whether she queened it at the “Thanksgiving Ball,” and from heel-and-toe, pigeon-wing, or mazy double-shuffle, evolved the finest and subtlest intricacies of muscle, or whether, on the Sabbath, walking behind her parents to meeting, she married the movement to the solemnity of the day, and, as it were, walked in long metre.

She always was in Hallelujah metre to the Blacks, Whites, Grays, Greens, and Browns that color so largely every New-England community; and the youths who were wont to form the crowd that invariably settled at the corner of the meeting-house waited only till Dorcas Fox went up the “broad-oil” to express open-mouthed admiration.  After her fashion, she was as much wondered at as the Duchess of Hamilton in her time, and with much more reason, since Dorcas was composed of real roses and lilies.

On Sunday, though the Puritanic doctrine prevailed, as far as doctrine can, of not speaking week-day thoughts, or having them, if they would keep away, yet inevitably, among the younger portion of the flock, the day of “meeting” was one of more than religious importance; and many lads and lasses who were never attracted by Father Boardman’s eloquent sedatives still made it a point to be regular in their attendance at meeting twice on every Sunday.  From far and near came open one-horse wagons, piled high with weekly