In five minutes, early apples, old cider, and a plate of raised doughnuts, flanked by plates of mince- and apple-pie, rewarded the patience and piety of the company.  Colonel Fox, solemnly, and as if he were quite accustomed to it, poured from a jug into large tumblers that held at least a pint, dropped three large lumps of loaf-sugar, filled the glass with water, grated some nutmeg on the top, and bade his guests refresh themselves with toddy, unless they preferred flip:  if they did, they had only to say so:  the poker was hot.

They all ate and drank, and by that time the bell rang again; and then they all went again.  And if they heard Father Boardman at all, it was with utterly composed minds, when he told them it was their duty to be contented, even should their condemnation be eternally decreed, since it must, of course, be for the good of the whole, and for the glory of God.  Hopkinsianism was in fashion then, and the minds of men in many parts of the country had accepted the logic of its founder, negatived as it was, in its practical application, by the sweetness of his Christian benevolence and his large humanity.  Then the toddy helped them to swallow many doctrines that in our cold-water days are sharply and defiantly contested.  The head is much clearer; whether hearts are better is doubtful.

After supper, and while yet the sun lingered smilingly over the Great Meadows and on the hills, behind which he sank, Dorcas, who had meanwhile adorned herself with Aunt Dorcas’s bequest, broke the long silence, by whispering so low that her father’s sleep should not be disturbed,—­

“Mother, do you set much by this pin?”

“Of course I do, child!  ’T was your Aunt Dorcas’s,” said Mrs. Fox, “your father’s own sister.”

“Yes, I know it, mother; but how did she come by it?”

All these years, and this was the first time Dorcas had asked the question!  She colored a little, too, as if some secret thought or story were busy about her heart, as she looked at the ring.

“Well,—­it was a man she ’xpected to ‘a’ bed.  They was to ‘a’ ben merried, an’ he was to ‘a’ gi’n up v’yagin’.  But he was cast away, an’ she never heerd nothin’ about neither him nor the ship.  He was waitin’ to git means, an’ he did, privateerin’ an’ so; but I ’xpect he was drownded,” concluded Mrs. Fox, in a suitably plaintive tone.

And that was Aunt Dorcas’s story.

CHAPTER II.

If anybody is curious to know why there should be mystery or secrecy connected with Swan Day’s meeting with Dorcas, or why they should meet under a pear-tree, instead of her father’s roof-tree, in a rational way, it might be a sufficient answer, that there never was and never will be anything direct and straightforward about Cupid or his doings.  But the real and more important reason was, that Colonel Fox did not like Swan, and had said, in so many words, that “he wouldn’t have Swan Day a-hangin’ round, no how!—­that he was a poor kind of a shote,—­that he wished both him and his clutter well out o’ town,—­and that he needn’t think to make swans out of his geese, no time!”