Like shafted light dropped in a sunset sea,
       The radiant pillars of my home
    Send from their glowing swift mortality
       Great voices crying, “Come!”

* * * * *

THE DEACON’S HOLOCAUST.

I

A First-class old lady is the most precious social possession of a New-England town.  I have been in places where this office of Select Woman had languished for want of a proper incumbent,—­that is, where the feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative.  In such a place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon.  No rich local tone and character are to be found in such a place.

This deplorable state of things had never existed in Foxden.  When strangers took a carriage at the depot and asked to be shown whatever was noteworthy in the town, they were driven to a many-gabled house shaded by a majestic oak, and informed that there lived Mrs. Widesworth, the grand-daughter of Twynintuft, the famous elocutionist.  They were also assured that the oak was no other than the Twynintuft Oak, celebrated in the well-known sonnet of a distinguished American poet.  Moreover, they were instructed that the room just to the right of the porch was a study added by Twynintuft himself in the year ’87, and that the shattered shed in the background was originally an elocutionary laboratory which had seen the forming of many Congressional orators.

In so confident a way was this information imparted, that visitors were compelled to receive it in all humbleness, and as a matter of course.  They could only feign that Twynintuft had been a household word from their tenderest infancy, and that they have made pilgrimage to Foxden to gaze upon the earthly abiding-place of this remarkable man.  Accordingly, young ladies sent their best respects from the hotel, and “Would dear Mrs. Widesworth spare them a few leaves from her grandfather’s oak?” And simple young gentlemen, with a morbid passion for notorieties and moral sentiments, forwarded little books, bound in sheepskin heavily gilt, inscribed, “World-Thoughts of My Country’s Gifted Minds,” and “Mrs. Widesworth is requested to write any maxim which her experience of life may have suggested on page 209 of this volume, just between the remarks of the Living Skeleton and the autograph of the Idiot Albino.”

If invited to visit any one of consideration in Foxden, you would no sooner have deposited your travelling-bag and subsided into the arm-chair than you would perceive a curious nervous twitching about the features of your host, which would finally culminate in these, accents of patronizing triumph:—­“My dear Sir, I shall be glad to take you across the street to pay your respects to Mrs. Widesworth!” Every householder quivered with anxiety until this rite had been solemnly performed.