church-members.  Under the fostering care of Mrs. Widesworth, the occasion grew to a musical festival of considerable importance.  When the meeting was at her house, there were invited many citizens of distinction from the neighboring towns; also, there was summoned all that was lively, pretty, or profound in Foxden.  From three in the afternoon until nine in the evening the old house broke out into singing, chatting, love-making, and sermonizing in rich variety.  The ancient bean-pot gave place to a tea-table loaded with everything which might be baked or fried or stewed.  Upon that day people in wise foresight made but slender dinners.  The hostess was known to possess a culinary experience of no ordinary scope, and the air of the house was heavy with the delicate incense of waffles and dough-nuts.  When the evening happened to be mild, and that comfortable estate of fulness whose adjectives the Latin Grammar tells us require the ablative had been attained, there was more music, secular, but highly decorous, beneath the rustling boughs of the oak.  Then the merriment grew hearty, and mocked the sombre night.  In vain the crickets chirped their shrill jeer at fallen humanity; the crackling leaves whispered,—­but no more audibly than to the painted Indians who once danced beneath the tree which the unborn Twynintuft was to monopolize.

Perhaps you think Mrs. Widesworth a kind-hearted, charitable, respectable old lady,—­in short, a model citizeness!  Many Foxden people thought so, until, in the fulness of time, they were drugged with iconoclastic logic, ghastly and fierce.  Then this worthy person suddenly loomed before them as a patron and upholder of every social abuse.  She was a trampler upon the rights of her sex, and deeply involved in the guilt of baby-selling at Charleston.  Above all, she was a Moderate Drinker, (half a glass of Sherry with her dinner, you know,) and, as such, could be proved to be the bulwark of the bar-room, and directly responsible for the ruin of the most talented graduates of Harvard College.  The brutalities of every wife-beating drunkard just landed upon our shores might be logically credited to Mrs. Widesworth, and to those respectable (with great sarcasm) church-members (sarcasm more intense) who countenanced the moderate use of intoxicating drinks.

For now there had come upon Foxden that political, sanatory, anti-everything revival, which, in those days, thrilled through our river-towns and took the place of the theological revival, which the churches seemed too feeble to produce.  And—­but this is addressed only to simple souls who think that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and Luther instituted the Reformation—­the settlement of Miss Patience Hurribattle in a Foxden boarding-house produced the social upheaval which shook the place.  Of course, the enlightened reader of the “Atlantic” is well aware that the mighty personages of history may be philosophically bejuggled out of all claim