of peculiarities gathered here would be little less than marvellous.  That they are found in so many American villages as to justify their being attributed to American villages in general is preposterous.  Certainly, this picture does not daguerreotype New England, however it may be in New York,—­and though New England is small and provincial and New York is large and cosmopolitan, still we respectfully submit that any characteristic which may belong to New York and does not belong to New England is local and not national; and though a writer, for his own convenience and the better to convey his moral, may, if he choose, group all the wickednesses and weaknesses of the land in one secluded spot, he ought not to convey to strangers so wrong an idea of our rural social life as to make that spot the exponent of all.—­So much for the title.

We now open the book, and are immediately in the midst of scenes which have an indescribable familiarity.  We have a confused sense of having met these people before.  Certainly they have a strong family-likeness to denizens of modern novels.  The sewing-circles and small-talk savor of the cheap wit of Widow Bedott.  Jutnapore must have descended in a right line from Borrioboola-Gha.  The traditional spinsters with their “withered bosoms” march in four abreast.  The hereditary clergymen, hungry, sectarian, sanctimonious, rabid, form into line with the precision acquired by long drill.  The hero and heroine stand up as good as married in the first chapter.  The features of the hero are instantly recognizable.  There is the small stir, the rising of the curtain, and some one steps upon the stage, “tall and sunburnt, with a moustache,”—­’tis he!  Alonzo!—­“with easy self-possession and a genial air,”—­the very man,—­“habitual manners slightly touched with reserve, but no man could unbend more easily,”—­who but he, our old acquaintance?—­“a rich baritone voice,” “strung with true masculine fibre,” striking in among the sharps and flats and bringing them all into harmony,—­that is the invariable way.  “Generally, the least intellectual persons sing with the truest and most touching expression, because voice and intellect are rarely combined, [the reason seems to us rather a restatement of the fact,] but Maxwell Woodbury’s fine organ had not been given to him at the expense of his brain.”  Certainly not.  He never would have been our hero, if it had.  When you add, that “his manners were thoroughly refined, and his property large enough and not too large for leisure,” why, one might almost send a sheriff to arrest him, trusting to this description to make sure of his identity.  The heroine is of course the “pale, quiet, earnest-looking girl,” who, in the midst of snoods, frocks, jackets, pocket-handkerchiefs, and other commonplace handicraft, is embroidering with green silk upon warm brown cloth the thready stems and frail diminishing fronds of a group of fern-leaves,—­who alone among assured matrons and faded spinsters is visited by “a flitting blush, delicate and transient as the shadow of a rose tossed upon marble,”—­and who matches the “glorious lay” of the hero, that “thrilled and shook her with its despairing solemnity,” with an Alpine song, that, pure and sweet, sets the hero once more face to face with the Rosenlaui glacier and the jagged pyramid of the Wetterhorn.