This little edifice is a rustic shrine devoted to Cadmus, and is under the dominion of parson Chub.  He is a plump, rosy old gentleman, rather short and thickset, with the blood vessels meandering over his face like rivulets,—­a pair of prominent blue eyes, and a head of silky hair not unlike the covering of a white spaniel.  He may be said to be a man of jolly dimensions, with an evident taste for good living, sometimes sloven in his attire, for his coat—­which is not of the newest—­is decorated with sundry spots that are scattered over it in constellations.  Besides this, he wears an immense cravat, which, as it is wreathed around his short neck, forms a bowl beneath his chin, and—­as Ned says—­gives the parson’s head the appearance of that of John the Baptist upon a charger, as it is sometimes represented in the children’s picture books.  His beard is grizzled with silver stubble, which the parson reaps about twice a week—­if the weather be fair.

Mr. Chub is a philosopher after the order of Socrates.  He was an emigrant from the Emerald Isle, where he suffered much tribulation in the disturbances, as they are mildly called, of his much-enduring country.  But the old gentleman has weathered the storm without losing a jot of that broad, healthy benevolence with which Nature has enveloped his heart, and whose ensign she has hoisted in his face.  The early part of his life had been easy and prosperous, until the rebellion of 1798 stimulated his republicanism into a fever, and drove the full-blooded hero headlong into a quarrel, and put him, in spite of his peaceful profession, to standing by his pike in behalf of his principles.  By this unhappy boiling over of the caldron of his valor, he fell under the ban of the ministers, and tested his share of government mercy.  His house was burnt over his head, his horses and hounds (for, by all accounts, he was a perfect Actaeon) were “confiscate to the state,” and he was forced to fly.  This brought him to America in no very compromising mood with royalty.

Here his fortunes appear to have been various, and he was tossed to and fro by the battledoor of fate, until he found a snug harbor at Swallow Barn; where, some years ago, he sat down in that quiet repose which a worried and badgered patriot is best fitted to enjoy.

He is a good scholar, and, having confined his readings entirely to the learning of the ancients, his republicanism is somewhat after the Grecian mold.  He has never read any politics of later date than the time of the Emperor Constantine, not even a newspaper,—­so that he may be said to have been contemporary with AEschines rather than Lord Castlereagh—­until that eventful epoch of his life when his blazing rooftree awakened him from his anachronistical dream.  This notable interruption, however, gave him but a feeble insight into the moderns, and he soon relapsed to Thucydides and Livy, with some such glimmerings of the American Revolution upon his remembrance as most readers have of the exploits of the first Brutus.