They had a quarrel then, you know, and have not spoken since.  If the Deacon likes it, the Squire won’t, and vice versa.  Then, Colonel Stearns has had a quarrel and a lawsuit with John Wilkinson about that little patch of meadow.  They won’t go; each is afraid of meeting the other.  Half the parish has some miff against the other half.  I believe there never was such a place for little quarrels since the Dutch took Holland.  There’s a tempest in every old woman’s teapot.  Widow Seedyweedy won’t let her daughters come, because, as she says, you are a temperance man, and said, at the last meeting, that rum made many a widow in Soitgoes, and sent three quarters of the paupers to the almshouse.  She declared, the next day, that you were ’personal, and injured her feelings; and ’twas all because you was rich and she was a poor lone widow, with nothing but her God to trust in.’”

“Oh, dear me,” said Uncle Nathan, “it is a queer world,—­a queer world; but after all it’s the best we’ve got.  Let us try to make it better still.”

Aunt Kindly could not sleep much all night for thinking over the details of the plan.  Before morning it all lay clear in her mind.  Monday afternoon she went round to talk with the neighbors and get all things ready.  Most of them liked it; but some thought it was “queer,” and wondered “what our pious fathers would think of keeping Christmas in New England.”  A few had “religious scruples,” and would do nothing about it.  The head of the Know-nothing lodge said it was “a Furrin custom, and I want none o’ them things; but Ameriky must be ruled by ’Mericans; and we’ll have no Disserlutions of the Union, and no Popish ceremonies like a Christmas Tree.  If you begin so, you’ll have the Pope here next, and the fulfilment of the seventeenth chapter of Revelations.”

Hon. Jeduthan Stovepipe also opposed it.  He was a rich hatter from Boston, and a “great Democrat;” who, as he said, had lately “purchased grounds in Soitgoes, intending to establish a family.”  He “would not like to have Cinderella Jane and Edith Zuleima mix themselves up with widow Wheeler’s children,—­whose father was killed on the railroad five or six years before,—­for their mother takes in washing.  No, Sir,” said he; “it will not do.  You have no daughters to marry, no sons to provide for.  It will do well enough for you to talk about ‘equality,’ about ‘meeting the whole neighborhood,’ and that sort of thing; but I intend to establish a family; and I set my face against all promiscuous assemblages of different classes of society.  It is bad enough on Sundays, when each man can sit buttoned up in his own pew; but a festival for all sorts and conditions of children,—­its is contrary to the genius of our republican institutions.”  His wife thought quite differently; but the poor thing did not dare say her soul was her own in his presence.  Aunt Kindly went off with rather a heavy heart, remembering that Jeduthan was the son of a man sent to the State Prison for horse stealing, and born in the almshouse at Bankton Four Corners, and had been bound out as apprentice by the selectmen of the town.