They never did find out, and never will, unless they read this veracious history.  If the selectmen are still disposed to punish the malefactors, I can supply Lawyer Hackett with evidence enough to convict Pepper Whitcomb, Phil Adams, Charley Marden, and the other honorable members of the Centipede Club.  But really I don’t think it would pay now.

Chapter Eighteen—­A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go

If the reader supposes that I lived all this while in Rivermouth without falling a victim to one or more of the young ladies attending Miss Dorothy Gibbs’s Female Institute, why, then, all I have to say is the reader exhibits his ignorance of human nature.

Miss Gibbs’s seminary was located within a few minutes’ walk of the Temple Grammar School, and numbered about thirty-five pupils, the majority of whom boarded at the Hall—­Primrose Hall, as Miss Dorothy prettily called it.  The Prim-roses, as we called them, ranged from seven years of age to sweet seventeen, and a prettier group of sirens never got together even in Rivermouth, for Rivermouth, you should know, is famous for its pretty girls.

There were tall girls and short girls, rosy girls and pale girls, and girls as brown as berries; girls like Amazons, slender girls, weird and winning like Undine, girls with black tresses, girls with auburn ringlets, girls with every tinge of golden hair.  To behold Miss Dorothy’s young ladies of a Sunday morning walking to church two by two, the smallest toddling at the end of the procession, like the bobs at the tail of a kite, was a spectacle to fill with tender emotion the least susceptible heart.  To see Miss Dorothy marching grimly at the head of her light infantry, was to feel the hopelessness of making an attack on any part of the column.

She was a perfect dragon of watchfulness.  The most unguarded lifting of an eyelash in the fluttering battalion was sufficient to put her on the lookout.  She had had experiences with the male sex, this Miss Dorothy so prim and grim.  It was whispered that her heart was a tattered album scrawled over with love-lines, but that she had shut up the volume long ago.

There was a tradition that she had been crossed in love; but it was the faintest of traditions.  A gay young lieutenant of marines had flirted with her at a country ball (A.D. 1811), and then marched carelessly away at the head of his company to the shrill music of the fife, without so much as a sigh for the girl he left behind him.  The years rolled on, the gallant gay Lothario—­which wasn’t his name—­married, became a father, and then a grandfather; and at the period of which I am speaking his grandchild was actually one of Miss Dorothy’s young ladies.  So, at least, ran the story.

The lieutenant himself was dead these many years; but Miss Dorothy never got over his duplicity.  She was convinced that the sole aim of mankind was to win the unguarded affection of maidens, and then march off treacherously with flying colors to the heartless music of the drum and fife.  To shield the inmates of Primrose Hall from the bitter influences that had blighted her own early affections was Miss Dorothy’s mission in life.