The wife of Selah Withers was accused of sorcery in the evil days of that delusion.  A careless expression in one of her letters, that “ye Parson was as lyke to bee in league with ye Divell as anie of em,” had got abroad, and given great offence to godly people.  There was no doubt that some odd “manifestations,” as they would be called nowadays, had taken place in the household when she was a girl, and that she presented many of the conditions belonging to what are at the present day called mediums.

Major Gideon Withers, her son, was of the very common type of hearty, loud, portly men, who like to show themselves at militia trainings, and to hear themselves shout orders at musters, or declaim patriotic sentiments at town-meetings and in the General Court.  He loved to wear a crimson sash and a military cap with a large red feather, in which the village folk used to say he looked as “hahnsome as a piny,”—­meaning a favorite flower of his, which is better spelt peony, and to which it was not unnatural that his admirers should compare him.

If he had married a wife like himself, there might probably enough have sprung from the alliance a family of moon-faced children, who would have dropped into their places like posts into their holes, asking no questions of life, contented, like so many other honest folks, with the part of supernumeraries in the drama of being, their wardrobe of flesh and bones being furnished them gratis, and nothing to do but to walk across the stage wearing it.  But Major Gideon Withers, for some reason or other, married a slender, sensitive, nervous, romantic woman, which accounted for the fact that his son David, “King David,” as he was called in his time, had a very different set of tastes from his father, showing a turn for literature and sentiment in his youth, reading Young’s “Night Thoughts,” and Thomson’s “Seasons,” and sometimes in those early days writing verses himself to Celia or to Chloe, which sounded just as fine to him as Effie and Minnie sound to young people now, as Musidora, as Saccharissa, as Lesbia, as Helena, as Adah and Zillah, have all sounded to young people in their time,—­ashes of roses as they are to us now, and as our endearing Scotch diminutives will be to others by and by.

King David Withers, who got his royal prefix partly because he was rich, and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew too old to write love-poems, married the famous beauty before mentioned, Miss Judith Pride, and the race came up again in vigor.  Their son, Jeremy, took for his first wife a delicate, melancholic girl, who matured into a sad-eyed woman, and bore him two children, Malachi and Silence.

When she died, he mourned for her bitterly almost a year, and then put on a ruffled shirt and went across the river to tell his grief to Miss Virginia Wild, there residing.  This lady was said to have a few drops of genuine aboriginal blood in her veins; and it is certain that her cheek had a little of the russet tinge which a Seckel pear shows on its warmest cheek when it blushes.—­Love shuts itself up in sympathy like a knife-blade in its handle, and opens as easily.  All the rest followed in due order according to Nature’s kindly programme.