Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons acquainted with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a schoolmaster, a college tutor, and afterwards for many years professor,—­a man of learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such as are hardly to be found, except in old, unmarried students,—­the double flowers of college culture, their stamina all turned to petals, their stock in the life of the race all funded in the individual.  Being a man of letters, Byles Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary acquirements of the good people of the rural district where he resided, and, having known much of college and something of city life, was apt to smile at the importance they attached to their little local concerns.  He was, of course, quite as much an object of rough satire to the natural observers and humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,—­perhaps not in any village where a score or two of families are brought together,—­enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary characters of a real-life stock company.

The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire, whose handsome monument—­in a finished and carefully colored lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely groomed willow—­hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were, monumental parlor.  Her household consisted of herself, her son, nineteen years of age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small children, twins, left upon her doorstep when little more than mere marsupial possibilities, taken in for the night, kept for a week, and always thereafter cherished by the good soul as her own; also of Miss Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the “Academy” in another part of the same town, a distant relative, boarding with her.

What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly to hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of the old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not believe a word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as to growl to himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the way about it.

The leading article of the “Banner and Oracle” for June 18th must have been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked, several of the “metropolitan” journals of the date of June 15th and thereabout had evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some of his ideas before he gave them to the public.  The Foreign News by the Europa at Halifax, 15th, was spread out in the amplest dimensions the type of the office could supply.  More battles!  The Allies victorious!  The King and General Cialdini beat the Austrians at Palestro! 400 Austrians drowned in a canal!  Anti-French feeling in Germany!  Allgermine Zeiturg talks of conquest of Allsatia