Send from their glowing swift mortality
Great voices crying, "Come!"

* * * * *

THE DEACON'S HOLOCAUST.

I


A First-class old lady is the most precious social possession of a
New-England town. I have been in places where this office of Select
Woman had languished for want of a proper incumbent,--that is, where the
feminine element was always supplicatory, never authoritative. In such a
place you may find the Select Men as vulgar and unclean as are some of
the more pretentious politicians of State or nation; the variety-store
sands its sugar quite up to the city-standard; and the parson is as
timid a timeserver as the Bishop of Babylon. No rich local tone and
character are to be found in such a place.

This deplorable state of things had never existed in Foxden. When
strangers took a carriage at the depot and asked to be shown whatever
was noteworthy in the town, they were driven to a many-gabled house
shaded by a majestic oak, and informed that there lived Mrs. Widesworth,
the grand-daughter of Twynintuft, the famous elocutionist. They were
also assured that the oak was no other than the Twynintuft Oak,
celebrated in the well-known sonnet of a distinguished American poet.
Moreover, they were instructed that the room just to the right of the
porch was a study added by Twynintuft himself in the year '87, and that
the shattered shed in the background was originally an elocutionary