audibly than to the painted Indians who once danced beneath the tree
which the unborn Twynintuft was to monopolize.

Perhaps you think Mrs. Widesworth a kind-hearted, charitable,
respectable old lady,--in short, a model citizeness! Many Foxden people
thought so, until, in the fulness of time, they were drugged with
iconoclastic logic, ghastly and fierce. Then this worthy person suddenly
loomed before them as a patron and upholder of every social abuse. She
was a trampler upon the rights of her sex, and deeply involved in the
guilt of baby-selling at Charleston. Above all, she was a _Moderate
Drinker_, (half a glass of Sherry with her dinner, you know,) and, as
such, could be proved to be the bulwark of the bar-room, and directly
responsible for the ruin of the most talented graduates of Harvard
College. The brutalities of every wife-beating drunkard just landed upon
our shores might be logically credited to Mrs. Widesworth, and to those
_respectable_ (with great sarcasm) _church-members_ (sarcasm more
intense) who countenanced the moderate use of intoxicating drinks.

For now there had come upon Foxden that political, sanatory,
anti-everything revival, which, in those days, thrilled through our
river-towns and took the place of the theological revival, which the
churches seemed too feeble to produce. And--but this is addressed only
to simple souls who think that Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, and Luther
instituted the Reformation--the settlement of Miss Patience Hurribattle
in a Foxden boarding-house produced the social upheaval which shook the
place. Of course, the enlightened reader of the "Atlantic" is well aware
that the mighty personages of history may be philosophically bejuggled
out of all claim to the admiration or reprobation of men. What did they
do but react on the society which created them?--what were they but the
average tendencies of an age clad in petticoats or top-boots, as the