of the widow and the orphan. How many a girl in the Normal School every
night put up a prayer of thanksgiving for him; how many a bright boy
in Hanover and Cambridge was equally indebted for the means of high
culture, and if not so thankful, why, Uncle Nathan knew that gratitude
is too nice and delicate a plant to grow on common soil. Once, when
he was twenty-two or three, he was engaged to a young woman of Boston,
while he was a clerk in a commission store. But her father, a skipper
from Beverly or Cape Cod, who continued vulgar while he became rich,
did not like the match. "It won't do," said he, "for a poor young man to
marry into one of our fust families; what is the use of aristocracy if
no distinction is to be made, and our daughters are to marry Tom, Dick,
and Harry?" But Amelia took the matter sorely to heart; she kept her
love, yet fell into a consumption, and so wasted away; or, as one of
the neighbors said, "she was executed on the scaffold of an upstart's
vulgarity." Nathan loved no woman in like manner afterwards, but after
her death went to India, and remained years long. When he returned and
established his business in Boston, he looked after her relations, who
had fallen into poverty. Nay, out of the mire of infamy he picked up
what might have been his nephews and nieces, and, by generous breeding,
wiped off from them the stain of their illicit birth. He never spoke of
poor Amelia; but he kept a little locket in one end of his purse; none
ever saw it but his sister, who often observed him sitting with it in
his hand, hand hour by hour looking into the fire of a winter's night,
seeming to think of distant things. She never spoke to him then, but
left him alone with his recollections and his dreams. Some of the
neighbors said he "worshipped it;" others called it "a talisman." So
indeed it was, and by its enchantment he became a young man once more,
and walked through the moonlight to meet an angel, and with her enter
their kingdom of heaven. Truly it was a talisman; yet if _you_ had
looked at it, you would have seen nothing in it but a little twist of