Perhaps it would have been funny, perhaps pathetic, to analyze the mixed
consternation and delight of Mehitable Hyde at such _bona-fide_ evidence
of a lover. Poor woman's heart!--altogether solitary and
desolate,--starved of its youth and its joy,--given over to the chilly
reign of patience and resignation,--afraid of life,--without strength,
or hope, or pleasure,--and all at once Paradise dawns!--her cold,
innocent life bursts into fiery and odorous bloom; she has found her
fate, and its face is keen with splendor, like a young angel's. Poor,
deluded, blessed, rapture-smitten woman!

Blame her as you will, indignant maidens of Greenfield, Miss Flint, and
Miss Sharp, and Miss Skinner! You may have had ten lovers and twenty
flirtations apiece, and refused half-a-dozen good matches for the best
of reasons; you, no doubt, would have known better than to marry a man
who was a villain from his very physiognomy; but my heart must needs
grow tender toward Miss Hyde; a great joy is as pathetic as a sorrow.
Did you never cry over a doting old man?

But when Mrs. Smith's son John, a youth of ten, saw, by the light of an
incautious lamp that illuminated a part of the south parlor, a
good-night kiss bestowed upon the departing Abner by Miss Hitty Hyde and
absolutely returned by said Abner, and when John told his mother, and
his mother revealed it to Miss Flint, Miss Flint to Miss Skinner, and so
forth, and so on, till it reached the minister's wife, great was the
uproar in Greenfield; and the Reverend Mrs. Perkins put on her gray
bonnet and went over to remonstrate with Hitty on the spot.

Whether people will ever learn the uselessness of such efforts is yet a
matter for prophecy. Miss Hyde heard all that was said, and replied very