Home as Found by James Fenimore Cooper

Author:James Fenimore Cooper [Cooper, James Fenimore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2003-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter XVI.

Her breast was a brave palace, a broad street,

Where all heroic, ample thoughts did meet,

Where nature such a tenement had ta'en,

That other souls, to hers, dwelt in 'a lane.

JOHN NORTON.

The village of Templeton, it has been already intimated, was a miniature town. Although it contained within the circle of its houses, half-a-dozen residences with grounds, and which were dignified with names, as has been also said, it did not cover a surface of more than a mile square; that disposition to concentration, which is as peculiar to an American town, as the disposition to diffusion is peculiar to the country population, and which seems almost to prescribe that a private dwelling shall have but three windows in front, and a facade of twenty-five feet, having presided at the birth of this spot, as well as at the birth of so many of its predecessors and contemporaries. In one of its more retired streets (for Templeton had its publicity and retirement, the latter after a very village fashion, however,) dwelt a widow--bewitched of small worldly means, five children, and of great capacity for circulating intelligence. Mrs. Abbott, for so was this demi-relict called, was just on the verge of what is termed the "good society" of the village, the most uneasy of all positions for an ambitious and ci-devant pretty woman to be placed in. She had not yet abandoned the hope of obtaining a divorce and its suites; was singularly, nay, rabidly devout, if we may coin the adverb; in her own eyes she was perfection, in those of her neighbours slightly objectionable; and she was altogether a droll, and by no means an unusual compound of piety, censoriousness, charity, proscription, gossip, kindness, meddling, ill-nature, and decency.

The establishment of Mrs. Abbott, like her house, was necessarily very small, and she kept no servant but a girl she called her help, a very suitable appellation, by the way, as they did most of the work of the mènage in common. This girl, in addition to cooking and washing, was the confidant of all her employer's wandering notions of mankind in general, and of her neighbours in particular; as often, helping her mistress in circulating her comments on the latter, as in anything else.

Mrs. Abbott knew nothing of the Effinghams, except by a hearsay that got its intelligence from her own school, being herself a late arrival in the place. She had selected Templeton as a residence on account of its cheapness, and, having neglected to comply with the forms of the world, by hesitating about making the customary visit to the Wigwam, she began to resent, in her spirit at least, Eve's delicate forbearance from obtruding herself, where, agreeably to all usage, she had a perfect right to suppose she was not desired. It was in this spirit, then, that she sat, conversing with Jenny, as the maid of all work was called, the morning after the conversation related in the last chapter, in her snug little parlour, sometimes plying

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