The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Rivermouth Romance, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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Title: A Rivermouth Romance

Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23358]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE ***

Produced by David Widger

A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.

By Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901

I.

At five o'clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front
door of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town
of Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This
door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not
open itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who immediately
closed it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with an
embarrassed air on the stone step, and then, throwing a furtive glance
up at the second-story windows, passed hastily down the street towards
the river, keeping close to the fences and garden walls on her left.

There was a ghost-like stealthiness to Miss Margaret's movements, though
there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She
was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing
low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly
meaningless if the features had not been emphasized--italicized, so to
speak--by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would
have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer
to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her glory
was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She
wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow
crape bonnet profusely decorated with azure, orange, and magenta
artificial flowers. In her hand she carried a white parasol. The newly
risen sun, ricocheting from the bosom of the river and striking point
blank on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an
imposing spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in
spite of the bravery of h