n dead for many years--was an
aristocrat by virtue of inborn prejudices and convictions, in
despite of circumstances. The neighbors said that Mrs. Zelotes
Brewster had always been high-feeling, and had held up her head with
the best. It would have been nearer the truth to say that she held
up her head above the best. No one seeing the erect old woman, in
her draperies of the finest black goods to be bought in the city,
could estimate in what heights of thin upper air of spiritual
consequence her head was elevated. She had always a clear sight of
the head-tops of any throng in which she found herself, and queens
or duchesses would have been no exception. She would never have
failed to find some stool of superior possessions or traits upon
which to raise herself, and look down upon crown and coronet. When
she read in the papers about the marriage of a New York belle to an
English duke, she reflected that the duke could be by no means as
fine a figure of a man as Zelotes had been, and as her son Andrew
was, although both her husband and son had got all their education
in the town schools, and had worked in shoe-shops all their lives.
She could have looked at a palace or a castle, and have remained
true to the splendors of her little one-story-and-a-half house with
a best parlor and sitting-room, and a shed kitchen for use in hot
weather.

She would not for one instant have been swerved from utmost
admiration and faith in her set of white-and-gold wedding china by
the contemplation of Copeland and Royal Sevres. She would have
pitted her hair-cloth furniture of the ugliest period of household
art against all the Chippendales and First Empire pieces in
existence.

As Mrs. Zelotes had never seen any household possessions to equal
her own, let alone to surpass them, she was of the same mind with
regard to her husband and his family, herself and her family, her
son and little granddaughter. She never saw any gowns and shawls
which compared with hers in fineness and richness; she never tasted
a morsel of cookery which was not as sawdust when she reflected upon
her own; and all that humiliated her in the least, or caused her to
feel in the least dissatisfied, was her son's wife and her family
and antecedents.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster had considered that her son Andrew was
marrying immeasurably beneath him when he married Fanny Loud, of
Loudville. Loudville was a humble, an almost disreputably humble,
suburb of the little provi