han the getting of a loving wife and
thrifty helpmeet ten years older than himself.

When a widower, like the Doctor, is but fifty, with the look of a much
younger man, people are apt to talk about the chances of his marrying
again. Before Mrs. Bugbee had been dead a twelve-month, rumors were as
plenty as blackberries that the Doctor had been seen, late on Sunday
evenings, leaving this house, or that house, the dwelling-place of
some marriageable lady; and if he had finally espoused all whom the
gossips reported he was going to marry, he would have had as many
wives as any Turkish pasha or Mormon elder. It was doubtless true that
he called at certain places more frequently than had been his custom
in Mrs. Bugbee's lifetime. This, he assured Cornelia, to whom the
reports I have mentioned occasioned some uneasiness, was because he
was more often summoned to attend, in a professional way, at those
places, than he had ever been of old; which was true enough, I dare
say, for more spinsters and widows were taken ailing about this time
than had ever been ill at once before. Be that as it may, certain
arrangements which the Doctor presently made in his domestic affairs
did not seem to foretoken an immediate change of condition.

Miss Statira Blake, whom the Doctor engaged as housekeeper, was the
youngest daughter of an honest shoemaker, who formerly flourished at
Belfield Green, where he was noted for industry, a fondness for
reading, a tenacious memory, a ready wit, and a fluent tongue. In
politics he was a radical, and in religion a schismatic. The little
knot of Presbyterian Federalist magnates, who used to assemble at the
tavern to discuss affairs of church and state over mugs of flip and
tumblers of sling, regarded him with feelings of terror and
aversion. The doughty little cobbler made nothing of attacking them
single-handed, and putting them utterly to rout; for he was a dabster
at debate, and entertained as strong a liking for polemics as for
books. Nay, he was a thorn in the side of the parson himself, for
whom he used to lie in wait with knotty questions,--snares set to
entrap the worthy divine, in the hope of beguiling him into a
controversy respecting some abstruse point of doctrine, in which the
cobbler, who had every verse of the Bible at his tongue's end, was not
apt to come off second best.

But one day, Tommy Blake, being at a raising where plenty of liquor
was furnished, (as the fashion used to be,) slippe