nitarian faction who
had been Parson Fair's old parishioners. At half-past seven o'clock
the street was full of people. The village women rustled through the
soft dusk with silken whispers of wide best skirts. Young girls with
spring buds in their hair flounced about with white muslins, and
fluttering with ribbons, flitted along. The men, holding back firmly
their best broadcloth shoulders, marched past in their creaking
Sunday shoes. Before eight o'clock the fine old rooms in Parson
Fair's house were lined with faces solemnly expectant, as the faces
of simple country folk are wont to be before the great rites of love
and death.

The women sat with their mitted hands folded on their silken laps,
their best brooches pinning decorously their fine-wrought
neckerchiefs, their bosoms filled with sober knowledge and patient
acquiescence. The young girls sat among them very still, with the
stillness of unrest, like birds who alight only to fly, their soft
cheeks burning, their necks and arms showing rosy through their
laces, their little clasped fingers full of pulses, and their hearts
tumultuous and stirred to imagination by the sweet surmise and
ignorance of love. They looked seldom at the young men, and the young
men at them, as they sat waiting. Still there were some who had
learned in city schools the suavities which cover like clothes the
primal emotions of life, and they moved about with exchanges of fine
courtesies, while the others looked at them wondering.

When the tall clock in the south room struck eight, there was a hush
among these few who had learned to flock gracefully, chattering like
birds, bearing always the same aspect to one another, without regard
to selfish joys or pains. The lawyer's wife, in a grand gown and
topknot of feathers, which she was said to have worn to a great party
at the governor's house in Boston, composed to majestic approval her
handsome florid face, and stood back with a white-gloved hand on an
arm of each of her daughters, slender and pretty, and unshrinkingly
radiant in the faces of the doctor's college-bred son and his
visiting classmate. The doctor's wife, also, who had come of a grand
family, and appeared always on festive occasions in some
well-preserved splendor of her maiden days, which had been prolonged,
drew back, spreading out with both hands a vast expanse of purple
velvet skirt. She quite eclipsed as with a murky purple cloud the two
meek elderly women and a timid you