ed, that was of no consequence in the prayers, since every
one had a prayer-book; and as for the sermon, she continued with some
causticity, we all of us heard more of it than we could remember when we
got home.

This youthful generation was not particularly literary. The young ladies
who frizzed their hair, and gathered it all into large barricades in
front of their heads, leaving their occipital region exposed without
ornament, as if that, being a back view, was of no consequence, dreamed
as little that their daughters would read a selection of German poetry,
and be able to express an admiration for Schiller, as that they would
turn all their hair the other way--that instead of threatening us with
barricades in front, they would be most killing in retreat,

'And, like the Parthian, wound us as they fly.'

Those charming well-frizzed ladies spoke French indeed with considerable
facility, unshackled by any timid regard to idiom, and were in the habit
of conducting conversations in that language in the presence of their
less instructed elders; for according to the standard of those backward
days, their education had been very lavish, such young ladies as Miss
Landor, Miss Phipps, and the Miss Pittmans, having been 'finished' at
distant and expensive schools.

Old lawyer Pittman had once been a very important person indeed, having
in his earlier days managed the affairs of several gentlemen in those
parts, who had subsequently been obliged to sell everything and leave the
country, in which crisis Mr. Pittman accommodatingly stepped in as a
purchaser of their estates, taking on himself the risk and trouble of a
more leisurely sale; which, however, happened to turn out very much to
his advantage. Such opportunities occur quite unexpectedly in the way of
business. But I think Mr. Pittman must have been unlucky in his later
speculations, for now, in his old age, he had not the reputation of being
very rich; and though he rode slowly to his office in Milby every morning
on an old white hackney, he had to resign the chief profits, as well as
the active business of the firm, to his younger partner, Dempster. No one
in Milby considered old Pittman a virtuous man, and the elder townspeople
were not at all backward in narrating the least advantageous portions of
his biography in a very round unvarnished manner. Yet I could never
observe that they trusted him any the less, or liked him any the worse.
Indeed, Pittman and Demp