cow mortgaged to Jethro Bass, though his father, the tithing-man,
doesn't know it.)

MODERATOR, SAMUEL PRICE.

(Natural ambition--dove of oratory and Jacksonian principles.)

etc., etc.

The notes are mine, not Moses's. Strange that they didn't occur to
Moses. What a wealthy man has our hero become at thirty-one! Jethro Bass
was rich beyond the dreams of avarice--for Coniston. Truth compels me
to admit that the sum total of all his mortgages did not amount to nine
thousand "dollars"; but that was a large sum of money for Coniston in
those days, and even now. Nathan Bass had been a saving man, and had
left to his son one-half of this fortune. If thrift and the ability to
gain wealth be qualities for a hero, Jethro had them--in those days.

The Sunday before March meeting, it blew bitter cold, and Priest Ware,
preaching in mittens, denounced sedition in general. Underneath him,
on the first landing of the high pulpit, the deacons sat with knitted
brows, and the key-note from Isaiah Prescott's pitch pipe sounded like
mournful echo of the mournful wind without.

Monday was ushered in with that sleet storm to which the almanacs still
refer, and another scarcely less important event occurred that day which
we shall have to pass by for the present; on Tuesday, the sleet still
raging, came the historic town meeting. Deacon Moses Hatch, his chores
done and his breakfast and prayers completed, fought his way with his
head down through a white waste to the meeting-house door, and unlocked
it, and shivered as he made the fire. It was certainly not good election
weather, thought Moses, and others of the orthodox persuasion, high in
office, were of the same opinion as they stood with parted coat tails
before the stove. Whoever had stirred up and organized the hordes,
whoever was the author of that ticket of the discontented, had not
counted upon the sleet. Heaven-sent sleet, said Deacon Ira Perkins, and
would not speak to his son Chester, who sat down just then in one of the
rear slips. Chester had become an agitator, a Jacksonian Democrat, and
an outcast, to be prayed for but not spoken to.

We shall leave them their peace of mind for half an hour more,
those stanch old deacons and selectmen, who did their duty by their
fellow-citizens as they saw it and took no man's bidding. They could not
see the trackless roads over the hills, now becoming tracked, and the
bent figures driving doggedly against the st