ton. Above all, she was a _Moderate
Drinker_, (half a glass of Sherry with her dinner, you know,) and, as
such, could be proved to be the bulwark of the bar-room, and directly
responsible for the ruin of the most talented graduates of Harvard
College. The brutalities of every wife-beating drunkard just landed upon
our shores might be logically credited to Mrs. Widesworth, and to those
_respectable_ (with great sarcasm) _church-members_ (sarcasm more
intense) who countenanced the moderate use of intoxicating drinks.

For now there had come upon Foxden that political, sanatory,
anti-everything revival, which, in those days, thrilled through our
river-towns and took the place of the theological revival, which the
churches seemed too feeble to produce. And--but this is addressed only
to simple souls who think that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and Luther
instituted the Reformation--the settlement of Miss Patience Hurribattle
in a Foxden boarding-house produced the social upheaval which shook the
place. Of course, the enlightened reader of the "Atlantic" is well aware
that the mighty personages of history may be philosophically bejuggled
out of all claim to the admiration or reprobation of men. What did they
do but react on the society which created them?--what were they but the
average tendencies of an age clad in petticoats or top-boots, as the
case might be? So let it be written, that the great Cosmos-machine had
ground itself to the precise point which necessitated a reformatory
tumult in Foxden, and it mattered little who happened to be there to
patronize it.

For several previous years Miss Hurribattle had borne about her an
uncomfortable turbulence of heroic effort. She had gradually accustomed
herself to regard our crooked humanity as something capable of being
caught up and reformed by a rapacious philanthropist. She had reached a
mental condition to which the time was as thoroughly out of joint as it
ever appeared to Hamlet, although, unlike that impracticable character,
she took great comfort in the belief that she was especially born to set
it right. The choice varieties of _men_ know that truth as it is and
truth as it appears to them are very different matters. But, thank
Heaven, the feminine nature is bound by no such doleful barrier! The man
who thinks is limited; the woman who feels may expand indefinitely. Miss
Hurribattle's mission was to attract the world's capital of unemployed
sentiment, and to set it to