at time that the
meetings were taking place, and the name of the village had been
changed to Amity. It had been held to be a happy, even a noble and
generous thought, on the part of Josiah Saunders. "Would that in such
wise, by a combination of poetical aspirations and practical deeds,
all differences might be adjusted upon this globe," said the Amity
Argus, in an account of the meeting. Thenceforth, Ramsey Four Corners
became Amity, and the most genteel of the ladies had Amity engraved
on their note-paper.

Mrs. Amelia Ramsey and George, who had suffered somewhat in their
feelings, in spite of the poetical adjustment of the difference, had
no note-paper. They were poor, else Amity might never have been. They
lived in a house which had been, in its day, as pretentious as the
Saunders mansion. At the time of Maria's first visit to Amity it had
been a weather-beaten old structure, which had not been painted for
years, and had a curious effect as of a blur on the landscape, with
its roof and walls of rain and sun stained shingles and clapboards,
its leaning chimneys, and its Corinthian pillars widely out of the
perpendicular, supporting crazily the roofs of the double veranda.
When Maria went to Amity to begin teaching, the old house had
undergone a transformation. She gazed at it with amazement out of the
sitting-room window, which faced it, on the afternoon of her arrival.

"Why, what has happened to the old Ramsey house?" she asked her aunt
Maria.

"Well, in the first place, a cousin died and left them some money,"
replied Aunt Maria. "It was a matter of ten thousand dollars. Then
Amelia and George went right to work and fixed up the house. It was
none of my business, but it seemed dreadful silly to me. If I had
been in their place, I'd have let that old ramshackle of a place go
to pot and bought a nice little new house. There was one they could
have got for fifteen hundred dollars, on this side of the river; but
no, they went to work, and they must have laid out three thousand
clear on that old thing."

"It is beautiful!" said Maria, regarding it with admiration.

"Well, I don't think it's very beautiful, but everybody to their
liking," replied Aunt Maria, with a sniff of her high, transparent
nostrils. "For my part, I'd rather have a little, clean new house
before all the old ones, that folks have died in and worried in, in
creation."

But Maria continued to regard the renovated Ramsey house with
admiration.