ingly after this graceful assent followed an "Unfavorable
Answer," which Sam Murdock would also see when he opened the book at
page 251; and still more portentously on the same page was a letter
which Miss Selina Murdock herself might choose to write him, a sickening
and dreadful thing entitled, "Unfavorable Reply on the Ground of
Poverty."

"To say that I do not feel pleased and flattered at your proposal would
be to tell a useless untruth," the thing began speciously. "But how are
we situated, what hope of happiness with our unsettled prospects and
worse than small means? Industry has doubtless never been and never will
be wanting on your part, but--" and so to its dreadful end. It was
almost base in its coldness and mercenary calculation. That phrase about
the "useless untruth" implied even a dubious and considering morality;
and the conclusion, "we must not entail misery upon others as well as
ourselves by a too hasty step," argued a nature cautious in the extreme.

Yet Mr. Gaskell was too evidently a man of the world, knowing in his
ripe experience that there existed a sufficient number of such cold
natures to warrant the obtrusion of this heart-rending formula; and I
doubt not that these negative specimens of the possible alone restrained
my namesake from going beyond mere copies of that first letter.

It will be seen that the influence of Mrs. Potts pervaded our utmost
social and commercial limits. And when the "Compendium" had become a
centre-table ornament in the homes of the rich, and a bulky object of awe
in humbler abodes, she went over the ground again with other volumes
calculated to serve her double purpose, from "Dr. Chase's Receipt Book"
to "Picturesque Italy, profusely Illustrated." She also purveyed a line
of "art-pieces," including "Wide Awake and Fast Asleep," "The Monarch of
the Glen," "Woman Gathering Fagots," and "Retreat from Moscow." Also,
little Roscoe, out of school hours, took subscriptions for the _Youth's
Companion_.

Yet the town long bore it with a gentle fortitude. I believe it was not
until the following spring that murmurs were really noticeable.
Naturally they were directed against Solon Denney. By that time Westley
Keyts was greeting Solon morosely, though without open cavil; but Asa
Bundy no longer hesitated to speak out. He quoted Scripture to Solon
about the house that was swept and garnished, and the seven other wicked
spirits that entered it, making its last state worse than