s of lavender in an
old chest of drawers, are a saving grace to other quite as dreary
nooks and corners.

Here and there at what is termed the West End is a neat brick
mansion with garden attached, where nature asserts herself in dahlias
and china-asters; but the houses are mostly frame houses that have
taken a prevailing dingy tint from the breath of the tall chimneys
which dominate the village. The sidewalks in the more aristocratic
quarter are covered with a thin, elastic paste of asphalt, worn down
to the gravel in patches, and emitting in the heat of the day an
astringent, bituminous odor. The population is chiefly of the rougher
sort, such as breeds in the shadow of foundries and factories, and if
the Protestant pastor and the fatherly Catholic priest, whose
respective lots are cast there, have sometimes the sense of being
missionaries dropped in the midst of a purely savage community, the
delusion is not wholly unreasonable.

The irregular heaps of scoria that have accumulated in the
vicinity of the iron works give the place an illusive air of
antiquity; bit it is neither ancient nor picturesque. The oldest and
most pictorial thing in Stillwater is probably the marble yard,
around three sides of which the village may be said to have sprouted
up rankly, bearing here and there an industrial blossom in the shape
of an iron-mill or a cardigan-jacket manufactory. Rowland Slocum, a
man of considerable refinement, great kindness of heart, and no
force, inherited the yard from his father, and a the period this
narrative opens (the summer of 187-) was its sole proprietor and
nominal manager, the actual manager being Richard Shackford, a
prospective partner in the business and the betrothed of Mr. Slocum's
daughter Margaret.

Forty years ago every tenth person in Stillwater was either a
Shackford or a Slocum. Twenty years later both names were nearly
extinct there. That fatality which seems to attend certain New
England families had stripped every leaf but two from the Shackford
branch. These were Lemuel Shackford, then about forty-six, and
Richard Shackford, aged four. Lemuel Shackford had laid up a
competency as ship-master in the New York and Calcutta trade, and in
1852 had returned to his native village, where he found his name and
stock represented only by little Dick, a very cheerful orphan, who
stared complacently with big blue eyes at fate, and made mud-pies in
the lane whenever he could elude the vigilance of