sufficient thus far, in a cordial neighborhood like Walton, when
industry and temperance were cardinal virtues not carried to excess;
and he was rather a favorite among the young women.

The peculiar languor and richness of his complexion,--the dark eyes,
soft as an Indian girl's,--the mouth, melting and red as the grapes
where under a tropical sun his foreign mother had lain, and, gathering
them ripe, had dropped them lazily into his baby mouth: these were new
and strange features in the Saxon community where he had accidentally
been left on the death of his father, who was shot at Saratoga. The
mother lingered awhile, and then dropped away, leaving Swan to thrive
in the bracing air in which she had shivered to death.

Many Sundays before this, Swan had looked at Colonel Fox's pew, and,
looking, loved.

Dorcas looked occasionally.

All the time, while the minister preached, she twiddled her
caraway-stems, sometimes biting a seed in two very softly between her
little teeth, and keeping, on the whole, an appearance of exemplary
devoutness. When Father Boardman reached "sixthly," she raised her
eyes, and saw Henry Mowers looking straight at her. Then she
dropped her eyelids at once, sniffed delicately at her bouquet of
southernwood, and, gaining strength from its pungency, applied herself
to staring once more at the great pine pulpit, where, like a very old
sparrow on the house-top, Father Boardman denounced and anathematized
at leisure all who did not think as he did. By degrees, all the eyes
in Dorcas's neighborhood that had been any length of time in the world
were dozing and closing with the full leave of the spirit. Finally,
when Father Boardman entered on the "improvement," Dorcas, who had
not heard a word, looked again in the direction of the Dorr pew. Henry
Mowers had succumbed to Morpheus half an hour before. Still there
flamed on the deep, bewitching eyes of Day; and as all the rest in her
neighborhood had gone to sleep, and the young girl had really nothing
specially to keep herself awake with, she looked up, too, and then
down, and then rosily, and timidly, and consciously, and then at
him once more. By that time she blushed again, and a smile was just
beginning to wake from its sleep in the corner of her mouth, when
a rush, a rising, and a general clatter and banging of pew-seats
announced the blessed news of suspended instruction.

In the fashion of sixty years ago, the congregation waited reverently,