thought happy marriages, and embittered more
hearts than any two persons in all the country round.

They lived in the heart of our village, (and never did that heart
quicken with one pulsation of excitement or surprise, or joy or
sorrow, but they were the first to search into the why and wherefore,)
in a large two story house, isolated from the rest, which seemed to
emulate its occupants in stiffness and rigidity, and whose glassy eyes
looked out as coldly upon the beauteous face of nature, as they from
their own stern "windows of the soul," upon the human face divine.
There was no comfort, no home-look about the place; even the flowers
seemed not to grow by their own sweet will, but came up as they were
bidden, tall and straight, and stiff. And the glorious rays of the sun
glanced off from the dazzling whiteness of the forbidding mansion, as
though they had met with a sudden rebuff, and had failed to penetrate
an atmosphere where every thing seemed to possess an antipathy to the
bright and the joyous. It was strange to see what a chilliness
pervaded the spot. The interior of the house (which I once saw when a
child; and, oh! I never _can_ forget the long, long-drawn sigh that
escaped my lips as I once more found myself without the precincts of a
place where my buoyant spirits seemed suddenly frozen beneath the
glance of those two spinsters, where even the large, lean cat paced
the floor with such a prim, stately step, now and then pausing to fix
her cold, gray eyes upon my face, as though to question the cause of
my intrusion, and also to intimate that she had no sort of sympathy
with either my feelings, or those of children in general.) Every thing
bore the same immovable look--the narrow, high-backed chairs seemed as
if they had grown out of the floor, and were destined to remain as
stationary as the oaks of the forest; the "primeval carpet," over
which the Misses Nancy and Jerusha Simpkins walked as though mentally
enumerating the lines that crossed each other in such exact squares,
never was littered by a single shred; and the high, old-fashioned
clock still maintained its position in the corner from year to year,
seeming to take a sort of malicious satisfaction in calmly ticking the
hours away which bore the Misses Simpkins nearer and nearer to that
_certain_ age (which they, if truth must be told, were in nowise
desirous to reach) when all further endeavors to conceal the
foot-marks of stern old Father Time would