t with a gentle series of
groans, such as were her general expression of approbation, swaying
herself backward and forward; while Mrs. Brown gave a sort of toss and
snort, and said that for her part she always thought people knew what
they did know,--but she guessed she was mistaken.

The conversation was here interrupted by the civilities attendant on
the reception of Mrs. Jones,--a broad, buxom, hearty soul, who had come
on horseback from a farm about three miles distant.

Smiling with rosy content, she presented Mrs. Katy a small pot of
golden butter,--the result of her forenoon's churning.

There are some people so evidently broadly and heartily of this world,
that their coming into a room always materializes the conversation. We
wish to be understood that we mean no disparaging reflection on such
persons;--they are as necessary to make up a world as cabbages to make
up a garden; the great healthy principles of cheerfulness and animal
life seem to exist in them in the gross; they are wedges and ingots of
solid, contented vitality. Certain kinds of virtues and Christian
graces thrive in such people as the first crop of corn does in the
bottom-lands of the Ohio. Mrs. Jones was a church-member, a regular
church-goer, and planted her comely person plump in front of Dr. H.
every Sunday, and listened to his searching and discriminating sermons
with broad, honest smiles of satisfaction. Those keen distinctions as
to motives, those awful warnings and urgent expostulations, which made
poor Deacon Twitchel weep, she listened to with great, round, satisfied
eyes, making to all, and after all, the same remark,--that it was good,
and she liked it, and the Doctor was a good man; and on the present
occasion, she announced her pot of butter as one fruit of her
reflections after the last discourse.

"You see," she said, "as I was a-settin' in the spring-house, this
mornin', a-workin' my butter, I says to Dinah,--'I'm goin' to carry a
pot of this down to Miss Scudder for the Doctor,--I got so much good
out of his Sunday's sermon. And Dinah she says to me, says she,--'Laws,
Miss Jones. I thought you was asleep, for sartin!' But I wasn't; only I
forgot to take any caraway-seed in the mornin', and so I kinder missed
it; you know it 'livens one up. But I never lost myself so but what I
kinder heerd him goin' on, on, sort o' like,--and it sounded _all_ sort
o' _good;_ and so I thought of the Doctor to-day."

"Well, I'm sure," said Au