without the protection of kings or lords, or a national church, or a standing army; and by what contrivance they render harmless the hosts of paupers and criminals, which want and worthlessness drive from the shores of the old world, for refuge in the new. The elder daughters of Mr. Atherton had the usual cockney contempt for all foreigners, especially Yankees ; and although conscious of their father's humiliating necessities, felt themselves better than any thing in Boston. The oldest of these young la dies, who was about five-and-twenty, was what is called showy nay, she was handsome. Fine, dark, glossy hair, fine teeth, fine complexion, brilliant eyes, tall person, fashionable dress. and an animated manner, fascinated the Vermont yeoman; who would have been despised by the second sister, a more decided beauty (though very like the first), and perhaps by Louisa, the oldest of the three, if the prudent father had not given her some hints which were not to be neglected. In short, Jeremiah Spiffard married the beautiful English fine lady, and took her to Spiffard-town, at that time consisting of five houses, a schoolhouse, tavern, church, and blacksmith's-shop. What a change was here! From the metropolis of Great Britain, to a paltry village in Vermont. From a Lord mayor's ball to a husking frolic. To live in Boston was death to Louisa, (so she said), what, then, was life in Spiffard-town? Her husband's good sense and kind behaviour, with handsome furniture and garniture brought from Boston, made this death in life somewhat supportable. Then there was some satisfaction in showing off to the natives, and in being the great lady of the place. Besides that, during the first year of her residence, she experienced the fears, hopes, and joys, attending the birth of our hero. Then came a visit to Boston to see her family, who were preparing to return, disappointed, to England. They did return; and Mrs. Spiffard the second, returned to Spiffardtown, feeling that she was abandoned by all that she held most valuable in the world: for what, alas! to a London lady, is a Yankee husband, and a Yankee child, if she is doomed to live in a Yankee village? Thus Squire Spiffard had not only got a town lady, but a foreign lady-a London lady-for a wife. Never let an American marry an Englishwoman, unless he is willing and resolved to abandon his country. We say English, because we know more of them, and think higher of them, than of any other Europeans. If an American marries in England, and brings his wife home, it is almost impossible but that domestic misery is the consequence. No Englishman has a just notion of this country; and we must not expect better information in the better sex, who are accustomed to rely for that article too much upon the stronger. A woman, who, even under the influence of love, gives up parents and country, will find every disappointment doubled, and every sorrow aggravated, by the recollection of what she left behind; and disappointments and sorrows will come, do what we will. Spiffard had the consolation of knowing that he did not induce his wife to leave her country; but then he was the cause that she did not return to it. In short, he had made a very foolish choice of a wife. Mrs. Spiffard became a very discontented woman; and not the less so, for finding that her claims to superiority were resisted or laughed at by the wives and daughters of the settlers, who rapidly increased her husband's village; many of whom were, in all the better part of knowledge, better instructed than the squire's lady. CHAPTER VI. A Sporting Gentleman, and a Philosophic Lady. "Alas! poor hurt fowl! Now will he creep in sedges." ANOTHER year passed, and another child was given to the husband; and early in the third year of her residence at Spiffard-town, the arrival of an English gentleman of fortune, with his wife and two young children, gave a gleam of joy to the misplaced Louisa; but only to plunge her in deeper darkness. The gentleman brought letters from Mrs. Spiffard's father; and having, as he thought, determined to make America the place of his future residence, only inquired for a good sporting country; and being told that Spiffard-town and its vicinity abounded in game, and was destitute of game-laws, he never doubted that the pheasant of Asia (domesticated in his father's park), and the partridge of Europe, were natives of the Green Mountains; especially as he found "real English snipe” on the borders of the lake, woodcock on the upland, and deer, by the herd, “all along Champlain." He fixed, at once, on that sequestered spot, purchased land, and began to plan a mansionhouse, park, gardens, and pleasure-grounds; but, in the meantime, found no difficulty in purchasing the house and "improvements" of a sturdy yeoman, who began to think he had too many neighbours, and turned his thoughts to the Genesee country. The lady of this gentleman had no apparent wish for introduction to those of her own sex and station in Boston (the port at which they landed), but seemed willing to seek romantic solitude among those, whom she called "the unsophisticated farmers of a new and innocent world." This gentleman's name was Lovedog. This is not a coined name to express character, like Fielding's Allworthy, or the Lovegold, the Crackjaw, and the thousand others of Comedy, but a real family, English name; and that it should denote the bearer's character, is not our fault. It certainly did so for Mr. Lovedog bestowed no small portion of his affections on some very fine pointers, setters, and terriers, who had accompanied him from England. Until he could determine on a site for his intended buildings and plantations, he endeavoured to content himself in the house recently built by a Connecticut settler, who, having got all comfortable about him, was very glad to sell his buildings and go west, leaving the rich Englishman to furnish his purchase by importations from Boston and New-York. The sportsman was out with his gun and dogs every day and all day. Sometimes Spiffard accompanied, but generally he went alone-his dogs his only companions. Spiffard used to say, that it was very pleasant to him, to ramble over hills and dales, and that he felt great exultation when he attained sufficient skill to strike down a distant bird in its rapid flight, and to be as expert with a double-barreled fowling-piece, as he had from youth been with a musket and rifle ; but when he saw that he wounded more birds than he killed-that he frequently, after having brought to the earth, with a broken wing, an innocent and a harmless fellow-creature, had to chase it before he could make prey of it, and while struggling in agony and terror, to crash its head or dash it on a stone through mere mercy, he began to think that what was sport to him was worse than death to creatures endowed with life by the same Creator who blessed him with health and strength; creatures enjoying the same blessings in another degree;-this "gave him pause"-and reason told him that he was counteracting God's will. He frequently observed too that a bird though wounded escaped, and he knew that there was no surgeon to cure the wound, or nurse to attend the patient-for "misery doth part the flux of company" -the herd shun the wounded stag-the struck bird "seeks the rushes" and there pines and dies in solitude. One day Spiffard exultingly brought down a bird from its flight-the fowl was winged only, and ran. The triumphant man pursued-overtook, and placed his foot on his victim. He stooped to seize it-the bird turned up his eye and looked him full in the face with such an imploring, such a reproving glance, that his heart smote him; and his reason rebuked him as a convicted murderer—a murderer for sport. In times long after he has said, “I have seen that eye a thousand times." He never discharged a gun to kill for pleasure again. At the proper season for the sport, for the time and season for hunting each species of game was observed by the rough Vermonters-Lovedog was shown, by a neighbour, the manner of hunting the deer in America. Here the free denizens of the forest were as free as the citizens of the republic who trespassed on their haunts, and sought their lives in sport. Lovedog had been only accustomed to see the beautiful animal in the parks of the lordly aristocrats of England, protected from commoners by laws which seemed to value their lives as if equal to the lives of men, but which only protected them from vulgar interference with the lord's pastimes, to be sacrificed to the luxury, the pleasures, and the pomp of the chosen few, the titled Nimrods, deriving what they call their rights from the conquering Norman, who desolated provinces to form privileged hunting forests for his own gratification. The English sportsman now saw the beautiful animal in a state of nature, free to rove his native woodlands. The novelty pleased the gentleman for a time, but he soon became weary of the change; and the deer hunt of Vermont suffered in comparison with the sports he had been used to, as much as the shooting of the partridges, snipe, and grouse of the country, appeared contemptible and laborious, compared with the same kind of bloody amusement, of which he had been a privileged participant in the enclosures devoted to the lordly sport. He sighed for the park and the race-course VOL. I. 5 of England. If he had sighed for the intellectual pleasures of that favoured country, he might be pitied in his voluntary exile, but such pleasures were to him unknown. Therefore while Lovedog continued in Vermont, his pointers and setters were almost exclusively his associates. Spiffard said, some time after, that his dogs were his only fit companions. In truth, it was hard to conceive that an English gentleman of fortune (and fortune he certainly had) could be so profoundly ignorant as Lovedog. Not so his wife. She was almost blue. She had not only read, but conversed with the Darwins, Hayleys, Sheridans, Moores, and Sewards. But she was as totally ignorant of the world she had come to, as she was of the world to come. She thought she was a philosopher, and was willing to be thought an atheist, rather than her philosophy should be doubted. Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Helvetius, Hume and Gibbon, were at her tongue's tip. She imagined that on coming to America she should find an Arcadia, such as she imagined Arcadia had been; and was determined to be the lawgiver, the female Solon of an Utopia, such as she thought an Utopia ought to be. She found herself in Spiffard-town, among practical pioneers, and was soon solicited for her contribution to the building a new church, and the support of a new clergyman who preached thorough-going Calvinism in the school house, until his pulpit and steeple should be erected. Disappointed in not finding an Utopia, she imagined herself in a Botany bay. Mrs. Lovedog soon tired of, and became tiresome to her neighbours. The yeomen's wives, (simple souls!) were shocked at what they thought indecency, and she was disgusted by what she (enlightened creature!) termed mauvaise honte, false delicacy, and unphilosophical ignorance. Mrs. Spiffard was neither a blue, nor a Yankee, and therefore was treated with indulgent condescending politeness; a mode of treatment sometimes felt as insult: not so in this instance. Being countrywomen, there was a bond of union which continued unimpaired when the bonds were all broken which united Mrs. Lovedog and the other females of the village. Mrs. Spiffard, though she had conformed, by degrees, to the mode of those among whom she had been thrown, was. pleased to find that bold-and as we think, indelicate style of conversation and choice of subject in Mrs. Lovedog, to which she had been accustomed at home. She was become, in most things, a disciple of the dashing female philosopher; but at length Spiffard became dissatisfied; for he found that the learned lady prescribed ether and laudanum to his wife as well as materialism and irreligion. |