University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

The scene of our little history now changes to the
small village of K—, in the interior of the State of
New York: the period, about two years after the
sudden disappearance of Dr. Gray and his children
from Boston. The village was of no great pretension.
It lay in a wide valley encompassed by massive,
but not abrupt hills; and to the south and east flowed
small meandering rivers. It was of sufficient age to
be free from stumps, and the immediate enroachments
of the forests; possessed an air of thrift and comfort,
several respectable tenements, and a goodly number
of neat white cottages, surrounded with ample grounds
and embosomed in shrubbery. But it was laid out
absolutely without plan. Its principal street was
thrice the width usually granted to avenues of the
kind; and from its northern extremity, in wild irregularity,
diverged other streets towards every conceivable
point of the compass. Its principal ornaments,
in the way of buildings, were its churches and halls
of learning. Two respectable structures, one of stone
and the other of brick, were devoted to the purposes
of an academy; while several massive collegiate edifices
crowned a hill at the south. The “Brick academy,”
the germ of two noble institutions of learning,
in the poverty of a new settlement, had been built
and sustained as a classic school through its infancy,

by a voluntary mortgage on the property of the principal
inhabitants of the place. These, it is hardly
necessary to add, were staid New-Englanders.

It was spring-time, and the buds and foliage of village
and country were just bursting into a rejoicing
green,—when, one morning, the inhabitants of K—
became aware of an accession to their numbers. A
little dilapidated hovel, standing on a common, and
for a long period untenanted, had during the night
been accommodated with occupants. A poor broken-down
horse, hitched to a broken weather-beaten cart,
stood by the shattered door-way; and an elderly,
square-built man, was endeavouring, with refuse
boards and paper, to patch up the open windows. In
the appearance of this individual there was something
peculiar. He wore a faded lion-skin coat, of large
dimensions, and enormous pockets; and an old slouched
hat to match. He was of middle height, but thickset
and muscular; with a most massive chest and
head. His face was pale and wrinkled, surmounted
with a heavy Roman nose, and shaded by an abundance
of short grizzly hair. His eyebrows were
heavy and projecting, and beneath them were a pair
of cold, keen, gray eyes. His head he carried a little
on one side, as though his neck was stiff; and all his
movements were made with great deliberation, and
an obtrusive self-possession. His companions—for
he was not alone—were three lads of, perhaps, twelve,
ten, and eight years of age, ragged and filthy, without
shoes or hats; their long, tangled locks sticking
out in every direction, and bleached almost white by

exposure to the weather; and with scarcely clothes
enough, such as they were, to cover their nakedness.
The eldest was robust in appearance; the next in
size less so; while the youngest was painfully frail.

It is, perhaps needless to say, that these individuals
were Doctor Gray and his children. He had
consented to the loss of his standing in life, and to
the disruption and degradation of his family, as he
flattered himself, from a feeling of excusable pride;
an inability to brave the reverses of fortune amid the
scenes of his prosperity, and to bear up under the
sneers of rivals and the pity of sunshine friends.
But had he probed his heart deeper, he would have
discovered there a consciousness, that in order to
regain his lost ground and retrieve his fortunes, it
was necessary for him to relinquish the bottle; and
that for a sacrifice so great as this, he was not quite
ready—not yet. It is unnecessary to trace him
through the two years of intervening time. Suffice
it, that he had changed his place of abode more than
once, each time sinking lower in the scale of respectability;
until the little remnant of availables he had
managed to smuggle from the city having become
exhausted, he and his children were reduced to the
condition in which they have been described.

The inhabitants of K— looked on him with some
wonder and curiosity, but nobody molested him: and
soon he came to be known, on what authority no one
exactly knew, as Doctor Glegg. Ere long, the hut he
occupied became a charmed precinct to all the children;
for the door was kept carefully closed against

intruders; and as to windows, there was not a pane
of glass in any one of them; or other contrivance
for the admission of light, save a few straggling
patches of oiled paper. Stolen glimpses, it is true,
had been caught by the more curious of the urchins,
through the door-way, of a box, or large chest; and,
it was cautiously whispered around, and, at length
among the grown-up and gray-headed children of
the place, that Doctor Glegg was a miser; and that
the chest in question contained his gold.

But the Doctor was poor enough; so poor, that his
miserable and cheerless tenement was rarely out of
the reach of absolute want. Indeed, it is surprising
how he and his wretched children managed to live at
all. Unfitted by the habits of his life for manual
labour; and maintaining, even in his most abject degradation,
a sort of personal respect, which forbade a
resort to menial offices, his sphere of exertion was
limited. Instead, therefore, of resorting to days'
works, he planted patches of corn and potatoes, on
shares; and secured a little hay in the same manner,
for the benefit of his famished horse; and in place of
the carriage to which he had been accustomed, he rode
to and from his fields in his cart; while his elfin boys
scoured the commons for refuse wood, and, bare-headed
and bare legged, waded and fished in the
streams.

As time passed on, Doctor Glegg became more and
more an object of curiosity. It was evident to all,
that he was intemperate; but he was never seen
drunk, and was never vulgar or profane. It was

perceived that he was a man of learning and of parts;
and that his conversation was a singular mixture of
wit and wisdom, of bombast and simplicity, according
to the circumstances under which he was accosted.
With men of sense he talked sense; with scholars, he
was scholastic; with fools, bombastic; and to those
who pressed him with an impertinent curiosity, he
was utterly unintelligible. To the last class his replies
were somewhat after this sort:

“Mon Dieu! man is a curious biped, made up of
the most heterogeneous and incomprehensible parts.
Procul! procul! scat! Neither him nor his concomitants
have I any desire to know; but consign them
all, in one conglomerated mass, to the crocus acclicatus
of the common cant.”

Others, however, who fell into casual conversation
with him, and did not attempt to pry into his circumstances,
or the events of his life found his mind well
stored with a variety of information, which he was
capable of imparting in forcible and appropriate language.
A student of the Academy having politely
accosted him, Dr. Gray said,

“You are in pursuit of knowledge, my young sir:
and among all the attainments after which the scholar
should strive, nothing is more important than a just
appreciation of his mother tongue. Allow me to inquire
of you, what is the chief element of good composition?”

“Simplicity,” replied the student.

“The question is well answered,” continued the
doctor; “De Witt Clinton himself could not have replied

more justly. To know what we wish to communicate,
and then to make the communication in
just those exact words necessary to convey the whole
idea, constitute the chief excellence of style.”

A rough person, having taken it upon himself to
abuse Dr. Gray, and to heap on him a volume of oaths
and profane epithets, the old man listened for some
time in silence. At length he quietly remarked:

“Sir, you cannot swear.”

“Swear, old curmudgeon!—what do you mean?”

“It requires sense, sir,” continued the doctor, “to
swear. You may use the words, but you cannot
swear.”

Thus lived, or rather existed, Dr. Gray and his
children in the village of K—, for a period of two
years; when an event occurred which wrought a gradual
change in their condition. There arrived in the
stage from the East, a pale and delicate, but sweeteyed
young woman, dressed in deep black; who, having
attended to the safe disposition of her baggage at
the hotel, inquired for the residence of the Rev. Mr.
Trimble. It was shown to her, and she at once bent
her steps in that direction.

The stranger lady approached the dwelling of the
clergyman, not without trepidation. Brushing an
unbidden tear from her eye, she raised the knocker
with a shaking hand, but her heart and her determination
were constant, for it was none other than Henrietta
Gray. She found Mr. Trimble at home; and
more than that, a kind and feeling man. She
told to him her little story, and exhibited to him her

certificate of membership in one of the churches of
Boston, as a voucher for her honesty, if, indeed, any
thing else were wanting than her sweet countenance
and modest deportment.

The good man entered heartily into the object of
her mission; informed her that Dr. Glegg and the
three children were still in K—; and from his account
of them, she became more fully confirmed in
the supposition that they were no other than her lost
father and brothers. To change probability into a
certainty, however, with a small daughter of Mr.
Trimble as her cicerone, she strolled into the quarter
of the village where stood Dr. Glegg's hut,—and saw
and recognized her parent. She also passed quite
near one or two of the boys; but in their changed
condition, she failed to discover any thing which bore
resemblance to the well-fed, well-clothed, and happy
children she had known. In great agitation of feeling,
she returned to Mr. Trimble's house; and accepted
a cordial invitation from him and his kind
lady, to pass the night with them.