University of Virginia Library

11. XI.
Squire Bodgers at Home.

THE village of Newtown is as pretty a place
as one can find in a ten days' drive around
the city of New York. It smacks of the old and
quiet times when gossips herded at the village inn,
and when, once or twice in the year, the whole
country around thronged upon the green to some
travelling show. It has its deacons and squires;
it has its branching elms, throwing their trembling
shadows across the village street; it has an humble
parsonage-house, all embowered with many cherry-trees,
and a gigantic butternut: it has its country

store, with its black-topped posts, where the
farmers' wives “hitch their colts;” and with its
strange variety of crockery, calicoes, teas, and
molasses. There is the head clerk, with a pen
behind his ear, deeply immersed in calculations;
and with fingers sticky with keg-raisins. There is
the store-keeper himself, a stout, bland man, with
wristbands turned up, who tries his groceries upon
the tip of his fore-finger, and wipes his finger upon
the nether portion of his dress, until his pantaloons,
from the hip to the knee, have become cheerfully
glazed with a shining and unctuous mixture of
lamp-oil, rosin, lamp-black, spirits of turpentine,
and New Orleans sugar.

The town has its tailor—over the store: with
a sign-board on which is a gilt pair of shears; and
a last year's plate of the fashions is in the window.
He possesses a ready disposition to have his customers'
work done on Saturday night, except “his
girls” are taken sick—which usually occurs. There
is also the shoemaker, in a quiet, small, rather
close-smelling shop, by himself; who “taps” for
half the city price, and who always keeps his
word, except he is out of “luvor”—which sometimes
happens.

Two attorneys, who once did business under
the general firm of Bivins and Rip, have, by

mutual consent, dissolved partnership; and henceforth
attend to the law-business in all its details,
such as drawing of writs and leases, collection of
moneys, etc., at their respective offices: Timothy
Rip, first door to the right, above Miss Doolittle's
millinery-store; and Ebenezer Bivins, at the old
stand on the meeting-house corner.

There are also sundry old-fashioned houses
scattered through the little town: houses with
gamble-roofs, and mossy, mouldy-looking, dormer-windows;
houses with gray-stone chimneys, on
which some ancient date is inscribed in the quaint-shaped
letters which you see in old primers;
houses with clambering vines that seem as old as
the houses, and ready with their weight of leaves
to crush the walls they cling to, or if need be, to
bury them under a cloak of green: there are
houses in out-of-the-way places with strange-shaped
hipped roofs, about which lurk ancient
tales of Dutch or Puritan wrong; floors spotted
with blood (not to be washed out with the hardest
scrubbing); haunted houses, pointed at of school-boys,
and romantic misses in gingham aprons.

The village is old, as I said; and lying out of
the reach of railway enterprise, has fallen sadly
in the wake of modern progress. Two sawmills
upon the brook above the village have stopped.

The long-store is positively closed. Squire Bivins'
practice has fallen off, they say, at least one-third.
But two house-raisings have been known within
the town-limits in the last three years; no new
barn has been erected, with the exception of an
addition to Smith's livery-stable. Even the tan-works,
belonging to the gentleman on whose
account solely I have entered upon this long
digression—I speak of Truman Bodgers, Esquire—
are in a dilapidated condition, and exhibit
undoubted evidences of dissolution.

Squire Bodgers is owner and occupant of one
of the houses to which I have alluded. His house
is an old house, and a gamble-roofed house. Hollyhocks
and red roses are growing (during summer)
beside the path that leads to his door. Ancestral
trees hang over the mossy roof. Although living
in such a quiet, decayed town, Squire Bodgers
has had the shrewdness to perceive, and to avail
himself of the commercial drift of the day. He
has had the courage—for the want of which
many such old-fashioned men have become poverty-stricken—to
withdraw his capital from the sluggish,
narrowing channels, and to bestow it upon the
growing enterprise of the cities. The result is,
that Mr. Bodgers is a rich man; richer than most
people suppose him; and far richer than Mrs.

Solomon Fudge, amid all her condescension of
manner, has for one moment imagined.

Upon the day on which this chapter of the
Fudge record is supposed to open, Mr. Truman
Bodgers is sitting before the fire, in a comfortable
high-backed chair, in what he calls the library,
under the roof of the antique mansion I have briefly
described. Two portraits are hanging on the wall,
over which the eyes of Mr. Bodgers occasionally
glance, with a pleasantly mournful expression.
One of them is that of a hale old gentleman,
long since gone, who was the builder of the mansion,
and the father of the present occupant.
The other picture shows a kindly old lady's smile,
which was half ruined by blindness twenty-odd
years ago; and which only went out finally twelve
months since, when the old lady (Mr. Bodgers'
mother) died.

Being blind, she loved greatly to listen to
pleasant voices, reading out of pleasant books;
and Kitty Fleming, having such a voice as made
even dull books pleasant, won her way deeply into
the old lady's regard, and at the same time into
the affections of her son. She was as dear, I am
sure, to the old lady as would have been any
grandchild, and had grown as dear to the son
as any daughter; perhaps she was even dearer.

I have said that these two pictures hung upon
the walls of Mr. Bodgers' room. There was a
third picture, much smaller than the other two,
in a little drawer of the antique secretary which
stood just at his elbow. It was in a morocco case,
and few ever opened it, save Mr. Bodgers himself.
It was the miniature of a sweet-faced girl—not
Kitty, or Kitty's mother.

Mr. Bodgers even now is dwelling on it mournfully.
An old affection lingers about that picture
of a beauty long since gone to the world of spirits.
Even Squire Bodgers, under that rough exterior,
has his tender places, and his affections flowing
like a river—widely and vainly. The world is
altogether too apt to consign the withered hulk
of the bachelor who has seen his five-and-fifty years
to the tomb of all passionate feeling. It is my
honest opinion that bachelors, thoroughly ripened
in years, are the most kind, tender, affectionate,
hopeful, self-denying, and calumniated creatures
that are to be found in the world.

Did people but know the seared hopes and
brimming expectancies which struggle, “fierce
as youth,” in the breasts of such men, they
would judge more wisely. Providence has dealt
kindly with us all. And as the fountains of hope
dry up along the straitened waste of the years

that are to come, deep wells of holy and sainted
memories gush to the light behind us, and freshen
us—to tears!

There is a paquet of faded letters in a pigeon-hole
of the antique secretary, which, if run over in
the careful way in which our friend Mr. Bodgers
runs them over on some late nights in winter, would
unfold the history of the minature. It is, after all,
only the old story of love, blighted by the Destroyer
long ago, and sometimes carrying back the manly
heart, by desperate leaps, over the wide gap which
thirty years open in life.

It is not often, however, that the practical
Mr. Bodgers wanders back so far; it is not often
that he looks over, so wistfully as now, the faded
paquet of letters; it is not often that he lingers,
when the sun is shining so cheerfully as it is, by his
desk and his fireside.

The truth is, Mr. Bodgers has met this day with
one of those little accidents which might easily
have been a large one, and which wakens the
thought of Fatality; and makes a serious man
balance the remaining weight of his days. Therefore
it is that the shattered arm, in a sling, has kept
Mr. Bodgers by his desk, and by the old letters
and pictures, with half-mournful thought. And in
virtue of the same mishap, his reflections have

turned upon testamentary documents, and upon his
list of rentals, and upon the chance—perhaps a
sudden chance—that all he now calls his own, will
lie bound up soon in some short testamentary parchment.
And therefore it is that such old parchments
have come under his eye this day; and with the
parchments, the cherished letters; and with the
letters, the pictures; and with the pictures, the
vague and shadowy memories; and with the memories—that
moistened eye.

Then the eye falls upon the parchments again, as
if for relief; and Mr. Bodgers thinks—of his own
Will.

“It must be drawn,” says Mr. Bodgers, talking
to himself.

“As well now as ever,” says Mr. Bodgers, thrusting
his papers into a pigeon-hole.

“It shall be done this very day,” says Mr. Bodgers,
giving emphasis to the remark by three consecutive
taps upon the lid of his snuff-box.

A half-hour after, and the careless spectator
might have observed a solitary individual, with a
brown surtout thrown over his shoulder, and his
right arm slung in a yellow bandanna, marching
with a resolute step into the office of Squire 'Nezer
Bivins, at his old stand, upon the meeting-house
corner.