University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET.

“WHO can have taken the Ferguses' house, sister?”
said a brisk little old lady, peeping through
the window blinds. “It's taken! Just come here and
look! There's a cart at the door.”

“You don't say so!” said Miss Dorcas, her elder
sister, flying across the room to the window blinds, behind
which Mrs. Betsey sat discreetly ensconced with
her knitting work. “Where? Jack, get down, sir!”
This last remark was addressed to a rough-coated Dandie
Dinmont terrier, who had been winking in a half
doze on a cushion at Miss Dorcas's feet. On the first
suggestion that there was something to be looked at
across the street, Jack had ticked briskly across the
room, and now stood on his hind legs on an old embroidered
chair, peering through the slats as industriously
as if his opinion had been requested. “Get down,
sir!” persisted Miss Dorcas. But Jack only winked
contumaciously at Mrs. Betsey, whom he justly considered
in the light of an ally, planted his toe nails more
firmly in the embroidered chair-bottom, and stuck his
nose further between the slats, while Mrs. Betsey took
up for him, as he knew she would.

“Do let the dog alone, Dorcas! He wants to see as
much as anybody.”

“Now, Betsey, how am I ever to teach Jack not to

jump on these chairs if you will always take his part?
Besides, next we shall know, he'll be barking through
the window blinds,” said Miss Dorcas.

Mrs. Betsey replied to the expostulation by making a
sudden diversion of subject. “Oh, look, look!” she
called, “that must be she,” as a face with radiant, dark
eyes, framed in an aureole of bright golden hair, appeared
in the doorway of the house across the street.
“She's a pretty creature, anyway—much prettier than
poor dear Mrs. Fergus.”

“Henderson, you say the name is?” said Miss Dorcas.

“Yes. Simons, the provision man at the corner, told
me that the house had been bought by a young editor, or
something of that sort, named Henderson—somebody
that writes for the papers. He married Van Arsdel's
daughter.”

“What, the Van Arsdels that failed last spring? One
of our mushroom New York aristocracy—up to-day and
down to-morrow!” commented Miss Dorcas, with an air
of superiority. “Poor things!”

“A very imprudent marriage, I don't doubt,” sighed
Mrs. Betsey. “These upstart modern families never
bring up their girls to do anything.”

“She seems to be putting her hand to the plough,
though,” said Miss Dorcas. “See, she actually is lifting
out that package herself! Upon my word, a very pretty
creature. I think we must take her up.”

“The Ferguses were nice,” said Mrs. Betsey, “though
he was only a newspaper man, and she was a nobody;
but she really did quite answer the purpose for a neighbor—not,
of course, one of our sort exactly, but a very
respectable, lady-like little body.”

“Well,” said Miss Dorcas, reflectively, “I always said
it doesn't do to carry exclusiveness too far. Poor dear
Papa was quite a democrat. He often said that he had

seen quite good manners and real refinement in people
of the most ordinary origin.”

“And, to be sure,” said Mrs. Betsey, “if one is to be
too particular, one doesn't get anybody to associate with.
The fact is, the good old families we used to visit have
either died off or moved off up into the new streets, and
one does like to have somebody to speak to.”

“Look there, Betsey, do you suppose that's Mr.
Henderson that's coming down the street?” said Miss
Dorcas.

“Dear me!” said Mrs. Betsey, in an anxious flutter.
“Why, there are two of them—they are both taking hold
to lift out that bureau—see there! Now she's put her
head out of the chamber window there, and is speaking
to them. What a pretty color her hair is!”

At this moment the horse on the other side of the
street started prematurely, for some reason best known to
himself, and the bureau came down with a thud; and
Jack, who considered his opinion as now called for,
barked frantically through the blinds.

Miss Dorcas seized his muzzle energetically and
endeavored to hold his jaws together, but he still barked
in a smothered and convulsive manner; whereat the good
lady swept him, vi et armis, from his perch, and disciplined
him vigorously, forcing him to retire to his cushion
in a distant corner, where he still persistently barked.

“Oh, poor doggie!” sighed Mrs. Betsey. “Dorcas,
how can you?”

“How can I?” said Miss Dorcas, in martial tones.
“Betsey Ann Benthusen, this dog would grow up a perfect
pest of this neighborhood if I left him to you. He
must learn not to get up and bark through those blinds.
It isn't so much matter now the windows are shut, but
the habit is the thing. Who wants to have a dog firing a
fusillade when your visitors come up the front steps—

barking-enough-to-split-one's-head-open,” added Miss
Dorcas, turning upon the culprit, with a severe staccato
designed to tell upon his conscience.

Jack bowed his head and rolled his great soft eyes at
her through a silvery thicket of hair.

“You are a very naughty dog,” she added, impressively.

Jack sat up on his haunches and waved his front paws
in a deprecating manner to Miss Dorcas, and the good
lady laughed and said, cheerily, “Well, well, Jacky, be a
good dog now, and we 'll be friends.”

And Jacky wagged his tail in the most demonstrative
manner, and frisked with triumphant assurance of restored
favor. It was the usual end of disciplinary struggles
with him. Miss Dorcas sat down to a bit of worsted
work on which she had been busy when her attention was
first called to the window.

Mrs. Betsey, however, with her nose close to the window
blinds, continued to announce the state of things
over the way in short jets of communication.

“There! the gentlemen are both gone in—and there!
the cart has driven off. Now, they 've shut the front
door,” etc.

After this came a pause of a few moments, in which
both sisters worked in silence.

“I wonder, now, which of those two was the husband,”
said Mrs. Betsey at last, in a slow reflective tone, as if
she had been maturely considering the subject.

In the mean time it had occurred to Miss Dorcas
that this species of minute inquisition into the affairs of
neighbors over the way was rather a compromising of her
dignity, and she broke out suddenly from a high moral
perch on her unconscious sister.

“Betsey,” she said, with severe gravity, “I really suppose
it 's no concern of ours what goes on over at the

other house. Poor dear Papa used to say if there was
anything that was unworthy a true lady it was a disposition
to gossip. Our neighbors' affairs are nothing to us.
I think it is Mrs. Chapone who says, `A well-regulated
mind will repress curiosity.' Perhaps, Betsey, it would
be well to go on with our daily reading.”

Mrs. Betsey, as a younger sister, had been accustomed
to these sudden pullings-up of the moral checkrein
from Miss Dorcas, and received them as meekly as
a well-bitted pony. She rose immediately, and, laying
down her knitting work, turned to the book-case. It
appears that the good souls were diversifying their leisure
hours by reading for the fifth or sixth time that
enlivening poem, Young's Night Thoughts. So, taking
down a volume from the book-shelves and opening
to a mark, Mrs. Betsey commenced a sonorous expostulation
to Alonzo on the value of time. The good lady's
manner of rendering poetry was in a high-pitched falsetto,
with inflections of a marvelous nature, rising in
the earnest parts almost to a howl. In her youth she
had been held to possess a talent for elocution, and had
been much commended by the amateurs of her times as
a reader of almost professional merit. The decay of her
vocal organs had been so gradual and gentle that neither
sister had perceived the change of quality in her voice,
or the nervous tricks of manner which had grown upon
her, till her rendering of poetry resembled a preternatural
hoot. Miss Dorcas beat time with her needle and listened
complacently to the mournful adjurations, while
Jack, crouching himself with his nose on his forepaws,
winked very hard and surveyed Miss Betsey with an uneasy
excitement, giving from time to time low growls as
her voice rose in emphatic places; and finally, as if even
a dog's patience could stand it no longer, he chorused a
startling point with a sharp yelp!

“There!” said Mrs. Betsey, throwing down the
book. “What is the reason Jack never likes me to read
poetry?”

Jack sprang forward as the book was thrown down,
and running to Mrs. Betsey, jumped into her lap and
endeavored to kiss her in a most tumultuous and excited
manner, as an expression of his immense relief.

“There! there! Jacky, good fellow—down, down!
Why, how odd it is! I can't think what excites him so in
my reading,” said Mrs. Betsey. “It must be something
that he notices in my intonations,” she added, innocently.

The two sisters we have been looking in upon are
worthy of a word of introduction. There are in every
growing city old houses that stand as breakwaters in the
tide of modern improvement, and may be held as fortresses
in which the past entrenches itself against the
never-ceasing encroachments of the present. The house
in which the conversation just recorded has taken place
was one of these. It was a fragment of ancient primitive
New York known as the old Vanderheyden house, only
waiting the death of old Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden and
her sister, Mrs. Betsey Benthusen, to be pulled down and
made into city lots and squares.

Time was when the Vanderheyden house was the
country seat of old Jacob Vanderheyden, a thriving
Dutch merchant, who lived there with somewhat foreign
ideas of style and stateliness.

Parks and gardens and waving trees had encircled it,
but the city limits had gained upon it through three
generations; squares and streets had been opened
through its grounds, till now the house itself and the
garden-patch in the rear was all that remained of the
ancient domain. Innumerable schemes of land speculators
had attacked the old place; offers had been
insidiously made to the proprietors which would have

put them in possession of dazzling wealth, but they gallantly
maintained their position. It is true their income
in ready money was but scanty, and their taxes had,
year by year, grown higher as the value of the land
increased. Modern New York, so to speak, foamed and
chafed like a great red dragon before the old house,
waiting to make a mouthful of it, but the ancient princesses
within bravely held their own and refused to parley
or capitulate.

Their life was wholly in the past, with a generation
whose bones had long rested under respectable tombstones.
Their grandfather on their mother's side had
been a signer of the Declaration of Independence; their
grandfather on the paternal side was a Dutch merchant
of some standing in early New York, a friend and correspondent
of Alexander Hamilton's and a co-worker
with him in those financial schemes by which the treasury
of the young republic of America was first placed on a
solid basis. Old Jacob did good service in negotiating
loans in Holland, and did not omit to avail himself of
the golden opportunities which the handling of a nation's
wealth presents. He grew rich and great in the land,
and was implicitly revered in his own family as being one
of the nurses and founders of the American Republic.
In the ancient Dutch secretary which stood in the corner
of the sitting-room where our old ladies spent their time
were many letters from noted names of a century or so
back—papers yellow with age, but whose contents were
all alive with the foam and fresh turbulence of what was
then the existing life of the period.

Mrs. Betsey Benthusen was a younger sister and a
widow. She had been a beauty in her girlhood, and so
much younger than her sister that Miss Dorcas felt all
the pride and interest of a mother in her success, in her
lovers, in her marriage; and when that marriage proved a

miserable failure, uniting her to a man who wasted her
fortune and neglected her person, and broke her heart,
Miss Dorcas received her back to her strong arms and
made a home and a refuge where the poor woman could
gather up and piece together, in some broken fashion,
the remains of her life as one mends a broken Sèvres
china tea cup.

Miss Dorcas was by nature of a fiery, energetic temperament,
intense and original—precisely the one to be a
contemner of customs and proprieties; but a very severe
and rigid education had imposed on her every yoke of
the most ancient and straitest-laced decorum. She had
been nurtured only in such savory treatises as Dr. Gregory's
Legacy to his Daughters, Mrs. Chapone's Letters,
Miss Hannah More's Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, Watts
On the Mind, and other good books by which our great
grandmothers had their lives all laid out for them in
exact squares and parallelograms, and were taught exactly
what to think and do in all possible emergencies.

But, as often happens, the original nature of Miss
Dorcas was apt to break out here and there, all the more
vivaciously for repression, in a sort of natural geyser:
and so, though rigidly proper in the main, she was apt to
fall into delightful spasms of naturalness.

Notwithstanding all the remarks of Mrs. Chapone
and Dr. Watts about gossip, she still had a hearty and
innocent interest in the pretty young housekeeper that
was building a nest opposite to her, and a little quite
harmless curiosity in what was going on over the way.

A great deal of good sermonizing, by the by, is expended
on gossip, which is denounced as one of the
seven deadly sins of society; but, after all, gossip has its
better side: if not a Christian grace, it certainly is one
of those weeds which show a good warm soil.

The kindly heart, that really cares for everything human

it meets, inclines toward gossip, in a good way.
Just as a morning glory throws out tendrils, and climbs
up and peeps cheerily into your window, so a kindly
gossip can't help watching the opening and shutting of
your blinds and the curling smoke from your chimney.
And so, too, after all the high morality of Miss Dorcas,
the energetic turning of her sister to the paths of propriety,
and the passage from Young's Night Thoughts, with
its ponderous solemnity, she was at heart kindly musing
upon the possible fortunes of the pretty young creature
across the street, and was as fresh and ready to take up
the next bit of information about her house as a brisk
hen is to discuss the latest bit of crumb thrown from a
window.

Miss Dorcas had been brought up by her father in
diligent study of the old approved English classics. The
book-case of the sitting-room presented in gilded order
old editions of the Rambler, the Tattler, and the Spectator,
the poems of Pope, and Dryden, and Milton, and Shakespeare,
and Miss Dorcas and her sister were well versed
in them all. And in view of the whole of our modern
literature, we must say that their studies might have been
much worse directed.

Their father had unfortunately been born too early to
enjoy Walter Scott. There is an age when a man cannot
receive a new author or a new idea. Like a lilac bush
which has made its terminal buds, he has grown all he
can in this life, and there is no use in trying to force him
into a new growth. Jacob Vanderheyden died considering
Scott's novels as the flimsy trash of the modern
school, while his daughters hid them under their pillows,
and found them all the more delightful from the vague
sensation of sinfulness which was connected with their
admiration. Walter Scott was their most modern landmark;
youth and bloom and heedlessness and impropriety

were all delightfully mixed up with their reminiscences
of him—and now, here they were still living in an age
which has shelved Walter Scott among the classics, and
reads Dickens and Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.

Miss Dorcas had been stranded, now and then, on
one of these “trashy moderns”—had sat up all night surreptitiously
reading Nicholas Nickleby, and had hidden
the book from Mrs. Betsey lest her young mind should
be carried away, until she discovered, by an accidental
remark, that Mrs. Betsey had committed the same delightful
impropriety while off on a visit to a distant relative.
When the discovery became mutual, from time
to time other works of the same author crept into the
house in cheap pamphlet editions, and the perusal of
them was apologized for by Miss Dorcas to Mrs. Betsey,
as being well enough, now and then, to see what people
were reading in these trashy times. Ah, what is fame!
Are not Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope on their
inevitable way to the same dusty high shelf in the library,
where they will be praised and not read by the forthcoming
jeunesse of the future?

If the minds of the ancient sisters were a museum of
by-gone ideas, and literature, and tastes, the old Vanderheyden
house was no less a museum of by-gone furniture.
The very smell of the house was ghostly with past
suggestion. Every article of household gear in it had
grown old together with all the rest, standing always in
the same spot, subjected to the same minute daily dusting
and the same semi-annual house-cleaning.

Carlyle has a dissertation on the “talent for annihilating
rubbish.” This was a talent that the respectable
Miss Dorcas had none of. Carlyle thinks it a fine thing
to have; but we think the lack of it may come from very
respectable qualities. In Miss Dorcas it came from a
vivid imagination of the possible future uses to which

every decayed or broken household article might be put.
The pitcher without nose or handle was fine china, and
might yet be exactly the thing for something, and so it
went carefully on some high perch of preservation, dismembered;
the half of a broken pair of snuffers certainly
looked too good to throw away—possibly it might be the
exact thing needed to perfect some invention. Miss
Dorcas vaguely remembered legends of inventors who
had laid hold on such chance adaptations at the very
critical point of their contrivances, and so the half snuffers
waited years for their opportunity. The upper shelves
of the closets in the Vanderheyden house were a perfect
crowded mustering ground for the incurables and incapables
of household belongings. One might fancy them
a Hotel des Invalides of things wounded and fractured
in the general battle of life. There were blades of knives
without handles, and handles without blades; there were
ancient tea-pots that leaked—but might be mended, and
doubtless would be of some good in a future day; there
were cracked plates and tea-cups; there were china dishcovers
without dishes to match; a coffee-mill that
wouldn't grind, and shears that wouldn't cut, and snuffers
that wouldn't snuff—in short, every species of decayed
utility.

Miss Dorcas had in the days of her youth been blest
with a brother of an active, inventive turn of mind; the
secret crypts and recesses of the closets bore marks of
his unfinished projections. There were all the wheels
and weights and other internal confusions of a clock,
which he had pulled to pieces with a view of introducing
an improvement into the machinery, which never was introduced;
but the wheels and weights were treasured up
with pious care, waiting for somebody to put them together
again. All this array of litter was fated to come down
from its secret recesses, its deep, dark closets, its high

shelves and perches, on two solemn days of the year devoted
to house-cleaning, when Miss Dorcas, like a good
general, looked them over and reviewed them, expatiated
on their probable capabilities, and resisted gallantly any
suggestions of Black Dinah, the cook and maid of all
work, or Mrs. Betsey, that some order ought to be taken
to rid the house of them.

“Dear me, Dorcas,” Mrs. Betsey would say, “what is
the use of keeping such a clutter and litter of things that
nothing can be done with and that never can be used?”

“Betsey Ann Benthusen,” would be the reply, “you
always were a careless little thing. You never understood
any more about housekeeping than a canary bird
—not a bit.” In Miss Dorcas's view, Mrs. Betsey, with
her snow white curls and her caps, was still a frivolous
young creature, not fit to be trusted with a serious opinion
on the nicer points of household management.
“Now, who knows, Betsey, but some time we may meet
some poor worthy young man who may be struggling
along as an inventor and may like to have these wheels
and weights! I'm sure brother Dick said they were
wonderfully well made.”

“Well, but, Dorcas, all those cracked cups and broken
pitchers; I do think they are dreadful!”

“Now, Betsey, hush up! I've heard of a kind of
new cement that they are manufacturing in London, that
makes old china better than new; and when they get it
over here I'm going to mend these all up. You wouldn't
have me throw away family china, would you?”

The word “family china” was a settler, for both Mrs.
Betsey and Miss Dorcas and old Dinah were united in
one fundamental article of faith: that “the Family” was
a solemn, venerable and awe-inspiring reality. What, or
why, or how it was, no mortal could say.

Old Jacob Vanderheyden, the grandfather, had been

in his day busy among famous and influential men, and
had even been to Europe as a sort of attaché to the first
American diplomatic corps. He had been also a thriving
merchant, and got to himself houses, and lands, and gold
and silver. Jacob Vanderheyden, the father, had inherited
substance and kept up the good name of the family,
and increased and strengthened its connections. But his
son and heir, Dick Vanderheyden, Miss Dorcas's elder
brother, had seemed to have no gifts but those of dispersing;
and had muddled away the family fortune in all sorts
of speculations and adventures as fast as his father and
grandfather had made it. The sisters had been left with
an income much abridged by the imprudence of the
brother and the spendthrift dissipation of Mrs. Betsey's
husband; they were forsaken by the retreating waves of
rank and fashion; their house, instead of being a center
of good society, was encompassed by those ordinary
buildings devoted to purposes of trade whose presence is
deemed incompatible with genteel residence. And yet,
through it all, their confidence in the rank and position
of their family continued unabated. The old house, with
every bit of old queer furniture in it, the old window
curtains, the old tea-cups and saucers, the old bedspreads
and towels, all had a sacredness such as pertained
to no modern things. Like the daughter of Zion
in sacred song, Miss Dorcas “took pleasure in their dust
and favored the stones thereof.” The old blue willow-patterned
china, with mandarins standing in impossible
places, and bridges and pagodas growing up, as the world
was made, out of nothing, was to Miss Dorcas consecrated
porcelain—even its broken fragments were impregnated
with the sacred flavor of ancient gentility.

Miss Dorcas's own private and personal closets,
drawers, and baskets were squirrel's-nests of all sorts of
memorials of the past. There were pieces of every

gown she had ever worn, of all her sister's gowns, and
of the mortal habiliments of many and many a one
beside who had long passed beyond the need of earthly
garments. Bits of wedding robes of brides who had
long been turned to dust; fragments of tarnished gold
lace from old court dresses; faded, crumpled, artificial
flowers, once worn on the head of beauty; gauzes and
tissues, old and wrinkled, that had once set off the triumphs
of the gay—all mingled in her crypts and drawers
and trunks, and each had its story. Each, held in her
withered hand, brought back to memory the thread of
some romance warm with the color and flavor of a life
long passed away.

Then there were collections, saving and medicinal;
for Miss Dorcas had in great force that divine instinct
of womanhood that makes her perceptive of the healing
power inherent in all things. Never an orange or an
apple was pared on her premises when the peeling was
not carefully garnered—dried on newspaper, and neatly
stored away in paper bags for sick-room uses.

There were closets smelling of elderblow, catnip,
feverfew, and dried rose leaves, which grew in a bit of
old garden soil back of the house; a spot sorely retrenched
and cut down from the ample proportions it
used to have, as little by little had been sold off, but still
retaining a few growing things, in which Miss Dorcas
delighted. The lilacs that once were bushes there had
grown gaunt and high, and looked in at the chamber
windows with an antique and grandfatherly air, quite of
a piece with everything else about the old Vanderheyden
house.

The ancient sisters had few outlets into the society
of modern New York. Now and then, a stray visit came
from some elderly person who still remembered the Vanderheydens,
and perhaps about once a year they went to

the expense of a carriage to return the call, and rolled
up into the new part of the town like shadows of the
past. But generally their path of life led within the narrow
limits of the house. Old Dinah, the sole black servant
remaining, was the last remnant of a former retinue
of negro servants held by old Jacob when New York was
a slave State and a tribe of black retainers was one of
the ostentations of wealth. All were gone now, and
only Dinah remained, devoted to the relics of the old
family, clinging with a cat-like attachment to the old
place.

She was like many of her race, a jolly-hearted, pig-headed,
giggling, faithful old creature, who said “Yes'm”
to Miss Dorcas and took her own way about most matters;
and Miss Dorcas, satisfied that her way was not on
the whole a bad one in the ultimate results, winked at
her free handling of orders, and consented to accept her,
as we do Nature, for what could be got out of her.

“They are going to have mince-pie and broiled
chicken for dinner over there,” said Mrs. Betsey, when
the two ladies were seated at their own dinner-table
that day.

“How in the world did you know that?” asked Miss
Dorcas.

“Well! Dinah met their girl in at the provision store
and struck up an acquaintance, and went in to help her
put up a bedstead, and so she stopped a while in the
kitchen. The tall gentleman with black hair is the husband—I
thought all the while he was,” said Mrs. Betsey.
“The other one is a Mr. Fellows, a great friend of theirs,
Mary says—”

“Mary!—who is Mary?” said Miss Dorcas.

“Why, Mary McArthur, their girl—they only keep
one, but she has a little daughter about eight years old
to help. I wish we had a little girl, or something that one

might train for a waiter to answer door-bells and do
little things.”

“Our door-bells don 't call for much attention, and a
little girl is nothing but a plague,” interposed Miss
Dorcas.

“Dinah has quite fallen in love with Mrs. Henderson,”
said Mrs. Betsey; “she says that she is the handsomest,
pleasantest-spoken lady she's seen for a great
while.”

“We 'll call upon her when they get well settled,” said
Miss Dorcas, definitively.

Miss Dorcas settled this with the air of a princess.
She felt that such a meritorious little person as the one
over the way ought to be encouraged by people of good
old families.

Our readers will observe that Miss Dorcas listened
without remonstrance and with some appearance of interest
to the items about minced pie and broiled chicken;
but high moral propriety, as we all know, is a very cold,
windy height, and if a person is planted on it once or
twice a day, it is as much as ought to be demanded of
human weakness.

For the rest of the time one should be allowed, like
Miss Dorcas, to repose upon one's laurels. And, after
all, it is interesting, when life is moving in a very stagnant
current, even to know what your neighbor has for
dinner!