The village of N., reader, where the scene of my story is laid, is truly a most lovely place, so far certainly as Nature is responsible; for a broad, beautiful river bounds it on one side, and a fine range of mountains, picturesquely grand, screen it on another. Wealth, too, has joined hands with Nature to assist in the perfect completion of what she had left as it were unfinished. Sweet cottages nestling in green shrubbery, and elegant mansions surrounded by spacious gardens and lawns, glistening with fountains or shady with groves, reveal to the beholder a harmonious conspiracy between taste and affluence to picture Paradise in daguerreotype—everything must be in daguerreotype in these days.

But the moral—perhaps it would be more charitable to say the conventional aspect of the village, is not so lovely as the natural aspect. A certain line of distinction has been drawn in society, and has long been assuming a greater and greater stringency, as an old generation passes away, and a new one refining upon its ancestor succeeds it. It is not the aristocracy of family and birth—the pride of nobility, as in England—nor the aristocracy of wit and talent, as in France—nor yet the true aristocracy of intellect and moral worth—but the peculiarly American aristocracy of money! Caste, determined by the possession or non-possession of estates and bank-stock, is scarcely more rigidly guarded on Hindoo ground than here—and intermarriages between the “higher and lower classes”—ridiculous names it is true, to be applied to society in republican democratic America—are regarded as sufficient reason for casting off all association with the degraded party, whatever rank said party may have sustained before.

And here I cannot forbear a passing remark on the obvious inconsistency of this principle. The accidents of fortune are so very variable, and its mutations such matters of every day experience, that a more fluctuating or uncertain standard of station could not possibly have been chosen. The possessor of half a million to-day, in a few years may die alone and in penury, the miserable tenant of a deserted garret, while the ragged, shivering, homeless boy, who pays his last hardly earned copper for the privilege of sleeping on an untenanted board, may at length find himself in the enjoyment of the “highest honors in the gift of his country-men,” the honorable master of thousands, with a once starving and outcast beggar child the sharer of his emoluments and the elegant mistress of his mansion. The son of the rich man may die unknown and unblessed in the prison or the almshouse, “while the son of the maid servant who cleaned the President’s kitchen,” may be carried to the “white house” in triumph, the chief magistrate of a great and powerful nation. But pardon my digression, dear reader—I needed not to pen your own sentiments. It is time I should introduce you to some of my people, if I would interest you, as I hope I may, in their acquaintance.

The “first and best” lady in the village of N. was Mrs. Josepha Tower. This lady was a widow, and in every respect, in heart, and mind, and manners, she was a truly elegant and accomplished woman. She belonged in a measure to the “old school,” and she possessed an uncommon share of sterling common sense, and the firmest and most uncompromising Christian principle. She was the possessor, too, of ample wealth, and diffused it with a liberality which reflected honor on her generosity, as well as poured a stream of happiness into her bereaved and widowed heart. The earlier part of Mrs. Tower’s life had been passed in a Southern city, though she was proud to claim a birth-right on New England’s soil, and an affinity with the upright and earnest New England heart in her purposes and dispositions. When the cholera with pestilential breath swept over the city of C?——, it numbered among its victims her husband and her only child; and as the staff and centre of her hopes were thus suddenly cut down at a single stroke, Mrs. Tower turned her face toward the home of her childhood, and sought amid the green hills and quiet streams, where those fresh and careless years had been passed, for that alleviation to her sorrows which she must have sought in vain among scenes where her irreparable losses would be constantly suggested by contact and association. She came forth from the furnace of her affliction like gold seven times purified, and resolutely declining even the consideration of a second marriage while her heart was bound so fast in its wedlock to the grave, she consecrated her influence and her wealth to the noble purpose of promoting the well-being and the happiness of her fellow sojourners in a wilderness world. The star of her hope had gone out while she yet watched it in midheaven, and why should she not henceforward bind herself to the unselfish aim of spreading abroad the joy which had taken its flight from her own bosom, leaving in its place a calm and holy resignation? So to the north and to the south, to the east and to the west, “from the river to the ends of the earth,” flowed the rills, all fresh and fertilizing, which found their reservoir in her kindly and world-embracing benevolence.

Every thing tasteful and elegant in the matter of household appointments, was always to be found at Mrs. Tower’s. Books, not laid upon the shelves of her library merely to dazzle by their gilding, but to be read by every body who would read—pictures and statues—for she was a generous patroness of the arts—music and flowers, and the most refined and polished society, were among the most familiar attractions one always found at the residence of that excellent lady; and yet I tell my readers only the truth when I say that with all her wealth, and her truly enviable social position, Mrs. Tower was the only woman in the whole circle of N. aristocracy who had independence enough to bid defiance to conventional proscription, and invite whom she pleased to tea with her—whether it was the President’s lady or her washer-woman. Mrs. Tower to be sure had too much politeness to invite those whom she knew her aristocratic neighbors did not choose to recognize as equals when she invited them; but she heartily despised the principle which governed her wealthier acquaintances, in excluding the worthy poor from their society because they were poor; and in the face of all expostulation and astonishment, she disdained such unreasonable trammels and acted accordingly, though she well knew what surprise her decision occasioned, and what gossip it furnished. But the fault-finders—what could they do? They could not proscribe Mrs. Tower, for she abounded in that one great requisite for elevated station—a plenty of money—and she could gather into her house more distinguished people from the circle of her private acquaintance, than half the village put together—they could not lose the pleasure of such agreeable levees as Mrs. Tower made for strangers who were visiting her at all seasons of the year. Beside, just now when my story commences, the young minister of the village was an inmate of her family, and being unmarried and unbetrothed, and there being at the same time a goodly number of young ladies unmarried, but marriageable, in the most important families of his parish, the minister, Rev. Louis Style, became a very interesting character, aside from his public capacity, and the unconscious prize in quite an extensive lottery. But more of the Rev. Louis Style anon.

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