fast and generous, pitying his sad plight, and having perfect faith in his unimpeached integrity, purchased—principally at the sale in bankruptcy of his own effects—a modest stock of new and second-hand books and magazines, together with some stationery and a few fancy articles in that line, and reestablished him in the humble but peaceful calling of a country bookseller. They called his shop "The Hendrik Athenaeum and Circulating Library," and all the county subscribed; for, at first, the Wimples were the fashionable charity, "the Wimples were always so very respectable, you know," and Sally was such a sweet girl that really it was quite an interesting case. Mrs. Splurge forthwith began improving the minds of her girls to the extent of three full annual subscriptions for Josephine, Adelaide, and Madeline respectively; and that triplet of fair students, who, separately or conjointly, were at all times competent to the establishment of a precedent for the graceful charities of Hendrik good society, handsomely led off with a ten-dollar investment in "fountain" pens, "cream-laid assembly note," motto-wafers, Blessington envelopes "with crest and initial," ivory tablets, pencil-sharpeners, and ink-erasers.
But all their munificence came to nought. Mr. Paul Wimple's heart was broken,—as they say of any weary Sysiphus who lies down by his stone and sleeps forever;—so he died.
Poor little Sally! The first thing she did was to disappoint her friends, and shock the decencies of Hendrik; for it had been agreed on all sides that "the poor dear thing would take on dreadfully, or else fret herself into fits, or perhaps fall into one of them clay-cold, corpsy swoons, like old Miss Dunks has regular every 'revival.'" But when they came, with all their tedious commonplaces of a stupid condolence not wholly innocent of curiosity, Sally thanked them with dry eyes and prudent lips and quiet nerves, and only said she thought she should do very well after she had set the house to rights and slept awhile. The sewing-circle of that week was a coroner's inquest on Sally's character, and "ungrateful," "cold-blooded," "indecent," "worse than a hypocrite," were not the hardest epithets in the verdict of the jury.
But Sally set the place to rights, and bade her father's old friends to the funeral, and buried him with all the money that was in the house, neither asking nor accepting aid from any; and with the poor pittance that her severe conscience could afford her sorrow she procured some cheap material of the doleful sort and went into the most unbecoming of "full mourning." When she made her appearance in church,—which she did, as usual, the very first Sunday after the funeral,—that plainest of bonnets and straitest of black delaines, unadorned save by the old-fashioned and dingy lace-cape, descended through many shifts of saving from her long-ago-dead-and-gone mother, were so manifestly a condescending concession to the conventionalities or superstitions of Hendrik, and said so plainly, "This is for your 'decencies,'—it is all that I can honestly spare, and more than you should demand,—my life is mourning enough,"—that all the congregation bristled at the affront. Henceforth Miss Wimple—no longer dear Sally, or even Miss Sally, but sharp "Miss Wimple"—had that pew to herself.
Now I believe it was not generally known in Hendrik that Miss Wimple had narrowly escaped being a very pretty girl. She was but just in her nineteenth year when her father died. Her features were regular, her expression lovely, her complexion, before trouble nipped the roses of her cheeks, full of the country's freshness. She had tender eyes, profoundly overshadowed by long, pensive lashes; in the sweet lines of her very delicate mouth a trace of quiet pride was prettily blended with thoughtfulness, and a just-forming smile that was always melancholy. Her feet were little, and her hands were soft and white; nor had toil and sorrow, and the weariness, and indifference to self, that come of them,
