Now do not go to thinking that Hester Bryan was a great strapping Amazon, and looked like a female prize-fighter. She was tall, and she was strong, and she was graceful as the Venus of the Porta Portese, if by good luck you ever saw her. And she was as good as pretty; and she was the queen of the whole town, because she was pretty and good, and so bright. She never set herself up as grander than the other girls, and all the other girls set her up as the queen of their love and worship. And the boys? Oh, that was of course. But then there were no "pretenders," as the French say. All that was settled long ago--as long ago as when she wore a sun-bonnet, and walked barefoot to school. Horace would always be waiting for her at the Five Corners, with the largest and ripest raspberries, or with whatever other offering was in season. As long ago as when he made his first canoe, there would hang under her window, before breakfast, great bunches of the earliest pond-lilies. As soon as it would do for these young folks to go on sleigh-rides, it was in Horace's cutter that Hester always rode. And when Hester sang in the choir, she always stood at the right hand of the altos, and just across the passage stood Horace, at the left hand of the tenors. Not a young man in the village interfered with Horace's pre-emption there. But not a young man in the village who did not stand by Horace as loyally as the girls stood by Hester; and if he had needed to summon a working party to build a bridge across a slue, that Hester might walk dry-shod with a white slipper on, why, all the young men of the neighborhood would be there as soon as Horace wound his horn. A nice girl at the West once wrote me to ask why all the good young men, who were bright and spirited and nice, were in my books, and why, in fact, the bright boys, who knew something and could do something and could be something--in short, were agreeable--were apt to be lounging round liquor saloons in the village when they should be better employed. I told her, of course, to wait a little; that she was looking through some very small key-hole. How I wish that my unknown correspondent could have seen Horace Ray! He was handsome, he was bright, he was strong, he was steady, he was full of fun; he could read French well, and could talk German, and he knew enough Latin. And yet he did not lounge round a liquor saloon, and the minister was glad, and not sorry, that he sung in the choir.