The circumstances of Aunt Abby’s marriage were as peculiar as were her own traits of character. Among the students of the college was a young gentleman of large fortune and fine talents, who was afflicted with a constitutional timidity and nervousness that paralyzed all his powers. He was the only child of a widowed mother, who had foolishly resisted the boy’s wish to go to school. He had therefore remained at home under the charge of tutors, and when the death of his mother released him from her affectionate tyranny, he entered college only to find himself inferior in attainments to every one else, and a perfect butt, from his timid shyness. He was full of poetry and sentiment. Among realities he was lost and bewildered, but in the world of fancy he was a hero even to himself. To a gay set of frolicksome students nothing could offer better game than the mental and personal peculiarities of the rich young Southerner, who rejoiced in the name of Sampson Terricott, (a name soon transmuted into Sampson Tear-your-coat) by his companions. Nothing could be more ludicrous than the association of such a name with such a person. The redoubtable Sampson was some five feet four inches in height, with an exceedingly slight figure, small features of the style usually designated as “_snub-faced_,” with a skim-milk complexion, and hair of that _sun-burned_ flaxen color, so common among hatless country urchins. His voice was a piping treble, with an occasional tone in it like that of a cracked penny-trumpet. His hands and feet were ridiculously small, and when attired in his college-gown, it required but little caricaturing to draw his portrait in a style decidedly feminine, yet decidedly like. He received all kinds of nicknames for his personal peculiarities, but, perhaps, none annoyed him more than the _soubriquet_ of “Miss Dalilah,” which was generally bestowed upon him. Yet a mind filled with images of beauty was hidden beneath this unpromising exterior. He had no force of character, no iron strength of intellect, but he had an unbounded imagination, and an unlimited reach of vision into spiritualities. He was a poet, but lacking the key to a poet’s harmonies of utterance, he expended his strength in the beautiful cloud-land of metaphysics and became a moral philosopher.