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.