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.