All the celebrated creatures whom Fate or the lecture-committee chance to bring to our town profess themselves amazed that Mrs. Marcellus should continue to make this little-celebrated locality her home. The comment has a double import, containing at once a compliment and the reverse. If therein be conveyed an intimation that Hurville as a place of residence is devoid of those varied opportunities for self-improvement, gayety and æsthetic culture which render existence in the great centres so diversified and so charming, or even should the insinuation go so far as to clearly express the indubitable fact that it is a crude, ragged little town, with a few staring red brick business-houses fronting each other on the muddy or dusty or frozen main street (according to the season), and a numerous colony of wooden cottages dotted around "promiscuous" as an outer fringe--nay, should Hurville even be apostrophized as a "hole," as it was once by a lecturer who came during the mud-reign and failed to draw a house,--why, even the most enthusiastic Hurvillian need take no offence. But whatever the town may be, think what our fellow-townswoman, Mrs. Marcellus, is! One of the greatest favorites our lecture-committee secures for us each year, a dramatic reader with a stentorian voice and a fine frenzy rolling around loose in his eye, expressed the whole thing in what I may call a Shakespearian nutshell by a happy paraphrase of the great bard. "It was not," said Mr. Blankenhoff, "that people appreciated Hurville _less_, but Mrs. Marcellus _more_." That settled it.