This old teacher of Persis Buckley had still some relatives left in Boston, and now and then she went to them on a visit. On one of these occasions Sarah Buckley commissioned her to purchase some books for Persis. All the literature in the Buckley house consisted of the Bible, Watts’s Hymns, and Doddridge’s _Rise and Progress_, and Sarah fancied that another book or two of possibly an ornamental and decorative tendency might be of use in her daughter’s education. When Mistress Tabitha Hopkins returned from Boston she brought with her a volume of Young’s _Night Thoughts_ and one of Richardson’s _Clarissa Harlowe_. The first she presented with confidence, the second with some excuses. “I know well that the poetry is of a nature that will elevate her soul and tend to form her mind,” said she, “and I have myself no doubt as to the other. If it be a tale, ’tis one she can read to her profit, and the pleasure she may take in it may lead her to peruse it more closely. ’Tis well sometimes to season hard doctrines with sugar if you would have them gulped down at all.” Mistress Hopkins made a wry face, as if the said doctrines were even then like bitter pills in her mouth, and Sarah Buckley glanced at her suspiciously. However, she took the books, and paid for them a goodly sum, and Persis was henceforth made acquainted with the lofty admonitions to Lorenzo and the woes of the unfortunate and virtuous Clarissa. It might well have been that Tabitha Hopkins’s recommendation of the story of poor Clarissa Harlowe and her desperate experience at the hands of a faithless lover had its object. Mistress Tabitha Hopkins’s single life had not predisposed her to implicit reliance upon the good faith or the motives of gay gallants who, in the course of some little trip out of their world, chanced to notice a beautiful rustic maiden. Everybody in the village knew now the reason for Ichabod Buckley’s and his wife’s strange treatment of their daughter Persis. They knew that the grand gentleman who had come to town with the coach and four had seen Persis, and cried out at her beauty, and made her father give his promise that she should be kept for him until she was grown up, when he would come over seas from England and marry her. Ichabod had vainly tried to keep this secret, but he had told it before a week had passed to old Thomas Knapp, who was helping him to set Widow Nye’s gravestone.