In the latter part of the summer of 1826,--a reasonable time having now elapsed since the death of poor Rachel,--the gossips of Ashfield began to discuss the lonely condition of their pastor, in connection with any desirable or feasible amendment of it. The sin of such gossip--if it be a sin--is one that all the preaching in the world will never extirpate from country towns, where the range of talk is by the necessity of the case exceedingly limited. In the city, curiosity has an omnivorous maw by reason of position, and finds such variety to feed upon that it is rarely--except in the case of great political or public scandal--personal in its attentions; and what we too freely reckon a perverted and impertinent country taste is but an ordinary appetite of humanity, which, by the limitation of its feeding-ground, seems to attach itself perversely to private relations. There were some invidious persons in the town who had remarked that Miss Almira Tourtelot had brought quite a new fervor to her devotional exercises in the parish within the last year, as well as a new set of ribbons to her hat; and two maiden ladies opposite, of distinguished pretensions and long experience of life, had observed that the young Reuben, on his passage back and forth from the Elderkins, had sometimes been decoyed within the Tourtelot yard, and presented by the admiring Dame Tourtelot with fresh doughnuts. The elderly maiden ladies were perhaps uncharitable in their conclusions; yet it is altogether probable that the Deacon and his wife may have considered, in the intimacy of their fireside talk, the possibility of some time claiming the minister as a son-in-law. Questions like this are discussed in a great many families even now. Dame Tourtelot had crowned with success all her schemes in life, save one. Almira, her daughter, now verging upon her thirty-second year, had long been upon the anxious-seat as regarded matrimony; and with a sentimental turn that incited much reading of Cowper and Montgomery and (if it must be told) "Thaddeus of Warsaw," the poor girl united a sickly, in-door look, and a peaked countenance, which had not attracted wooers. The wonderful executive capacity of the mother had unfortunately debarred her from any active interest in the household; and though the Tourtelots had actually been at the expense of providing a piano for Almira, (the only one in Ashfield,)--upon which the poor girl thrummed, thinking of "Thaddeus," and, we trust, of better things,--this had not won a roseate hue to her face, or quickened in any perceptible degree the alacrity of her admirers.