There was the gossip of the town in which he lived as biting as the hoar frost, revamped and magnified to his hurt. When the gossipping spinsters heard that the judge was reinforcing his natural attractiveness by the glossiest and finest of raiment, coming out of the wardrobe like the butterfly out of the chrysalis, they hurried to and fro among the neighbors, like magpies chattering and twittering, and they laid the poor fellow under the power of an anodyne upon the cold marble slab, and with scalpels scarified him horribly, as some women only can do. "Did you ever! Did you ever!" came a refrain from puckered lips. "Who would have believed it!" exclaimed Miss Jerusha Timpkins, as she rolled up her dancing eyes and clasped her bony hands as if in expostulation. "The idea! The idea!" ejaculated Miss Narcissa Scoggins. "That man going to marry!" they all exclaimed in chorus. "My, my, my!" "And pray who told you so?" asked Miss Jemima Livesay with a biting expression. "Why, where have you been, Jemima, all these months, you ain't heard it? It is the town talk. Why, Amarylla Hedgepeth she heard it straight from the knitting society. Squire Jiggetts told old Deacon Bobbett that the judge had spoken to him to marry him to the beautiful Alice Seymour, and Deacon Bobbett told his wife, and Mrs. Bobbett told Sarah Marlow, and Sarah Marlow told Polly Ann Midgett, and Polly Ann ups and tells Martha Gallop, and that's how the news gets to us strait." "Well sir!" exclaimed Miss Serepta Hightower, forgetting she was speaking to old maids who had a loathing for any expression that suggested a man or the name or the memory of a man, except the man they were prodding and scarifying. "I wouldn't believe it if the news came pine blank from the clouds; that I wouldn't!" and she gave emphasis to the utterance by the malicious and vehement stroking of one skinny fist against the other. "Why, that man?" she exclaimed with horror, "Why, he would forget his marriage vows before he ever made them. Why when he led Malindy Hartsease a blushing bride to the altar thirty years ago; why, don't you all remember that he sauntered out of the church by his lone lorn self, and the preacher had to go to his house in the dead of night in the rain and tell him that he had left his bride in the church crying her very eyeballs out?" "The monster! the monster!" all exclaimed and skinny hands and skinny arms and skinny necks were tossing and swaying automatically. "Of course I warnt there myself (nor I either, came interruptions from all the spinsters) but I heard my mother, poor soul, say that she was right there and that she never felt so sorry for a poor human being in all her life as she did for poor Malindy; but she has gone to her rest now, thank the Lord!" and a dozen handkerchiefs instantly gravitated toward a dozen hysterical faces.