There is a peculiar freshness about the entertainment that opens the gayeties of the season. The shucking at Lumsden's had the advantage of being set off by a dim back-ground of other shuckings, and quiltings, and wood-choppings, and apple-peelings that were to follow, to say nothing of the frolics pure and simple--parties alloyed with no utilitarian purposes. Lumsden's corn lay ready for husking, in a whitey-brown ridge five or six feet high. The Captain was not insensible to considerations of economy. He knew quite well that it would be cheaper in the long run to have it husked by his own farm hands; the expense of an entertainment in whiskey and other needful provisions, and the wasteful handling of the corn, not to mention the obligation to send a hand to other huskings, more than counter-balanced the gratuitous labor. But who can resist the public sentiment that requires a man to be a gentleman according to the standard of his neighbors? Captain Lumsden had the reputation of doing many things which were oppressive, and unjust, but to have "shucked" his own corn would have been to forfeit his respectability entirely. It would have placed him on the Pariah level of the contemptible Connecticut Yankee who had bought a place farther up the creek, and who dared to husk his own corn, practise certain forbidden economies, and even take pay for such trifles as butter, and eggs, and the surplus veal of a calf which he had killed. The propriety of "ducking" this Yankee had been a matter of serious debate. A man "as tight as the bark on a beech tree," and a Yankee besides, was next door to a horse-thief. So there was a corn-shucking at Cap'n Lumsden's. The "women-folks" turned the festive occasion into farther use by stretching a quilt on the frames, and having the ladies of the party spend the afternoon in quilting and gossiping--the younger women blushing inwardly, and sometimes outwardly, with hope and fear, as the names of certain young men were mentioned. Who could tell what disclosures the evening frolic might produce? For, though "circumstances alter cases," they have no power to change human nature; and the natural history of the delightful creature which we call a young woman was essentially the same in the Hissawachee Bottom, sixty odd years ago, that it is on Murray or Beacon Street Hill in these modern times. Difference enough of manner and costume--linsey-woolsey, with a rare calico now and then for Sundays; the dropping of "kercheys" by polite young girls--but these things are only outward. The dainty girl that turns away from my story with disgust, because "the people are so rough," little suspects how entirely of the cuticle is her refinement--how, after all, there is a touch of nature that makes Polly Ann and Sary Jane cousins-german to Jennie, and Hattie, and Blanche, and Mabel.