Scudder had gone to sleep the first night after
James's departure, she had settled upon the house where the minister
and his young wife were to live, had reviewed the window-curtains and
bed-quilts for each room, and glanced complacently at an improved
receipt for wedding-cake which might be brought out to glorify a certain
occasion!
CHAPTER VII.
THE FRIENDS AND RELATIONS OF JAMES.
Mr. Zebedee Marvyn, the father of James, was the sample of an
individuality so purely the result of New England society and education,
that he must be embodied in our story as a representative man of the
times.
He owned a large farm in the immediate vicinity of Newport, which he
worked with his own hands and kept under the most careful cultivation.
He was a man past the middle of life, with a white head, a keen blue
eye, and a face graven deeply with the lines of energy and thought. His
was one of those clearly-cut minds which New England forms among her
farmers, as she forms quartz crystals in her mountains, by a sort of
gradual influence flowing through every pore of her soil and system.
His education, properly so called, had been merely that of those common
schools and academies with which the States are thickly sown, and which
are the springs of so much intellectual activity. Here he had learned
to think and to inquire,--a process which had not ceased with his
school-days. Though toiling daily with his sons and hired man in all the
minutiae of a farmer's life, he kept an observant eye on the field of
literature, and there was not a new publication heard of that he did
not immediately find means to add it to his yearly increasing stock of
books.
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