The Guardian Angel | Page 6

that they have established a right to a
place among my poems in virtue of long occupancy. Besides, although
the writing of verses is often a mark of mental weakness, I cannot
forget that Joseph Story and George Bancroft each published his little
book, of rhymes, and that John Quincy Adams has left many poems on
record, the writing of which did not interfere with the vast and
important labors of his illustrious career.
BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 7, 1891.
O. W. H.

THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
CHAPTER I.
AN ADVERTISEMENT.
On Saturday, the 18th day of June, 1859, the "State Banner and
Delphian Oracle," published weekly at Oxbow Village, one of the
principal centres in a thriving river-town of New England, contained an

advertisement which involved the story of a young life, and stained the
emotions of a small community. Such faces of dismay, such shaking of
heads, such gatherings at corners, such halts of complaining, rheumatic
wagons, and dried-up, chirruping chaises, for colloquy of their
still-faced tenants, had not been known since the rainy November
Friday, when old Malachi Withers was found hanging in his garret up
there at the lonely house behind the poplars.
The number of the "Banner and Oracle" which contained this
advertisement was a fair specimen enough of the kind of newspaper to
which it belonged. Some extracts from a stray copy of the issue of the
date referred to will show the reader what kind of entertainment the
paper was accustomed to furnish its patrons, and also serve some
incidental purposes of the writer in bringing into notice a few
personages who are to figure in this narrative.
The copy in question was addressed to one of its regular
subscribers,--"B. Gridley, Esq." The sarcastic annotations at various
points, enclosed in brackets and italicised that they may be
distinguished from any other comments, were taken from the pencilled
remarks of that gentleman, intended for the improvement of a member
of the family in which he resided, and are by no means to be attributed
to the harmless pen which reproduces them.
Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons
acquainted with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a
schoolmaster, a college tutor, and afterwards for many years
professor,--a man of learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such
as are hardly to be found, except in old, unmarried students, --the
double flowers of college culture, their stamina all turned to petals,
their stock in the life of the race all funded in the individual. Being a
man of letters, Byles Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary
acquirements of the good people of the rural district where he resided,
and, having known much of college and something of city life, was apt
to smile at the importance they attached to their little local concerns.
He was, of course, quite as much an object of rough satire to the natural
observers and humorists, who are never wanting in a New England

village,--perhaps not in any village where a score or two of families are
brought together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
characters of a real-life stock company.
The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire,
whose handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored
lithograph, representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely
groomed willow--hung in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were,
monumental parlor. Her household consisted of herself, her son,
nineteen years of age, of whom more hereafter, and of two small
children, twins, left upon her doorstep when little more than mere
marsupial possibilities, taken in for the night, kept for a week, and
always thereafter cherished by the good soul as her own; also of Miss
Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the "Academy" in another part
of the same town, a distant relative, boarding with her.
What the old scholar took the village paper for it would be hard to
guess, unless for a reason like that which carried him very regularly to
hear the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, colleague of the
old minister of the village parish; namely, because he did not believe a
word of his favorite doctrines, and liked to go there so as to growl to
himself through the sermon, and go home scolding all the way about it.
The leading article of the "Banner and Oracle" for June 18th must have
been of superior excellence, for, as Mr. Gridley remarked, several of
the "metropolitan" journals of the date of June 15th and thereabout had
evidently conversed with the writer and borrowed some of his ideas
before he gave them to the public. The Foreign News by