Judge Bonham, the purchaser, had been highly distinguished in the civic and military employments of the country. Like his old friend, Colonel Seymour, he was with Lee at Spottsylvania, Gettysburg and Appommattox, and like his colleague in the humiliations of the hour he had declined to "bend the pregnant hinges of the knee that thrift may follow fawning." To say that under all circumstances he maintained a perpendicular, from which there was no swerving backwards or forwards or to the right, or the left would be a falsification of biography. He, like all other mortals upon this terrene had his passions, when his temper, despite curbs and restraints, almost overmastered him. Judicial experiences had affected his manners, so that he appeared austere and unfriendly; but he had a kind heart, open-handed to a fault, true to his convictions, his friends, his God.
There were curves and lines in the physical man here and there that appeared misplaced and misshapen. His long stringy hair or what there was left of it, was of a carrotty color, his nose was aquiline with unnatural projections, and his mouth though a little rigid in outline displayed, when animated, a beautiful set of teeth.
He was a very scholarly man; a religious man too, and entertained throughout his life strong Calvinistic convictions. It was strange indeed that a gentleman so exemplary in life, should sometimes run the hazard of being suspected as a rogue by those who were ignorant of the infirmity that harassed him all of his years. When meditating upon this playfulness of nature he would observe confidentially, that in any community where he was not known he would be oftener in the State's prison than without it.
"Better a Bedouin in the trackless desert than a man who is forever running the gauntlet at such a risk," he said embarrassingly.
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."