When breakfast was over Jupiter brought round the horses and sleigh, and Mrs. Gower entered, holding her prize, and they drove off.
It was noon when they reached the end of their long journey, and entered the little village of St. Mark's. Sloping upward from the bay on one side, and encircled by a dense primeval forest on the other, the village stood. St. Mark's was a great place in the eyes of its inhabitants, and considered by them the only spot on the globe fit for rational beings to live in. It was rather an unpretending-looking place, though, to strangers, who sometimes came from the city to spend the hot summer months there, in preference to any fashionable watering-place. It contained a church, a school-house, a lecture-room, a post-office, and an inn.
But the principal building, and pride of the village, was Mount Sunset Hall. It stood upon a sloping eminence, which the villagers dignified with the title of hill, but which in reality was no such thing. The hall itself was a large, quaint, old mansion of gray stone, built in the Elizabethan style, with high turrets, peaked gables, and long, high windows. It was finely situated, commanding on one side a view of the entire village and the bay, and on the other the dark pine forest and far-spreading hills beyond. A carriage-path wound up toward the front, through an avenue of magnificent horse chestnuts, now bare and leafless. A wide porch, on which the sun seemed always shining, led into a long, high hall, flanked on each side by doors, opening into the separate apartments. A wide staircase of dark polished oak led to the upper chambers of the old mansion.
The owner of Sunset Hall was Squire Erliston, the one great man of the village, the supreme autocrat of St. Mark's. The squire was a rough, gruff, choleric old bear, before whom children and poultry and other inferior animals quaked in terror. He had been once given to high living and riotous excesses, and Sunset Hall had then been a place of drunkenness and debauchery. But these excesses at last brought on a dangerous disease, and for a long time his life was despaired of; then the squire awoke to a sense of his situation, took a "pious streak"—as he called it himself—and registered a vow, that if it pleased Providence not to deprive the world in general, and St. Marks in particular, of so valuable an ornament as himself, he would eschew all his evil deeds and meditate seriously on his latter end. Whether his prayer was heard or not I cannot undertake to say; but certain it is the squire recovered; and, casting over in his mind the ways and means by which he could best do penance for his past sins, he resolved to go through a course of Solomon's Proverbs, and—get married. Deeming it best to make the greatest sacrifice first, he got married; and, after the honeymoon was past, surprised his wife one day by taking down the huge family Bible left him by his father, and reading the first chapter. This he continued for a week—yawning fearfully all the time; but after that he resolved to make his wife read them aloud to him, and thereby save him the trouble.
"For," said the squire sagely, "what's the use of having a wife if she can't make herself useful. 'A good wife's a crown to her husband,' as Solomon says."
So Mrs. Erliston was commanded each morning to read one of the chapters by way of morning prayers. The squire would stretch himself on a lounge, light a cigar, lay his head on her lap, and prepare to listen. But before the conclusion of the third verse Squire Erliston and his good resolutions would be as sound as one of the Seven Sleepers.
When his meek little wife would hint at this, her worthy liege lord would fly into a passion, and indignantly deny the assertion. He asleep, indeed! Preposterous!—he had heard every word! And, in proof of it, he vociferated every text he could remember, and insisted upon making Solomon the author of them all. This habit he had retained through life—often to the great amusement of his friends—setting the most absurd phrases down to the charge of the Wise Monarch. His wife died, leaving him with two daughters; the fate of the eldest, Esther, is already known to the reader.
Up the carriage-road, in front, the sleigh containing our travelers drove. Good Mrs. Gower—who for many years had been Squire Erliston's housekeeper—alighted, and, passing through the long hall, entered a cheerful-looking apartment known as the "housekeeper's room."
Seating herself in an elbow-chair to recover her breath, Mrs. Gower laid the baby in her bed, and rang the bell. The summons was answered by a tidy little darkey, who rushed in all of a flutter.
"Laws! Missus Scour, I's 'stonished, I is! Whar's de young 'un! Jupe say you fotch one from the city."