LETTY RAWDON.
AN EPISODE IN AMERICAN LIFE.
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BY THOS. R. NEWBOLD.
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The ever-changing hues of the kaleidoscope, and the varying tints of our autumnal forests do not present more changeful or varied scenes than are to be found in real life in this country. The decay of one family, the rise of another, depending as they do on the pecuniary fortunes of their possessors, render American society a scene of constant excitement, and he who is at the top of the social ladder to-day, falls to-morrow with the fall of stocks to the bottom. The little tale which follows is but a type of what is daily occurring around us, and is presented as a general outline, which all may fill up at their leisure to suit their pleasure.
Letitia, or as she was usually called in her girlhood, Letty Rawdon, was the only daughter of old Elias Rawdon, a thrifty and prosperous tailor in the pleasant village of Middlebury. The old man had married rather late in life, after he had in his own phrase “got a little something snug about him.” She followed the usual course of village girls, and at the dame’s school had learned those difficult arts of reading, writing, and ciphering. In her young days, the road to learning was not the plank or rail-road track on which our young people now travel so readily. The A, B, C, required some study to ponder out, and in 179—, the portals to learning were not thrown so wide open as they are in the year of grace 1852. Be that as it may, Letty, however, mastered them. From her earliest years she had been an ambitious child, never content unless she was among the foremost; as eager for superiority over her little schoolmates in play as in study, as if she had been born to rule them. She was not what would be termed a handsome child, but her features were delicate, and her full hazel eye looked out from its long lashes with a glance that showed full well the determined soul within. She was her father’s darling, who denied her nothing, whence she soon obtained a complete ascendancy in the dwelling of the old tailor.
When Letty was about thirteen years of age, a fashionable boarding-school was opened in the village, and the old man yielded at once to her wishes to become a day-scholar at it. Here her ambition carried her rapidly onward, and if Letty, when she entered it, was comparatively a raw, ignorant country-girl, no one who saw her at the termination of her course of studies there, could have recognized in the graceful, intelligent, and accomplished girl before him, the little awkward being, who, four years before had there commenced her career. The principal of the school, an elegant and accomplished lady, was early attracted to her by her aptitude for learning, and her desire to acquire it, and Letty was soon a favorite pupil. Nor whilst cultivating her mind did she neglect her person. The elegant manners of her preceptress made a most decided impression on her; gradually she found her own forming on the model before her, and in process of time, though she made no pretensions to great beauty, it would have been difficult to have found a more attractive person than Letty Rawdon, the tailor’s daughter.
The young men of the village and neighborhood were the first to make this discovery, and at all the general merry-makings which occurred, Letty Rawdon was, beyond all rivalry, the village belle. We say general merry-makings, for our village, like all others large and small, had its aristocracy, and in the eyes of the “upper circle,” we mean the female part of it, of its fifteen hundred inhabitants, she was only “that conceited, forward thing, the daughter of old Rawdon, the tailor.” Mrs. Baxter, the wife of the leading lawyer of the place, in an interview with Mrs. Danforth, the wife of the physician, had settled—“that, although they supposed in their small place they must know the tailor’s daughter when they met her in the street, or at church, or other public place, still she was not to be on any account admitted into their set.” How often has many a lovely girl been thus tabooed, not that she would not confer honor on them, but she might mayhap be in the way of an advantageous settlement of some marriageable daughters, perchance less attractive than herself.
Letty soon found that there was a determination in the female magnates of the village to crush her rising into any importance among them. But the spirit of the girl rose with the occasion. In a short time it became generally known that she was to be kept at a distance by the village fashionables. What cared she? Her father had accumulated a snug little competency, and few girls in the neighborhood would be as well dowered as Letty. On this she was allowed to draw as she pleased. New and tasty furniture adorned the best “sitting-room,” and Letty’s brilliant performance on by far the best piano in the village, caused many a hasty step to loiter on its way, as it passed the tailor’s door. Nor were the listeners confined to the outside of the house, for within were frequently found all the “most desirable” young men, who showed a decided preference for Letty’s fine music and lively conversation, to the more dignified, but less agreeable assemblages of the exclusives of the place. Nor abroad did she attract less admiration than at home, and envy itself was at length compelled to confess that Letty Rawdon was by far the best dressed and most stylish girl in the village.