END OF PART FIRST.
[OUR VILLAGE POST-OFFICE.][19]
BY MISS SEDGWICK.
'Why weep ye then, for him, who, having won
The bound of man's appointed years, at last,
Life's blessings all enjoyed, life's labors done,
Serenely to his final rest has passed;
While the soft memory of his virtues yet
Lingers like twilight hues, when the bright sun is set.'
Bryant.
The master of our village post-office for many years past was an old man; but the real dispenser of its joys and sorrows was his son, a youth who performed its duties with intelligence, exactness, and delicacy. Some persons may not be aware how much the last quality is called into requisition in a village post-master. Having the universal country acquaintance with his neighbors' affairs, he holds the key to all their correspondences. He knows, long before the news transpires, when the minister receives a call, when the speculator's affairs are vibrating; he can estimate the conjugal devotion of the absent husband; but most enviable is his knowledge of those delicate and uncertain affairs so provoking to village curiosity. Letters, directed in well-known characters, and written with beating hearts within locked apartments, pass through his hands. The blushing youth steals in at twilight to receive from him his doom; and to him is first known the results of a village belle's foray through a neighboring district. Our young deputy post-master rarely betrayed his involuntary acquaintance with the nature of the missives he dispersed; but, whenever sympathy was permitted, his bright smile and radiating or tearful eye would show how earnest a part he took in all his neighbors suffered or enjoyed. Never was there a kinder heart than Loyd Barnard's—never a truer mirror than his face.
Every family, however insignificant in the stranger's eye, has a world of its own. The drama and the epic have their beginning, their middle, and their end, in the material world. The true story of human relations never ends, and this seal of immortality it is, that gives a dignity and interest to the affections of the humble and unknown, beyond that which fiction and poetry, even when it makes gods and heroes its actors, can attach to qualities and passions that are limited to this world's stage. This intrinsic dignity I claim for the subjects of my humble village tale.
Loyd Barnard's father, Colonel Jesse Barnard, belonged to that defunct body, the aristocracy of our country. He served in the revolutionary war, he did good service to the state in the subsequent Shay's rebellion, and, though he afterward inexplicably fell into the ranks of the popular or democratic party, he retained the manners and insignia of his caste—the prescribed courtesies of the old régime, with the neatly tied cue, and the garment that has given place to the levelling pantaloon. He even persevered in the use of powder till it ceased to be an article of merchandise; and to the very last he maintained those strict observances of politeness, that are becoming, among us, subjects of tradition and history. These, however, are merely accidents of education and usage. His moral constitution had nothing aristocratic or exclusive. On the contrary, his heart was animated with what we would fain believe to be the spirit of our democratic institutions, a universal good will. The colonel was remarkably exempt (whether fortunately or unfortunately each according to his taste must decide) from the virtue or mania of his age and country; and consequently, at threescore and ten, instead of being the proprietor of lands in the West, or ships on the sea, he possessed nothing but his small paternal estate in B——, a pretty, cottage-looking dwelling, with a garden and an acre of land. As far back as the administration of Jefferson, he had received the appointment of post-master; and, as the village grew with the prosperity of manufactures and agriculture, the income of the office has of late amounted to some five or six hundred dollars. This, with the addition of his pension as a revolutionary officer, made the colonel 'passing rich;' for by this time his sons and daughters were married, and dispersed from Maine to Georgia, and the youngest only, our friend Loyd, remained at home. 'Passing rich' we say, and repeat it, was the colonel. Those who have never seen an income of a few hundred dollars well administered in rural life, can have no conception of the comfort and independence, nay, luxury, it will procure. In the first place, the staples of life, space, pure air, sweet water, and a continual feast for the eye, are furnished in the country, in unmeasured quantity, by the bounty of Providence. Then when, as with the colonel, there are no vices to be pampered, no vanities to be cherished, no artificial distinctions to be sustained, no conventional wants to be supplied, the few hundred dollars do all for happiness that money can do. The king who has to ask his Commons for supplies, and the Crœsuses of our land who still desire more than they have, might envy our contented colonel, or rather might have envied him, till, after a life of perfect exemption from worldly cares, he came, for the first time, to feel a chill from the shadows of the coming day—a distrustful fear that the morrow might not take care of itself.