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THE COUNTERPART COUSINS.
Almost every house, in a little village situate in the lower part of Somersetshire, near the borders of Devon, was tenanted, two or three generations back, either by a Blake or a Hickory. Individuals, of one or the other of these names, occupied all the best farms, and all the minor lucrative posts, in the parish. The shoemaker, the carpenter, the thatcher, and the landlord of the public house, were Blakes; and the parish clerk, the glazier, the tailor, and the keeper of “the shop,” where almost every thing was sold, Hickories. Numerous matrimonial alliances were formed among the young people of the two families. As the Blakes were manly, and the Hickories handsome, it happened, rather luckily, that the children of the former were, for the most part, boys, and those of the latter, girls. If a male child were bom among the Hickories, he grew up puny in frame and womanly in features; and there was not an individual, among the few females of the Blake family, who did not bear the strongly marked features and robust frame, characteristic of the race from which she sprang. The young men of the house of Hickory were too much like their sisters, to be good-looking fellows; and the damsels of the other name resembled their brothers too closely, to be beautiful women; they were, apparently, stout enough in form, and sufficiently bold in heart, had not the days of chivalry been past, to have been esquires to “mettlesome knights of hie renown;” while the striplings of the other family were more adapted, from their lady-like limbs and gentle looks, to be bower-pages to those high-born dames, for whose honour and amusement, their chivalric lords occasionally broke each other's pates in the tourney.
Notwithstanding these disparities, some strong attraction seemed to exist between the blood of the two families; not only did the “manly Blakes” take unto themselves wives from among the “handsome Hickories,”—-this was natural enough,—but the young yeomen of the tribe of Hickory, intermarried with the spinsterhood of the Blakes. Perhaps it was Hobson's choice with the youths,—these or none;—there being scarcely another name in the village except those of the “two great houses”—Hickory and Blake; and in those days, but few of its young folks travelled far beyond the landmarks of their native place.
The Blakes and Hickories, at length, grew so numerous, that the village did not offer sufficient resources for their support, and several of them emigrated;—some to the neighbouring towns, but the greater part to the metropolis, where they were soon lost in its mighty tide of population, which is constantly recruited by “supplies from the country,” as the river, whose banks it ennobles, is supported by the tributary streams which eternally flow into its huge bed. A great number of the descendants of those females of the Blake family, who had intermarried with Hickories, still remained; but it was in vain to seek for the fine Herculean forms, which tradition had assigned to the Blakes, or the surpassing beauty, which, according to old tales, was once possessed by the female Hickories. It is true, that the features of each family were to be seen, scattered among various individuals; but no perfect specimen, in the prime of life, of either race, could be found. Two or three gaunt fellows, the oldest men in the parish, who were issue of the first unions between the two houses, still stalked about, with melancholy countenances, thinking but little of the present, and more often of the past than the future; but as their fathers had been Hickories, and their mothers Blakes, it was said that they did not possess those excellencies of form or feature, which their cousins, who were Blakes by the father's side, and Hickories by the mother's, were reported to have been endowed.
A single individual of the Blake family, in whose veins none of the Hickory blood flowed, remained alive; that individual was a woman, fettered by age and infirmities, to a chair on the kitchen hearth of one of her descendants. Dame Deborah was venerated as a relic of old times, rather than beloved. The beings about her had come into the world when she was aged; and those, to whom she had given life, had passed away before her; leaving their mother to the care of a third generation. To her, those little acts of kindness, which are so endearing in the first stage of human decay through “length of days,” were rarely performed, because she was too withered in mind and feeling to appreciate them. She lived among relations, but had no friends. All her wants were scrupulously provided for; but the attentions, which her grand-children and great-grand-children paid her, were acts of duty rather than affection. The days of her glory, even as an old woman were over: she had ceased to become a domestic adviser; the last child she had nursed, for one of her daughters, was now “a stout and stalwart” young fellow, nearly six feet high; and those, to whom she had told tales of other times, when her memory and breath were both equal to the task, were getting old themselves, and beginning to relate the same chronicles, round the kitchen fire, on winter nights; generally without acknowledging, and often forgetting, to whom they were indebted for that legendary lore, the possession of which so exalted them in the opinions of the young.
From the dark cloud, which usually obscured Dame Deborah's mental faculties, a gleam of youthful memory occasionally shot up, which much amazed many of her descendants. One evening, a warm discussion took place in the kitchen where she sat, as to the precise ages of Ralph Hickory and his cousin Harry. After a world of talk, without an atom of conclusion, Dame Deborah placed her hand upon the arm of one of the disputants, and said, in a tremulous but distinct tone: “Susanna Hickory, who was big Anthony Blake's seventh child, and only daughter, and married one of the young Hickories of Hickory Hatch, was brought to bed of a boy on the second day of our Whitsun revel, the same hour that her cousin Polly had twins,—both boys,—but only one of them lived to be christened. I stood godmother to the two babes. Susey's boy was called Ralph, after my first husband, and Polly's after my second goodman, Harry. That was the year when lightning struck the steeple, and Matty Drew, the witch, was drowned. She told the children's fortunes, and said of them,—
'Merry meeting—sorry parting;
Second greeting—bitter smarting;
Third struggle—'”