man turning in at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the vision of
the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she felt ashamed of her old
sun-hat, and sick of North Dormer, and jealously aware of Annabel Balch
of Springfield, opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on glories
greater than the glories of Nettleton.

"How I hate everything!" she said again.

Half way down the street she stopped at a weak-hinged gate. Passing
through it, she walked down a brick path to a queer little brick temple
with white wooden columns supporting a pediment on which was inscribed
in tarnished gold letters: "The Honorius Hatchard Memorial Library,
1832."

Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she
would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her
only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For
Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had
enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of
the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked
literary gifts, written a series of papers called "The Recluse of Eagle
Range," enjoyed the acquaintance of Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene
Halleck, and been cut off in his flower by a fever contracted in Italy.
Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a
link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity
Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a
freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt
any deader in his grave than she did in his library.

Entering her prison-house with a listless step she took off her hat,