Byles Gridley, A. M., as he would have been styled by persons acquainted
with scholarly dignities, was a bachelor, who had been a schoolmaster, a
college tutor, and afterwards for many years professor,--a man of
learning, of habits, of whims and crotchets, such as are hardly to be
found, except in old, unmarried students,--the double flowers of college
culture, their stamina all turned to petals, their stock in the life of
the race all funded in the individual. Being a man of letters, Byles
Gridley naturally rather undervalued the literary acquirements of the
good people of the rural district where he resided, and, having known
much of college and something of city life, was apt to smile at the
importance they attached to their little local concerns. He was, of
course, quite as much an object of rough satire to the natural observers
and humorists, who are never wanting in a New England village,--perhaps
not in any village where a score or two of families are brought
together,--enough of them, at any rate, to furnish the ordinary
characters of a real-life stock company.

The old Master of Arts was a permanent boarder in the house of a very
worthy woman, relict of the late Ammi Hopkins, by courtesy Esquire, whose
handsome monument--in a finished and carefully colored lithograph,
representing a finely shaped urn under a very nicely groomed willow--hung
in her small, well-darkened, and, as it were, monumental parlor. Her
household consisted of herself, her son, nineteen years of age, of whom
more hereafter, and of two small children, twins, left upon her doorstep
when little more than mere marsupial possibilities, taken in for the
night, kept for a week, and always thereafter cherished by the good soul
as her own; also of Miss Susan Posey, aged eighteen, at school at the
"Academy" in another part of the same town, a distant relative, boarding
with her.