No longer ago than yesterday, he said, General Sam Wheeler, the
popular high school committeeman, looked in to say, that it was
getting all over Barnstable, and had very nearly got into the
columns of the Patriot, that he had been got down by the evil agency
of the anti-temperance men to lecture on a new process of making
brandy from crab apples. And the Baptist clergyman rather encouraged
this report, which was doing serious damage. I was told, too, that
the subject of my lecture had been warmly debated by the ladies of
the Orthodox Sewing Circle, where Mrs. Silas Heywood, who had
written several strong articles for the Patriot, which journal
adopted them as its own, was heard to declare emphatically that she
had never heard of this man Crabbe, though she had read no end of
books. Miss Bruce had been six quarters at the high-school, knew
something of Latin and algebra, and had taken music lessons of
Monsieur Pensin‚; but she had never heard of Crabbe until she read
"Night and Morning," where, out of sheer affectation, as it seemed
to her, she found that the author had made sundry quotations from
him to adorn the heads of his chapters. As for Miss Leland, who had
been two years abroad with her father and mother, and was supposed
to know all about literature and the poets, she thought Mr. Crabbe
could not be much, since she had not even heard of him while in
England. Mr. Faulkner, the storekeeper, had not a book of Crabbe on
his shelves, though he dealt largely in hardware and literature, and
was a very respectable scholar. And Squire Brigham, the lawyer, who
mixed himself up with other people's business a great deal, busied
himself in saying: Crabbe must have been an obscure fellow, for
though there was a pyramid of old books in his library, he had not
one of this author's among them; and perhaps he ought to be thankful
for it, for indeed Mrs. Forbush had said to him in confidence, that
she understood of the little deformed man that Crabbe had written