gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer
evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am
afraid, not unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned with
such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not
perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the
heart and seemed to travel with the blood. Day came in with a
shudder. White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as
we see them more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon
dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat
and crystal pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had still
been there, and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing
damps and foul malaria. The fences along the line bore but two
descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos, and the
other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At the point of day, and
while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the
state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a
doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."

The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived
at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she
was at no pains to conceal. But being a woman of a practical
spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and
encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry all
her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit
by my empty seat. Nay, she was such a rattle by nature, and, so
powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for
want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell me the story
of her life. I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have
made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays.
I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her