The good people of Devonshire were rather given to quarreling--

sometimes about the minister's wife, meek, gentle Mrs. Tiverton, whose

manner of housekeeping, and style of dress, did not exactly suit them;

sometimes about the minister himself, good, patient Mr. Tiverton, who

vainly imagined that if he preached three sermons a week, attended the

Wednesday evening prayer-meeting, the Thursday evening sewing society,

officiated at every funeral, visited all the sick, and gave to every

beggar who called at his door, besides superintending the Sunday

school, he was earning his salary of six hundred per year.

Sometimes, and that not rarely, the quarrel crept into the choir, and

then, for one whole Sunday, it was all in vain that Mr. Tiverton read

the psalm and hymn, casting troubled glances toward the vacant seats

of his refractory singers. There was no one to respond, unless it were

good old Mr. Hodges, who pitched so high that few could follow him;

while Mrs. Captain Simpson--whose daughter, the organist, had been

snubbed at the last choir meeting by Mr. Hodges' daughter, the alto

singer--rolled up her eyes at her next neighbor, or fanned herself

furiously in token of her disgust.

Latterly, however, there had come up a new cause of quarrel, before

which every other cause sank into insignificance. Now, though the

village of Devonshire could boast but one public schoolhouse, said

house being divided into two departments, the upper and lower

divisions, there were in the town several district schools; and for

the last few years a committee of three had been annually appointed to

examine and decide upon the merits of the various candidates for

teaching, giving to each, if the decision were favorable, a little

slip of paper certifying their qualifications to teach a common

school. Strange that over such an office so fierce a feud should have

arisen; but when Mr. Tiverton, Squire Lamb and Lawyer Whittemore, in

the full conviction that they were doing right, refused a certificate

of scholarship to Laura Tisdale, niece of Mrs. Judge Tisdale, and

awarded it to one whose earnings in a factory had procured for her a

thorough English education, the villagers, to use a vulgar phrase,

were at once set by the ears, the aristocracy abusing, and the

democracy upholding the dismayed trio, who, as the breeze blew harder,

quietly resigned their office, and Devonshire was without a school

committee.

In this emergency something must be done, and, as the two belligerent

parties could only unite on a stranger, it seemed a matter of special

providence that only two months before, young Dr. Holbrook, a native

of modern Athens, had rented the pleasant little office on the village

common, formerly occupied by old Dr. Carey, now lying in the graveyard

by the side of some whose days he had prolonged, and others whose days

he had surely shortened. Besides being handsome, and skillful, and

quite as familiar with the poor as the rich, the young doctor was

descended from the aristocratic line of Boston Holbrooks, facts which

tended to make him a favorite with both classes; and, greatly to his

surprise, he found himself unanimously elected to the responsible

office of sole Inspector of Common Schools in Devonshire. It was in

vain that he remonstrated, saying he knew nothing whatever of the

qualifications requisite for a teacher; that he could not talk to

girls, young ones especially; that he should make a miserable failure,

and so forth. The people would not listen. Somebody must examine the

teachers and that somebody might as well be Dr. Holbrook as anybody.




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