The  "  great  folks,"  meaning  the  mansion-house  gentry,
were  just  beginning  to  come ;  Dudley  Venner  and  his  daugh
ter  had  been  the  first  of  them.  Judge  Thornton,  white-
headed,  fresh-faced,  as  good  at  sixty  as  he  was  at  forty,  with
a  youngish  second  wife,  and  one  noble  daughter,  Arabella,
who,  they  said,  knew  as  much  law  as  her  father,  a  stately,
Portia-like  girl,  fit  for  a  premier's  wife,  not  like  to  find  her
match  even  in  the  great  cities  she  sometimes  visted;  the
Trecothicks,  the  family  of  a  merchant,  (in  the  larger  sense,)
who,  having  made  himself  rich  enough  by  the  time  he  had
reached  middle  life,  threw  down  his  ledger  as  Sylla  did  his
dagger,  and  retired  to  make  a  little  paradise  around  him  in
one  of  the  statliest  residences  of  the  town,  a  family  inherit
ance;  the  Vaughans,  an  old  Rockland  race,  descended  from
its  first  settlers,  Toryish  in  tendency  in  Revolutionary  times,
and  barely  escaping  confiscation  or  worse;  the  Dunhams,  a
new  family,  dating  its  gentility  only  as  far  back  as  the  Hon
orable  Washington  Dunham,  M.  C.,  but  turning  out  a  clever
boy  or  two  that  went  to  college,  and  some  showy  girls  with
white  necks  and  fat  arms  who  had  picked  up  professional
husbands:  these  were  the  principal  mansion-house  people.
All  of  them  had  made  it  a  point  to  come ;  and  as  each  of  them
entered,  it  seemed  to  Colonel  and  Mrs.  Sprowle  that  the
lamps  burned  up  with  a  more  cheerful  light,  and  that  the
fiddles  which  sounded  from  the  uncarpeted  room  were  all
half  a  tone  higher  and  half  a  beat  quicker.
