href="#ulink_50ad7f4b-9fb1-5555-8ded-43cf840de22d">CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER I
ETHELYN
There was a sweet odor of clover blossoms in the early morning air, and the dew stood in great drops upon the summer flowers, and dropped from the foliage of the elm trees which skirted the village common. There was a cloud of mist upon the meadows, and the windings of the river could be distinctly traced by the white fog which curled above it. But the fog and the mists were rolling away as the warm June sun came over the eastern hills, and here and there signs of life were visible in the little New England town of Chicopee, where our story opens. The mechanics who worked in the large shoe-shop halfway down Cottage Row had been up an hour or more, while the hissing of the steam which carried the huge manufactory had been heard since the first robin peeped from its nest in the alders down by the running brook; but higher up, on Bellevue Street, where the old inhabitants lived, everything was quiet, and the loamy road, moist and damp with the dews of the previous night, was as yet unbroken by the foot of man or rut of passing wheel.
The people who lived there, the Mumfords, and the Beechers, and the Grangers, and the Thorns, did not strictly belong to the working class. They held stocks in railroads, and mortgages on farms, and so could afford to sleep after the shrill whistle from the manufactory had wakened the echoes of the distant hills and sounded across the waters of Pordunk Pond. Only one dwelling here showed signs of life, and that the large square building, shaded in front with elms and ornamented at the side with a luxuriant queen of the prairie, whose blossoms were turning their blushing faces to the rising sun. This was the Bigelow house, the joint property of Mrs. Dr. Van Buren, née Sophia Bigelow, who lived in Boston, and her sister, Miss Barbara Bigelow, the quaintest and kindest-hearted woman who ever bore the sobriquet of an old maid, and was aunt to everybody. She was awake long before the whistle sounded across the river and along the meadow lands, where some of the workmen lived, and just as the robin, whose nest for four summers had been under the eaves where neither boy nor cat could reach it, brought the first worm to its clamorous young, she pushed the fringed curtain from her open window, and with her broad frilled cap still on her head, stood for a moment looking out upon the morning as it crept up the eastern sky. "She will have a nice day for her wedding. May her future life be as fair," Aunt Barbara whispered softly, then kneeling before the window with her head bowed upon the sill, she prayed earnestly for God's blessing on the bridal to take place that night beneath her roof, and upon the young girl who had been both a care and a comfort since the Christmas morning eighteen years before, when her half-sister Julia had come home to die, bringing with her the little Ethelyn, then but two years old.
Aunt Barbara's prayers were always to the point. She said what she had to say in the fewest possible words, wasting no time in repetition, and on this occasion she was briefer than usual, for the good woman had many things upon her mind this morning. First, there was Betty to rouse and get into a state of locomotion, a good half hour's work, as Aunt Barbara knew from a three years' experience. There was the "sponge" put to rise the previous night. She must see if that had risen, and with her own hands mold the snowy breakfast rolls which Ethelyn liked so much. There were the chambers to be inspected a second time, to ascertain if everything was in its place, and dinner to be prepared for the "Van Buren
