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.