All the country knew
and loved him, for he was a natural overseer of the poor, and guardian
of the widow and the orphan. How many a girl in the Normal School every
night put up a prayer of thanksgiving for him; how many a bright boy
in Hanover and Cambridge was equally indebted for the means of high
culture, and if not so thankful, why, Uncle Nathan knew that gratitude
is too nice and delicate a plant to grow on common soil. Once, when
he was twenty-two or three, he was engaged to a young woman of Boston,
while he was a clerk in a commission store. But her father, a skipper
from Beverly or Cape Cod, who continued vulgar while he became rich,
did not like the match. "It won't do," said he, "for a poor young man to
marry into one of our fust families; what is the use of aristocracy if
no distinction is to be made, and our daughters are to marry Tom, Dick,
and Harry?" But Amelia took the matter sorely to heart; she kept her
love, yet fell into a consumption, and so wasted away; or, as one of
the neighbors said, "she was executed on the scaffold of an upstart's
vulgarity." Nathan loved no woman in like manner afterwards, but after
her death went to India, and remained years long.
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