The schoolmaster is generally a man of some importance in the
female circle of a rural neighborhood, being considered a kind of
idle, gentleman-like personage of vastly superior taste and
accomplishments to the rough country swains, and, indeed,
inferior in learning only to the parson. His appearance,
therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table
of a farmhouse and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes
or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver tea-pot.
Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles
of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the
churchyard between services on Sundays, gathering grapes for them
from the wild vines that overrun the surrounding trees; reciting
for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones; or
sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the
adjacent mill-pond, while the more bashful country bumpkins hung
sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.
From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travelling
gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to
house, so that his appearance was always greeted with
satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of
great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and
was a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History of New England
Witchcraft, in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently
believed.
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