Could I but show her as she was then, tricked out on a
Sunday morning in the hereditary finery of the old Dutch clothes-press,
of which her mother had confided to her the key.
The wedding dress of
her grandmother, modernized for use, with sundry ornaments, handed down
as heirlooms in the family. Her pale brown hair smoothed with
buttermilk in flat waving lines on each side of her fair forehead. The
chain of yellow virgin gold, that encircled her neck; the little cross,
that just rested at the entrance of a soft valley of happiness, as if
it would sanctify the place. The - but pooh! - it is not for an old man
like me to be prosing about female beauty: suffice it to say, Amy had
attained her seventeenth year. Long since had her sampler exhibited
hearts in couples desperately transfixed with arrows, and true lovers'
knots worked in deep blue silk; and it was evident she began to
languish for some more interesting occupation than the rearing of
sunflowers or pickling of cucumbers.
At this critical period of female existence, when the heart within a
damsel's bosom, like its emblem, the miniature which hangs without, is
apt to be engrossed by a single image, a new visitor began to make his
appearance under the roof of Wolfert Webber. This was Dirk Waldron, the
only son of a poor widow, but who could boast of more fathers than any
lad in the province; for his mother had had four husbands, and this
only child, so that though born in her last wedlock, he might fairly
claim to be the tardy fruit of a long course of cultivation.
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