Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/120

 which seems the birthright of the New-England farmer, while the simplicity of his opinions on some subjects, and the oddity of his dialect, administered to her entertainment.

Calling one morning on his patroness, for whom he cherished a respect, almost bordering upon adoration, he was requested to walk into her parlour. This he had ever refused to do, under pretence that his "shoes were clumsy, and he was afraid of meeting some of the gentlefolks, whose ways he was not used to." But she being some what indisposed, and declining to go into her kitchen, he appeared at the door, with a well meant bow, which the dandies of the present day, who deal principally in nods and shrugs, might consider a semi-prostration. The revolution, which in giving us liberty, obliterated almost every vestige of the politenes of the "old school," had not then done its work completely. Individuals were found, forty years since, in every grade of society, who, having been educated when a bow was not an offence to fashion, nor respect for age a relic of monarchy, continued the exercise of both, without being hooted at as aristocrats, or "quizzed" as antidiluvians.

Farmer Larkin was dressed in a suit of stout cloth, whose deep brown colour was produced by an infusion of the bark of the butternut. It had grown the preceding summer upon his own sheep, and after sustaining many processes of mutation in the domestic laboratory, now appeared upon his own person. The mail of Diomede was