Chapter 1

MISS OCTAVIA BASSETT.

Slowbridge had been shaken to its foundations.

It may as well be explained, however, at the outset, that it would not
take much of a sensation to give Slowbridge a great shock. In the first
place, Slowbridge was not used to sensations, and was used to going on
the even and respectable tenor of its way, regarding the outside world
with private distrust, if not with open disfavor. The new mills had been
a trial to Slowbridge,--a sore trial. On being told of the owners' plan
of building them, old Lady Theobald, who was the corner-stone of the
social edifice of Slowbridge, was said, by a spectator, to have turned
deathly pale with rage; and, on the first day of their being opened in
working order, she had taken to her bed, and remained shut up in her
darkened room for a week, refusing to see anybody, and even going so far
as to send a scathing message to the curate of St. James, who called in
fear and trembling, because he was afraid to stay away.

"With mills and mill-hands," her ladyship announced to Mr. Laurence, the
mill-owner, when chance first threw them together, "with mills and
mill-hands come murder, massacre, and mob law." And she said it so loud,
and with so stern an air of conviction, that the two Misses Briarton, who
were of a timorous and fearful nature, dropped their buttered muffins (it
was at one of the tea-parties which were Slowbridge's only dissipation),
and shuddered hysterically, feeling that their fate was sealed, and that
they might, any night, find three masculine mill-hands secreted under
their beds, with bludgeons. But as no massacres took place, and the
mill-hands were pretty regular in their habits, and even went so far as
to send their children to Lady Theobald's free school, and accepted the
tracts left weekly at their doors, whether they could read or not,
Slowbridge gradually recovered from the shock of finding itself forced to
exist in close proximity to mills, and was just settling itself to
sleep--the sleep of the just--again, when, as I have said, it was shaken
to its foundations.

It was Miss Belinda Bassett who received the first shock. Miss Belinda
Bassett was a decorous little maiden lady, who lived in a decorous little
house on High Street (which was considered a very genteel street in
Slowbridge). She had lived in the same house all her life, her father had
lived in it, and so also had her grandfather. She had gone out, to take
tea, from its doors two or three times a week, ever since she had been
twenty; and she had had her little tea-parties in its front parlor as
often as any other genteel Slowbridge entertainer. She had risen at
seven, breakfasted at eight, dined at two, taken tea at five, and gone to
bed at