There was the minister of the parish, and there was an old schoolmaster
either of them served very satisfactorily for grandfathers and old
uncles. All I had to do was to shift some of their leading
peculiarities, keeping the rest. The old minister wore knee-breeches. I
clapped them on to the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster carried a tall
gold-headed cane. I put this in the minister's hands. So with other
things,--I shifted them round, and got a set of characters who, taken
together, reproduced the chief persons of the village where I lived, but
did not copy any individual exactly. Thus it went on for a while; but by
and by my stock company began to be rather too familiarly known, in spite
of their change of costume, and at last some altogether too sagacious
person published what he called a 'key' to several of my earlier stories,
in which I found the names of a number of neighbors attached to aliases
of my own invention. All the 'types,' as he called them, represented by
these personages of my story had come to be recognized, each as standing
for one and the same individual of my acquaintance. It had been of no
use to change the costume. Even changing the sex did no good. I had a
famous old gossip in one of my tales,--a much-babbling Widow Sertingly.
'Sho!' they all said, that 's old Deacon Spinner, the same he told about
in that other story of his,--only the deacon's got on a petticoat and a
mob-cap,--but it's the same old sixpence.' So I said to myself, I must
have some new characters. I had no trouble with young characters; they
are all pretty much alike,--dark-haired or light-haired, with the outfits
belonging to their complexion, respectively. I had an old great-aunt,
who was a tip-top eccentric. I had never seen anything just like her in
books. So I said, I will have you, old lady, in one of my stories; and,
sure enough, I fitted her out with a first-rate odd-sounding name, which
I got from the directory, and sent her forth to the world, disguised, as
I supposed, beyond the possibility of recognition. The book sold well,
and the eccentric personage was voted a novelty. A few weeks after it
was published a lawyer called upon me, as the agent of the person in the
directory, whose family name I had used, as he maintained, to his and all
his relatives' great damage, wrong, loss, grief, shame, and irreparable
injury, for which the sum of blank thousand dollars would be a modest
compensation. The story made the book sell, but not enough to pay blank
thousand dollars. In the mean time a cousin of mine had sniffed out the
resemblance between the character in my book and our great-aunt. We were
rivals in her good graces. 'Cousin Pansie' spoke to her of my book and
the trouble it was bringing on me,--she was so sorry about it! She liked
my story,--only those personalities, you know. 'What personalities?'
says old granny-aunt. 'Why, auntie, dear, they do say that he has
brought in everybody we know,--did n't anybody tell you about--well,--I
suppose you ought to know it,--did n't anybody tell you you were made fun
of in that novel?' Somebody--no matter who--happened to hear all this,
and told me. She said granny-aunt's withered old face had two red spots
come to it, as if she had been painting her cheeks from a pink saucer.
No, she said, not a pink saucer, but as if they were two coals of fire.
She sent out and got the book, and made her (the somebody that I was
speaking of) read it to her. When she had heard as much as she could
stand,--for 'Cousin Pansie' explained passages to her,--explained, you
know,--she sent for her lawyer, and that same somebody had to be a
witness to a new will she had drawn up. It was not to my advantage.
'Cousin Pansie' got the corner lot where the grocery is, and pretty much
everything else. The old woman left me a legacy. What do you think it
was? An old set of my own books, that looked as if it had been bought
out of a bankrupt circulating library.
"After that I grew more careful. I studied my disguises much more