There are no servants in the house, but the lady in the snowy cap, with the spectacles, who sits sewing every afternoon among her daughters, as if nothing ever had been done, or were to be done,--she and her girls, in some long-forgotten fore part of the day, "_did up the work_," and for the rest of the time, probably, at all hours when you would see them, it is "_done up_." The old kitchen floor never seems stained or spotted; the tables, the chairs, and the various cooking utensils, never seem deranged or disordered; though three and sometimes four meals a day are got there, though the family washing and ironing is there performed, and though pounds of butter and cheese are in some silent and mysterious manner there brought into existence.
* _The Ancient History_, ten volumes (1730-1738), by the French historian Charles Rollin (1661-1741).
** _Scott's Family Bible_ (1788-1792), edited with notes by the English Biblical commentator, Thomas Scott (1747-1821).
On such a farm, in such a house and family, Miss Ophelia had spent a quiet existence of some forty-five years, when her cousin invited her to visit his southern mansion.

The eldest of a large family, she was still considered by her father and mother as one of "the children," and the proposal that she should go to _Orleans_ was a most momentous one to the family circle.

The old gray-headed father took down Morse's Atlas* out of the book-case, and looked out the exact latitude and longitude; and read Flint's Travels in the South and West,** to make up his own mind as to the nature of the country.
* _The Cerographic Atlas of the United States_ (1842-1845), by Sidney Edwards Morse (1794-1871), son of the geographer, Jedidiah Morse, and brother of the painter-inventor, Samuel F.B.Morse.
** _Recollections of the Last Ten Years_ (1826) by Timothy Flint (1780-1840), missionary of Presbyterianism to the trans-Allegheny West.
The good mother inquired, anxiously, "if Orleans wasn't an awful wicked place," saying, "that it seemed to her most equal to going to the Sandwich Islands, or anywhere among the heathen." It was known at the minister's and at the doctor's, and at Miss Peabody's milliner shop, that Ophelia St.Clare was "talking about" going away down to Orleans with her cousin; and of course the whole village could do no less than help this very important process of _talking about_ the matter.

The minister, who inclined strongly to abolitionist views, was quite doubtful whether such a step might not tend somewhat to encourage the southerners in holding on to their slaves; while the doctor, who was a stanch colonizationist, inclined to the opinion that Miss Ophelia ought to go, to show the Orleans people that we don't think hardly of them, after all.

He was of opinion, in fact, that southern people needed encouraging.