Throckmorton

This is a novel book. In a lowland Virginia neighborhood, strangely cut off from the rest of the world geographically, and wrapped in a profound and charming stillness, a little universe exists. It has its oracles of law, medicine, and divinity; its wars and alliances. Free from that outward contact which makes an intolerable sameness among people, its types develop quaintly. There is peace, and elbow-room for everybody’s peculiarities. Such was the Severn neighborhood—called so from Severn church. Every brick in this old pile had been brought from green England two hundred years before. It seemed as if, in those early days, nothing made with hands should be without picturesqueness; and so this ancient church, paid for in hogsheads of black tobacco, which was also the currency in which the hard-riding, hard-drinking parsons took their dues, was peaked and gabled most beautifully.