It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many
years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical
parenthesis.
Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a
high number--a region where the extension of the city began to assume
a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there
was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory
Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the
gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly
departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found
within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would
blush to be reminded of them. Catherine had a great many cousins,
and with her Aunt Almond's children, who ended by being nine in
number, she lived on terms of considerable intimacy. When she was
younger they had been rather afraid of her; she was believed, as the
phrase is, to be highly educated, and a person who lived in the
intimacy of their Aunt Penniman had something of reflected grandeur.
Mrs. Penniman, among the little Almonds, was an object of more
admiration than sympathy. Her manners were strange and formidable,
and her mourning robes--she dressed in black for twenty years after
her husband's death, and then suddenly appeared one morning with pink
roses in her cap--were complicated in odd, unexpected places with
buckles, bugles, and pins, which discouraged familiarity.
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