It was a genuine relic of the
Mayflower, and had been brought over, together with the great chest in
the entry, by the grand-grand-grandmother of all the Foxes. If anybody
were disposed to be skeptical on this point, Colonel Fox had only to
point to the iron clamp at the end, by which it had been confined to
the deck; that would have produced conviction, if he had declared it
came out of the Ark. This was a queer-looking little mirror, in which
the young Dorcas saw her round face reflected: framed in black oak,
delicately carved, and cut on the edge with a slant that gave the
plate an appearance of being an inch thick.
Sixty years ago there were not many mirrors in country-towns in New
England; and in Colonel Fox's house this and one more sufficed for the
family-reflections. In the "square room," a modern long looking-glass,
framed in mahogany, and surmounted by the American emblem of triumph,
was the astonishment of the neighbors,--and in Walton those were many,
though the population was small.
Dorcas looked wistfully and wishingly at the oval pin; but with no
more notion of what she was looking at than the child who gazes into
the heavens on a winter night.
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