An Old Feud.

Indirectly we learn that Col. Hiram Atkins, chairman of the Vermont Democratic Committee, thinks he has been unfairly dealt with by “The Daily News.” He complains that the quotations which we gave as coming from his paper, “The Montpelier Argus and Patriot,” were never printed in his paper at all: he declares that he never announced that “Squire Eastman’s tumor has cast a gloom over our little village,” or that “Mrs. Mehitabel Ranney laid an egg on our table last week,” etc. It is possible that we have done Col. Atkins an injustice; if so, the injustice was done unintentionally; and we, lamenting it, do hereby crave pardon therefor. Col. Atkins is a jovial, enterprising, fair, and bright man: he is incapable of a mean action. We wish him a big run of sap every spring, and a powerful harvest of beech-nuts next Michaelmas.

As to the items about Squire Eastman’s tumor, Mrs. Mehitabel Ranney’s eggs, etc., which we printed, and credited to “The Montpelier Argus and Patriot,” we received them from Senator Edmunds, with the remark that he had found them in Atkins’s paper. Edmunds told us that Atkins was a “fat, pussy man, that sweat twelve months in the year, and wore out two paper collars every day:” he said that Atkins had pursued him 190for years, maliciously and relentlessly, there being no species of base piracy to which Atkins would not willingly stoop.

Atkins’s demoniacal animosity was incurred, so Edmunds avers, many years ago, when the two were attending the academy at Rutland. Edmunds, it appears, was in the senior class when Atkins entered the academy as a freshman.

At that time the prettiest girl in the school was a Miss Joyful Higginson, the only daughter of Squire Nathan Higginson of Bennington. She had a trim figure, black eyes, curly hair, and red cheeks; and when she got rigged out in one of her new gingham gowns on a Sunday morning, she was, to use a phrase common in those times, “prettier than a yoke of father’s steers.” To this Miss Joyful did Edmunds and Atkins pay ardent but respectful homage, sending her lumps of maple-sugar, and packages of rose-lozenges, taking her coasting and to picnics on a Saturday, and showing her, in short, delicate attentions of that nature which seldom fail to touch the maidenly heart. The fact, however, that Edmunds was the older of the twain, that he had impressive side-whiskers, and that he sang a delicious bass in the academy-choir, seems to have made him more acceptable to Miss Joyful than any of the other young beaux were: at any rate, Miss Joyful went sliding down hill with Edmunds oftener than with anybody else, and his gifts of pippins, maple-sugar, lozenges, 191nosegays, and the like, appeared to go to the spot which the tokens of other beaux failed to reach.

The preference which Miss Joyful manifested for young Edmunds set Atkins into a frenzy of jealous rage; and one night he threw his Livy upon the floor, trampled upon his Andrew’s Latin Lexicon, and delivered himself of this volcanic eruption of long-pent-up wrath: “Gol darn that bewhiskered crittur! I’ll git even with him if I hev ter live ter be ez old ez Methuselah! With that tarnation bass voice o’ his’n, as hard as Pharaoh’s heart, and them whiskers the color o’ soft-soap, he hez cut the rest on us clean out o’ our swaths. It may take an all-fired long time to do it, but I’m goin’ to, by gosh, knock him higher’n a meetin’-house steeple afore I git thru’ with him!”

This malignant threat was uttered fifty-eight years ago; and ever since then, so Senator Edmunds tells us, Hiram Atkins has had but one grand end in view,—the annihilation of George F. Edmunds. The episode of Miss Joyful Higginson was simply one of the pretty idyls of youth. In 1838 Joyful married Leander Merrick, the popular young man who drove the stage for a great many years between Brattleboro and Townsend.

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