THROCKMORTON
A NOVEL
BY
MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers :: :: New York
Copyright, 1890
By D. Appleton & Co.
Copyright, 1909
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
CONTENTS
| Chapter I | Chapter VIII | |
| Chapter II | Chapter IX | |
| Chapter III | Chapter X | |
| Chapter IV | Chapter XI | |
| Chapter V | Chapter XII | |
| Chapter VI | Chapter XIII | |
| Chapter VII | Chapter XIV |
THROCKMORTON.
CHAPTER I.
In a lowland Virginia neighborhood, strangely cut off from the rest ofthe world geographically, and wrapped in a profound and charmingstillness, a little universe exists. It has its oracles of law,medicine, and divinity; its wars and alliances. Free from that outwardcontact which makes an intolerable sameness among people, its typesdevelop quaintly. There is peace, and elbow-room for everybody’speculiarities.
Such was the Severn neighborhood—called so from Severn church. Everybrick in this old pile had been brought from green England two hundredyears before. It seemed as if, in those early days, nothing made withhands should be without picturesqueness; and so this ancient church,paid for in hogsheads of black tobacco, which was also the currency inwhich the hard-riding, hard-drinking parsons took their dues, was peakedand gabled most beautifully. The bricks, mellowed by two centuries, hadbecome a rich, dull red, upon which, year after year, in the enchantedSouthern summers and the fitful Southern winters, [Pg 4]mosses and graylichens laid their clinging fingers. It was set far back from the broad,white road, and gnarled live-oaks and silver beeches and the mel