Youths in Upper Chester. Upper Chester was then, as in our time, the seat of learning in the township, the Female Academy being there, too. Both were boarding-schools, but the young people came home to spend Sunday; and their weekly returns, all together in the stage, were responsible for more than one Old Chester match....

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“The air,” says Miss, sniffing genteelly as the coach jolts past the blossoming May orchards, “is most agreeably perfumed. And how fair is the prospect from this hill-top!”

“Fair indeed!” responds her companion, staring boldly.[Page 6]

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Miss bridles and bites her lip.

“I was not observing the landscape,” the young gentleman hastens to explain.

In those days (Miss Letty was born in 1804, and was eighteen when she and the ruddy Alfred sat on the back seat of the coach)—in those days the conversation of Old Chester youth was more elegant than in our time. We, who went to Miss Bailey’s school, were sad degenerates in the way of manners and language; at least so our elders told us. When Lydia Wright said, “Oh my, what an awful snow-storm!” dear Miss Ellen was displeased. “Lydia,” said she, “is there anything ‘awe’-inspiring in this display of the elements?”

“No, ’m,” faltered poor Lydia.

“Then,” said Miss Bailey, gravely, “your statement that the storm is[Page 7] ‘awful’ is a falsehood. I do not suppose, my dear, that you intentionally told an untruth; it was an exaggeration. But an exaggeration, though not perhaps a falsehood, is unladylike, and should be avoided by persons of refinement.” Just here the question arises: what would Miss Ellen (now in heaven) say if she could hear Lydia’s Lydia, just home from college, remark— But no: Miss Ellen’s precepts shall protect these pages.

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But in the days when Letty Morris looked out of the coach window, and young Alfred murmured that the prospect was fair indeed, conversation was perfectly correct. And it was still decorous even when it got beyond the coach period and reached a point where Old Chester began to take notice. At first it was young Old Chester which giggled. Later old Old Chester made[Page 8] some comments; it was then that Alfred’s mother mentioned the matter to Alfred’s father. “He is young, and, of course, foolish,” Mrs. Price 

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