A Leap-Year Romance [pp. 211-222]

A LEAP- YEAR RO/IzANCE.
A LEAP-YEAR R OMANCE.
A TRUE TALE OF WESTERN LIFE.
"'Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tamed so."
PRINGTOWN City is a quiet little village that
has grown up around a college for both sexes,
which was founded by a vigorous religious sect,
something less than half a century ago, in what was
then the far West. It stands upon a gentle south ern slope, from which, across a deep ravine or glen,
can be seen a magnificent expanse of rich level bot tom-land.
Farther up, behind the town, in a grassy oakopening, stands an immense but now somewhat
dilapidated wooden hotel, which a rash speculator
had built fifteen years before our story commences,
over a large chalybeat-e spring. The glen, through
which now flows a tiny stream, must once have been
the bed of a mighty torrent, for it is more than half
a mile wide, very deep, and cut with many a curve,
quaint, tunneled arch, and dangerous pit-hole through
the solid blue limestone rock. Indeed, one of the
professors of the college had been for years, and
despite some ridicule, patiently accumulating evidence for a pet theory of his, that the three central
great lakes along our northern boundary once found
a nearer outlet to the sea through this ravine, but
that it had been for most of its length filled up by
the debris of the glacial epoch, till the rising waters
of the lakes were forced to seek out a new and higher channel, now called the Niagara, into Ontario and
the St. Lawrence.
Both college and town had been larger twentyfive years ago than now. Indeed, the claims of the
former upon the patronage of the community had
been at first so successfully urged that more than a
dozen ignorant heads of families actually sold all
they had, and came in canvas-topped prairie-wagons
and encamped for weeks under the unfinished walls
of the dormitories in the vague hope that somehow
their dirty and unlettered youngsters were here to
be trained up into lawyers, editors, statesmen, and
perhaps presidents, by a new-fangled educational
process which they did not pretend to understand.
The town also had once given promise of speedy
and unlimited growth. For a few years extravagant
expectations of sudden wealth had attracted many
capitalists, until, as the larger enterprises failed one
after another, investments were withdrawn to more
promising fields.
Springtown City had now entered upon a second
and more tranquil period of its history. A large
portion of the population was still transient, settling here for a few months or years, on account of
the extreme cheapness of rent, for the education of
children, or for health and recreation. Half a dozen wealthy business-men from a not far-distant city
had established summer-homes in or near the village.
But the strangest thing about the place was that the
influence and number of the unfair sex had been
steadily decreasing until by the last census it was
found that in the village proper the men were out numbered almost three to one by the women. Wid ows left with slender incomes, anxious mammas who
looked upon a college-town as a cheap matrimonial
bazaar, wives of business-men who could spend only
Sunday with their families, and a whole chorus of
sharp-witted and often sharper-tongued maids, old
and young, made up the society and the sentiment of
the town; while for half a generation the younger and
more ambitious men had sought competency or pro fessional renown in wider and more promising fields.
In the college, too, the girls had gradually come
to outnumber and even outrank the boys, while
their influence upon the latter grew more and more
dominant. They had never been regarded with
contempt as rivals, and from the first their presence,
almost without their consciousness, had tended to
repress many of the bad habits and licensed barbarities of college-life. But now a stolen moonlight
ramble with a young lady class-mate, or a picnic in
the glen, was gradually becoming more attractive
than a midnight raid on freshmen or a game of ball,
until at last the robust boy-life of the American college, which, with all its abuses, seasons and straightens many a green and crooked stick, was almost forgotten. Even the faculty were obliged to admit
that the collection of specimens in natural science
was vastly facilitated by allowing the classes to pair
oqf in their studies of flora and fauna. The boys
sometimes wrote essays on domestic life, on ideal
womanhood, and on the prominence given to the
sentiment of love in the literatures of the world, and
were fond of attending the Hypatia Club, where
social and political themes were discussed by their
young lady rivals, often with great sagacity and maturity. In all social gatherings where town and college met, men were at quite a premium. On Shakespeare evenings ladies sometimes had to assume the
parts of Orlando, Ferdinand, and even Benedict and
Petruchio. Two of them became quite acceptable
as bass-singers, and all took turns in dancing "gentleman " with white handkerchiefs tied about the
right arm. In the weekly prayer-meetings at several of the churches, the most edifying exercises were
usually led by women. A few of the stronger-minded once walked to the polls, and vainly demanded
the right to vote, and one of them afterward went so
far as to allow her piano to be sold rather than to
pay her taxes. Another, at a public anniversary,
read a rather too scientific essay on tight-lacing, and
another persisted for a year in wearing a reform costume. But, on the whole, despite some gossip-mongering, and now and then an eccentricity like the
above, a wise spirit of moderation pervaded the
place. Not a dram-shop was open there after the
woman's crusade. Immorality was repressed by a
rigid social ostracism, while the whole moral atmos
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