The Quaker and the Robber

 Many years ago, when Philadelphia was a bustling young city, in a neat little cottage in one of the retired streets, dwelt Obadiah Simpson, an honest Quaker, moderately blessed with this world’s goods, but rich in the possession of a treasure which gladdened his heart as the heart is never gladdened by wealth. This treasure was none other than his daughter Mary, a maiden of seventeen, whose surpassing beauty was but the outward expression of that inner loveliness of which it was the visible type.

Obadiah had lost his wife more than a year prior to the date at which our story commences. Admonished of the likelihood of such an event, and wishing by every means to perpetuate the memory of one so dear, he employed a young artist of the city to execute a portrait of the invalid. It was while thus engaged that Edward Weresford became acquainted with Mary; and the effect of her charms, heightened by an expression of pensive sadness, which increased with the decline of her mother’s health, was not lost on one who was a devoted worshiper of true spiritual beauty.

After their bereavement, it was with no feigned feeling of sympathy that Edward visited and condoled with the Quaker and his daughter; nor need we stop to recount the gradations by which, as the violence of her grief subsided, Mary came to reciprocate an attachment of which she had already long been the object.

Obadiah saw no reason to oppose the inclinations of the lovers. Edward was the son of a gentleman reputed to possess considerable wealth, who had come, no one knew whence, several years before, to reside in the city, where he had since dwelt in strict retirement, forming few if any acquaintances, and giving rise to many surmises on the part of those lovers of knowledge deprecatingly styled by those of a less inquiring turn, the curious. But whatever speculations were indulged in touching the mysterious stranger’s… Read More