A Rivermouth Romance

Before breakfast on a July morning in 1860, Margaret Callaghan slips out of the Bilkins household in Rivermouth and returns with a marriage certificate. The cook has married Larry O'Rourke, a young sailor, without telling the elderly couple she has served for nearly twenty years. His arrival at their door turns her carefully guarded secret into a household disturbance. Thomas Bailey Aldrich builds this comic tale around marriage, loyalty and the awkward business of accommodating another person's choices.

The seaport setting gives the story its passing sailors, quiet streets and connection to life at sea. Inside the Bilkins home, affection competes with irritation. When Larry takes up gardening, his confident mistakes with plants and a thermometer supply a different kind of trouble. Readers interested in nineteenth-century domestic humor will find a narrator who comments freely on his characters and draws comedy from the gap between their intentions and their abilities.