THE
OPEN QUESTION
A Tale of Two Moods
By ELIZABETH ROBINS
(C. E. Raimond)

AUTHOR OF
"GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND"

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1899

Copyright, 1898, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.

THE OPEN QUESTION

[Pg 1]

THE OPEN QUESTION

It is not always easy to trace the origin of an American family, even when the immediate progenitor did not begin life as a boot-black or a prospector, without so much as a "grub stake." The Ganos had been people of some education and some means—clergymen, merchants going to and from the West Indies, or home-keeping planters in the South—for the little space of a hundred years before the Civil War. Further back than that—darkness.

Whether the name was of Huguenot, Flemish, Italian, or other origin, the Ganos themselves, like thousands of families of consequence in America, never pretended to know. Only one of the race ever evinced the least disposition to care.

In the family mind, to be born a Gano was of itself so shining an achievement as almost to constitute an unfair advantage over the rest of mankind. The name (which was rigidly accented on the final syllable) was held to confer a distinction peculiar and sufficient, difficult as it may be for the inhabitants of a larger world to realize on what the illusion lived. The Ganos had never been enormously rich; they had never done anything of national or even of municipal importance, unless founding a religious paper and endowing a theological seminary to spread a faith which they themselves speedily abandoned—unless these modest [Pg 2]achievements might be construed as taking some sort of interest in public concerns. They held themselves aloof from politics, and religiously minded their own affairs. The oddest thing, perhaps, about their naïve veneration for the house of Gano was that so many of their neighbors shared it. Generation after generation, it imposed itself upon the community they lived in. To be able to say of a vexed question, "Gano agrees with me," was to turn the scale at once in the speaker's favor. A stranger would be told, "Smith married a Gano, you see," as though that single phrase established Smith's claims on your consideration.

The usual American fashion of that time of giving double or treble names was not followed in the christening of the daughters of Gano, so that after marriage each girl might retain her patronymic, writing it after her Christian name and before her husband's. The eldest son of every daughter was called Gano, and Gano was given to each succeeding child for a middle name. This had been going on for some time, and yet neither Maryland nor any more favored spot was populous with Ganos. They had not been a prolific race, and but a single mésalliance was set down to their discredit. A Gano had once married a New England school-mistress with a turn for preaching. This unpopular lady's offspring, John Gano—the only son of an only son—died eleven years before the Civil War, leaving a widow, two sons, and a daughter. These three survivors in the direct line of male descent, Ethan, John, and Valeria, were unmistakably delicate children. The neighbors had doubts if their mother would rear them.

The widow, "one of the Calverts of Baltimore," held to be a very retiring and religious person, soon discovered a force of character and an energy not too common among women of her class in the slave-holding South. She managed her husband's estate and the education of her children with ability and judgment, albeit arbitrarily enough, save in matters of religion.

Was it a breath wafted across the years of that old passion for [Pg 3]religious liberty that had carried her ancestors over perilous seas—an echo of the Eve of St. Bartholomew, or of some Lollard wrong—that made so strangely tolerant this autocratic woman, turned Baptist in her strenuous youth, inclining now, through throes of spirit incommunicable, to the Episcopacy her dead husband had abandoned?

The element of the grotesque in this battering in succession at the different doors of heaven is more apparent to those never storm-tossed souls that venture not from the haven, so content with being spiritually becalmed that striving after truth and faring far in pursuit of it seem childish and ignoble. Such people smile at Newman, and think themselves magnanimous if they accept his "Apology." Mrs. Gano had gone unflinchingly through those seasons of spiritual stress, common enough among the thoughtful of that time, and so difficult for some of us to-day even to imagine. In spite of her strong self-control and her great practical common-sense, her passionately religious nature had hurried her headlong through one doctrinal crisis after another. Her youth and early maturity had been one wide spiritual battle-field. Not that a moment of unbelief in revealed religion ever troubled her, but questions of the true interpretation, questions of dogma and of form, that might as well have been questions of life and death. And all the while, up and down the highway of her youth, raged the ancient dragons, renamed Election and Reprobation.

Whether as a result of enlightenment, brought her by her own honest seeking, or a tradition in the blood, compelling her to give as well as to demand perfect liberty of conscience in the affairs of faith, this imperious mother let her tyrannously tended young brood wander whither they would along the by-ways of religious experience. To look back a moment upon the infantine struggles of these young crusaders in the Holy War is to realize afresh how far the race has travelled since that day. These mere children, with their fear of hell and of damnation, their "changes of heart," conversions, and pathetic joy at [Pg 4]being "saved," had for their vividest remembrance of their father the abiding vision of his kneeling down with them in the great dim parlor at Ashlands, praying, with hands uplifted and with tears, that these "little ones" might not be lost forever.

No one ever knew how much hold these religions ecstasies had taken upon Ethan. But John was violently wrought upon; and most impressed of all was the small but preternaturally precocious Valeria. At a time when she should have been romping in the open air or reading fairy-tales in a corner she was living through days of agonized doubt on the subject of her soul's salvation, and crying softly in the night to think of that outer darkness into which unbelievers were certain to be cast—a darkness lit only by lurid flames from "the lake that burneth forever and ever."

Little John had gone through a varied and, on the whole, triumphant spiritual experience by the time he was ten. At that ripe age he was baptized by immersion on public confession of faith. His mother, having now maturer views on the subject, was not among the group at the river-side; but she made no effort to divert the boy's enthusiasm from a form of belief that for her was losing its significance. She would sit on the long white veranda in those first months of her widowhood re-reading D'Aubigné and Bishop Spalding's History of the Protestant Reformation, sandwiching Wesley with patristic writings, balancing Arian against Socinian, and drawing conclusions of her own, while her eldest boy was writing hymns to Apollo instead of construing his Cæsar, and John, the centre of an admiring crowd down by the river, was being dipped instead of being sprinkled, which it presently appeared was the only true and orthodox way.

If some of the Ganos had of late been mightily earnest in their religious experiences, they had long been "musical" in a pottering kind of way. They would have assured you more than half seriously that music was a "pottering" pursuit—a pastime for boating-parties on the Potomac or[Pg 5] rainy evenings at home, not for a moment to be regarded as a profession, except for long-haired foreigners. Mrs. John, or, as she now called herself, "Mrs. Sarah C. Gano," accepted this point of view cheerfully enough, as she had not a note of music in her. Her children's passion for singing and playing came early under the head of "noise," and under the ban of her displeasure.

Therefore, when it was discovered that the eldest boy had done badly in his third year at Dr. Baylis's Academy for Young Gentlemen, and that Dr. Baylis accounted for his pet pupil's falling off by saying the boy played the piano, and even wrote music, when he should have been doing mathematics, great was the mother's disappointment in her son, and renewed objection to the Art Divine. Ethan came home for his holidays in disgrace. It was significant of the mastery Mrs. Gano had obtained over her not unspirited children that, without being formally forbidden to play at home, Ethan never dared touch the piano the whole vacation through. It was this privation, he used to say later on, that drove him into the Church. He had got beyond the banjo and singing with the blacks down in the negro quarter. He longed for the coming of that day in the week when he might hear the sound of the organ, and even such a choir as they had at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Catawbaville, where, the Baptist phase having been painfully passed, the entire family now went to church twice every Sunday, rain or shine. Ethan made friends with the rector, and whether out of gratitude for the Rev. Mr. Searle's permission to practise in the church, or from the reflection that Holy Orders presented a means of combining a livelihood with an organ, the upshot was that Ethan presently became a student of Divinity.

At the beginning of his last year at the Theological School at Baltimore, he fell in love with a pretty Boston girl who had come South on a visit to a school friend. For the first time in his life flatly disobeying his mother's wishes, he married the little lady forthwith. Under conditions of great privation, they took up life in Baltimore[Pg 6] till Ethan should be ordained. Ten months afterwards a son opened his eyes upon the world, and the girl-wife closed hers forever.

The passive horror that falls on passionate young life laid desolate by death, the hush that seems to lie shroud-like on the world, was rent and blown to the four winds of heaven by the clarion note of war. In his bewilderment and helplessness after his wife's death, Ethan had allowed his mother-in-law, Mrs. Aaron Tallmadge, to take the baby home with her for a visit to Boston. A few weeks before his appointed ordination, young Gano joined the Southern army. About the time he was to have taken the vows that should make him a man of peace and a priest, Ethan Gano was rushing blindly with Kirby Smith's brigade across the fields from Manassas Station, among the first to break and rout the Union ranks and give his life for a Southern victory in the battle of Bull Run.

It was said in Catawbaville that none of the disasters other Southerners were fearing could add much to Mrs. Gano's grief after the loss of her eldest son. She had been a striking, although fragile-looking, woman, tall, arrow-straight, and auburn-haired, just entering on middle life, when she went to her own room and closed the door behind her that day the despatch came after Bull Run. A few weeks later, when she came forth again, it seemed to her awe-struck household that it was an old woman who appeared among them, with stern, blanched face, bowed shoulders, and abundant hair whitening at the temples. But what her altered looks called forth of sympathy, her reticent manner either held at bay or ruthlessly rebuffed. She went nowhere, received no one. Months afterwards a neighbor, seeing her by chance, offered some conventional but kindly meant condolence. The look of cold surprise that any one should venture to come near her grief sealed up the fountain of neighborly sympathy. The rumor going forth that Mrs. Gano was more unapproachable than ever since Ethan's death, her friends left her to the solitude she was rightly understood to demand. But vain for[Pg 7] her to shut and double-lock the great white gates of Ashlands—the tide of war swept on and in, and overwhelmed the house.

It is no part of the purpose of this account to tell in detail the old story of Southern losses, scenes of impotent indignation at the quartering of Northern soldiers in Confederate houses, wanton violence to property, and greater violence still to the old-fashioned Southern sense of personal dignity. These were the commonplaces of the war. Almost equally common were the lamentations in the negro quarters when the word went forth that the slaves were free, that they were to turn their backs on the patriarchal life and get them out into the world to taste the bitter and the sweet of independence.

When Mrs. Gano found that her belated private proclamation through her overseer, months after that of the President, had the inadequate effect of relieving her of but one negro, she assembled her household servants and plantation folk round the long veranda, and told them they were free. Uncle Charlie, as the accepted mouth-piece of the Gano niggers, stepped forward and pulled off his dilapidated hat.

"We done yeah somethin' 'bout dis 'mancyperation befo', but we don' gib no 'count to it, Mis' G'no."

"But I tell you it's true, and you must go. I'll have a fair division made of what's left in the quarter—of clothes and tools and food, and—"

"Law, ma'am, don' go fur t' do dat," said Cæsar, the gardener, grinning cheerfully, "we ain't gwine t' leab yo'."

"Yes, it is best you should," said the mistress.

"Bress yo' soul, ma'am"—old Charlie pulled his woolly white forelock and bowed low—"de G'nos hab stood by us a po'ful long time, an' now we gwine to stan' by de G'nos in dis yer trouble. We ain't gwine t' leab yo' t' de mussy o' dem Yankees."

"No, no, nebber w'ile de blessed Lawd sabes po' sinners," Mississippi Maria lifted up her voice and eyes and hands.

[Pg 8]

"The Yankees have given you your freedom," said Mrs. Gano, with wasted scorn.

"I don' gib' no 'count t' what de po' white trash says dey'll do fur me," said Uncle Charlie, loftily; "I b'longs t' de G'nos."

"Yah, yah, we b'longs t' de G'nos," the murmur went through the crowd.

"Of course you do, by rights," said the mistress, with a flash of fire. "But we can't keep our rights, it seems. So just make the best of this liberty, now you've got it; make the best of it, as young Jerry did."

She waved her hand, dismissing them. Sensation in the crowd, and some whispering. Jerry senior created a diversion by pulling himself together and venturing up one of the long, low steps of the veranda. He held out two coal-black hands with pallid palms.

"Don' git mad, Mis' G'no, 'count o' Jerry. Jerry been a po' sort o' chile eber since de Lawd made him," urged his earthly father, with a comfortable sense of having no responsibility in the matter. "Jerry been jes' dyin' fo' 'bout a year fur t' see dat yaller gal, Liza, yo' sen' to yo' sister down Kentucky way. Dat's wha' he's a-gwine. Yo' won't catch no G'no nigger gwine near de Yankees."

"If he's been dying to go so long, why didn't he set off in January?"

"In Janoowerry? Yo' only sent us word yes'day mawnin'."

"Hadn't Jerry heard of Lincoln's precious Proclamation at the New-Year?"

"Oh ye-es, ma'am, he done yeah."

There was a moment's pause, and then the father pulled his shambling figure up.

"Jerry ain't much 'count, but he ain't clean gone crazy. He know it all bery well fo' de Yankee Pres'dent fo' to say he wus free. But Jerry know he jes' better hold his hosses till he yeah what Mis' G'no got t' say 'bout dat. Jerry been waitin' roun' since Janoowerry t' yeah wot yo' got t' say."

[Pg 9]

"Well, I've told you."

Uncle Charlie stepped forward, pulled old Jerry off the step without ceremony, and said, severely: "Yo' got a heap o' gab, but yo' better tote yo'self down to de gyarden an' do yo' chores." Then, looking up at the mistress: "An' 'tain't no use, ma'am, fo' yo' t' stan' up dah on de po'ch an' tell us we all 'mancyperated, and yo' don' care nuthin' no mo' 'bout us. Dar's a heap o' cotton got t' be picked, and we got t' pick it." He turned away to his companions: "Come 'long, yo' lazy black niggers, jes' stir yo' stumps!"

"No, Charlie, no; the cotton must rot in the fields." Blank astonishment swept over the dusky crowd.

"Golly!" said one or two under their breath, while the others stood speechless, with mouths open and round eyes fixed and staring.

"Ef yo' thinkin' 'bout us bein' 'mancyperated an' 'spectin' to be paid," began Jerry, while a ripple of contempt at the notion passed over the bewildered throng, "well, we ain't 'spectin'."

"You are expecting to be fed," said Mrs. Gano, more gently than they were accustomed to hear their mistress speak, "and that's more than I can do for so many any longer."

The newly emancipated lifted up their voices and wept.

"For Law's sake, don' sen' us away, Mis' G'no!"

"I reckon yo' can't git 'long widout me and Tom nohow."

"We don' want nuthin' to eat," said Mississippi Maria, sobbing, while she cuffed the only completely happy person present—a youth of four or five, who clung to her skirt with one hand, while with the other he clutched a section of green melon. "Put dat down, yo' greedy gump!"—his grandmother clouted him over the head till he, too, joined in the general lamentation—"stuffin' yo'self wid watermillion fo' ladies."

"We gwine to wuk hard dis time, Mis' G'no," said another voice from out the general clamor, "and we don't[Pg 10] need no bacon. Corn-pone and 'lasses is 'nough fo' any nigger."

"I'm sorry for you, but the Northerners have not only freed you, they have crippled us. We can't afford to have you here any longer. You must all go, except Jerusha and her children."

There was a lull of incredulity, and then a steadily rising storm of dismal howling.

"'Tain't fair!" shrieked old Chloe. "I done come yer fust—long befo' Jerusha. Missis! Missis! I done come to G'nos fo' yo' did yo'self."

"I dassent leab yo'," Jerry persisted. "Massa 'd 'mos' 'a' killed me ef he'd ebber thought I'd leab yo' and little missy to dem debbils o' Yankees. 'Tain't safe, ma'am—'tain't safe."

It was not Mrs. Gano's way to show emotion. She turned abruptly, and disappeared in the house. She had the well-earned reputation of being no easy mistress. But she had treated her slaves justly, according to her lights, and this hour of enforced setting them adrift was bitter on other than political and economic grounds.

[Pg 11]

At the close of the war the Ganos were ruined. The rambling, verandaed house was sold for a song to the Gano-Lees, and the question was, where could John with his delicate health, his interrupted and insufficient schooling, make a livelihood? Where could Mrs. Gano live most inexpensively, and with least annoyance to sensibilities so outraged by the issue of the war? Certainly not in Virginia—not anywhere in the despoiled, prostrate South. Certainly not in the hated North. But the West—

Far off in the wilds of one of the Middle States, Mrs. Gano's father, William Calvert, had once held property, and in her early youth she had been taken from Baltimore in a stage-coach over the Alleghany Mountains to visit him during one of his long absences from home on business in connection with these Western lands. He had bought a queer, grim house in a little town on a river among the Mioto Hills, and made himself there a temporary home or headquarters for these yearly Western pilgrimages. The State where he had his interests was the first one carved out of the great Northwestern Territory, and though later on a much farther West robbed this mid-America of its early century associations of adventure and of danger, it was far remoter from the Atlantic seaboard then than the Pacific is to-day.

The house that Mrs. Gano inherited from her father had been built in times of Indian warfare for a fortress and ammunition centre. With the retreat of the Indians to the Western Reservation, the settlement's need of a fort was less than the need of a school. The solid and spacious rectangular building of stone on the height above the river[Pg 12] was turned into an academy for boys. A rival school sapped its prosperity in time; it declined into bankruptcy, and came upon the market. William Calvert bought it, made it into a dwelling-house, ultimately adding a wooden L, and establishing his partner's family there. This house in the small but growing town of New Plymouth was all that was left to his eldest daughter when his shrunken estate was divided at his death. Through former acquaintances of William Calvert, the position of teller in the principal bank of the town was obtained for John Gano; and hither at the close of the war came Mrs. Gano with her son of twenty and her daughter, Valeria, nineteen.

New Plymouth was not looked upon by its inhabitants as at all beyond the pale of a most advanced civilization. Founded by stout New-Englanders, it was one of the oldest settlements in this part of the world. It had its churches, its court-house, its excellent academy for boys and its unparalleled seminary for young ladies, when the present capital of the State was a wild unpeopled plain, crossed by winding cow-paths.

Mrs. Gano soon discovered that her own view of her exile among a ruder people, and to a narrower and more primitive life, was not likely to be shared by her neighbors, proud of their New England origin, and secure in their honest self-esteem. This difference of view was a matter quite unimportant to the new-comer, except that it made it easier to carry out her plan of refraining from any share in the active life of the bustling little community.

"I am an invalid," she gave out; "I neither pay nor receive visits."

She did not even go often to church. The Rev. Mr. Collins was "a person of no education," she decided, "and spoke with a vile Western accent." But she rented a pew, and with rigid regularity sent the children to sit in it. Her children! As she called them, so she treated them—John, six feet two, doing a man's work in the world, with a man's spirit, and the tall, grave Valeria.

The girl was an enigmatic creature, silent, self-absorbed[Pg 13], shrinking from the give-and-take of social life. It was not the cross to her that it was to her more genial brother that their mother's craving for solitude, and not too Christian contempt for her well-meaning neighbors, precluded asking people to the house. But the young man, after the young man's fashion, escaped to some extent the tyranny of home conditions. He had come forth from his juvenile predilection for pious observances. He had developed a passion for natural science, and yet was content to work hard all day in the bank, and to spend his free evenings in a rapidly acquired circle of new friends. In summer there were moonlight drives and walks; there was boating on the Mioto, and singing songs and discreet love-making on the "stoops" of the houses of the prettiest girls. In the mild weather, too, sometimes combining a picnic with the pursuit of knowledge, he would make up a party to go to Black Hand or Cedar Rock, where the hills were rich in fossils, and sometimes he would go farther afield to find specimens in the coal seams of the region. In winter there were church sociables, "taffy-pulls," sleigh-rides, and skating-parties. He was, in short, living an active and healthy life under conditions not intrinsically inspiring, perhaps, except to the inner vision of ardent youth.

His mother offered no objection to his amusing himself in New Plymouth's somewhat crude society, but took quick alarm at a piece of chance gossip repeated by the privileged factotum, Aunt Jerusha.

"Massa John done got a reel truly-truly sweetheart dis time. He'll be marryin' her berry soon, by all 'counts."

It came out that the lady in question was Miss Hattie Fox. Who was Miss Hattie Fox? Valeria had seen her at church. She was very pretty, and her father was senior warden at St. Thomas's on Sundays, and attorney-at-law at 114 Main Street on week-days. To Mrs. Gano's evident annoyance, nothing obviously objectionable could be urged against the girl. The next Sunday, Mrs. Gano went to church. Coming out, the impulsive John went forward, and had a precious whispered word with the lady in [Pg 14]question. As the young people reached the bottom of the church steps, his mother touched him on the shoulder.

"Introduce Miss Fox to me," she said.

John performed the ceremony with the air of one who lights a powder-train, and against all canons of prudence stands waiting to see the explosion. But, behold! his mother was most gracious.

"Your family have been very hospitable to my son," she said. "I am an invalid, and do not entertain, but if you will come to supper some evening, my daughter and I will be glad to see you. Could you come to-night?"

"Oh yes; do come," urged the smiling and unwary John.

She came. She was certainly a beautiful and amiable creature, but nevertheless John found himself fighting valiantly against the sudden temptation to judge her by a brand-new standard. His mother's soft Southern voice made Hattie's Western burr sound curiously common, and the manners he had thought delightfully vivacious seemed boisterous on a sudden. As he listened through his mother's ears, it dawned upon him for the first time that the girl laughed too loudly and too constantly. He set his acute discomfort down to his humiliating lack of discernment in the past, and too easy conquest by mere good looks. He did not realize that Hattie's gaucheries were intensified by her nervous awe of Mrs. Gano. She had never known any one in the least like her hostess, and so far from failing in respect, she was so deeply impressed that in her wonder and veneration she was driven to adopt the juvenile device for the working off of oppressive emotion—pretending to be extravagantly at her ease.

One or two things in that evening of disillusionment stood out with painful distinctness in John Gano's memory for years. Naturally, Hattie answered "Yes" and "No" to John's mother, not as Southern youths said to their elders: "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," or "Sir." But she also sat down to the piano without being invited, and sang a song which it was plain Mrs. Gano thought [Pg 15]unrefined. Even John realized now that it wasn't quite the song he had imagined.

At supper, when Mrs. Gano's covert but unsparing inspection of the girl announced to her children, plain as words, that their visitor was overloaded with jewelry, John thought to mitigate the enormity of the huge frying-pan locket Hattie wore on her innocent breast by observing:

"Haven't I heard your sister say you have a daguerrotype of your father in the locket you're wearing?"

"Right you are!" she said. "I never go without it." Then to Mrs. Gano: "My! I'm awful fawnd of my paw. P'raps you'd like to see him."

Miss Fox obligingly unfastened the frying-pan, and shied it, quoit-like, down the table to her hostess.

There was a pause, a hideous silence.

"Pass me the crackers, Venus," Mrs. Gano said, presently, to Aunt Jerusha's daughter. As she took the plate she, without touching it, indicated the big bold locket. "Take that to Miss Fox," she said.

And while the maid was conveying the visitor's property back to her in the middle of a large tray, Mrs. Gano had turned to Valeria and was speaking of the morning's sermon.

Poor Miss Hattie put the finishing touch to her visit by departing without taking leave of her hostess.

"Won't you come to the parlor a moment and say good-bye to my mother?" said John, when Valeria brought their guest down-stairs into the hall, hatted and gloved, and ready to go home.

"Gracious Peter! say good-bye?" The guest drew back in genuine alarm. "You may just bet I won't say 'beans' before her from now till Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning. Did you hear the last thing she said to me? My!"

"No; I was playing 'Dixie Land.'"

"Yes; and all through it she kept looking at the clock, and when you got to the loud part she leaned over and[Pg 16] asked me whether I expected my father or a servant to come for me? My gracious!"

"Oh, but I—I—" stammered John.

"You—you? Not a bit of it. She said Jerusha should see me to my door. The old hag's out at the gate now waiting for me. Oh my!"

And Miss Fox fled the premises.

No word ever passed between mother and son about the young lady. It was wholly unnecessary to discuss her. John had been made to see, in a ruthless light, the unseemliness of asking this raw little Westerner to be his mother's successor in the house of Gano, even in these degenerate days.

John's disappointment had no tragic issue, yet, in spite of the consolation of other friends, in spite of the joys of experimental science in the freedom of the woodshed, he was grievously unhappy for a time, especially on Saturday evenings, which he had been used to spend at the Foxes'. Partly in order to have an excuse for breaking through that custom, and partly for a belated doctrinal reason, he occupied his Saturday evenings in taking Hebrew lessons from the Principal of the Boys' Academy. Young Gano had the inquirer's temper, and if he had not had his bread to win, he would probably have been a traveller along many of the roads of learning.

And Valeria—she had not been as successful as her brother in shaking off the paralyzing fears and lulling hopes of the old religious view. But a new passion had found its way into her secluded life, altering, shaping, imperiously governing it. It was no sudden love for the hero of a girlish dream, no dedication of dawning woman-life to the worship of some man, made saint or savior by imagination's magic, no fairy prince's coming, no Romeo calling under her balcony in the night, that wakened this grave-eyed dreamer of dreams to a thrilling sense of life and service. It was that most blessed or accursed summons to rise and join the ranks of those who follow Art. Here in the Western wilds, among conditions grotesquely [Pg 17]unpropitious, barren beyond the telling, sordid, if you like, this keen young vision, searching the horizon of a pent-up life, had seen the signal from afar, shining and beckoning her on.

Valeria at nineteen was lamely, impotently following that Will-o'-the-wisp which, under fairest conditions, may "lead to bewilder and dazzle to blind," and of which you shall say in vain, "He lights you to the swamps of death." The happy followers know the swamps of death are waiting all, but many there be who travel thither without the kind-deceiving light.

Valeria, in common with some other members of her family, had written little verses, chiefly religious; but that was nothing. It had been said long ago in Maryland that the Ganos were born with a pen in their hands. Like the others, she had given some of her time to music, when her mother was out of ear-shot. She had a smattering of French, a modicum of German, and a few lessons in painting. In the home in New Plymouth there were specimens here and there about the house of work done before she left Maryland: a Melanchthon with a coppery face and a glimpse of hair-shirt, two copies of the portrait of Raphael done by himself, a "Beatrice Cenci," and a "Holy Family." But from the days of inarticulate childhood, with no more than a handful of her native soil and a watering-pot, or a precious lump of putty from the plantation carpenter, she had tasted the tyrannous joy of the creator, fashioning beasts and men.

And now, grown up, exiled to the West, living in poverty, and isolated from all art save that in books, she said to herself that she had been sent into the world to model beautiful forms, and express her restless spirit in enduring marble.

In vain she prayed to be allowed to go away and study—not to Paris, not to Rome: only to New York. She had a small legacy left her by an aunt. The interest was so little, why not spend the capital in studying sculpture? Her mother, amazed at the proposal, left Valeria no moment in doubt of her determination to crush it.

[Pg 18]

Valeria's Aunt Paget was with them on a visit when the matter was under discussion. Mrs. Paget was seldom admitted to family counsels, and felt herself something of a stranger in her sister's house. She was the worldly, the frivolous member of her family, who "dressed in the mode" and "cultivated society." She was surprised when on this occasion the topic proved too much of the "burning" order to be smuggled out of sight.

"Study sculpture! Such a thing is unheard of!" ejaculated Mrs. Paget, making wide blue eyes at her elder sister and her niece.

"So I tell Valeria," said Mrs. Gano. "She couldn't go to New York alone, she couldn't live there without a chaperon."

"And even if she could afford it, you need her here. You are always ill nowadays."

"It isn't that," said Mrs. Gano. "I'm thinking of Valeria herself."

"Of course; so am I. She ought to marry."

"I shall never marry!"

Aunt Paget smiled.

"Well, at all events, it won't help you to be chiselling marble."

"Help me to what?"

"To a suitable marriage, of course."

Valeria's dark eyes flashed, but before she could speak her mother said:

"I am not one of those women who are anxious for their children to marry. I shall be more than content if Valeria remains single."

"Well, Sarah, forgive me, but I think it's a mistake. I said so before we left Maryland, when she refused young Middleton. Every one of us was married before we were Valeria's age, and none of us ever dreamed of wanting to go away from our home and study sculpture, or do anything in the least unladylike."

Valeria gathered up her sewing as if to leave the room.

"You must admit," Aunt Paget went on, "there's[Pg 19] something unfeminine about sculpture. I'm not sure it isn't even a little irreligious."

"You don't know anything about it, Maria. You never had the least taste yourself for anything but dress and going out."

"Well, you see, that's what makes it so surprising," said the younger sister, in an apologetic tone. "You have always thought me so frivolous, and yet I wouldn't think—no, not in my wildest moments—of being a sculptor."

As Valeria left the room, Mrs. Gano looked with pride after the tall, willowy figure.

"You must remember," she said, speaking unusually gently, "the Ganos are more artistic than we Calverts. Valeria has great talents."

But having talent altered little. Valeria beat her wings against the walls of the old Indian fortress all in vain. But she studied books, she got clay for modelling, and tools, and in secret wrought rude images that mocked her dreams. By-and-by she flung the tools aside, and the plastic clay that she had meant to fashion into forms of beauty hardened uncouthly into an unmeaning mass. An interim of aimlessness and despair of life was followed by a gradual healing of the spirit and restored activity of mind, through nothing more nor less than the power of poetry. Saturated with Keats and Shelley, she took up again her old childish habit of verse-making, but very seriously now, thinking of herself as a poet. Some hint of the way she passed her time, some whisper, through servants or others, of the reams of paper she engrossed with verse, got abroad in the town. She was asked to contribute to the Mioto Gazette, and was stopped on her way from church, by people she scarcely knew, to hear that her fellow-townsmen were full of curiosity and pride at having a poet among them. She was embarrassed, but not altogether displeased. Not so Mrs. Gano, whose favorite remark about the good people of New Plymouth was that they didn't know a B from a bull's foot. Of course they were impressed that any one in this benighted place should write verse!

[Pg 20]

"Just tell them the next time they bother you that the Ganos do it by the yard."

It was very difficult to impress this mother of hers, who took so much for granted.

"I think," said Valeria, with dignity, laying down a volume of Aurora Leigh—"I think I shall seriously devote myself to literature."

"Ah! then in that case be careful you don't adopt New Plymouth standards."

"I am not likely to."

"I don't know. Nothing is more difficult than to avoid measuring yourself by the people you live among. John is an ignoramus compared to his father, but he tells me he is considered here a highly educated person."

"I think, mother," the girl said, gravely, "that you'll protect me from having too good an opinion of my work."

But the conversation had set her thoughts in a new groove. There was truth in this. She must guard against an ignorant satisfaction in her poems. She must have better standards of style; she must know what the masters taught and practised. She must learn to be more critical than even her critical mother. "The great teachers of the world shall be my teachers," she said to herself, and there sprang up within her a new and fiery curiosity about the classics.

She asked her mother to let the Roman Catholic priest teach her Latin, and the request was granted with but slight demur, as an alternative to the pursuit of art away from home. Quietly and doggedly Valeria went on with her studies, teaching herself Greek, and lying long mornings on the floor in the Blue Room, getting by heart the wit and wisdom of men to whom the existence of a creature like Valeria Gano, in such a world as America, would have been harder to grasp than she, unaided, had found the niceties of the historical tense, or tolerance for her masters' morals.

While the girl up-stairs was patiently learning letters of the pagans, in the room below the mother conned Church[Pg 21] History and Biblical Criticism, searching the Creeds and her own unquiet heart for justification and for peace. And all the while about these two absorbed, self-centred women surged the turbulent life of the little town. Gossip was busy with Mrs. Gano from the first, albeit her face was unknown to most of her towns-people—to nearly all who had not seen her in her rare pilgrimages to St. Thomas's. They speculated, too, about the young girl who dressed so severely, and whom one couldn't fancy at a party or a picnic—who, though an irreproachable Episcopalian, learned Latin of Father O'Brien, wrote verses about heathen gods and goddesses, if report spoke true, and yet sat in church on Sunday with the rapt look of a medieval saint.

It was universally agreed by the neighbors that John Gano was the flower of the flock. He, at least, was an addition to New Plymouth society, being a very rising as well as agreeable person.

There was more than one sore young heart in the town when, in the following year, John Gano came back from a visit to his childhood's home in the South, engaged to marry his cousin Virginia Gano-Lee, just sixteen at the time. His mother, who had never ceased to fear that, despite her vigilance, he might be beguiled into marrying some one of these "ill-mannered Western girls," hailed the idea of further alliance with the Gano-Lees. However, much too big as her house was for her own use, she did not welcome John's natural proposal to bring his wife there to live.

"No; wait till you can make a home of your own," his mother had said.

So it behoved the young man to better his worldly position as speedily as possible. An opening in a bank in New York, with a little larger salary, and prospect of a partnership, took him away from New Plymouth the following year, and left his mother and sister alone in the old house.

[Pg 22]

Naturally so clannish a woman as Mrs. Gano had not let the years go by without much solicitude on behalf of her orphan grandchild. After the death of her eldest son, Mrs. Gano wrote to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Tallmadge, asking her to send the little orphan to his father's people, or else appoint a time when Mrs. Gano might come to Boston and bring her grandson home. The reply came from Mr. Tallmadge, showing how deeply he and his wife had resented Mrs. Gano's behavior on the marriage of her son. Mr. Tallmadge wrote that his daughter on her death-bed had committed the infant to the care of her own mother, and that Ethan Gano himself had sent his son North under the protection of Mrs. Tallmadge. He had broken with his own family, and held no communication with them. It was plain what his wishes were with reference to his son. And the Tallmadges might be depended upon to make good their right to the custody of the child. Several spirited letters were exchanged, and then silence till the close of the war and the news of Mrs. Tallmadge's death. Mrs. Gano then made another attempt to get possession of the boy, but finding his grandfather as resolute as ever to keep him in Boston, she proposed a journey thither. This apparent prompting of natural affection could not decently be thwarted, although Mr. Tallmadge understood perfectly the suspicion and anxiety as to the way the orphan was being brought up, that secured the Tallmadges the honor of a visit from Mrs. Gano.

She declined to make the house in Ashburton Place her headquarters, "having already," she wrote, "engaged an[Pg 23] apartment at the Tremont House." Mr. Tallmadge smiled, understanding perfectly.

But if he contemplated with serenity the descent of Mrs. Gano upon Ashburton Place, not so his unmarried daughter and house-keeper, Hannah Tallmadge. With nervous misgiving she looked forward to the coming of this hereditary foe, who, moreover, had the blackest designs upon her darling Ethan. Still, Hannah Tallmadge was a most Christian soul. Short of giving up Ethan, she would do all in her power to exhibit a hospitable and forgiving spirit in the approaching trial. She would do what she could to curb her father's uncompromising bluntness of speech, and would keep him off dangerous topics. It occurred to her that the mere sight of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the parlor table might rouse angry passions. She was in the act of putting that work into the bookcase, when her father, observing her suspiciously, asked:

"What are you doing?"

"Just putting this away."

"Leave it on the table. It is the only work of fiction I have ever been able to read. Leave it on the table."

Nevertheless, next day, in a moment of nervousness induced by the news that a strange lady was getting out of a carriage at their door, Miss Hannah dropped Uncle Tom behind the horse-hair sofa-cushion.

"Where is Ethan?" said her father, turning suddenly from the window.

"I'll go and bring him," replied Miss Hannah, and she left the room with haste.

A few moments, and the door opened again. Mrs. Gano came in with an air that seemed to Aaron Tallmadge suspiciously gracious. She paused for just that decisive but infinitesimal moment of first impression, as she took the measure of the spare figure standing on guard in the middle of his prim New England parlor.

"Mr. Tallmadge?" inquired Mrs. Gano, suavely.

"Mrs. Gano?"

He offered his hand, and then pushed a straight-backed[Pg 24] horse-hair chair a little nearer the fire. In the mere speaking of her name his twang made instant attack upon the Southerner's nerves. It passed through the man's mind presently that Mrs. Gano's voice was disagreeably reminiscent of a runaway slave he had once befriended.

"I have just seen my grandson's face at an upper window." She looked round eagerly. "Ah!"

The door had opened very slowly. One eye and half a little dark head were put doubtfully in.

"Come here, Ethan!" said his grandfather.

The child disappeared altogether.

Mr. Tallmadge went out into the hall, and presently reappeared leading Ethan in. He hung back, dropping his curly head, and shooting an occasional look at the newcomer; but since she did not fly at him in the objectionable way of visitors, he allowed himself to be brought by degrees up to the strange lady's chair.

She did not even say "How do you do?" She stooped and kissed him silently. He stared at her with great melancholy eyes, backed away, and stood by his grandfather's side.

"I am afraid he is not strong," said Mrs. Gano, a little huskily.

"He has been singularly free from childish ailments—an occasional cold—"

"Of course, in this trying climate."

"Oh, we find our climate does very well."

"No doubt, in the case of those to the manner born. This child is singularly like his father."

"He reminds us constantly of his mother."

"Is it possible? I assure you I feel, as I look at him, that I have dreamed these twenty years, and that my son is standing there before me."

"You don't say!" remarked the child's grandfather, unmoved. "Everybody here considers him so like the Tallmadges."

Mrs. Gano, with unflattering eyes on the head of the house, gave an incredulous cough. She seemed on the[Pg 25] point of expressing more indubitably some further thought, looked at the boy, softened suddenly, and smiled at the grave little face.

"You know who I am?"

He shook his brown curls. A shadow crossed the woman's face.

"Is he never told anything of his father or his father's people?"

"He is very young yet to take an interest in folks he hasn't seen."

"He is nearly six."

"What say?"

"I should have thought an intelligent child of six might have been told that his grandmother—"

"Not six yet, madam. Of course, when he is older—"

He made a gesture indicating a liberal policy.

"When he is older you will have no objection, I suppose, to his making a visit to his father's people?"

"No objection whatever to a visit, madam."

"How soon should you consider such a move expedient?"

"Ah, that depends," replied the wary gentleman—"depends so much on circumstances."

"What kind of circumstances?" she inquired, stiffly.

His look and tone said unmistakably, "Depends on your behavior, madam." "Depends on the child's health and— Run away and play, Ethan," he said.

As the little boy closed the door: "Then you do admit he is delicate?"

Mrs. Gano spoke more coldly than when Ethan had been there to hear.

"I admit the need to consider the health of all children, and secondary only to that, their education."

"What are your views as to Ethan's schooling?"

"I shall expect him to go through the regular mill, as I did: a good primary school, then the preparatory at Andover, then Harvard."

The woman felt a certain fainting of purpose at the cut-and-dried programme presented in that dry manner by the[Pg 26] dry old man. It was a "regular mill," and who could tell if the sensitive, fragile little Gano was the stuff to stand these machine-made processes?

"I don't believe, myself," said Mr. Tallmadge, with decision, "in haphazard, shilly-shally ways of raising children, and leaving it to them to see what they'll take to."

"I have little experience of shilly-shally methods," replied his visitor.

"If you leave it to boys to decide, what they take to is mischief nine times out of ten."

"I think you may make your mind easy about my grandson."

Mr. Tallmadge looked at her in silence for a moment; then suddenly: "Yes, yes; he'll turn out all right." He nodded, as if to say, "Trust me to see to that!" "My experience is, if you want a boy to do a particular thing, set that aim before him at the start. That's the way I was raised; that's the way I propose to raise my grandson."

There was a slight pause.

"And in what form of religious faith?"

"We are all members of the Presbyterian Church." It was said as though it had been in obedience to an edict of the Everlasting from the foundation of the world. "You will appreciate the necessity of having my grandson raised under my own eye when I tell you it is my intention that, after he gets through Harvard, he shall succeed to the editorship of my paper."

"My grandson edit an Abolitionist paper?"

Mr. Tallmadge blinked in a slightly nervous fashion, but answered, steadfastly:

"Abolition is abolished, madam; it has served its end. Ethan will naturally fall heir to my property and my profession."

"Ethan is his father's heir first of all—heir to a man who gave his life at Bull Run for our rights, not for the abolition of them."

"Abolition was right, and is law, by the sanction of the God of battles."

[Pg 27]

Mrs. Gano rose from her chair; the door opened, and in came Miss Hannah. Whether it was chance, or whether she had been waiting outside for the psychological moment, certainly her entrance was opportune. She went through her greeting with a flustered civility that, by its own extreme nervousness, made the situation she had broken in upon seem calm to the point of commonplace. Mrs. Gano found herself trying to put Miss Hannah at her ease.

The tall, thin spinster, with her smooth gray hair and anxious manner, must have been more than double the age of Ethan's mother.

Supper would be ready in twenty minutes.

"Of course," she said, "you will stay? Ethan has just been asking if he mayn't sit up a little later to-night."

"Ethan!" Potent conjuration! Mrs. Gano had not come all this way to look after her grandson's welfare and be turned back by a fanatical outbreak on the part of a bigoted Abolitionist. No, and if plain speaking was to be the order of the day, Mr. Tallmadge should not do it all. He had it his own way, however, in the long grace with which he prefaced supper, a performance that sounded in Mrs. Gano's ears aggressively Presbyterian. It appeared at that meal that Miss Hannah was disposed to be indulgent to her little nephew, and that he was devoted to her. He talked very little, and what he had to say he confided in a whisper to his aunt. But as he ate, he stared unceasingly with great gloomy eyes at his grandmother. She saw with deep misgiving that he was permitted to make the same meal as his elders. He declined to share his aunt's decoction of "shells," as she quaintly called cocoa, and joined his grandparents in a large cup of coffee. He bolted down quantities of that moist and leaden Boston brown bread which Mrs. Gano regarded with amazement and alarm, and he seemed to share the New England taste for beans and bacon, a fare which, in the visitor's mind, ranked with the "hog and hominy" of the hard-working plantation blacks; but to place such food before a little delicate child!

[Pg 28]

After supper his aunt took him on her lap, and, while Mr. Tallmadge and his guest skirted dangerous topics with stately politeness, Miss Tallmadge, in the corner by the fire, was softly repeating nursery rhymes to the little Ethan. Others might have been struck by the picture of the gaunt, childless woman and her ready assumption of the mother rôle; Mrs. Gano was vaguely conscious of a kind of remissness in herself in having omitted to tell her own children a word about little Nannie Etticott or Cock Robin. In all her life of maternal solicitude she had never once mentioned "Hey-diddle-diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle," or even hinted at the existence of "the Little Man who had a little gun." Presently, in the midst of Mr. Tallmadge's remarks upon the beauties of Boston Common, Mrs. Gano caught the child's more and more insistent demand for some joy which Miss Tallmadge was minded to withhold. In spite of "Sh! sh!" more and more shrill came the iteration:

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

In his fervor Ethan had dragged the stern, unyielding horse-hair cushion off the end of the sofa, revealing two volumes hidden behind it.

Mrs. Gano seemed not to regret this diversion. Helping the child to restore the sofa-cushion, she took up the books. As she read the title her look darkened. She put the work down as if it burned her fingers.

"A great, bad book," she said.

"What is that?" asked Mr. Tallmadge.

Mrs. Gano jerked her head without answering.

"What say?" persisted the old man, with his hand to his ear.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin," said Miss Tallmadge, trying to speak lightly.

"A very uncommon woman, Mrs. Stowe," said Mr. Tallmadge, firmly; "very uncommon, indeed."

"Let us hope so," ejaculated Mrs. Gano, half to herself.

"Eh?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with gruff suspicion. "What say?"

[Pg 29]

"I was granting her uncommonness, and hoping it wouldn't get commoner."

"H'm! It could hardly be expected, I suppose, that you should think well of—"

"No; I can't be expected to think well of a woman who is not content with getting a whole nation by the ears, but she must interfere between husband and wife, and—"

"What say?" inquired Mr. Tallmadge, with corrugated brows and hand to his deaf ear. "I'm talking about Harriet Beecher Stowe."

"So am I," said Mrs. Gano. "I only hope she'll be content with the mischief she's done already, and not rush into print with her espousal of Lady Byron's wrongs."

"I haven't heard that Mrs. Beecher Stowe had any such intention. As a friend of the family, from Lyman down—"

"As a friend of the family, you ought to warn them in time to curb her propensity for attending to other people's affairs. Uncommon! Yes, an uncommon busybody."

"I think, madam, you are misinformed," said Mr. Tallmadge, with dignity.

"I know more about Harriet Beecher Stowe than most people—though she never has set foot in the South—and I know she's a busybody. I also know she has less excuse than some women. The spring I spent with my sister, Mrs. Paget, in Covington, before I met the Stowes, I used to look out and see a man trudging about the hills in front of my windows with a basket on his arm. 'Who is that?' I asked. 'That's Professor Stowe,' they said; and we all wondered what he had in the basket. I said he was botanizing; Mrs. Paget said the basket was too big for that: he must be looking for kail, or dock, or dandelion greens for dinner. By-and-by we heard he had twins in the basket, and was taking them about for an airing. The Stowes were very poor, too, and what with that and twins, Harriet B. ought to have found enough to do at home."

"Nwingy Tat! Nwingy Tat!"

[Pg 30]

"Sh!" said his aunt.

"Mus' sing it," answered Ethan, in the only distinct words his grandmother had heard from his lips.

"What is it?" she asked, more interested in Ethan's infant tastes than even in Mrs. Stowe's enormities.

"It's that foolish little rhyme, 'The New England Cat,'" replied Miss Hannah.

"I don't know it," said Mrs. Gano.

"Ethan likes it for some unknown reason. When he had scarlet-fever last year—"

She stopped, seeing the sudden change in Mrs. Gano's face.

"We had an epidemic of it," said Mr. Tallmadge, as though that fact lessened the danger. "Ethan came out of it famously—didn't you, my little man?"

"Nwingy Tat!" said Ethan.

"Oh yes, he came out all right," said Miss Hannah; "but before the crisis I sat up with him at night, and I sang 'The New England Cat' to him till I nearly died of it. Through sheer exhaustion my voice would get weaker and weaker, till it seemed to die too natural a death for him to notice. But the moment I stopped he would start up and say feverishly, 'Nwingy Tat!' It was the only thing that quieted him."

Mrs. Gano might have been supposed to regard this passion for New England cats as a depraved taste on the part of a Gano, but she said, graciously:

"Let me add my petition to Ethan's. I would like to hear his favorite song."

Perhaps in the dim recesses of her mind she had some formless idea of learning this lyric.

"It's not a song," said Miss Hannah, hurriedly. "Come, child, it's time you went to bed."

"Nwingy Tat, first," said Ethan, firmly.

"Oh, hum it for the child!" said Mr. Tallmadge, impatiently.

Miss Hannah's face took on a dull-red hue, but obediently she began in a thin, sweet little voice:

Mrs. Gano was as "astonished" at this performance as "the parson." Ethan nodded a grave encore.

"Nwingy Tat!"

Whereat they all laughed with the best humor in the world, and Ethan was carried off to bed.

Mrs. Gano, under plea of weariness from travel, made her "good-nights" at the same time, arranging to return to Ashburton Place the next day.

She wakened early the following morning. Reviewing the events of the evening before, and having now dispassionate regard to the object of her visit, she registered a vow that no provocation upon earth should induce her another time to touch upon any vexed question. The opinions of these Tallmadges were not apparently to be altered any more than her own were. If she were going to wring any concession out of them with reference to Ethan, she must walk warily, she must appeal more to their sense of justice and family feeling. She was in their power. It was theirs to dictate terms. A new situation for Sarah C. Gano, but she would make the best of it.

When she arrived at Ashburton Place before ten o'clock, Miss Hannah was just leaving the house.

"Oh!" she said, as nervous people will, as though you had pinched them.

[Pg 32]

"Good-morning!" Mrs. Gano bowed urbanely.

"Good-morning! We understood you couldn't go out before the afternoon."

"Yes, I can never count on being fit for much in the morning; but to-day I am abroad early. Shall I find the child?"

She made a motion towards the house.

"Ethan has just gone to school. Pa took him to-day."

"Oh! And you are going to walk?"

"No—y-yes—a little way."

Miss Tallmadge's embarrassment seemed to rouse in Mrs. Gano's breast a sentiment to which it was commonly a stranger. She was curious. Ought she not to know something about this woman who stood in the relation of mother to Ethan? What was her life like? What were her interests?

"I have always heard," the visitor said, as they walked along Somerset, and through Beacon to Tremont Street—"always heard what admirable house-keepers the New England women are. Do you do your own marketing?"

"Yes; but always earlier."

"This is a good time for shopping, before the crowded mid-day. I must look for a shawl of some kind."

"I would be glad to show you the best place for such things, but to-day I—I have a most important engagement."

She paused near a stationer's. On the right a staircase led from the street to the floor above. Several ladies bustled past, nodding good-morning to Miss Tallmadge, and disappearing up these stairs. Mrs. Gano's keen eyes explored the precincts. A small placard in the entry stated in white letters on lacquered tin: "Ladies' Domestic Philanthropic Society (Colored Registry Office)."

"H'm!" she said, not seeming to see the nervous hand seeking farewell. "Colored! What color?"

"I suppose you would say black."

Miss Tallmadge had drawn herself up.

"I should probably say negro. But I've heard they like[Pg 33] to call themselves colored. Seems a curious taste. Always suggests variegated to me."

"That is not how we mean it," said Miss Tallmadge solemnly, making way for more ladies who swarmed up the staircase. "We are a little group of people working on purely humanitarian principles, finding succor and employment for the destitute, thrown out of work by—"

"Yes; we know by whom." Then, with a misleading geniality: "This idea of restitution seems to me very right and proper."

Miss Tallmadge's face betrayed perplexity. A shivering little quadroon girl crept up the stairs behind a coal-black old man.

"It is too difficult, perhaps, to make plain our point of view," said Miss Hannah, with quiet dignity, "otherwise I should feel it my duty while you are in Boston to show you—"

"Have you the right," interrupted her visitor, "to bring a stranger to these colored meetings?"

"I have frequently brought a friend. Perhaps—" Miss Hannah's good face brightened. "We don't discuss politics, and perhaps if you could see something of the pains we take to befriend and find homes for these poor creatures—"

"I am ready to attend the meeting," announced Mrs. Gano, tightening her bonnet-strings. "It sounds like a sensible institution. We had the best cooks, the only well-trained servants in America. They must be a godsend here in the North."

She remembered, as she mounted the stairs behind Miss Hannah, that her hostess had not provided 16 Ashburton Place with any of these "colored" joys, and she reflected that she had not yet seen a darky since her arrival except the old man and little girl on in front of them.

A clock struck ten as Miss Tallmadge hurriedly led the way up the second flight to the registry-office. When she caught up to the old negro, the domestic philanthropist applied her handkerchief to her nose.

[Pg 34]

The society's room was unexpectedly spacious, furnished with a desk fronting a goodly assemblage of ladies seated in rows upon rows of cane chairs. On the right a space was railed off, and set close with empty wooden benches. Miss Tallmadge explained in a whisper that "the candidates" were kept in an adjoining room till a later stage in the proceedings. As for the domestic philanthropists, there were so many of them that there was some difficulty in finding Mrs. Gano a seat. As the late-comers settled themselves, a thin, hard-featured lady with a dogged manner took her place at the desk. This action moved the D. P.'s to a faint flutter of applause. The President laid down some papers, drew off her gloves, folded her hands, and invoked a blessing.

"And now, ladies, we will proceed to business."

She read a report. At the end she characterized it as highly satisfactory, considering the wellnigh superhuman difficulties in the way of the object of the society. She gave an unflattering account of the extravagance, filth, and idleness cultivated in servants by the Southern régime. She told of thrifty New England housewives' experience with highly recommended Southern cooks—stories that moved the domestic philanthropists to open expressions of horror. No one denied colored women knew how to cook, but they were lazy and dirty beyond measure, and required the markets of the whole world to supply their inordinate wants. As for what they threw away, it would feed a cityful! To Miss Hannah's evident relief, Mrs. Gano nodded and whispered:

"True as Gospel—that much of it."

"Still," the President pointed out, "philanthropy must bear with these evils; philanthropy must find these outcasts homes. What can be expected of poor down-trodden slaves? called on to suffer every ignominy, torn from their children, quivering under the lash, bought and sold like dumb-driven cattle! Out of compassion for these fellow-creatures who are, like ourselves, children of God—His latter-day martyrs—we have met here this morning[Pg 35] to bring succor and to offer service. Daughter, call in the candidates."

A young lady rose, wiped away a sympathetic tear, crossed behind the wooden bar, and opened a door. The President meanwhile opened a reticule, took out a bottle of lavender-water, and poured a few drops on her handkerchief. Through the open door presently appeared the old negro, the little quadroon girl (evidently ill), and a great strapping mulatto woman. Mrs. Gano kept looking for the rest, while the trio huddled together like sheep in the farthest corner, until "daughter" indicated that benches were to be sat upon.

"Do they come in threes?" Mrs. Gano whispered to Miss Tallmadge.

"This is all there are this time."

The President opened a large ledger, dipped and poised a pen, and nodded to "daughter." Daughter bent down and spoke to the old man. He got up trembling, and followed the young lady out behind the bar to the little open space in front of the desk. The look on his face was not the look negroes commonly wore when mounting the block in Southern slave-markets. It was more like the look that would come into their faces when they were knocked down to some notoriously hard master.

"What is your name?"

"Jake, mehm."

"Jake what?"

"Jes' Jake, mehm. F'om Henderson's."

"Oh, I have a letter about you." She looked about among her papers. "Yes, here; I will tabulate this and see what we can do for you. You may come to the next meeting."

"Yes, mehm."

He hobbled a step or two away in a dazed fashion, when a piercing shriek rang across the room. He started as if a lash had been laid across his back. The little quadroon girl was standing up, holding out two shaking arms to him. The old man blinked.

[Pg 36]

"I swar I ain't leabin' yo', Till. I gwine t' wait by de do'."

But the little girl flew forward, climbing benches and creeping under the bar. She had nearly reached the old man when the President, leaning forward, said:

"Are you not the girl I sent to Mrs. Parsons's as general servant?"

"Yes, mehm," said the candidate, taking tight hold of the old man's coat.

"I have a very bad account of you."

"Yes, mehm."

"Mrs. Tilson says you are idle and good for nothing."

"Yes, mehm."

The old man took her hand.

"She ain't berry well, mehm, sence we come t' Bosting. Mebbe she'll be better able by'm-by t' go where dere ain't eleben chillen and so much snow ter shubbel."

"You look anything but strong," said the President. "I'll try to find you an easier place. They all want easier places," she said, over her shoulder, to the domestic philanthropists.

"Hush! Hush! I'll tell de lady, honey, ef yer don' take an' cry."

But the President was motioning the other candidate forward. The old man stood hesitating, and then began shakily:

"It 'ud be mighty kin', mehm, ef yo' could get Till an' me de same place."

"The same place!" echoed the President, sharply.

"Y—yes, mehm," faltered the old man, backing timidly; "or anyways places close togedder, mehm, please, mehm."

"That's seldom possible."

The little quadroon wept audibly. The old man patted her arm feebly.

"I—I disremember it myself, but Till, yere, she says I tol' 'er down Georgy dat up yere in Bosting dey didn't nebber make de chilluns go one way an' de ole folks anudder."

[Pg 37]

"We'll do what we can."

"Thank yo', mehm."

And they went out.

The President made an entry in the ledger.

"The old grandfather is said to be an invaluable hand at polishing plate," she said, with a sardonic look at her fellow philanthropists. "Any one who wishes may see his credentials after the meeting. Daughter, I called the next candidate."

"I have told her, ma."

"Come forward!" commanded the President.

The big mulatto woman wriggled about, and then got up, frightfully embarrassed, and by dint of kindly urging from "daughter" and the President, she was finally landed in front of the desk.

"Now," said the President, fixing the woman through her spectacles, "where have you resided?"

This question was repeated three times and in three forms.

"Oh, w'ere I libs? Up Corn Alley."

"But before you lived in Corn Alley, where did you come from?"

"F'om Jacksing's."

"Where did the Jacksons live?"

"On de hill."

"What hill?"

She thought deeply, and then looked up, grinning and silent.

"What State?" asked the President, with a haggard air.

"State?"

"Yes, Georgia or Alabama?"

"No, mehm. It was Keziah wus f'om Alabammy."

"What is your name?"

"Yellah Sal."

She squirmed with an elephantine coquetry.

"Your last name?"

"Las'?"

[Pg 38]

"Are you married?"

"Huh! Yes, mehm," she chuckled.

"What was your husband's name?"

"W'ich husbin?"

"Have you been married more than once?"

"Huh! Yes, mehm." She bridled and twisted. "Six or seben times."

"As Vice-President," said a white-haired woman, standing up suddenly near the desk, "I suggest that it would be a more practical investment of our time if we confine ourselves to finding out what the candidates could do."

"Do you wish me to register this woman as Yellow Sal?" inquired the President, severely.

"Put her down as Sarah Yellow," advised the Vice-President, and resumed her seat.

This passage seemed to unhinge the candidate. The question of what she could do found her relapsed into speechlessness. Even its repetition elicited only twistings and spasmodic grins.

"Come, come," said the President, wearily. "You are a strong, able-bodied woman; you at least can do a good day's work at something. Now, the question is, what?"

Yellow Sal only moved her massive shoulders with an air of conscious power.

"Did you cook?"

"Cook? No, mehm."

She smiled in a superior fashion.

"What then?"

She twisted a piece of her calico gown.

"Were you the laundress?"

"Me? No, mehm. Bet an' Sabina done de washin'."

"Well, and you? Were you nurse?"

The down-trodden one shook her head.

"Nebber could abide chillen."

"Well, what did you do?"

The President leaned in a threatening attitude over the desk.

"Huh! Me, mehm? Me—w'y," speaking soothingly,[Pg 39] "Lor bress yo' soul, mehm, I done kep' de flies off'n ole missis."

Miss Hannah's hope of the possible good effects of the meeting upon her guest was more than justified. Mrs. Gano returned to Ashburton Place in a distinctly cheerful frame of mind.

Whether Mr. Tallmadge, too, had begun the day with vows of peace, he certainly bore himself towards his unwelcome visitor with no little consideration and courtesy. Mrs. Gano was forced to admit to herself a growing respect, an unwilling admiration even, for her old enemy. The only outward and visible sign of this change of heart was made manifest after the departure of the one other visitor that evening brought to Ashburton Place. Mr. Tallmadge had not only prevented Mr. Garrison from speaking of the war, but he had headed the conversation off every time it approached any topic of the day that bore upon the South. When the door closed behind him Mrs. Gano turned to her host and said, formally:

"I appreciate your desire not to have these questions raised in my presence; but I see that in one regard you misapprehend me. I agree with your visitor as to the undesirability of slavery."

"You, madam?"

She bowed.

"My objection is almost solely on the score of its evil effects on the superior race. Still, slavery was an institution we had inherited, and in which our social and industrial life was rooted. One part of a free country had no right to dictate to another part. The South would have freed her slaves herself in due time."

Mr. Tallmadge was unable to repress an incredulous smile.

"Slaves were once held in the North," his guest reminded him, drawing herself up. "If the African had been able to live in this terrible climate, New England would not so soon have seen the iniquity of slavery. The[Pg 40] South, on wider grounds, was coming to the same conclusion. The war only precipitated with bloodshed and disaster that which, if left to right itself, would have been done without such awful squandering of blood and gold."

Mr. Tallmadge shook his head.

"I cannot agree with you, madam. Violent uprooting is the only way to clear the ground of certain noxious growths."

"Ah, you think you've cleared the ground—by inflicting the duties of citizenship all in an instant upon a barbarian horde? You are more of an optimist even than your friends."

"What friends are you quoting?"

"Your Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance. Even in the full tide of her romantic enthusiasm she can find no better use for the idealized ex-slave than to ship him to Liberia. This, too, after educating him—sending him for four years to a French university." She smiled. "But since you and I may not meet again, all I wish to point out before I go is that you need not count me as an advocate of slavery."

She rose.

"Before you go?" he began, hesitating.

"I am needed at home," she said. "I shall not remain in Boston longer than is necessary to secure your agreement to Ethan's coming to us for a visit."

"I have already said, madam—"

"I should not feel the object of my journey attained unless the date were fixed."

They stood looking at each other.

It will never be known how much Mr. Tallmadge's readiness to restore Mrs. Gano to the bosom of her family influenced his views at this juncture. He turned away and considered, with one foot on the fender and chin-whisker in hand.

"This next summer," he said, "I have promised to take Ethan to my brother's place in the White Mountains."

"Then the summer after this."

[Pg 41]

"Yes; the summer after he could come, if he were well."

"If he were ill, I would come to see him."

"Ah—yes."

"When does his vacation begin?"

"About the middle of June."

"If he is well, you will send him to us the third week?"

"Yes."

They shook hands solemnly.

[Pg 42]

It was when Ethan was seven years old that he was permitted to go to New Plymouth to spend his summer holidays. He was brought by his uncle Elijah Tallmadge, who, on his way to Cincinnati, satisfied his sense of duty, if not his civility, by dropping the little boy on the platform of the New Plymouth station, and watching from the window of the receding train how a tall, grave girl in an old-fashioned bonnet, and with a turbaned negress in her wake, went up to the little traveller and greeted him.

"Are you Ethan Gano?" said the lady, gently.

"Yes," answered the child.

She kissed him. "I am your aunt Valeria," she said, and took his trunk check out of his hand and gave it to the negro hackman, who departed to claim the child's belongings.

When the boy had said he was Ethan Gano, he was startled by an exclamation of uncouth joy from the negress who stood behind his aunt. Jerusha showed her strong teeth in a smile of wide beneficence, and rolled her great bulging eyes till Ethan quaked.

"Tooby sho'," she broke out; "didn't I tell yo' he'd got de Gano look in his lubly face? He's jes' de spi't en image ob his paw;" and she held out her motherly arms to embrace him.

Ethan fled, shuddering, not from fear alone, but from that sense, so much stronger in the Northern bred than in the Southern, of physical shrinking from the black. Ethan held himself to have escaped a dire indignity, as he overtook his aunt at the edge of the platform, close to a dilapidated carriage. He looked back, fearing the black woman[Pg 43] was following, and might be coming with them. But no, there she was, shuffling down a side street with her heavy see-saw hip-motion. Ethan's little trunk was put on the box, and he and his aunt got into the dilapidated vehicle and drove off with a rattling and jingling of loose windows and ancient brass-mounted harness. Presently they passed Jerusha, who smiled in at them broadly, seeming to bear no trace of a grudge. But Ethan colored and looked away.

His aunt did not seem to be a talkative person. She sat looking out of the window almost as if she were alone. She did, however, point out the Court-house, and when they rumbled and clattered over the great wooden bridge, "Now we are crossing the Mioto," she said; "we live on the other side. It's much nicer to live on the other side."

"Oh yes," said Ethan, as though he appreciated the advantage keenly.

His aunt had delicate aquiline features, and a singularly beautiful pale skin. He did not know it, but the two occupants of the carriage were curiously alike, even to the look of melancholy lurking in the eyes of each. Ethan noticed that the ungloved hand that lay listless in her lap was very long, and whiter than any hand he had ever seen.

They suddenly turned off the main street leading from the bridge.

"This is Washington Street," said his aunt. "If you lean out you'll see our house." But the trees were too thick for one who didn't know where to look to distinguish the glimpses of the gray-stone building. In a moment the vehicle stopped. "Here we are," said Aunt Valeria.

Ethan looked up at the massive gray front above him on a terrace only a little back from the street. Ampelopsis trailed over, but did not yet hide the great blocks of hand-hewn stone that in those old days had been set up for defence between the pale-face and the Indian.

Aunt Valeria opened the gate, and Ethan followed her up the half-dozen stone steps and along the brick-paved path to the porch. There in the doorway, between the big Doric columns, stood a tall, slim woman, dressed in[Pg 44] black, with masses of silvered hair nearly covered by a white veil. Her face was furrowed, but she wore a look of welcome and a light of unquenched youth in her smiling eyes that made the child smile too, feeling himself no stranger, but as one who had come home. She set her hands on either side his face and kissed him.

"But where is Mr. Tallmadge?" Mrs. Gano asked her daughter when they were in the hall.

"Gone on to Cincinnati. He didn't get out of the train."

"What? He never left this child to the chance of—"

Ethan had never seen any one look so angry. The eyes that had been smiling flashed a steely blue fire. He shrank away to the neighborhood of the more friendly umbrellas in the hat-rack.

"Oh, he knew we would be sure to meet him," said Aunt Valeria, apologetically.

"One can never be sure of anything of the kind! Suppose either you or I had been very ill! To drop a little child like that on a strange platform, as you would a sack of corn—"

Ethan felt covered with shame at the conduct of his uncle. He had heard Mrs. Gano herself criticised in Boston, but he felt now that her standards, after all, seemed higher, and her eyes were certainly more terrifying than any in the house of Tallmadge.

The hackman was struggling up-stairs with the trunk, Mrs. Gano bidding him have a care of the paper and the balustrade.

Ethan noticed there was a big open door at the end of the hall and a vision through of a veranda and green trees. In the hall was an oaken hat-rack, with umbrella-stand and two carved oaken chairs on either side, with high fleur-de-lis backs. While his grandmother was paying the hackman, the child discovered that the seats of these chairs lifted up in a miraculous manner. Unnoticed, he raised one a little and inserted his hand—something prickly, even porcupiney! He withdrew precipitately. Was it a beast[Pg 45] in there, or only a brush? He resolved upon cautious exploration at a more convenient season.

The hackman was going now, and Aunt Valeria was taking the boy up-stairs to be washed.

"Don't be long," said his grandmother, smiling over the banister as he went up; "supper is ready."

What a comfort that she seemed to have forgotten Uncle Tallmadge's disgraceful conduct!

The one jarring note during that first meal under his grandmother's roof was the apparition of the negress who had dared to offer to kiss him. To be sure, when she appeared this time, it was with a plate of smoking squares of Johnny-cake; but Ethan couldn't meet her eye, and shrank under his blue serge jacket when she came behind his chair to offer him that delectable staple of a Southern supper-table. He did not notice that the meal was very plain, it was all so good, and the silver on the table was much prettier than that Miss Tallmadge presided over in Boston.

While his Aunt Valeria and his grandmother talked, he ate steadily, and regarded with awe the immensely tall coffee-pot and other things that were covered all over with trees and little pagoda-like buildings in repoussé. Seeing Mrs. Gano behind this service gave him an impression of her wealth and magnificence that no after series of meagre meals and authentic knowledge of her poverty was ever able quite to efface. Observing the child craning his neck to see the inscription on the sugar-bowl, she turned it towards him.

"It is your own name," she said: "Ethan Gano. It will belong to you some day."

"Oh!" said Ethan, feeling his prospects to be princely.

"Now you may come and walk about a little," she said, rising. "But fold your napkin and put it in your ring."

He noticed the ring was marked "E. G.," and laid it down with a sense of ownership. It wasn't like visiting in a strange place when you found your own name on the things at supper.

[Pg 46]

Valeria brought her mother a shawl, and disappeared. Ethan put his hand in Mrs. Gano's, and with great care moderating his child's pace to one sedate and slow, he passed out on to the veranda at the back with his grandmother on that first tour of inspection. There were heavy wooden settees on the veranda against the wall.

"Oh, I shall sit here when I do my lessons," said Ethan, coming out of his shyness.

"No; you must bring out a chair," said his grandmother; "these benches are so black."

"What makes them black?"

"The soot. We burn bituminous coal here. You'll have to wash your hands oftener than you do in Boston."

"Doesn't anybody ever sit on these benches?"

"Never. Why do you do lessons in holiday time?"

"Grandfather expects me to."

"Humph!" said Mrs. Gano.

They had come down off the veranda towards the terraces that sloped on this side down below the level of the street at the bottom of the property, which occupied an angle between Washington Street and Mioto Avenue. They went down the first flight of stone steps, but stopped at the top of the second.

"We won't go down there," said Mrs. Gano. "It is a perfect wilderness."

"Really?" said Ethan, making great eyes of wonder. "What's down there?"

"What you see. Huge sunflowers, and reeds, and grasses—it's very damp in the middle—and briers and wild roses, blackberries, great weeds and bushes, dock and tall mullein, and up on that side where the ground rises a little towards the lower terrace, there used to be a garden—where you see the asparagus gone to seed."

"But it's a real wilderness?" asked the boy, radiant.

"I should say so."

"Snakes, too?"

"I shouldn't wonder."

His heart beat hard. This was a wonderful place to[Pg 47] come to for a visit. It was almost a pity one didn't live here.

"Are those apple-trees along the bottom of the terrace?"

"No, quince. And that one big tree in the middle of the lower plateau is a choke-pear."

"Isn't there a vine climbing up?"

"Yes. There are grapes down there in the autumn."

"How long do you think I can stay?"

"We'll see," she said, in a somewhat defiant tone, as they turned to go up the terrace.

There were still some "snowballs" on the great guelder rose-bushes, and the waxberries on the little one's gleamed like pearls.

"I like this place," said the child, suddenly.

"That's right, my dear."

They were up on the level of the house now, past the long veranda with the banned black benches. It was growing dusk, a time that under all conditions of this child's life made rude test of cheer. He drew nearer to the tall, bent figure. She dropped his hand, and stooped over the edge of clovered grass.

"What is it?" he asked, as she stood upright with something in her hand.

"A four-leaved clover—the third I've found to-day."

"Oh, do you think there are any more?"

He knelt down and examined the clump.

"You may have this," she said, presently, "and we'll come and look to-morrow, when we have a better light."

"Oh, thank you."

He held the clover carefully, thinking of the fairy-tale.

Now they were passing the great, perfectly straight tulip-tree, that went up and up like a ship's mast before the far-away boughs soared out into the dim depths of evening air. A light breeze had risen. A bird high up in the proudly waving branches twittered faintly. Except for that, a hush was over the world; but in the child's heart there was a mysterious sense of tumult, one of those periodic waves of excitement that rush over sensitive young [Pg 48]creatures, along with the vague consciousness of the wonder of this strange thing, life, that is opening out before their thrilling senses.

Ethan stood looking up till a kind of delicious dizziness seized him, and he leaned his head lightly against his grandmother's arm. She smiled down into his eyes, saying never a word, but when they went in-doors there was understanding between them.

A large octagon-shaped lamp of debased Moorish design hung in the hall, and the light came through the eight panes of parti-colored glass with a cheerful, even festive, effect. The parlor on the left of the front-door was dark. The great room opposite, which ran the whole length of that end of the house, and had two windows at either extremity, was Mrs. Gano's sitting-room in summer, and, by an arrangement of screens, her bedroom as well in winter. There was a single lamp burning on one of the pair of heavy old card-tables on either side the fireplace. Opposite, along the wall separating the room from the hall, stretched a great old-fashioned buffet, consisting of two mahogany cupboards, with drawers above, and pillared porches below, and an arched and carved back bridging them, and forming below a well-polished surface, whereon stood empty cut-glass decanters and tall celery vases. The long drawer of this middle part of the buffet, as well as those on the top of the cupboards on either side, was opened by a big brass ring held in a lion's mouth. The fireplace opposite was screened by an extensive landscape in oils, framed in ornate and tarnished gilt. All the space on each side of the mantel-piece right and left as far as the windows was filled with bookcases and mineralogical cabinets built into the wall. Between the front windows was an old-fashioned escritoire, reaching high up, nearly to the ceiling, always locked, and equally always wearing the air of a keeper of things secret and important. An engraving, grown brown with age, hung in a faded gilt frame above the fireplace. It was the great scene from "Measure for Measure," and above the buffet hung another from "The[Pg 49] Tempest," with "What is't? A spirit?" written underneath. On the mantel-piece were two tall blue china vases, that had been old, Mrs. Gano said, when she was young. She sat down by the lamp in a chair that no one ever saw the like of before. Very big and very crimson, it was rounded out in semicircular fashion on each side at the top, forming well-padded cushions against which to rest the head; but no one ever saw Mrs. Gano making such a use of them. The chair had arms and a foot-rest, and was mounted upon short, strong rockers—altogether a structure of unique device, that no one up to that time, except its proper owner, ever dared dream of inhabiting for a moment.

Mrs. Gano handed Ethan a book.

"I suppose you know that by heart?"

"Moral Tales? No; I've only heard about 'em."

"Is it possible? What do you read, then?"

"You see, I have to study a good deal."

"But when you aren't studying?"

"Well, then, you see, I read only the things I like."

"To be sure. But what kind of things?"

"Well"—he colored faintly—"I read Hans Christian Andersen mostly. But I like 'Horatius at the Bridge,'" he added, as though anxious to redeem his character, "and Henry of Navarre, and Paul Revere."

"Well, now you may read Moral Tales. It was your father's book, and you may have it if you'll take care of it. I'll cover it for you to-morrow."

"Oh, thank you," said the boy.

She opened her own volume where a worked marker kept the place, and began to read. But Ethan was too excited to follow suit. He sat looking at her, and about the room. The pressed four-leaved clover presently fell out of her book on to the footstool. He picked it up carefully and handed it to her.

"Ah!" she ejaculated, smiling, and turning back to the beginning of the volume, where she replaced the leaf. But Ethan had watched the discreet turning of yellowed pages.

[Pg 50]

"Why, your Bible is full of clovers," he said.

"This is not the Bible, it is Lockhart's Scott," she answered. "And as for the four-leaved clovers, I find them as I walk about in the evenings."

"I suppose you look for them because they're so lucky?"

"Nonsense! of course not. They just look up at me from the grass."

Ethan felt dashed a little, but he noticed how the long, slim fingers held the book so that no more clovers should fall out. She must think a good deal of them, he concluded.

Many an older person under the circumstances would have felt it incumbent upon her to entertain the child; but while no doubt some young people might have been made happier by being noticed more, there are those, especially the shy and sensitive ones, who are all the better for a little wholesome letting alone. It is evident that the officious attempts of many well-meaning adults to amuse, even if it involve making mountebanks of themselves, are ofttimes destined to humiliation. We have all seen children solemnly regarding grown-up capers with the air of philosophers looking down with scorn upon an antic world.

There was something in his grandmother's calm pursuit of her usual routine that set the child at ease. If she had gone obviously out of her way to make herself agreeable to him, he, with the perversity of his type, would have been more on his guard against her blandishments.

His Boston relatives were evidently quite wrong in every respect about his grandmother. His grandfather Tallmadge had sympathized with him deeply at having to pay this duty visit. Even Aunt Hannah had evident misgivings, and had put a seed-cake in his trunk. He felt a sudden resentment against those estimable persons for their distrust and thinly veiled dislike of his grandmother Gano. Already he saw himself her champion and faithful knight, ready to do battle, if need be, for his sovereign lady. It was not altogether strange that the conquest of the child was so speedy, for the heart of the woman was full of a[Pg 51] passionate tenderness for this little Ethan come back again, so like the one she had lost that he seemed to bring with him her youth and all the sunny circumstance of those far-off Maryland days. She softened wondrously to the child, yet it was so little her way to be demonstrative that she neither alarmed nor bored the boy, but simply took hold on his imagination. He, quick of spirit and keen of sense, responded as the natural child will, to the reassuring spectacle of beautiful and august age. What children suffer from sheer ugliness in their elders is not to be written down. Partly in that many mercifully forget, and partly in that others remember certain martyrdoms too vividly to set them down without a blush. One is inclined to think, looking back, that life has taught us nothing more successfully than tolerance of these departures from a possible comeliness; for it is not irregularity of feature or deepening furrows or whitening hair that appall the child, but the unnecessary ugliness of dress and eccentricity of demeanor, and, above all, the avoidable and indecent display of the ravages of time.

With every desire to think nobly of women, it must be admitted that it is chiefly they who offend against the canon childhood unconsciously sets up, that old age shall not with impunity offend or affright the young.

Mrs. Gano would have repelled indignantly the idea that her grandson's affection had anything to do with her spotless neatness; the sober distinction of her plain silk gowns, made before the war; her white lawn kerchiefs, rolling up from her V-shaped bodice, fold on fold, voluminous and soft about her neck; her full lawn undersleeves, that came so daintily out from the silk, and fastened with a silver shell button at the wrist, flowing out again in a fine ruffle, and falling over her hands. As to that most distinctive touch of all, the veil of plain white net that covered, and yet did not conceal, the thick silver hair massed about the high shell comb, one cannot help thinking that if she had quite realized its effectiveness, she would have considered it her duty to discard it. She always said she disliked[Pg 52] caps as "would-be ornamental," and besides, she had "too much hair;" she "would be top-heavy in a cap." So she had adopted the white net veil, fastened just behind the heavy rings of hair on the temples with a pair of pearl and silver pins of curious old design, and the veil fell down to the shoulders behind, concealing the neck, masking a little the droop of the bowed back, and falling softly down each side of the strong old face, and dropping into her lap.

The child sat with the open book in his hand, but with big eyes roving, reading as well as he could the more obscure but not less interesting story incarnate in the great red chair, getting the details by heart in the observant way of children.

"What time do you usually go to bed?" she asked, presently, turning a page.

"When I feel sleepy."

"H'm! I think eight o'clock is a good time."

"It's pretty early," he said, wistfully.

"Your father, when he was your age, always went to bed at eight."

"Oh!"

"Aunt Jerusha will come presently and take you up-stairs."

"Aunt Jerusha!"

He dropped the Moral Tales on the floor. The terrifying black woman was his aunt!

"Oh, oh! that's not the way to treat books. The Ganos are always very careful of their books."

Ethan recovered the volume hurriedly, a prey to conflicting agitations.

"Where's Aunt Valeria?" he said, presently.

"Up in the blue room"—Mrs. Gano glanced overhead, and then looked out severely into space over her gold spectacles, adding, meditatively, "making herself ill with writing."

"Oh, if she's writing letters, I s'pose I mustn't 'sturb her."

"H'm! she's not writing letters."

[Pg 53]

"What is she writing?"

"Verses, most probably."

"Poetry verses?"

"Well, verses, at any rate," she said, a little grimly. It was noticed that during Valeria's lifetime Mrs. Gano never spoke of her daughter's work except as "verses;" after her death it was all "poetry." "It's high time she was interrupted. Go up-stairs, child," she said, turning to Ethan, "and knock at the door next your own, and say I sent you."

It was a possible escape from that other most awful "aunt." He laid the Moral Tales down as if they were made of glass, and departed with alacrity.

Twice he had to knock upon the blue room door before a voice said:

"Who's there?"

"It's me, Aunt Valeria."

"Oh, run away, dear."

"But, please, I'm sent."

A little pause and the door was opened. A spacious bedchamber, where everything—walls, curtains, carpet, and bedfurnishing—was a soft faded blue, almost gray in this light. The floor was strewn with papers, books and papers lay on the chairs, on the sofa, even on the preternaturally high and massive bedstead, that looked quite inaccessible to all save the athletic without the aid of a ladder.

"Did my mother send you?" asked Aunt Valeria.

"Yes, and—oh, are you awful busy?"

His voice faltered a little.

"Why?" she said, taking the child by the hand and leading him in.

The action of kindliness wrought upon the perturbed little spirit. His eyes filled with tears.

"You see," he said, "I thought she was a servant."

"Who was a servant?"

"My other aunt."

"Miss Tallmadge?"

"No, the other one here. But I like you best. Won't[Pg 54] you take me up to bed? Of course I do everything for myself; it won't be a great trouble; it's only just so my other aunt needn't come even as far as the door."

"What other?"

"Aunt J—J—Jerusha," he said, with an excited sob.

Valeria began to laugh, a thing she seldom did.

"My poor little boy!" she said, "Jerusha's the cook, and a very good friend to all of us. People in the South call a good old servant like that 'aunt' when they like her as much as we do Jerusha. She used to be a slave; we brought her from Maryland."

"And she's not my really truly aunt at all?"

"Of course not, you foolish little boy! Didn't you see she was a negress?"

"Oh yes, I saw that."

He shuddered.

"And didn't you see she waited on us at the table?"

"Yes, but so does Aunt Hannah in Boston on Sundays."

"Does she?" Then seeing the child's anxiety was not quite dissipated: "Didn't you notice when she'd finished waiting at supper Jerusha went back to the kitchen? Now, if she'd been a real aunt—"

"Well, you see, I did think of that, but I thought perhaps aunts didn't come and sit in the parlor here, and I remembered how she—she"—he looked down and grew scarlet—"tried to kiss me at the station."

"Oh yes, she might do that. You see, she was very fond of your father."

"But my father didn't use to kiss her."

"Oh, I dare say—"

"No, Aunt Valeria; I should think he never did."

"Perhaps not, then," she said, humoring him.

"Do you think," he began, in a half-whisper—"do you think when she takes me up to bed she'll—she'll—"

"I don't know, but I'll take you myself, if you'd like that better."

"Oh, I would, Aunt Valeria."

[Pg 55]

"Very well, then. Come, we'll go down-stairs and say good-night."

He slipped his hand in hers.

"Of course, I didn't really think she was my aunt," he said, with the easy mendacity of childhood.

[Pg 56]

Although this visit was the only one Ethan was destined to pay to New Plymouth before he came to man's estate, he carried back with him to Boston at the holiday's end something more than an intimate understanding with his father's people, and a vivid picture of the outer aspect of life in the house of his grandmother.

Out of his fear of Aunt Jerusha that first evening grew the habit of Valeria's visiting his room ten minutes or so after he had said good-night. During those first evenings, when he was allowed a candle to go to bed by, this small attention on his aunt's part was for the ostensible purpose of putting out the light and opening his windows. Later on she went for no better reason than that the child would be expecting her. Absent-minded dreamer as she was, after the second evening of Ethan's stay she never forgot what became her kindly custom.

On this particular evening, as she sat among the litter in the blue room, her acute ears caught a faint sound of sobbing. She hurried into the adjoining chamber, and found all dark and silent, Ethan breathing regularly, apparently asleep. She bent over in the faint moonlight to kiss him, and found his face wet with tears.

"My dear! Then it was you?"

"Me?" he inquired, in a steady voice.

"Yes. Why were you crying?"

After a pause:

"I thought the walls were so awful thick," he said, as if answering her question with all circumstance.

"Shall I light the candle again?"

[Pg 57]

"No, thank you," he said, sedately; "I can see the moon through the locust-tree."

She went to the window, and leaning her folded arms on the wide seat, she repeated softly, as she looked out:

"Is that what you've been writing, Aunt Valeria?"

"No." She came back and sat down on the side of his bed. "No; Shelley wrote it. What shall I do for you?" she said, wondering how women that were used to children would meet the exigency, for the little voice was plaintive in spite of itself.

"I don't want anything," Ethan said, stoutly, and there was another pause. Then, by way of a delicate hint: "Grandmamma has been telling me a story."

"Has she?"

"Yes; about when she was young. Tell me about when you were young, Aunt Valeria."

The innocent petition jarred. Valeria was the youngest of her family, and had never yet been asked to think of herself as one who had left youth behind.

"There's nothing to tell about me," she said.

"Didn't you ever cross the Alleghanies in a stage-coach?"

"No; all that was before my time."

"Didn't you ever go to visit your grandfather Calvert in the mountains of Virginia?"

"No; he died before I was born."

"Then, you never got homesick?" His voice wavered a little, and then, quite firmly, he added: "Grandmamma did, and she used to go off by herself to meet the postman, who came only once a week, and she'd walk and walk till she heard him wind his horn. How do you 'spose he wound it?"

[Pg 58]

"He just blew a long blast."

"Did that make it wind? Well, anyhow, when he wound it, that used to make grandmamma homesicker than ever. It used to echo all about among her grandfather's mountains, and when she heard that she used to stop running, and sit down on a rock and cry and cry. You see, she was so afraid the postman wasn't bringing the letter to say Aunt Cadwallader was coming to take her home."

"Did my mother tell you that story to-night?" inquired Aunt Valeria, without enthusiasm.

"No; it was this morning, when I said I wasn't a bit homesick like Aunt Hannah said I'd be. Grandmamma seemed to think it didn't matter if I was homesick. The Ganos nearly always are, but in the end they're always glad they came."

This obscure saying seemed not to rivet Aunt Valeria's attention; she moved as if she were going. Ethan sat up in bed and asked, a little feverishly:

"Did you know about Aunt Cadwallader bein' in the war?"

"No; I never heard she was in the war."

"Well, she was. She was about four years old, and the British were firing on Fort McHenry, and all the doors and windows in Baltimore were shut, and nobody went out, and everybody was living in the cellar, so's not to get shot, and bombs were exploding in the garden, and the fambly missed Aunt Cadwallader—"

"Oh yes," said Aunt Valeria; "she was out in the garden, wasn't she, picking up the bullets?"

"Yes; they were raining all about, and she was putting them in a little egg-basket she carried on her arm." Ethan finished, a shade crestfallen to find his scheme to entertain and, above all, to detain his aunt had been forestalled. "I thought perhaps if I told you you'd remember something that happened to you—when you were young, you know."

"I'm sorry I don't know any stories."

"Don't you know the one about the poor man over your fireplace?"

[Pg 59]

"What poor man?" she repeated, bewildered.

"The man without his clo'es on, tied to the wild horse."

"Oh, you mean the Mazeppa on the iron fire frame."

"Yes"—Ethan sat up again, with dilated eyes—"wolfs comin' after him, wif mouths wide open."

"Oh, well, they don't eat him up; he gets away, and lives happy ever after."

"I am glad!"

He lay down, and she covered him up.

"I'd sing to you, but I'm afraid it would disturb my mother."

"Then, couldn't you say some more poetry or something?"

"I don't believe I know anything you'd like."

"Oh, I'd like anything—except the 'May Queen.'"

She sat silent a moment, and then began:

"H'm!"—and she stopped.

"Can't you remember any more?" inquired the boy, eagerly.

"Well—a—perhaps something else;" and she made a fresh start:

No, no; I must think of something a little less—"

Another pause, and then:

On and on the low voice chanted, whispered, verse after verse and page on page, until the child slept sound. In this wise was the habit formed of Aunt Valeria's [Pg 60]prolonging her nightly ministrations till Ethan was safe beyond the touch of homesickness, beyond the need of a doubtful cheer. From most of her selections, it must be confessed, he derived only the vague comfort of listening to the rhythmic rise and fall of a friendly, sleep-wooing voice, that sent him softly to oblivion. But as the days went on he developed tyrannous preferences, and would call for "The Neckan" as regularly as he had been used in infancy to demand "The New England Cat." He managed to keep awake longer as time went on, and it took "The Ancient Mariner," or the solemn and somnolent-burdened rhyme of the "Duchess May" to send him to the land of Nod. He came to know these favorites by heart, and would prompt Valeria if she ventured to skip or hesitated at a line. In after years he used to feel it odd to realize how much English verse he knew by heart that he had never seen upon the printed page. But Aunt Valeria's patience was sometimes sorely taxed by his wide-eyed attention to the story. Then it was she would unkindly lapse into German, against which no young wakefulness is proof.

"Now go to sleep," she would admonish, "or I'll say 'Kennst du das Land.'" Notwithstanding it was a very dull poem, she would say it over and over, and Ethan, vanquished utterly, would fall asleep with the refrain, "Dahin, Dahin, Möcht ich mit Dir O mein Geliebter ziehn," sounding in his ears. He had his own view of what it was all about, and classed it with such ditties as "Annabel Lee." "Dahin" he was satisfied was the heroine, and he determined on his return to Boston to bestow the name upon the least attractive of three terrier puppies, fresh arrivals in his absence.

There was no one to play with, apparently, here in New Plymouth, but few children could have felt the lack so little as Ethan. Nobody interfered with him, nobody seemed to want him to study. The spectre of Grandfather Tallmadge was still potent enough to make him carry about a French grammar in the shallow jacket-pocket, that was always ejecting it upon an indifferent world. Ethan, on its[Pg 61] every mal à propos appearance, would hurry the book out of sight with an uneasy conscience, and betake himself into the wilderness, where he owned an oasis under a barberry-bush; or he would seek diversion from linguistic cares in the sooty attic. Nobody seemed to mind, if only he were washed when he appeared on the surface again. That same attic, however, was a place of peril. You gained access to it by means of a ladder in a closet on the upper landing, and you went up through a trap-door into a dim and stifling atmosphere; not but what there were windows, but they seemed to admit only heat and soot. There was an army of disabled or disused pots, pitchers, vases, and so on, standing in the middle of the rough wooden floor, and above them stretched a long table like a counter, on which were ranged queer lamps and candlesticks, brackets, door-knobs, pewter vessels and great platters, candlesnuffers and trays, and all manner of household goods and gear that had then been long out of fashion, and had not yet come back again. With grimy fingers Ethan poked about, taking great care not to step off the middle aisle of flooring on to the lath and plaster between the mighty hand-hewn beams. Sometimes, in more daring moods, he would venture farther afield, balancing cautiously on a beam to some remote cobwebby corner to examine nearer an object that had lured him long with its air of the unattainable. In this way he made acquaintance with certain pictures turned disobligingly to the wall, and a great horse-hair trunk, into which he peeped with palpitating heart; for all the world knew that such trunks were the abode of skeleton ladies. But here were only dusty papers. The far corner he never ventured into: it was there the great elk antlers shone, and the skull and white teeth grinned and threatened. One had just to pretend it was chained there, and strained impotently to get at little boys. Turning over a lot of ancient rubbish in a box one day, he came across a heavy old brass door-knocker with "E. Gano" on it. Down-stairs he rushed, all black and beaming.

Mrs. Gano was sitting, as usual, very upright in the[Pg 62] great red chair, with Dean Stanley's History of the Eastern Church open on her knees.

"My child, you're like a blackamoor!"

"But just look what I've found!"

"Ah, yes! I had that taken off the front-door the last thing before I left Maryland."

"Why didn't you put it on the front-door here?"

"You see, it's 'E. Gano.' There was no 'E. Gano' then," she said, with shadowed face.

"But there is now—I'm here."

"To be sure," she answered, smiling. "As your grandfather said, 'It's necessary to have an Ethan in every generation to avoid re-marking things.' We'll have the knocker put up, if you like. Venie will polish it."

"Shall I ask her please to come to you as soon as she's done her work?" he said, hesitatingly, for an interview with these black women was not yet lightly to be faced.

"Tell her I want her at once," said his grandmother, a little brusquely.

He was struck with her peremptoriness.

"Sha'n't I say 'please'?" he inquired.

"Certainly not. It's not as my servants please, but as I please. Tell her to come."

Ethan knew now that his manner to Aunt Jerusha and her daughter must have appeared abject according to Gano standards. He secretly determined to adopt a loftier demeanor. Vain ambition! Never once in his life did he find the accent, let alone the conviction, of the superior, except with persons of his own station. Of servants he asked service unwillingly, and, to the end of his days, with an uneasy sense that somebody was being abased—he inclined to think it was himself. The wages question never in his estimation touched the heart of the obligation. Any underlining of the relation of master and servant was as irksome to him as if he had come of generations of communists, instead of a race of tyrannous slave-holders.

Venie brightened up the knocker till it shone like gold, and Aunt Jerusha, who could do anything on earth, [Pg 63]apparently, promised to come round and screw it firmly in its place at exactly the angle it had taken on the great white door "down South."

It was over this business of the knocker that Ethan made friends with Aunt Jerusha. He was still mortally afraid of her, but he had come to that point where he was able to snatch a fearful joy in passing quite near her without flinching, as though she had been any ordinary white person, whose eyes didn't roll, and whose plaited wool didn't escape in little horns from under a flaming bandanna. He had insisted on carrying the tool-box and the hammer and the big screw-driver from the kitchen round to the front porch. It was so that his intention to be lofty and aloof had ended. At the front-door stood his grandmother.

"You've got a lazy man's load," she said.

And, as if on purpose to justify her, down dropped the screw-driver on the gravel, and out jumped the French grammar on the grass. He recovered the book, and as he reached after the screw-driver away slid the hammer off the tool-box.

"Put down your book. Don't try to do so many things at once. That's how your great-uncle Rezin put out his eyes at Harper's Ferry, and Shelley lost his life trying to read and sail a boat at the same time."

Who was this Shelley who was always being quoted, and where did he come into the family saga? Byron, too, and others he hadn't heard mentioned in Boston. The appearance of Aunt Jerusha see-sawing round the corner was a welcome diversion, and soon the glittering knocker was screwed firmly into place. It was a triumph. Aunt Valeria was called down to see, and admitted it was resplendent!

"Isn't it delicious having our very own Maryland knocker on the door again!" remarked the young gentleman, with as heartfelt satisfaction as though he had watched the decline and fall of the old house in the South, and now saw the family fortunes to be mending.

His grandmother patted his shoulder.

[Pg 64]

"We say 'delicious' of good things to eat, not of door-knockers, even when they come from Maryland."

"Oh, you wouldn't limit such a word as delicious to things we eat," remonstrated Aunt Valeria. "That's a point where I've always differed from Byron."

"Then I'm surprised to hear it, for it's one of the few things he got right."

The younger woman withdrew into her shell, making no rejoinder, but pausing at the bottom of the stairs on her way back to her work, with an air of perfunctory deference, to hear her mother out. Ethan watched the two with interest, feeling that he and his aunt were in the same boat.

"We can't be too jealous of guarding the purity and honesty of language," Mrs. Gano said, firmly. "Any one who has the smallest pretence to caring for letters or for accuracy, or for truth, must do what he can to oppose the debasing of the current coin of speech. If you use words loosely, you'll begin to think loosely, and in the end you'll find you've lost your sense of values, and one word means no more than another. You'll be like Ethan here, who tells me 'bonny clabber' is perfectly splendid, and that he 'loves' Jerusha's Johnny-cake. After that, he mustn't say he loves you and me. It would be like kissing us after the cat."

"It's a kitten," said Ethan, feeling froward and very bold.

His grandmother laughed delightedly.

"Oh, very well, we'll be accurate, if it's only about a kitten that I haven't so much as seen."

The child flashed out to the veranda and returned with a small basket, in which lay a diminutive coal-black object.

"You said you didn't like animals," he observed, reproachfully.

"I don't—not in the house."

"This one's very little to stay out o' doors."

"Yes, it's too little to stay here at all."

"Oh no, it isn't so little as that."

He pulled out its tail that it might look as long as [Pg 65]possible, but it would curl under. He lifted the creature up, clawing and feebly wailing.

"Why, Ethan," said Aunt Valeria over the banisters, "it hasn't got its eyes open."

"Not just yet."

"Can it walk?"

"Well, not much," said Ethan, guardedly; "but nobody walks as young as this. The Otways' cat brought it over in her mouth. They're nice to the Otways' cat in the kitchen."

There was judgment delivered in the phrase.

"Venus must take the thing home," said Mrs. Gano, eying the wailing one with coldness.

"Oh, grandmamma!"

There bade fair to be a duet of lamentation.

"It will die if it's left here."

"No, no; I'll take care of it." He clasped it fondly.

"We don't know what to do for such a young creature."

"Oh yes, we do," interrupted Ethan. He came nearer, notwithstanding Mrs. Gano's edging away from her grimy descendant, and from the small, wailing, trembling, clawing object on his breast. The child took hold of her gown, and said, with ingratiating, upturned, face, "Dear grandmamma, couldn't we buy it a cow?"

The suggestion apparently pleased his unaccountable grandmother too well for her to persist in banishing the kitten. So "Duchess May," as Ethan insisted on calling her, became an acknowledged member of the sooty circle in the kitchen, and was well and safely brought up without the immediate superintendence of a cow.

Mrs. Gano's refusal to admit the Duchess to other parts of the house resulted in Ethan's spending a good deal of his time, too, in Aunt Jerusha's society. She turned out to be a most interesting and accomplished person. No wonder his father had thought well of her, but as to—no, he never, never could have kissed her!

Aunt Jerusha sang the most wonderful songs.

The words were not very intelligible for the most part,[Pg 66] but that didn't matter: the effect was all the more exciting and mysterious. There was one monotonous chant she used solemnly to give forth when she was polishing the dining-room table—something about

Then a string of undistinguishable words, ending with something like—

There was a wild melancholy in the air that made the child's heart tremble in his breast. Particularly on wet days, when he couldn't go down into the wilderness, he used to stand in the doorway with the Duchess in his arms, listening with all his ears.

"An' Jerusha," he said, one morning during a thunderstorm, when she polished the oak in persistent silence, "why don't you sing? Grandmamma can't hear."

"No, Massa Efan, not to-day."

"Why not? This is just the day to, when the rain's makin' such a noise you can sing as loud as you like."

"Yo' won't nebber ketch dis nigger raisin' no chunes on de twenty-firs' ob July."

"Why not?"

"Don' you know, little massa, dis de day yo' fader died?"

"Oh-h, is it?" A silence of some moments, broken only by the dash of summer rain against the window-pane. "Did you know my father when he was quite little?"

"Law, yes, littler'n you—so little, he couldn't walk by[Pg 67] hisself. De firs' time I done lef' him, jes' fur a minute, standin' in de big arm-cheer by de winder, he turn roun' w'en he see I wusn't holdin' on t' him, an' he yelled like forty—" She chuckled proudly, stopped suddenly, and held out timid arms and made a baby face. "'Ow! ow! Efan fall—Efan bake!'" She relaxed into smiles again. "Break he meant, yo' see. He'd seen pitchers and china dolls and sich like fallin' and smashin' ter bits, and he wus 'feared dat's wot would happen t' him."

She went on chuckling a moment, and then fell unaccountably to weeping. The thunder crashed and the wind blew loud. It lashed the great tulip-tree with fury. Ethan laid his face against the velvet back of the Duchess. Aunt Jerusha wept audibly. Ethan felt rather low in his mind himself.

"Where does this door out here lead to?" he said, feeling the need of a diversion.

"Unner dem front stehs."

"Oh, does it go under the stairs?"

"Yes; but don' yo' go dah, honey."

"Why not?"

"It ain't a berry cheerin' kin' ob a place."

"Dirty?"

"Spec's so."

"I've noticed Venie always runs past that door. It can't be 'cause it's dirty."

"No, honey; no."

"An' Jerusha, Venie told me yesterday when grandmamma first came here she couldn't get any servants to sleep in this house, and that was why she had to send for Venie."

"Don' yo' min' Venus; she's misleadin'."

"Well, but I asked Mr. Hall while he was cutting the grass, and he said he wouldn't like to live here, and he looked at the house in such a funny kind o' way."

"Huh! yo' mus'n't listen to po' w'ite trash."

"Then you'd better tell me, or I'll ask everybody."

"No, no, honey. Yo' grandma would be hoppin' mad ef yo' should git dem iggorant pussens t' gabbin' agin."

[Pg 68]

"Then you'd just better tell me, and it'll be a secret, please, An' Jerusha."

"Well, dey do say, Massa Efan, dis yer house am hanted."

"Hanted? What's that?"

Aunt Jerusha rolled her eyes cautiously over her shoulder and lowered her voice.

"Got ghos'es."

"Under the front stairs?" whispered Ethan, quickly withdrawing from that proximity.

Aunt Jerusha nodded.

"Did you ever see one?"

"Law, yes; oncet or twicet."

"What was it like?"

"Like de debbil in a night-gown. Hark! Yo' heah dat?"

"Yes; oh, what was it?" Ethan was nearer Aunt Jerusha in his alarm than he had ever ventured before.

"Dat's de bad ghos' under de stehs. De fust fall we come heah he done groan and gro-o-an like dat all de time. He been mighty still now fur a spell. Hark! yo' heah dat?"

Ethan was horribly conscious of a hideous noise somewhere in front of the dining-room.

"I think he's in the parlor," he whispered, when he could command his emotions sufficiently for speech.

"No, no; I used t' 'spect he was dah, but dat's jus' his being so cute, he didn' want nobody to know he was unner de front stehs. Come into de kitchen, Massa Efan, and I'll gib yo' a cinnamon roll."

It is useless to pretend that Ethan was a stout-hearted young gentleman. From infancy he had been a prey to a thousand unseen terrors having for the most part quite respectable Christian name and origin, such as the "worm that dieth not," "the thief in the night," the "great red dragon" of the Revelation, and "the beast with seven heads." But there are some terrors that need no inculcating. It occurred to him now that the ghost under the stairs[Pg 69] was called Yaffti. Why "Yaffti" he could not have told, or what suggested the name to him; but Yaffti was angry when people, especially little boys, walked over his head without saying:

His worst form of nightmare was forgetting to use this formula, and daring in his purblind sleep to stamp on the stairs directly over Yaffti's head. He realized by-and-by that the restless spirit underneath was soothed when the stairs were not used, and his young friend made the descent astride the banisters. This pleased all parties, except Mrs. Gano. Next best, from the Yaffti point of view, was walking on the narrow green border of the stair carpet, instead of in the fawn-colored centre. Little by little Yaffti enlarged his jurisdiction, and ruled the porches with a despotism as secret as it was potent, permitting no child to walk on the cracks between the boards. Yaffti was pleased, too, if in going about the town you steered clear of the cracks between the flag-stones. But all this attempt at a friendly understanding was at bottom a mere daylight truce, and with the coming on of night the hollow mockery stood exposed. Ethan, like many another, went through his childish terrors with a silent endurance that would have earned him the name of hero had he been a man, and had Yaffti boasted another name, though not necessarily a more demonstrable existence.

Nevertheless, these were wonderful and beautiful days, having in them a rapture of freedom from human interference incompatible with life under the same roof with Aunt Hannah and Grandfather Tallmadge, who seemed to have nothing better to do than to look after Ethan and spoil his fun from morning till night.

[Pg 70]

In spite of Ethan's somewhat heathen faith in the power of Yaffti, and the efficacy of rites and spells, he was a true Gano, in that he early developed a deep concern about Christianity. During the stately strolls after supper with his grandmother, he propounded many a question which so taxed that practised theologian that she was fain to turn the conversation by quoting a question-begging beatitude, or saying loftily the subject was beyond little boys. But if, like Dr. Johnson on the immortality of the soul, she sometimes left the matter in obscurity, she had a Bible quotation ready for every conceivable emergency in life. Her ingenuity in wresting from the stern old Scripture humane and cheerful counsel, fit for the infant mind of a conscience-plagued Gano, discovered how true was her comprehension of his fears, and how much wiser her teaching all unconsciously was than that of the creed she would have died for. Her own spiritual development had never for a moment been arrested. She had travelled farther than she was quite aware, since the days when she had allowed her young children to be tormented by the fears of a fiery hereafter. She soon discovered that the Presbyterian Tallmadges had done their best to plant the Calvinistic evil in the sensitive mind of her grandson, and, without misgiving, she proceeded to root it out.

"I don't see how anybody can feel sure they're going to be saved," the child said, with deep anxiety, one Sunday evening.

"Such thoughts are a temptation of the Evil One. 'O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?'"

"But how do I know I'm not one of those He meant[Pg 71] when He said, 'Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?'"

"Because our Saviour distinctly says it of that generation—centuries ago—of rebellious and unbelieving Jews."

"Oh-h!" He was only half reassured.

She paused on the gravel walk and looked down at him. His little grave face was upturned in the twilight, his great eyes darkened by a world of care, but he looked so very fragile withal, such a tender little baby, that she felt her lips twitching at his anxiety lest he should be the viper of the Lord's denunciation. In another moment her unaccustomed eyes were strangely wet, and she walked on with averted face.

"I can't help wondering often," the child pursued, with evident heaviness of spirit, "how I shall manage to be a profitabubble servant."

"A what?"

"Well, not like the unprofitabubble servant that had to be cast into outer darkness, where there was weeping and gnashing—"

"Nonsense! all that has nothing to do with you! He said, 'Suffer little children to come unto Me.'"

"You think, if I died now, I'd go to heaven?"

"Of course you would. All little children go to heaven."

"All children who aren't too wicked," corrected Ethan, gravely, with misgiving.

"There is no such thing as a wicked child," interrupted his mentor, impatiently; then, catching herself up—"They may be foolish and wayward"—she looked down on him sternly—"and they may have to be severely punished on this earth, but they don't know enough to be wicked, not enough to deserve being shut out of heaven."

"I've heard Grandfather Tallmadge say somebody—I think it was some saint—had seen"—he lowered his voice—"had seen an infant in hell, a span long." He shuddered.

"Nonsense!" retorted Mrs. Gano, angrily. "No saint ever saw anything of the sort—nor no sane creature. It was that John Calvin."

[Pg 72]

"Oh! and you think perhaps he—"

"He didn't know what he was talking about. He had a black, despairing mind, and is the only human creature who ever had any valid excuse for being a Calvinist."

"Oh!"

"I suppose they've not neglected in Boston to tell you there is such a thing as 'the unpardonable sin'?"

The ironic intonation was lost on Ethan.

"Oh no," he said, with the animation of one who recognizes an old friend; "Grandfather Ta—"

"Now, never forget that the only unpardonable sin is to doubt the mercy of God."

"Then you think that when the end of the world comes—"

"I think," she interrupted, with a lyrical swell in her voice as she remembered the prophet's vision—"I know, that 'the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joys upon their head; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.' And now we've had enough of that for to-night," she ended, with an abrupt change of voice and style.

Oddly enough, she was not so likely to close the subject in this summary fashion if the evening talk fell upon Ulysses, or Peter the Great, or General Lee. It was sometimes Aunt Valeria who had to remind them of Ethan's bedtime, if the topic had chanced to be the Civil War, or any one of the legion of family stories of Calverts or Ganos and their doings in the South. There was Ephraim Calvert, who had fought for the King in 1774, and when he died had left his curse and his red coat for "a sign" to his rebellious sons, who had fought for independence. There was that cousin Ethan Gano, who had lost his right hand, and yet was such a famous shot and swordsman with his left that no man dared stand up against him. He had made a fortune in the India trade, by chance, as it were, for he never really cared for anything but sword and pistol practice, and would be always talking of feats of arms,[Pg 73] even to parsons and Quakers. "Just as that other boaster, Byron," Mrs. Gano would wind up, "was forever telling how, like Leander, he had swum the Hellespont, and took more credit to himself for being able to snuff out a candle with a pistol-shot at twenty paces than for being able to write Childe Harold. But that was not only because he was a poet," she would add meditatively over Ethan's head: "it was the direct result of inordinate vanity and a club-foot. Just as Ethan Gano would never have been a crack swordsman if he hadn't been one-armed as well as worldly."

Among the minor advantages of life in New Plymouth was that a boy didn't come in for a scolding here if he went without his cap. In common with many children, Ethan hated head-gear of all kinds, and yet fully expected to be scolded, on strict Boston principles, the first time he was discovered hatless out-of-doors. Valeria, wearing a wide shade-hat, and Mrs. Gano, with a green-lined umbrella, came unexpectedly upon him one hot noon-day as he sat reading bareheaded in the scorching sun on the terrace steps.

"How like his father that child is!" said Mrs. Gano, stopping and looking at him as though she saw, not him at all, but another boy.

"Don't you want your hat?" asked Aunt Valeria.

"No," said Ethan, gathering courage. "I—I like the hot sun."

"Isn't that like Shelley?" said Aunt Valeria in the same way that Mrs. Gano had remarked on the likeness to Ethan's father. "If his curly hair wasn't cropped so close, his little round head would be exactly like—"

"What are you reading?" interrupted his grandmother.

"I'm studying," answered Ethan, self-righteously, and he held up his French grammar.

"Don't you do enough of that in school?" said Mrs. Gano, with what seemed strange lack of appreciation in a grandmother.

"They expect me to do some work in the holidays."

[Pg 74]

"Oh, they do, do they?"

She turned away indifferently, as if to continue her walk, glancing sharply down in that familiar way of hers at the clover fringing the path.

"Do you think I needn't study?" The child had jumped up and joined them as they walked round the house. "You see, I hate doing it most awfully."

"Not 'awfully.'"

"Yes, really, especially être and avoir; but grandfather says—"

"I notice you use that word 'awfully' a great deal. Do you know what it means?"

Ethan preserved an embarrassed silence.

"Awful means that which inspires awe. Now, your feeling about French grammar does not inspire awe. French is all very well, but it's a good thing sometimes to consider your English. You couldn't have a better task than that in the holidays."

"Shall I carry your coat?" said the child, willing to change the topic, and laying his hand on the thin wrap she had on her arm.

"This," said his grandmother, with the Tallmadge insistence on French still rankling, apparently—"this is not a 'cut,' as you call it; and that person approaching is not walking in the 'rud.' You are losing some of your twang, but thy speech still bewrayeth thee. Perhaps learning to talk like a Gano, since you are one, would be a fitting task for the holidays here. Say 'co-o-at.'" He repeated the word in a shamefaced way. "Now 'road.' Yes, that's right." She drew back suddenly and faced about. "Some one's coming in!" she whispered, hurriedly, as who should say "An enemy is at the gate."

She stalked behind the house with Ethan at her side, while Aunt Valeria went forward and greeted the visitor.

"Why, it's the same gentleman who has been here twice before," Ethan observed, looking back.

"Are you sure?" said Mrs. Gano, stopping short. "Was that Tom Rockingham again?"

[Pg 75]

"I don't know his name," answered Ethan, wondering what awful sin Tom Rockingham could have committed.

"Little, insignificant-looking man?" demanded his grandmother.

"He wasn't very big," admitted the child. "It's the one that walked home from church, as far as the corner, with Aunt Valeria and me last Sunday."

"Upon my word!" she ejaculated. "Has Tom Rockingham begun that?"

"I didn't hear his name."

"A man"—she made a gesture of contempt—"very careless about his linen?"

"I didn't notice."

"—without gloves? Hands rather grimy—"

"Aunt Valeria said he was a great scholar."

"A great fiddlestick! Of course it's Tom Rockingham."

This was evidently a most exciting character, and in any case it was pleasant to have a visitor who didn't merely leave cards and go away, as all the others did.

"Aren't we going in to see him?"

"No, certainly not, unless he stays too long."

She threw back her head in that way of hers. They walked up and down the back veranda in silence, Ethan as well aware as if she had poured forth torrents that his grandmother's ire was growing with every moment. Presently she dropped his hand, and going to the door, she called, in an unmistakable tone:

"Valeria!—Valeria!"

"Yes, mother, in a moment," came from the direction of the parlor.

Mrs. Gano waited for some seconds with sparkling eyes, then:

"Valeria, I have called you!"

Ethan was hot and cold with excitement.

"Run away and play," said his grandmother, her gleaming eyes falling on a sudden upon the child. She turned sharply and went in-doors, leaving Ethan to wonder which she was going to kill—Tom Rockingham or Aunt Valeria.[Pg 76] He stood quite still, waiting for developments. At last, unable to bear the combined suspense and solitude any longer, he pulled the Duchess out from the cool shade under the veranda, and sat down with her on the step.

Presently Aunt Valeria came out of the parlor and went up-stairs. He didn't see her face.

With a vague, frightened feeling, he got up with the Duchess in his arms and walked away.

Mr. Rockingham never came again, and the only reference ever made to him was weeks afterwards, when the summer was waning, and he passed by the house one evening without a word, without a pause, taking off his hat to the ladies who sat in the dusk on the front porch.

"Who is that?" Mrs. Gano asked her daughter.

"Mr. Rockingham."

"Humph!" remarked Mrs. Gano.

Aunt Valeria said nothing.

Ethan laid his cheek against her slim, white hand. But she didn't seem to him to know or to care for a little boy's sympathy. It was natural, he thought, that he should care so much more for these relations than they did for him. The holidays were ended—so Grandfather Tallmadge had written—and a French boy, a kind of cousin, had come to live at Ashburton Place and go to school with Ethan. "So now he would have a playmate," Aunt Hannah had added, as a postscript. Ethan didn't want a playmate, and he was horribly shy of a boy who knew French by a superior instinct. But to-morrow he was to go back to Boston. No help for it.

Many letters on this subject had been written; it was all no use. He had to go, and his grandmother's eyes were angry when the subject was mentioned, and his own heart heavy and sore in his breast. Aunt Valeria had never said anything, but she was even kinder to him after the decision, especially at dusk, when one felt dreary. Mrs. Gano would seldom allow even the hall lamp to be lighted in the summer evenings, probably from motives of economy; but this reason was never given for any mandate [Pg 77]except under great pressure. The ostensible end served by sitting in the dusk and groping one's way up-stairs, or being beholden to the moon for acting as the domestic candle, was that if darkness reigned mosquitoes and miller-moths were not attracted into the house; neither were those great winged things with horns, that one never saw in Boston, which fact would have compensated Ethan for endurance of the dark if anything could. In the moments preceding bedtime, the firefly had been a distinct consolation. That very morning he had hid Aunt Valeria's empty cut-glass camphor-bottle under the syringa-bush, and now was the time to try the experiment of bottling a few fireflies and seeing how they lightened their captivity. He sallied forth into the scented dusk, whistling softly. His plan worked wondrous well. With each new victim his spirits mounted higher, he thinking—poor deluded soul!—that he should never again feel downhearted in the dusk. He had caught and imprisoned over a dozen of these winged lamps, when Aunt Valeria came through the bushes, calling softly:

"Ethan! Ethan!"

"Yes; here I am."

He concealed her camphor-bottle as well as he could under his jacket, but the bottle was big and the jacket was small.

"Bedtime," called the voice.

"Just a few more fire—I mean minutes."

"No; your grandmother says it is past the time."

"Oh, dear! then I s'pose it is." He came out of his covert, and on a sudden impulse added, hurriedly: "Aunt Valeria, do you care about your camphor-bottle?"

"Care about it?"

"Yes; do you mind if there's fireflies in it instead of camphor?"

He held it up, and the captives lit their pale lamps and fluttered despairingly.

"Oh, my dear! they'll die."

"No; they like it. It's such a beautiful bottle."

[Pg 78]

"But you've got the glass stopper in; they can't breathe."

In spite of his entreating, she took out the stopper, and put the end of her lace scarf over the opening.

"You won't take it away from me?"

"No, no," she said, gently leading him back to the front porch, repeating as she went:

"It isn't their little eyes that glow; it's their little tails," said Ethan, with his nose flattened against the camphor-bottle.

When they got near the porch, the prudent young gentleman took off his coat, and wrapped the bottle from the too inquiring gaze of his grandmother. Aunt Valeria was in a kind of dream, and didn't seem to notice.

"What a perfect evening!" she half whispered, looking up through the trees.

"Good-night," said Ethan to his grandmother, trying to get through the ceremony and hold his coat round the bottle on Aunt Valeria's arm at the same time.

"Forty-eight years to-day," she went on to her mother, "since Shelley's body was burned on the sands at Viareggio."

"Ah, yes," returned the other, speaking very gently. "Good-night, child."

"What! Is he dead?" said Ethan, feeling a double shock.

"Yes, dear; he's dead."

And he and Aunt Valeria went up-stairs in the dark.

"You never told me," said the child, when they had passed Yaffti in safety. "I s'pose Byron's all right," he added, remembering allusions to that person's physical prowess.

"Byron's dead, too," said Aunt Valeria, sadly, "and Keats—poor Keats!"

[Pg 79]

"All dead!"

They had been referred to as if they lived in the next street. If it had been Shelley who had come to make them a visit, it would have seemed as natural—more natural than the apparition of Tom Rockingham or the objectionable Uncle Elijah.

"I'll get a piece of net to put over the bottle while you undress," said Aunt Valeria.

When she came back Ethan was in bed.

"What relation was Shelley to me?" he asked, welcoming the camphor-bottle to his arms.

"Relation? None."

"Oh-h!"

These things were obscure. The Tallmadges, for instance, weren't related to Grandmamma Gano, so she had said with emphasis.

"Then what relation was Shelley to you?"

"No relation at all, dear. He was an English poet."

"You mean he wasn't even born in America?"

Ethan sat up straight in his bed.

"He was born far away in England," said Aunt Valeria, dreamily.

"An' dead an' burnt?"

"Yes."

"And never was no relation to any of us?"

"No."

"Oh-h!"

He lay back on his pillow, conscious of a new loneliness—of being bereft of something he had counted his. Yes; it was just as if some one belonging to him had died.

After Aunt Valeria had told him why they had burned Shelley's body, and even after she had repeated all his favorite poems, a sense of loss remained.

She thought he was asleep when she kissed him good-night. But he stirred and gave a little sigh.

"Well, I'm glad I've got my fireflies, anyhow," he murmured.

[Pg 80]

His leave-taking next morning was extremely harrowing to his own feelings, however austerely the rest took it. He wept freely after breakfast down under the barberry-bush, but he promised himself he would get it all done down there in the blessed privacy of the wilderness, and not cry another tear after he got back to the house. He had made a tour the moment he was dressed, saying good-bye to everything. Now there was nothing left but An' Jerusha and the family. Uncle Elijah might come any minute. He dried his eyes, and crept back through the rank undergrowth to the terrace, went heavily up the two flights of stone steps, saying good-bye again to the flag lilies and the crooked catalpa and the tulip-tree, and so on sedately round the house to the kitchen. On his appearance, An' Jerusha rushed towards him with wide-spread, motherly arms, but observing his involuntary recoil, she stood still, looking at him with unlessened affection.

"Good-bye, An' Jerusha," he said, holding her hand tight in both his own.

"Good-bye, honey. Be suah you come agin soon."

"Yes, I mean to; and thank you for all the songs and the cinnamon rolls."

"Law, honey! jes' listen to de chile."

She turned away to Venie with an attempt at a chuckle, but the tears had started down her cheeks.

"Good-bye."

Ethan shook hands with the smiling Venus.

"Maw and me done put yo' in a Johnny-cake," she said, an outsider might have thought enigmatically.

"Thank you," said Ethan, tremulously—"thank you both, awfully."

"Dat's de do'-bell, an' Massa Efan's knocker," said Aunt Jerusha, sniffing violently. "You go, Venus; I ain't 'spectabel."

"Oh, it's my uncle," said Ethan, rather relieved at the interruption; and he hurried after Venus, feeling, however, deeply dissatisfied with his leave-taking of An' Jerusha.

[Pg 81]

She had been so awfully kind—it was useless to pretend there was any other way of putting it—and she had cared so much for his father. Ought he to have kissed her? It was plain she had expected it. It was all very uncomfortable and heart-achy.

Now he was in the hall, and Uncle Elijah was there, and so was grandmamma, being very stiff to poor Uncle Elijah. Aunt Valeria came down-stairs, and the good-byes were said. Uncle Elijah's hack was at the door, and Ethan's trunk was being carried out.

Suddenly, at the very last, "Come here a moment," said his grandmother, retreating into her own long room.

Ethan followed, quaking. Had he been doing something wrong? And yet she had just kissed him good-bye so kindly. As she turned and faced him, he saw her eyes were full of tears. He could hardly believe his senses, but he began to cry, too.

"I do wish I was going to stay with you," he said, breaking down and forgetting his fears.

"You will come back to me," she said; and she put her arms round him, and held him close to her for a moment, while he cried silently against her white veil, thinking the while she wouldn't like it when she discovered it was wet.

"Don't you think," he faltered, as she released him—"couldn't this be my home?"

"Of course, it is your home. Isn't your name on the front door?"

"Oh yes," he said, smiling through his tears; "I forgot that," and the remembrance seemed to give him confidence in the future.

Mrs. Gano was looking hastily about for some excuse for bringing him into the room.

"Here is a book that belonged to your great-grandfather, called Plutarch's Lives. You will read it when you are older, and remember it was my parting present after your first visit."

"Oh, thank you," he said, brushing his sleeve across his eyes; and they went out, and Ethan got into the carriage.[Pg 82] "Oh, dear me, my fireflies!" he shouted, suddenly, as the driver was closing the door. "I shall need them so awfully—I mean so pertickly—in Boston"; and he scrambled out and rushed up to his bedroom.

"What does the child mean?" asked Mrs. Gano.

"It's all right," said Aunt Valeria; "something I gave him. I'll tell you afterwards."

Ethan came tumbling down-stairs in the buff middle of the carpet—anywhere, indifferent for once to Yaffti and his possible revenge.

"Good-bye," he called back from the carriage-window. "Thank you, ma'am, for Plutarch."

"Keep him covered," was Mrs. Gano's unemotional rejoinder as they drove away.

Ethan sank back breathless, clutching the camphor-bottle under his coat.

"Tired?" asked Uncle Elijah, looking at the flushed little face. Ethan nodded "Yes, sir."

"You needn't have hurried so; there's oceans of time. But I thought we could wait just as well at the station."

They were not going the way Ethan had been driven that day of his arrival, so long, long ago, at the beginning of the summer. He leaned forward excitedly.

"Why, he's taking us round by the Wilderness!"

"The what?" Uncle Elijah looked out. "Moses! they do let things run wild here."

Ethan's quick eye had sought out the spot where, hidden in that tangle, was a little clearing and a "heavenly secret-house," with a barberry-bush for a roof. But no hint of such a matter to the profane passer-by!

What was that? His heart gave a great jump. Why, it was An' Jerusha on the lower terrace watching to see them go by! She stood there alone, and now she was putting her apron up to her eyes. Nobody else was looking after the carriage from this side. It was plain, for all his grandmother's momentary melting, it was An' Jerusha who had felt the parting most, and he had refused to kiss her!

[Pg 83]

"Uncle Elijah," said the child, hurriedly, "do you mind, if we've got such a lot of time, I'd like to get a barberry leaf for my fire-flies. Please stop!" he called out of the window to the coachman.

And while Uncle Elijah was saying, "What—what?—barberry leaves, fire-flies? What nonsense is this you've been learning?" Ethan had jumped out of the slowing vehicle, made a frantic sign to An' Jerusha, run up to the fence, pushed aside a loose picket of his acquaintance, and dashed into the wilderness. There was nothing for Uncle Elijah to do but to wait. The child had vanished without a trace; by the time Mr. Tallmadge had adjusted his spectacles on his nose he couldn't even find the place where his nephew had disappeared. The eminent Bostonian sat fuming while Ethan was feverishly making his way to An' Jerusha.

"Come down!" he called, when he got near the bottom of the terrace. "Come towards the barberry-bush, An' Jerusha—quick, quick!"

Her eyes rolling wildly with amazement and concern, Jerusha penetrated a few paces into the jungle.

"Wha is yo', honey? Wot's de matter? Air yo' hurt, my honey? Jes' wait; An' Jerusha's comin'."

"Oh, here I am," gasped the child, and he precipitated himself into her arms. "I forgot to kiss you good-bye, An' Jerusha, and I had to come back."

He shut his eyes and held his breath while she kissed him, muttering prayers and blessings.

"Good-bye, An' Jerusha," he said. "I sha'n't ever forget you;" and he tore his way back through the rank grasses, the mulleins and sunflowers, catching his feet in the briers, and saying to himself: "Oh, I'm quite sure my father never, never did. But for me it's different; I'm glad I went back."

He stripped a handful of leaves and coral berries off the barberry-bush as he passed, pushed back the loose picket, and reappeared all over burrs and pollen before Uncle Elijahs' astonished and unapproving eyes.

[Pg 84]

"I've got plenty of leaves for my fire-flies," was his greeting, as he clambered into the hack, "but I must get some water for them at the station. How many years should you say a fire-fly would live, Uncle Elijah, with plenty to eat and drink?"

[Pg 85]

Ethan was not allowed to repeat his visit, and life went on for several years without incident at the old Fort. Yet, since "it is in the soul that things happen," these were stirring times. One shrinks from inquiring too closely into what the years held for the two eager-hearted women shut up there with those perilous companions, thwarted hope, stunted ambition, and pent-up energy. Well had it been for Valeria had she not possessed that small, cramped competency. If the girl had had to earn her living, she might have found peace, if not great gladness, in wholesome grappling with the material things of life. But in saying so one forgets that all this was thirty years ago, when a penniless Southern woman who had a brother, or even some distant relation, to support her, no more dreamed of getting her own bread than she does to-day of going before the mast.

Meantime, with John Gano things for a while went better. At the end of four years of uninterrupted toil, such years of all work and no play as only an American will put up with, he was able to offer his cousin the kind of home he had set his heart on. They were married in the South, and after a brief visit to Mrs. Gano, John took his bride to New York. Ten months' happiness, followed by the birth of a daughter, whom they named Valeria, and called Val; then protracted ill-health and a yearly baby for the young mother, money troubles and killing work for John Gano.

The distance between New York and New Plymouth was too great to admit of much visiting back and forth on trivial grounds for people of limited means. But young Mrs. Gano was not expected to live after the birth of her fourth[Pg 86] child, and her "aunt-mother-in-law" was sent for. The elder Mrs. Gano stayed till the danger was past, and, as she wrote home to her daughter, "to relieve Virginia a little of the pressure of existence," she had made up her mind to bring back Emmeline with her to the Fort. Emmeline was the younger of the two little girls, and that was the reason given for her having been chosen instead of Val, since, with a new baby in the house, a child of fourteen months was more of a charge on its mother's mind even than an enterprising young person of four. But it was presently revealed that Emmeline was by far the more attractive child, gentle, charming, and very beautiful to look upon; rather like her cousin Ethan, whose loss was still mourned silently at the old Fort. There was no further visiting between the two houses until the following winter, when Valeria's health broke down. Mrs. Gano would not hear it said that her daughter was dying of consumption.

"I've had a cough myself for half a century. Consumption? Nonsense! Valeria had undermined her constitution by too much study and a too sedentary life. What was to be expected when one remembered the hours she kept! But there! no Gano could ever do anything with moderation."

However, the jealous mother was alarmed at last, and admitted that what Valeria needed was a change.

"No," said the old-young woman; "I have reached the end."

A journey to the Adirondacks was proposed. Valeria refused to fall in with the plan.

"You wouldn't let me go away when it would have been some use," she said; "leave me in peace now."

A horrible fear clutched at the resolute heart of the mother as she took fresh and sudden note of the wasted frame, the languid, long, transparent hands, the far-away vision of the eyes.

"No, I wouldn't let you go alone and unprotected. But now that John and his wife are settled in New York it's a different story altogether. You can stay with them, and[Pg 87]—and study sculpture for a while," she added, with a visible effort.

Valeria shook her head. But there was a new light in the hollow eyes. Little by little she was seen to be in reality feverishly bent on availing herself of her mother's late concession. Mrs. Gano was as good as her word. She put no further obstacle in the way, and, though it was the depth of winter, took the long journey with her daughter, arriving at her son's house much exhausted, to find Mrs. John ill in bed, a mutiny among the servants, and a scene of inexpressible confusion and disorder, in the midst of which stood Val, turbulent and triumphant. Nor did she budge upon the usually subduing apparition of Mrs. Gano. Dirty and neglected, an impudent little face with bold gray eyes looking out from a wild swirl of tawny hair, there she stood in the middle of the untidy dining-room, aided and abetted in some unspeakable enormity by the mere presence of her faithful ally, a huge St. Bernard dog.

"My patience!" exclaimed Mrs. Gano, surveying the scene.

"Why, it's my dear little namesake," said Aunt Valeria, with a kind of gentle incredulity, as she moved forward.

Her dear little namesake retreated, dragging the great dog back with her by the collar.

"That my granddaughter!"

Mrs. Gano spoke with mixed emotion, and hurriedly put on her spectacles.

"My darling," said Aunt Valeria, watching the dog with the tail of her eye, "come and kiss me."

The child stared solemnly without moving a muscle.

"Come, my dear, and speak to your grandmother."

Mrs. Gano advanced with majesty till she was arrested by a low growl from the St. Bernard.

"Don't be afraid of us," urged Aunt Valeria, somewhat superfluously. "I've brought you a pretty toy in my trunk. Come, darling."

The child kept a suspicious eye on the ingratiating stranger.

[Pg 88]

"She has very pretty hair," pursued Aunt Valeria, amiably.

"She hasn't pretty manners," retorted Mrs. Gano.

"Oh, she's shy. Don't be afraid of us"—she ventured a step nearer. "Come here, my sweet little one."

Never taking her eyes off her gentle aunt, the sweet little one said, with a charming childish lisp:

"Ef yer don't be thtil, I'll thick my dawg on yer."

The two ladies fell back appalled.

"Turn that great animal out of doors," said Mrs. Gano, in awful tones, to the cook. But Katie O'Flynn shrank visibly from availing herself of this kind permission.

"Sure, mum, he'd have the heart out of me; and that's just what Miss Val would like, be the Howly Mother!"

"This is beyond everything," said Mrs. Gano, more nonplussed than she had often found herself. "The child must be out of her senses. We will go up to your mistress," she said to Katie O'Flynn. "If you were my daughter," she added, solemnly, looking back at the immovable one, "I should know how to deal with you. As it is, I'll leave you to your father."

But leaving Val to her father proved a less drastic measure than Mrs. Gano anticipated. Whether because of his sentiment about the first-born—offspring of that only year of happiness and hope—or merely because her wildness was a distraction in his brief moments of respite from crushing cares, at all events, he looked upon the child with a lenient eye. He had her much about him when he was at home, smiled at recitals of her escapades, and called her his amiable firebrand, never in the least realizing that the overflow of animal spirits, which in rare hours of ease were his diversion and delight, might be to others a chronic bewilderment, and a not infrequent torment.

"Her mother," said the elder Mrs. Gano, not thoroughly understanding the situation—"her mother has utterly spoiled the child."

"No, no," said John Gano, smiling. "Val was born like that. I've never known anybody with such high spirits."

[Pg 89]

"'Spirits?' Nonsense! Fever. And you, every one of you help to aggravate her unnatural activity of mind and body. Meanwhile, my advice to you is: Don't make an idol of your eldest daughter. It's bad enough in the case of a boy, but no girl survives it."

Mrs. Gano returned home with little loss of time. Her daughter-in-law's higgledy-piggledy house-keeping, the "slackness" that was not all ill-health, coupled with the ubiquitous and unquiet presence of Val, made the elder lady long for her peaceful home in the West. Her going left behind a memory of awe and a vivid sense of relief.

Valeria the elder, with improved health, or else strung up to a semblance of it by the potent ghost of a dear ambition, began her studies in art. She took out a course of lessons in modelling at the Cooper Institute.

The story of those months may not be written here. We will not dog her through her days of disillusionment, her shrinking from the curiosity of the students, her amazement at their facility, her heart-sinking at their youth. As the weeks went on the teacher, an Italian of fine and gentle countenance, looked at her far more often than he looked at her work; and yet it was observed by the merciless young crew in the studio that her blundering attempts were inspected with an interest and frequency not bestowed on their more creditable efforts.

Signor Conti leaned over her one day, speaking kindly phrases in broken English about the new attempt she was making.

"Don't! don't, please!" she said, on a sudden impulse. "Understand that at least I know it's bad."

"Oh, it will be better," he answered, gently.

"No," she said, very low, "it will never be much better. I've waited too long."

"You must not feel discouraged." He leaned lower and spoke under his breath. "You may yet find great happiness by means of your art."

She shook her head, and when she could steady her voice said:

[Pg 90]

"I'm going home."

The man's face changed.

"You will not do that!"

"Yes."

"It would be another mistake, I think."

"Another?"

"Yes. The first was for one of your temperament to come to a great noisy class like this. You cannot do your best work here. This is not the place for you."

"What could I have done?"

"You can work under some artist alone, some one who can give you more time. I tell you, you have talent, a bello ingegno, signorina."

She looked up with a gleam of hope shining through tears.

"You—you are too busy. I'm afraid you don't receive pupils at your own studio," she said, timidly.

"No, I do not receive pupils as a rule; but I will receive you, signorina."

That was the end of lessons at the Cooper Institute, and the beginning of the brief, but best, happiness Valeria's life was to know.

Some indiscreet allusion to the change in a letter Valeria or her brother had written to their mother brought Mrs. Gano in hot haste to New York again. She found Valeria a different being—but she also found Signor Conti and a lonely studio in a side street, where her daughter worked alone with this foreigner, modelling "the members of the human body," while the sculptor worked on his "Lady at the Bath." It was all unspeakably objectionable and un-American. This was no fit milieu for a Gano. It wasn't a seemly place for any lady. Valeria must come home. She told her so the same night. No, Valeria could not do that.

"Why? Are you so attached, then, to this Italian image-maker?"

Valeria went home to the West the next day. The following winter she died.

[Pg 91]

Little Val was nearly seven when she woke up one morning and was told that the baby had died in the night. Then it was true, this thing she had heard about people dying. Her excitement and curiosity were infinitely greater than her sorrow. Had he gone to heaven yet? No, he was in the cold, uninhabited "best" room, where nobody but strangers—guests and grandmothers—had ever slept. She made Nanna hurry through the bath and dressing. The nurse was crying. Val observed her critically.

"Isn't heaven a nice place?" the child asked; and a vague uneasiness seized her with regard to this much-vaunted reward of merit.

"Av coorse, av coorse—the most beautiful place ye can think av. The streets are all gowld," said the woman, with quivering face.

"I must go and see mamma," the child said.

But she had to pass the "best" room door. She couldn't get by, but stood there rooted before it. She listened, advancing her small ear nearer and nearer. No sound. Then she put her eye to the key-hole. But the key-hole did not command the bed. She glanced over her shoulder—nobody near; the house silent. She turned the knob softly and went in, shutting the door behind her; then quickly reopening it, and leaving it prudently ajar. She tiptoed to the bed. Behold, the coverlid lay smooth, and no little dead child there at all. Then he was gone to heaven. If she'd got up a little earlier she might have seen the angel flying off with him. He hadn't left the window open; the very blind wasn't drawn up. What was that on the table? Something white, laid over something strange, and—two little sandalled feet stuck stiffly out!

On the table! It couldn't be the baby lying on the hard marble slab! The cruelty of the idea made her cold. Slowly she came nearer. She circled, fascinated, round to the other side. Yes, a gleam of the baby's yellow hair. The white cloth over him was a little awry, but it covered the body and hid the face. Horrible to have the air shut out; she felt stifled at the thought. He was lying on a[Pg 92] pillow, she could see. But there was something inhuman in leaving a baby like this. And they had been so irritatingly careful of him before, never left him alone a moment; neglected her on his account; wouldn't even let her hold him—oh, so carefully; and now—this! Nothing, perhaps, in all the strange circumstance—not even the subsequent burial—impressed the child so painfully as this fact of the baby being laid unguarded on a table, as though he had been no more than a book. This it was that by one stroke seemed to cut him off from fellowship, that suddenly degraded him from his high estate of life and lordly consideration. This "death" was evidently a far stranger thing than going to heaven.

A feeling of intense commiseration for the little brother swept over her. She came nearer, crying. "Poor! poor!" she whispered. Why had they shut out the air? She lifted her hand and turned the linen down from the waxen face. Her tears dried on her cheeks as she stood staring. He might be only asleep. How had they come to be so sure, and lay him unguarded on a table, when he might wake and— She saw in a flash how she would earn the gratitude of the family. She would wake him, and she, who hadn't been allowed to hold him, would carry him to her mother. And how glad they'd all be! And it would be her doing.

"Baby," she said; "baby, wake up!" She put her hand on the body, and withdrew it quickly. He felt so strangely unlike life and tender babyhood. An evil dread took hold on her. She strove some moments, battling with new suspicions and vague fears. "Poor little baby! poor little baby!" she whispered, tiptoed up, and kissed his cheek. Violently she started back. Who that ever, as a child, has felt that first chill contact with the mysterious enemy—who does not remember the formless horror it conjures up in the unprepared young mind? This, then, was death. She walked backward to the door, staring at the dead face, feeling that cold touch on her lips spread like a frost through her body. She must go quickly and get into her[Pg 93] mother's lap. With her hand on the door, "Poor! poor!" she repeated with a sob, still looking back at the face. "You can't come and get warm in mother's lap any more; you've got to go to heaven." Had they any idea how cold the baby was? Should she go and get his quilted travelling-coat? Was it any use? A faint dawning of the hopelessness of any earthly service to the dead made her resolution waver, and, with that, a horrible weight descended on her heart. She drew a hard breath, ran back to the table, and knelt down before it with folded hands and trembling lips. "Forgive me, baby," she whispered, "'bout the yellow ball. If I'd known this I wouldn't have taken it away." She scrambled to her feet and ran out as fast as she could, leaving the door ajar.

She was going up to bed that same evening, full of excitement and speculation, when her father called to Nanna over the banisters to come and help to find the smelling-salts—her mistress had fainted.

"Go to your room; I'll come presently," said the woman; and they shut her mother's door.

They hadn't let her go in since morning. Her mother was ill, they said, but that was a pretence; she was always ill. The reason Val was shut out to-day was because her grandmother had arrived that morning, and her grandmother was her enemy. She was in there now.

On every-day occasions Val would have contested the matter; but, grandmothers apart, there was a great deal to think about and consider just now.

She sat down on the stairs. She had seen her father crying that day, and the very foundations of all stabilities seemed tottering. Men could cry, it seemed—cry like little children. It was very strange; she had supposed it a thing to be outgrown. For her own part, she had nearly overcome the childish habit. The baby, of course, had cried a great deal; but one's father!

Somebody was coming up-stairs behind the servant—a strange man. What was he carrying? Something big,[Pg 94] and as shiny as the new musical-box. She hugged the banisters as the two passed.

"What's that?" she said to Matilda.

The servant didn't answer. She and the strange man went by. As Val was in the act of following, her grandmother appeared. She looked at Val a moment, and then called the nurse in a whisper: "Put that child to bed."

To-morrow was the funeral. She should go, she had said.

"No, certainly not," said her grandmother; and Val set her firm little mouth.

After breakfast the next morning, her father went into the room where the baby was, and stayed a long time. The doctor was with her mother. The doctor was a rude man, with a long yellow-white beard; he had spoken as sternly as if he'd been one's grandmother when Val had said she would see her mother. She lingered now by the "best" room door. Would she hear her father crying again? She hoped she would. There was something so horribly exciting in it; it made her feel as if she should die, and yet she listened eagerly to find out if he were doing it again.

No sound. He came out after a long, long while, and kissed her; his face was wet.

"Run to your nurse, my dear," he said.

She didn't tell him Nanna had been sent out. He smoothed her hair, and then went into her mother's room.

She was thinking a great deal about the baby. Nanna had been telling her more about heaven. The nurse hadn't liked it when the child had asked leading questions about the grave. But Nanna herself had said dozens of times before, "I've buried me husband and three childer." What a curious idea to put people in the dirty, black ground! And the baby! It must be very bad for his pretty white clothes. How awful to have earth on one's face, all over the ears and mouth! She choked a little. But one wouldn't feel it, of course; the real baby was in heaven. He would have everything there. "Yellow balls, too?" she had asked Nanna.

[Pg 95]

"He won't want the likes of that," the nurse had said. Nanna was very stupid; as if the baby had ever wanted anything in his life so much as that yellow ball! Conscience pricked cruelly. She had been selfish and horrid to the poor baby. She fell a-crying. Very likely they didn't have yellow balls in heaven, and wouldn't know how much the baby loved them, and he mightn't like to ask; besides, the poor baby talked such a queer language, strangers never understood him. A sudden inspiration. It was rather confusing about the real baby in heaven, and the real baby in the "best" room. Wouldn't it be better to be on the safe side? Anyhow, there was that business about Gabriel and the Last Trump and the Resurrection. They had talked about that in church, and Nanna and mother had said it was true. The dead would surely rise; the baby in the "best" room there would one day come alive. It looked as if there'd be two real babies in the end; but never mind. She flew up-stairs, rummaged the cupboard in the nursery, and came flying down with something wrapped in her apron. The doctor was in the lower hall talking to her father; she peeped at them through the balusters, then softly on to the "best" room.

She shut the door this time, though more frightened than the day before. She stopped short in the middle of the room. Too late! the baby had gone. But there was something she'd never seen before. She went close. How pretty and shiny it was; it smelt like the piano. Why, this was what the strange man had brought up-stairs behind Matilda last night. It was bigger than the musical-box—much bigger. What was in this beautiful, shiny, new thing? She dragged a chair to the table, climbed on it, and looked down into the coffin.

She stood some time motionless; then, hearing a noise in the hall, hurriedly lifted a corner of the baby's frock and pushed a yellow ball down against the padded white satin side.

In spite of the continued "riling" presence of a [Pg 96]grandmother in the house, Val made up her mind to be very good now the baby was gone, and be a comfort to her mother. No more fights with Nanna, even over the hair-combing; no defiant refusals to say her prayers. Standing by the cot in her nightgown the evening of the funeral, "I shall say three prayers," she announced, sternly; "and you mustn't interrupt, Nanna."

"Three!" said the nurse, suspicious of such overwhelming piety.

"Yes; I shall say, 'Our Father,' and 'Nower Lamy,' and then one of my own—one I can understand as well as God. Now! Sh!" She knelt down and recited the two accustomed petitions, and then, still kneeling there, poured forth some stringent directions to the Lord which horrified the good Christian woman not a little.

After that, Val insisted on going to church, rain or shine. She read her Bible with vigor and astonishment, belaboring Nanna with difficult questions. Nanna was so ill-inspired as sometimes to appeal in her perplexity to the elder Mrs. Gano. But this lady found to her cost that the course so successfully pursued with little Ethan was doomed to failure here. When she thought to curb the excessive Gano concern about Biblical interpretation by saying, "It is not a book for children," she was met with:

"My Bible says, 'Suffer little children,' and people 'mustn't despise the little ones.'"

Her father began to laugh; she felt encouraged to proceed:

"And says, 'Search ye the Scriptures,' too; nothin' 'bout waitin' till you're old."

"You are too young to understand, even if I should try to explain."

"Why, I understand it nearly every bit," she answered, indignantly, "all except the mizz—I can't find where it says about the mizz."

"The mizz?" repeated Mrs. Gano.

"The mizz?" her father echoed, uneasily. "I haven't read about that myself."

[Pg 97]

"Well, you've heard about it in church. Didn't you go to church when you were young?"

"Yes," said her parent, meekly, feeling the full force of her implied criticism. "But I don't recall the—what is it?"

"The mizz. Mr. Weston says every Sunday in the Commandments: 'The sea and all that in the mizz.'"

The elder Mrs. Gano could have put up with these crude evidences of a share in the family bias, but not with her granddaughter's growing unsubmissiveness, her chronic mutiny against the smallest restraint. The child had been taught early to look upon herself as a very potent factor in the family life. She observed that arrangements that failed to meet with her approval were often altered. Her mother's sternest form of discipline had been to argue with her. More than one servant had been dismissed in obedience to Miss Val's demands. There was the case of the lady house-keeper from Boston, who, in addition to regular duties, undertook also to teach Val—a learned maiden lady with shaky nerves and a passion for history. It was supposed she left so suddenly because of illness in her family, until Val admitted that she had threatened the lady with the carving-knife after dinner one day.

"What on earth made you do that?" said the child's father, horrified.

"She talked too much about the British," replied Val, calmly.

"What!"

"I said the Americans were just as brave. I could see she didn't think so, so I got the carvin'-knife and—well, you know, she just caught the three-o'clock train."

The June of that year was intensely hot, but young Mrs. Gano was too ill to be carried out of the stifling city. Val was sent into the country to some cousins "for a change"—for whose change was not insisted upon. She was not brought back till the day after her mother's funeral. It was a strange and terrible time. For once she was passive and subdued. If the servants had not already remarked[Pg 98] on her hard-heartedness, she would have cried herself ill. But she was full of a dull resentment as well as pain. At the time she was sent away she had gathered, as a quick-witted child does—Heaven knows how!—that her mother was dangerously ill. During that time in the country she had prayed for her recovery as she never prayed before or after, as none but the passionate-hearted ever pray. Night after night, when the light had been put out, and the others had gone to sleep, Val would get out of bed and kneel down at the side beseeching God to save her mother's life, and making solemn compacts with the Lord of Hosts. She would be so good, and build a church, too, in memory of this answer to prayer; she would be a nun, and serve God all her days, if He would spare her mother. She pointed out how easy it was for the All-Powerful to do this little thing. She wasn't waiting till it would require a Lazarus miracle, she was asking Him in good time. He had only to let the doctors know what would cure her. But she, Val Gano, would recognize in the recovery a direct answer to prayer, and she would keep her vows. She remembered a sermon she had heard on mountain-moving faith. Hers should be perfect and unfaltering. She knew God would answer this one prayer; she saw herself already in her nun's black habit, and began to say her last farewell to the world, to the prince that she knew was coming later on, to all her children—she called them by their names, "five brave sons and five beauteous daughters." She turned her back on them all, cut her long hair, and heard the convent gates clang to—all this was an accomplished destiny in her mind, when the telegram came to say her mother was dead. Her father was ill, too, now; there was nothing but sickness and death in the world, and the child was to stay where she was. The telegram was from her grandmother to cousin Nathaniel. Four days later, when she was permitted to go home, the funeral was over, and her grandmother was in charge of her mother's house. It was very awful. What did God mean by it?

The following week John Gano returned to his post at[Pg 99] the bank. As he was leaving the counting-room, that first and last day after the death of his wife, he was seized with a violent hemorrhage, and was carried home, it was thought, to die.

Mrs. Gano nursed her son back to something faintly resembling health, and urged him to come home with her. No; he would stay where he was, till—

"Nonsense! you must rouse yourself for your children's sake. Here is Val, left to servants, and running wild. She must go to school. None better than the New Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies."

"Oh, time enough for that. I can't let the child go just yet."

"There isn't time. That child is going to wreck and ruin. And you don't suppose I'm going to leave you here alone? You must come and get well and strong."

"It's no use," the invalid said, adding, half under his breath: "I'm done for."

"Hush!" she interrupted, frowning. "Anybody is done for who has made up his mind that he is."

John Gano shook his head.

"You know we all go like this. It's not a matter of imagination."

"Nearly everything's a matter of imagination," she said.

The gaunt man put his handkerchief to his lips.

"This is imagination, too, I suppose," he said, as he turned the bright spot in and out of sight—"a case of seeing red."

"That small stain means very little in itself," she retorted, seeming scarcely moved; "its effect on your mind is the only thing to be afraid of."

"You speak as though I hadn't inherited the blessed business."

"Oh, inherited—inherited! I'm sick of that white feather showing all along the line. Look at me!"

He did look at her. She seemed suddenly taller and thinner and grayer and more defiant than any being he had ever beheld.

[Pg 100]

"Look at me!" she repeated. "I have been given up by the doctors half a dozen times. My mother was told when I was sixteen that I had only a piece of a lung left—that it might last me through the winter. It has served my purpose for half a century since. But I didn't worry about the color of my handkerchiefs, and I didn't admit for a moment that I could possibly be induced to die—that is, of course"—she put on a sudden aspect of resignation that was almost funny—"unless it was the Lord's will."

[Pg 101]

Nothing seemed to matter now that her mother was dead. It was plain Val would never be happy again. Leaving her home, to which she was devotedly attached, was hardly a misfortune, any more than going to live with her grandmother. What did anything matter? God hadn't heard her prayers; He had mocked her faith, and she was motherless. She hadn't enough interest in life even to be "owdacious," as her grandmother called it. She was passive, almost "good."

Her father, observing her settled depression on the journey West, gathered her into his arms, and whispered:

"We have each other, you know."

And she lay with her face hidden, and cried a long time, so quietly that her grandmother thought she was asleep.

It was the reunion with her little sister that first roused her out of her unchildlike apathy. Not the genial warmth of family affection, not the diversion of having a playmate, but the tonic of a vigorous antagonism, as unexpected as it seemed unnatural.

"Where is my room?" Val had asked, on the evening of their arrival at the Old Fort.

"You are to sleep with Emmeline," said her grandmother.

"But, grandma, I've never slept with any one."

"Haven't you, my dear?"

"No, and I've always—"

"That will do now. Go up-stairs and wash your face and hands. Emmeline will show you the way."

Val went off quietly enough, but it might have staggered[Pg 102] Mrs. Gano could she have known the rage and rebellion that seethed in that small female heart.

It was dusk up in the little girls' room.

"Why haven't they lit the gas?" asked Val.

"We don't have gas here."

"Lamps, then."

"Gamma thinks lamps are too esplosive."

"Do you live in the dark?"

"No; we have candles, but it ain't dark enough yet. I'll show you where everything is."

"I'll find 'em myself."

Val had espied the candles on the bureau. She lit them.

"Oh, we never have more'n one," admonished Emmie, gently.

Val went on calmly with her toilet. Presently Mrs. Gano looked in.

"Come to supper, little girls, as soon as you're ready."

She was going away without more words, when Emmie called out excitedly:

"Just look, gamma—two candles a-burnin', 'and no ship at sea!'"

Mrs. Gano smiled.

"Yes, my dear; one is enough."

She put the extinguisher over the nearest, and went down-stairs.

"Skinflint!" observed Val.

The supper was on this occasion a late and hurriedly prepared meal. There were soft-boiled eggs. Val helped herself to two, and broke them into a tumbler; then mixed in salt, and pepper, and butter, and bits of bread.

"Just look at what Val's doing!" said Emmie, with innocent excitement, while her elder and more accomplished sister stirred the agreeable compound round and round.

"Never do that again," said Mrs. Gano, suddenly aware of the enormity. "I don't like people to make puddings in their tumblers at my table."

"T'ain't puddin'," said Val.

[Pg 103]

"That will do." Mrs. Gano ended the matter according to her usual formula. "Will you have some corn bread?"

"No, thank you; I don't like it."

"It is enough to answer, 'No, thank you.' Never say you don't like anything you see on my table."

Val wished her father had not been too tired to come to supper. She had observed that she was never so much corrected in his presence.

The full moon was shining in the gloaming as they passed the open veranda door coming from their belated meal.

"Let's go out a minute," said Val to Emmie, in a whisper.

"No; it's too late. I'd catch cold."

"Oh, nonsense! Come along."

And she dragged her little sister off. But they stayed out only a few minutes.

Emmie came in crying.

"Gamma, she made me fall down on the g'avel."

Val, without explanation or apology, flushed angrily and ran up-stairs. She knocked at her father's door.

"Come in," he said, and she went over in the dim candlelight and stood by his bed.

"How you feel, father?"

"Little tired," he answered. "Are you come to say good-night?"

"I 'spose I mustn't stay?"

"Oh, a minute or two."

She perched on the side of his bed. She had come in with the express intention of making complaints. Some vague notion of sparing him because he was ill kept her tongue-tied.

"Isn't this a nice old house?" he said, presently.

"Y—yes," she answered.

"In the daytime you'll see what capital places there are for you and Emmie to play in."

"Is it true I mustn't swing on the gate?"

[Pg 104]

"Well, I dare say—"

"Emmie says so. Is it true I mustn't roll down the terraces?"

"H'm—well—"

"Emmie says so. What are terraces for, anyhow? I thought," she added, with a sigh—"I thought it was going to be like the country."

"Oh, wait till you see it by daylight. It's a great deal more like the country than New York."

"She doesn't keep a horse?"

"No."

"Nor a cow?"

"No; there's no stable, you see."

"There isn't any pig, father!"

"Oh no; she wouldn't like a pig."

"But there isn't a single smallest kind of a dog here. There isn't," she wound up, tremulously—"there isn't even a chicken."

"You just wait till to-morrow, and I'll show you heaps of nice things. There isn't a finer tulipifera rhododendron in the world than the one out by the back veranda. And there's a beautiful old crooked catalpa on the terrace you can make a house in."

"Emmie says she only lets cousin Ethan climb trees."

"Oh-a, well—a—I dare say there are plenty of other things. Aren't the peaches nearly ripe?"

"I don't know."

"Have you seen my Indian arrowheads and stone hatchets down-stairs in the cabinet?"

Val shook her head despairingly.

"They're in her room."

Her father seemed not to notice.

"And to-morrow I must show you the great slab of stone at the back door. The oldest inhabitant of this place told me when I first came to New Plymouth that he remembered cracking nuts there at recess in 1800, when he went to school here. There aren't many little girls who have such a wonderful old house to live in."

[Pg 105]

"N—no. I liked the little trees and houses in the silver at supper."

"You'll like lots of things. I've got an old fiddle somewhere about—"

"Have you? Oh, that'll be fun!"

She crept up under his arm and nestled down against him.

It is no part of the office of this plain chronicle to attempt to justify any person in it. Mrs. Gano herself was too little touched by other people's opinions for one who sets about reporting her to dare belittle her robust errors, or omit the defects of her qualities. Few things would have bothered her so much as "being universally beloved," as the phrase goes; and yet, or perhaps because of this, her family affections struck such deep root that plucking them up was like tearing asunder the very fibres of her life. Even now, even to her son, she could not speak of Valeria. Her long hands shook when she touched the dead woman's books. When chance would bring to light a scrap of the familiar writing, she would look away hurriedly, that she might not break down utterly and lose herself in that ocean of agonized regret that had threatened to sweep her, too, out of the world after Valeria's death. It could never have occurred to her as possible that she should set about winning anybody's affections. She would probably have regarded it as a slavish and far from upright procedure. Affection was not a thing to set snares for. It was the duty of children to love their parents (she would probably have said to "honor" them); it was the duty of parents to train the children in the way they should go. That was "the law and the prophets." She could never have quite realized the impression she made on the young or guilty-minded, but she would not have denied that she belonged to a generation disposed to treat healthy children on more or less Spartan principles. She had from time to time obtained a sufficiently all-round view of the spoiling process that had, to her thinking, wellnigh ruined Val Gano.

[Pg 106]

She had come quickly to the conclusion that she would say nothing more to the child's nervous and ailing father, but was quite definitely minded to set to work quietly and vigorously to correct in Val's upbringing the pernicious mixture of sentimentality and neglect that had made the child a révoltée and a household terror. Already in New York there had been a battle royal on the subject of the proper bedtime for a little girl. Val had announced herself in no uncertain note as mortally opposed to retiring at eight, or even nine. If there was one thing more than another that she objected to utterly it was this going to bed at all. Her mother had been helpless to prevent her from ranging the house till remorseless sleep struck her down in the midst of her delights. If she could manage to keep her eyes open, or to wake up after a brief oblivion, she had made no bones about descending during the evening in her night-gown, entirely prepared for the rapturous reception she knew awaited her from her father. Val had early, then, come to associate her grandmother with tyrannical designs on the liberty of the free-born child after the hour of eight. She also had cause to know her repulsive opinions on the value of a milk and cereal diet for the young. These, and a general sense of radically opposed interests, not unmixed with astonishment at, and fear of, the alarming old lady, made up the sum of Val's dismay when she came calmly to consider what life was going to be like here at the Fort.

She woke up on the morning after her arrival with a vague sense of a duty to perform. She rubbed her eyes and kicked Emmie. Ah, yes, that was it—her grandmother had not understood. She had condemned Val, who was accustomed to her own room, with all her "things" about her, just as she liked them, and no one to interfere—she had put Val in "another person's room," with a single big bed in it, and condemned her to sleep with Emmie. Her grandmother must be brought to a better understanding.

The child made no further announcement of her frame[Pg 107] of mind till she sat down to a barren breakfast with the despised Emmie. There was no coffee. There was tea going up to her father, as usual. The silent Emmie quaffed her mug of milk serenely. For a year now Val had demanded and been given her morning cup of coffee.

"Ask for some for me, please," she said, after making inquiries of Venie.

"Gamma says cawfee will make you an old woman before you're a young one," said Emmie, showing her milk-white teeth in a pleased smile. "You can't have any cawfee."

"Tell the cook, please," said Val, in a loud voice, "that I'm waitin' for my coffee."

An' Jerusha put in a turbaned head.

"Lordy, missy! don' yer yell like dat, an' I'll make yo' some cambric tea."

"I won't drink cambric tea. I'm the oldest of the famerly, and my father always let me have coffee."

"Yo' father ve'y ill, missy. Yo' mustn't worrit yo' father."

"I never worry my father—I settle everything for myself. Are you going to get my coffee?"

"Can't do dat, missy, widout leab."

"Isn't grandma coming to breakfast?"

"No; she always habs it in her own room since Miss Valery died."

The child pushed back her chair and marched out. The two women called remonstrance after her, but a mighty indignation swept her on. She halted before her grandmother's room, knocked loudly, and opened the door without further waiting.

Midway in her valiant advance upon the enemy she stood still. Mrs. Gano was sitting propped with huge feather pillows in an ancient four-poster. She wore a small shrunken cotton nightcap awry on her wonderful thick hair, which tumbled out in a tangle of silver and lay dishevelled over the white flannel jacket that was buttoned crooked over her night-gown, the sleeves hanging loose and[Pg 108] armless. In her long taper fingers she held an open letter. Envelopes, notes, the Baltimore Sun, and other papers were strewn thick over the silk patchwork quilt. A breakfast tray stood on a table by the bedside. It wasn't her attire, it wasn't even the shrunken, rakish nightcap (self-conscious and uneasy at its obvious shortcomings), that made the old lady's aspect so arresting. She had not said a word at the child's irruption, but she lowered her chin and looked over her heavy gold-rimmed spectacles with a strange cold stare, singularly disconcerting, even slightly paralyzing. But Val's was a bold heart. And she realized that a blow must be struck for liberty.

"They haven't given me any coffee for my breakfast," she announced, with equal directness and warmth.

The piercing eyes bored into her, but the stern mouth uttered no word. The child began to wish she'd waited till her grandmother were properly dressed and looked more human.

"I'm in my eighth year," she went on with dignity, "and I'm accustomed—"

"'Good-morning!' is the custom in this house," said the old lady.

"Oh! Good-morning!" Slight pause. "The servant says you told her I wasn't to have coffee."

"Well?"

"I always have it at home."

"You're not at home now."

"But I can't eat breakfast without—"

"There's no need for you to eat breakfast if you're not hungry."

"Why can't I have coffee?"

"Because I think it injurious"—the keen old eyes caught the swift disdain of the child's glance at the half-empty cup on the tray—"very injurious for children," she added.

"My mother didn't think so," Val said, feeling her throat swell.

"But I am your grandmother, you see."

[Pg 109]

She had lowered her chin again; her eyes were shooting out over her spectacles, her eyebrows terrifically high. This grandmother of hers could move her eyebrows about as easily as other people moved their arms and legs. It was a fearsome accomplishment.

"In my house," she went on, after the awful pause, "the thing to be considered is what I think. Among other matters I consider your way of entering a room might be improved. Now, you may see how quietly you can go out."

Seldom has a child been more surprised at an unexpected turn in affairs than was this one when she found herself on the outside of the door. She stood irresolute a moment. Why had she obeyed? She gritted her little white teeth in self-contempt. Should she go back? There were loads of things she had forgot to say. The idea of being sent out like that! She went slowly up-stairs and angrily tumbled some of her clothes out of her trunk. There were three cookies, a cruller, and some chocolates in a box near the bottom. Oh, wise precaution of provident childhood! Still, her present lot was a most unhappy one.

"No breakfast! How angry my poor sainted mother would be!" She shed two tears. "No mother, no coffee, nothing but a cruel grandmother."

She revelled gloomily in the tragic picture till she heard Emmie coming up-stairs. She hid the "remainder biscuit" and hurriedly dried her eyes. There had long been a theory in the family—even her mother had shared it—that Val never cried, and hadn't any heart to speak of. She was intensely proud of this reputation for stoicism, and wouldn't for worlds have undeceived any one. She brushed past Emmie now with lofty looks and ran down-stairs and out-of-doors. She ranged about the grounds, finding that her father was right—there were great possibilities of enjoyment in these neglected haunts. She was not long in discovering the grape-vine climbing the pear-tree in the wilderness, and satisfying herself that "peaches[Pg 110] were ripe." The osage orange-trees that grew along the fence behind the drying-ground had dropped their rugged globes on the grass, and one could play ball with these oranges till their tough fibres grew soft and yielded grudgingly, like rubber. Presently one that she had sent flying over the trees into the adjoining grounds came mysteriously back. Val parted the fringe of lower undergrowth and peered between the fence rails, but could see no one. She shied another orange, and this time she saw a boy dart out from behind a tree and send the orange swiftly through the sunshine over her head. Val leaped up, and by a fluke caught it firmly in her hands.

"Hooray!" came involuntarily from the next-door neighbor; and they went on playing ball in ambush till curiosity prevailed over shyness.

When the next-door neighbor drew near the osage barrier, he revealed himself as a boy about Val's age, with a freckled face and a queer little knob of a nose.

"Wot's your name?" he inquired.

"Val Gano. What's yours?"

"Jerry—I mean, Jerningham Otway."

"That your house?"

She climbed upon the fence and distinguished glimpses through the bushes of an imposing place beyond.

"Yes," he answered; "and we got a bank over the river."

This eliciting nothing, he went on, genially:

"You can fire a ball 'bout as well as a boy!"

"I should hope so."

"My sister can't, and she's a year older 'n me. Most girls can't, and they're all awful mad they wasn't born boys."

"That so?"

"Yes. I know a girl over the river—awfully jolly girl—she's got a monkey—nicest girl I ever knew!—and Geerusalem! don't she want to be a boy!"

"She must be a ninny," observed his next-door neighbor.

"Hey?"

[Pg 111]

"Can't think why any girl in her senses should want to be a boy!" as who should say: the least of created things.

Jerry widened saucer eyes.

"If a girl likes," his neighbor continued, "she can do all the jolly things a boy does without the bother of being a boy."

"Ho! ho! Don't find it much bother."

"Well, but it's a little dull, ain't it?"

"Hey?"

"Not now exactly, but don't you ever think about the future?"

Jerry looked vaguely alarmed for a single instant, and then strutted off with his hands in his pockets, whistling defiantly all across the lawn. He stopped at the barn door, and whistled his way back, in time to catch a friendly ball.

The feminine wile that eventually won the young gentleman's heart, and "did for" the girl with the pet monkey, was Val's gift for turning the most surprisingly rapid somersaults all across the drying-ground. A small contorting ball, she rolled head over heels, without stopping, from one side to the other, and came up smiling, in spite of a crack on her crown against the pump.

"Gee-rusalem!" observed Jerry, when he saw she was laughing. "I say," he added, with a child's fine disregard for preface or preliminary—"I say, come over to Bentley's Pond and let's be pirates."

It seems highly probable that Val would have closed with the offer if Emmie had not made a timely appearance.

"What you doin'?" she asked, Jerry being invisible.

"None o' your business," said her polite sister.

"Oh-h," purred Emmie. "Gamma don't let us—"

She paused.

"Don't let us what?"

"What you're doin'."

"What am I doin'?"

It was difficult to say. She seemed to be just sauntering about, occasionally kicking an osage orange. But Emmie,[Pg 112] not without reason, had got it into her law-abiding head that whatever this sister of hers might be engaged in it was pretty sure to be something taboo, and Emmie, as an older inhabitant here, and one who never made these mistakes, was bound to keep the new-comer from transgression. Her sister had gone back to the house now. Emmie followed her up-stairs to their room. Val found her trunk gone from the upper hall, and its contents disposed in drawers and wardrobe with Emmie's belongings.

Who had done this thing?

"Venie," said Emmie.

The new-comer anathematized the officious servants of the Fort. Emmie stood looking on with growing consternation, as Val flung forth from the wardrobe to the middle of the room a shower of pinafores and petticoats, books and toys. They lay on the floor in an indiscriminate mass. What was this daring person about? Emmie stood shyly by the door, her face flushing with excitement.

"I won't have my things mixed up with other peoples'!" Val announced, severely. Then, after a moment: "What are you standing there for?"

"I—I don't know," responded Emmie.

"Haven't you got any place of your own, where you belong?"

Emmie looked bewildered, as well she might.

"I've got a little rocking-chair down in gamma's room—used to be cousin Efan's."

"Humph! rocking-chair's just the thing for you! Why don't you go and sit in it?"

Val was clearing out the bureau now at the other end of the room. It was Emmie's things this time that were being flung out with disdain. Val's harsh question, coupled with the moving spectacle of Emmie's best hat on the floor, brought ready tears to the soft brown eyes.

"What you got in this?" demanded Val, shaking the rattling contents of a well tied-up box.

"B'longs to cousin Efan. Gamma don't let us open it."

Val untied the cord and revealed the forbidden spoil[Pg 113]—marbles, a jack-knife, a broken whistle, and at the bottom a little drawing-book and a French grammar.

"I'll take care of the marbles and the knife for cousin Ethan," said Val, "but you can have the other things," and she flung the treasured box to the opposite side of the room. The vandalism widened Emmie's trouble-clouded eyes. "Now my clothes are going in the bureau."

Val was sorting and folding away her own belongings with a deftness characteristic of her thin little hands. Emmie watched the process tearfully.

"And my books and things like that go on this side," she went on, busily bringing order out of chaos. "Now, do you understand?" she said, sternly. "This half o' the room is mine. You can't ever come here."

The little girl at the door nodded, speechless.

"Perhaps I'll help you afterwards to put your things away in the cupboard. First go down into the hall and bring me a piece of chalk out of the lift-up chair where they keep the brushes."

"Chalk!" What was she going to do?

"Yes, chalk, goosie gander! Chalk! chalk!"

Emmie fled. She had serious thoughts of never returning, but curiosity and the memory of her best hat sitting on the floor got the better of her fears.

"That's right," said Val, on Emmie's reappearance. "Don't come over here!" she shouted. "Stop, I tell you!" She stamped violently as the child advanced, bewildered, holding out a piece of yellow crayon. "Didn't I just say this part of the room is mine?"

"Y-yes."

"Well, it is, just as much as if it had doors, which it ought to have, and locks and bolts. Don't ever come here till you get my permission. Understand?"

"I—I—" Emmie dropped the crayon, and retreated slowly. "I was only going to say we oughtn't to use that chalk. It belongs to Aunt Valeria's painting things."

"Look here!" Val waived such puny scruples aside. "See this seam in the carpet?"

[Pg 114]

"Yes," answered a small, scared voice.

"Well, I'll make it plainer, so's there's no mistake." She stooped and drew a yellow line down the seam from wall to wall. "Now," she said, getting up and striking a threatening attitude, "you're younger than me, but I give you all that side for your room. This side is mine. If you ever cross that line without my leave, I'll kill you—yes, I'll kill you dead with cousin Ethan's knife!"

She turned her head and beheld her grandmother standing in the doorway.

[Pg 115]

This was the beginning of the Four Years' War.

But although Val was worsted in this encounter, the race was sometimes to the swift and the battle to the ingenious. For instance, that very night in bed she discovered a way of reducing Emmie to submission without resorting to physical violence. Val began to tell out loud a terrible and harrowing tale, which nearly threw the younger child into fits. Emmie would do anything for her dear, dear sister if only darling Val would say the black figure wasn't a ghost. Darling Val complied, after a thorough understanding that whenever Emmie was too unbearable that black figure, which was a ghost only on certain nights—that black figure should be introduced into their nocturnal amenities. Val was not always as good as her word. She did once or twice in the comfortable daytime make the sinister threat, "If you do that again I'll tell you a scary story when we're in bed to-night"; but in the morning the night is almost as far away as being grown up or dying—at all events too far off to seem very real or important. Experience proved that Val would forget the menace by the time it was dark, or else would be too sleepy to live up to it—so sleepy, in fact, that she could do nothing but kick Emmie in a desultory way, or lie like a log in the middle of the bed, leaving the younger child to find her half on the outer edge of both sides; whereupon Emmie's long-suffering patience would suddenly break down, and she would go crying to her grandmother's door, and stand there wailing till she was taken in. After some weeks' trial the plan of making the two sisters share the same[Pg 116] room was abandoned, and Emmie had a cot at the foot of her grandmother's four-poster.

Val was made to realize that now she had crossed the Rubicon. Up to that hour she had been on probation, but this change once effected, she was "beyond the pale." Not that she was harassed, nagged, scolded; that she would have understood and known how to meet; she was ignored, not spoken to, not even seen. For days she might have been thin air, so little did her grandmother seem able to realize her corporal presence. There had been no doubt in Val's mind from the first but what Emmie was the favourite here. The very servants, she saw, were under the spell of Emmie's pretty ways, and in any time of trouble took it for granted that the imperious Val had been the aggressor. Natural and inevitable as was this attitude of the entire household (for Mr. Gano was spared all details, and did not count), it was not calculated to make the sisters better friends, or win Val to a more amenable mind.

Nobody, from Val's point of view, could care much about what Jerusha and Venie thought, but her grandmother's good opinion was somehow, even at this stage, a secretly coveted honor. Yet there was no blinking the fact Emmie was her pet. This form of putting the hard underlying fact was the more satisfactory in that one could as soon imagine Mrs. Gano dancing the Highland fling as having a pet. Gran'ma! who wouldn't let a dog or even a bird into the house, and whom no one could fancy nursing or caressing anything on earth! There was a suggestion of the ludicrous, a faint ironic aroma, in the phrase, which aroused angry passions. It fitted in, too, with all manner of exigencies. In any event it was apposite to remark, "Of course Emmie's the pet." This could be said with such effect of scorn that Emmie found no refuge save in tears.

"What's the matter?" inquired Mrs. Gano.

She had happened on the twain as they were loitering in the hall before going off to church.

Emmie wept on. Val set her little red mouth doggedly. Her grandmother glared.

[Pg 117]

"Now what have you been doing to this poor child?" she demanded.

Gran'ma's eyes were very strange when she was angry, as Val had frequently confided to the cobwebs in the wood-shed—unlike anybody's on earth—piercing, glittery; made you cold down your back. Servants shook and scuttled when she looked at them like that. Val herself was always reminded of

and braced herself by saying, internally: "I ain't 'fraid o' tigers and I ain't 'fraid o' gran'ma"—this, too, with a fine sense of climax.

"What is it, Emmie? Stop crying. I can't have this noise."

"V—Val says I'm your p—pet."

"Nonsense! I have no pets. You are not to worry Emmeline. Never say that again. Understand?"

Val was silent.

Gran'ma's eyes were awful.

"Are you going to promise, or do you prefer to spend the day alone?"

That had been tried, and proved a great waste of time and opportunity.

"Yes, I promise."

"Very well; now go to church; Venie is waiting."

"Aha!" said the victorious Emmie when they were out of earshot. "Now you see what you get for teasing me."

And she crowed over her comrade with restored vivacity, till Val said, with suspicious geniality:

"Oh, well, I s'pose I was mistaken. I knew you were either her pet or else—"

"What?"

Emmie fixed her beautiful soft eyes expectantly on her sister.

Val turned on her with suppressed fury:

"Or else a creepin', crawlin' little woo—er—er—m."

[Pg 118]

Floods of tears, and Venus to the rescue.

The Four Years' War did not always rage round Emmie, although it was the innocent little sister who was the means of forcing upon Val the conviction that her grandmother was not, and never could be, her friend. It is true she cherished a dream at first of earning her gratitude and admiration by some splendid heroic deed that should cover her grandmother with shame at the memory of the way she had misunderstood and undervalued her descendant. The house would be on fire some day, and Val would "save all their lives"; or a robber would get in in the night, and by a series of thrilling adventures Val would entrap and lock him up in the closet under the stairs, where that silly old Jerusha said there was a ghost; or the ancient nag that sometimes came from the livery-stable to take her father and grandmother out for an airing—this steed would unexpectedly run away some fine day. Val saw herself dashing out of the bushes at the road-side, seizing the bit, and hanging on to it till she brought the frantic animal to a stand-still. Then her grandmother would say: "Dear, brave child, we owe you our lives," etc. "How I've misunderstood you!" etc. Val would be magnanimous, and forgive everything. She had a fixed intention of saying in reply: "Gran'ma, let the dead past bury its dead." Her grandmother would feel that. But until that day came, how was she to endure all this injustice and oppression? Emmie was her grandmother's—well, she took Emmie's word about everything, and Emmie counted on that. She didn't play fair, and she was an awful cry-baby; couldn't climb trees, or even run hard without falling down and hurting herself and saying it was Val's fault. Then for the rest of the day her grandmother would treat Val like an outcast, and dock her of Jerry's society. How sickening it was to be told Emmie was the littlest, and delicate! Val herself had at one time been "only six," but she hadn't been a sniveller; she had always played fair and never cried. Ask anybody. They'd all say Val Gano never cried. Whereupon she would steal away to the wood-shed, or climb[Pg 119] up high in the catalpa-tree, remind herself she had no mother, shed a private tear or two, and tell herself a story.

After all, the only serious blemishes in the scheme of creation were grandmothers and Sundays. Now that Val had renounced religion, she could not but look on the day of rest as an interruption and a time of bondage, when grandmothers and grandmothers' views pervaded creation to creation's cost.

On the third Sunday after the arrival at New Plymouth she announced that she was not going to church.

"I don't want to, either," whispered Emmie. "Let's pertend we're very ill."

"No; let's just say we won't go."

"Better not," admonished the cautious Emmie. "I think my throat is going to be sore."

So Emmie was duly cosseted by Aunt Jerusha, and given delicious black-currant jelly.

Mrs. Gano, hearing rumors of rebellion, had sent for Val. She was dressed and sitting in the big arm-chair before the fire with a book on her knees. It was quite warm, but she couldn't apparently do without a fire and a shawl. She was seldom seen about the house in these days without a shawl. She must have had hundreds—white and black and gray, striped and dotted; silk, cashmere, canton-crêpe. Her gowns all seemed to be made of rusty black silk. They were so exactly alike that Val thought for long she had but one. There was always, too, the inevitable and spotless lawn at the throat; no frivolous ruffle or after-thought of tie—nothing set on, extraneous, but smooth white folds that seemed to grow up out of the dress—an integral part of the plain and changeless uniform that was the outward and visible sign of one's grandmother's severe, uncompromising spirit.

"What's this I hear? Why are you not dressing for church?"

"I—I don't feel like going to-day."

"Are you not well?"

[Pg 120]

"Ho yes"—very contemptuous. "I never get ill."

"Then you must go to church. It's the custom in this house."

"Venie says you go only twice a year. I'll go when you do."

The old lady's eyes blazed behind her gold spectacles.

"You'll go when you are told." Awful pause. "When you are my age you may suit yourself."

"Father hasn't had to wait all that time; he doesn't go now."

"Your father is very ill."

"Didn't go when he was well; that is, hardly ever," added the explicit young person.

"He went regularly as a boy, before he had a house of his own. But I'm not accustomed to arguing with children. Go and get dressed."

Val wavered a moment, then faced about gravely. She planted herself before the old lady, with the wide-apart legs and tense look of one who braces herself to bear the crack of doom.

"I'm sorry to hurt your feelings," she said; "but I'm a infidel."

"What!"

"Yes; father and I are both infidels."

"Hush! you don't know what you're saying."

"Oh yes, I do. He says, 'Damn it!' when you're not there."

"How dare you!"

"I don't, but father does, so you see—"

"I see that you talk wildly and ignorantly, as well as too much. Go and dress for church."

She had half risen, her eyebrows had risen wholly. She looked singularly alarming. Val retreated backwards to the door, and Mrs. Gano resumed her seat.

"I ain't so igorunt as you think," the child persisted. "The reason I stopped going to church was because my conscience wouldn't let me join in."

Mrs. Gano turned and looked at the child over the back[Pg 121] of her arm-chair. There was a gleam of amused tolerance in the steely eyes. Val was quick to detect it.

"You see, it's not worth while to waste the whole morning nearly when the only thing you can join in is a piece they don't do every Sunday."

"Which is that?" asked Mrs. Gano, in an odd voice.

She had turned away again, and Val couldn't see her face now.

"That long piece about the weather."

"The weather?"

"Yes—lightnings, and whales, and things. Don't you know that one? It's like this." She put her hands behind her, and shrilly intoned: "'O ye green things, angels and fowls of the air, praise Him and magnify Him for-r-rever. O ye—'"

"That will do," interrupted Mrs. Gano, in a stifled voice.

Val felt snubbed; there was a lot more that, with encouragement, she would have endeavored to do justice to. She felt for the door-handle, but paused again on the threshold.

"Mayn't I go and sit with father?"

"Certainly not; you are to go to church."

"Gran'ma." There was a renewal of courage in the clear little voice. With a bound she planted herself in front of the old lady's chair. "I oughtn't to go. It's pertending; it's wicked. For I can't say the 'I b'lieve' any more."

Mrs. Gano rose in her wrath and towered. Val stood to her guns, looking up with determined, excited face.

"I used to join in when I was younger: I used to bow, just like mother. Father never bowed. I don't any more, neither."

Mrs. Gano seized her by the shoulder and propelled her to the door. Wild thoughts of dungeons and burned martyrs flew through the child's mind. Still clutching the infidel, Mrs. Gano opened the door. In an awful voice she called:

"Jerusha! Venus!"

[Pg 122]

Venus appeared with perturbed countenance, out of which all genial companionableness had fled. Yes, that was the kind of face an executioner might wear.

"Take Miss Val up-stairs and get her ready for church."

Venus took hold of the child none too gently, and pulled her, wriggling vainly, up the long staircase. It was no use to cling feverishly to the banisters; it only hurt her hands. Half-way up Venus stopped for breath. Val looked back to see if her grandmother was still there. Yes; leaning exhausted against the frame of the door, with her handkerchief to her lips. Now Venus was dragging her on again. In a fresh access of rage the child put her chin over the banisters and screamed:

"All the time they're doing the 'I b'lieve,' I shall go like this." She shook her head with such passionate dissent that her shock of wild hair swirled madly back and forth in a cloudy circle, completely hiding the mutinous, flushed face of the infidel.

Very soon after the formal removal of Emmie and her effects to her grandmother's bedroom, Val gave up the last lingering shred of hope that she might ever, while these misunderstood days of childhood lasted, propitiate the powers that be. She was always feeding her imagination in secret with stories of the ultimate love and adoration, not only of the suitors and heroes who should line her path later on, but of her family, too. They and the entire community should adore her one day for something wonderful and noble that she was going to be and to do in that fair future when she should be grown up and great and good.

Meanwhile there were moments when this sense of present outlawry brought with it a fierce and splendid joy. It endowed even a down-trodden child with a superhuman courage. Such a one might even go and plump herself down in the great red chair of state, and rock violently back and forth in a wild abandonment of wickedness, while Emmie stood transfixed and gran'ma's awful eyes made lightning. An outlaw so brave, she could narrate unmoved that she had taken a ride in the milkman's cart.[Pg 123] And he had been "so perlite as to ask me how was Grandmother Gano." This horrible insult on the part of the milkman was duly punished, but Val had a momentary sense of having "got even." In the South—in any civilized community, Mrs. Gano would have told you—you did not call people "old"; it had foolishly enough come to be a term of reproach, or at least of scant respect, fit only for "any old thing" of no account. Therefore, let alone the "owdacious" familiarity of asking after a lady as "Grandmother" So-and-so, you couldn't even with decency distinguish the elder lady from her daughter-in-law by asking after old Mrs. So-and-so. In the South, where manners were still understood, you said "senior" and "junior," or, among the better class, you called the son's wife "Mrs." So-and-so, and you called the head of the family "Madam."

"Grandmother Gano, indeed! I'll grandmother him!"

It was a great score, too, when Julia Otway, Jerry's nearly two years older sister, assured Val that that common term of reproach "Grannie," was a corruption of the ancient and honorable title Gran'ma. Inseparably associating the word with the drunken rag-picker, "Ole Granny Gill," and the scathing juvenile satire, "Teach your granny to suck eggs," etc., Val determined on the next provocation to introduce the subject at home. She found occasion to dilate on the virtues of Julia Otway's grandmother. This was a shrunken and timid old lady, who sat unnoticed in the corner, clicking her knitting-needles, and usually saying nothing. When she did speak it was found her speech was odd, and the children laughed.

"Nearly everybody else's gran'ma knits stockens," Val observed one day, with critical eyes on the eternal book open on Mrs. Gano's knees.

"You know very few grandmothers," said the lady.

"I know Julia's. She's so nice. I don't wonder Julia and Jerry like her."

This elicited nothing.

"She's the kindest person. She keeps a little chest o' drawers chock-full o' doughnuts and winter-green candy."

[Pg 124]

"Very strange use for a chest of drawers. Is the lady right in her head?"

Val, very indignant: "Goodness gracious! mercy me! I should think so!"

"I've told you not to use those exclamations."

"No, you didn't say—"

"Do I understand you to be contradicting me?"

"You said I wasn't to say 'Oh, Lord!' nor 'Gee-rusa-lem!' nor 'Dear me suz!' nor 'Holy Moses!' I don't see what there's left to say."

"I said let your speech be 'Yea, yea,' and 'Nay, nay.' You are not to bring sacred names into common talk. The Jews of old had a proper instinct for these things. They never uttered the name of Jehovah even in prayer. No Jew would step upon a piece of parchment, for fear it might be inscribed with the name of God. It is impious to call upon the mercy of the Most High on trivial occasions."

"I don't call on Him—never."

"Yes, you do, when you use those expressions. God is 'gracious'; He alone is 'goodness.'"

Silence; then Val, recovering and returning to the attack:

"Jerry's grandmother—"

"Jerningham Otway's grandmother knows as well as I do that this is a turbulent and stiff-necked generation, without fear of God or reverence for authority. Her remedy seems to be effacement for herself and bribes for her young barbarians. But"—she had risen, and was towering—"I'd have you know, my lady, I'm not a doughnut grandmother."

Val thought it time to depart. She moved briskly to the door, sending over her shoulder a Parthian shot:

"Julia calls her gran'ma "Granny," and so do lots o' people. It seems it's the reg'lar name."

Thereupon she took to her heels, for even outlaws know limits.

At a safe distance she would speculate darkly: "I [Pg 125]wonder if she knows I hate her. Oh yes; it would be a waste of breath to mention it. She knows, and she doesn't care—she's that hardened."

It was clear at such times that this Ishmaelite's hand must be against every man, and every man's hand against her. All consideration of decent restraint had been flung to the winds. She had turned her back on the hallowed customs of society, and joined the iconoclasts of earth. She would even at times plant her elbows on the dinner-table before everybody, with a wild, despairing sense that nothing mattered forever any more. Nobody loved her. Even her father didn't want her about him since his relapse. He said she came in like a whirlwind on the rare occasions when she was admitted to his room. She should never forget that day when he said: "Why can't you be quiet and good like Emmie?" Like Emmie! Val fled to the wilderness, and in the neighborhood of the barberry-bush flung out her arms and apostrophized the heavens. She talked a great deal to herself in those days—arraigned society, and used long words with vague meaning, but studied accent and overwhelming effect. However, in spite of the difficulty of life, Val found it an exhaustless mine of interest. Being naughty alone was full of palpitating excitement. Besides, she was much better than her family realized; that of itself was curious, and at times sufficient. At any rate, she was not, as she frequently observed to the scarlet barberries—she was not a sniveller. Fortunately, it did not occur to her that the circumstance might be less creditable to her than she fondly imagined.

Her quarrel with domestic conditions lent a fine tragic interest, in her own mind, to a life that was deep-rooted in joy. It was impossible not to be happy, such a splendid world as it was—a world with skipping-ropes and a stolen jack-knife in it; a world where an awful jolly boy lived on the other side the osage-trees, and liked you better than that favorite of fortune who had a pet monkey; a world with wild tracts below its terraces where grandmothers ceased from troubling, and hard-pressed heroines could[Pg 126] hide and talk out loud. A new house building in the next lot, with ceilings open to the sky, and instead of common floors, great beams where a child who "never was 'fraid" could walk up and down with its heart in its mouth; blocks to be picked up, and a kind workman to talk to when it was cold and gran'ma wasn't patrolling the north side of the Fort. Even for rainy afternoons there were the beloved Scottish Chiefs; there were jack-stones, and a family next door who owned a barn. Oh, a splendid world, where you got twelve winter-green drops for a cent, and could play on your father's fiddle in the back hall! Hooray! it was a good plan this being born.

[Pg 127]

One peculiarity of life at the Fort was that although visitors in general were in high disfavor, everybody, from Mrs. Gano down to Jerusha—especially Jerusha—was always hoping for a visit from cousin Ethan. And he never came. The last vacation before Val's arrival Emmie said he had had to go with the Tallmadges to Bar Harbor. This June he couldn't come, because his aunt Hannah had died, and his grandfather was alone; but he thought he might come "later on." Now that the maples were scarlet and gold, he wrote regretfully, saying that, after all, he had to go back to Harvard without any holiday. He sent his love to his cousins, and the annual photograph—which she had commanded to be taken each year—to his grandmother. She had a row of them on the mantel-piece in her room. When the new one came like a falling leaf each autumn, she spent anxious days deciding which of the old ones should go in a drawer to make room for the latest. There were three that never yielded to any new-comer, however beguiling. Ethan's cousins, it must be admitted, who were ardent admirers of the more recent pictures, thought little enough of Mrs. Gano's favorite three.

The first was of a child about three years old in his night-gown—a dreamy little face framed in a halo of curling hair. Yes; it was more like an angel than a flesh-and-blood boy, but it was yellowed and faded, and not taken at an interesting age, so his two cousins thought.

The next was a very solemn little chap with a tiny pail in his hand, dressed in a kilt, and wearing a wide white collar, seeming to labor hopelessly with a wooden spade in a world of unmitigated woe.

[Pg 128]

The third had been taken in Paris with his school friend Henri de Poincy, and he had on "funny French clothes," but he held his slender figure very easily erect, and without seeming to remember he was having his photograph taken. He had written from Neuilly to his grandmother:

"I always think of my summer at the Fort when I go to have your picture done."

If that were the case, this time the remembrance must have been a gracious one, for his dark little face was lit, expectant, beautiful.

"Why did he go to France?" Val had asked.

"Oh, some nonsense about accent, as if the only accent to be considered was the French." Mrs. Gano threw back her head. "And then a cousin of the Tallmadges married a Frenchman, a man called De Poincy. The mother died, and left a boy—"

"That awful little ape in the pho— I mean Henri?"

"Yes; Henri, a very nice boy."

Mrs. Gano would not have prolonged the conversation, but Emmie said:

"I'm sure he's nice. Cousin Ethan's letters always say beautiful things about Henri. Do go on."

"I've told you scores of times."

As if that were not the flimsiest reason for not repeating a stock tale, half of whose charm is its familiarity.

"Didn't cousin Ethan find Henri at the Tallmadges' when he got back?"

"Yes, after that summer he spent here." The old eyes were mild. "And although Henri was a couple of years older, the two boys set up a sort of David and Jonathan league. And when Henri's father sent for him to come back to France—they said—humph!"

The mildness vanished in a sudden blaze.

"What did they say?"

Again Mrs. Gano threw back her head.

"Ethan had been coming here. We had his room all ready for him, and Valeria had bought pink wax-candles for his dressing-table—a most unnecessary extravagance[Pg 129] for a boy, as I told her. And as for Jerusha, she wasted half her mornings brightening up Ethan's knocker on the front door, and the rest of the time she was making cinnamon rolls. And, after all—humph!" she said, with something rather near to a snort.

"Then those Tallmadges wrote, didn't they?" said Emmie, gently applying the spur.

"Ho, yes, the Tallmadges wrote. The children were heart-broken at the idea of separating, and so they had to let Ethan go to Neuilly with the De Poincy boy."

"To improve his accent!" added Emmie, with borrowed scorn.

"Oh yes; I admitted in my reply that Ethan's accent was no doubt again in need of improvement, but it had not been necessary to send him so far afield as France."

"How long did he stay?" asked Val.

"Three years. He came back the summer you were born. He was nearly ten."

"Well, it's a good thing he came back. He does look a gump in those French clo's—I mean"—Val caught herself up hurriedly, seeing how unpopular the observation was—"I mean, I like him best in proper American things. This last picture's scrumptious!"

After this, it was not only gran'ma and An' Jerusha who held the Fort in readiness for Ethan's coming, eager to capitulate at the first blow on the door; but two little girls as well, in their different ways, set their faces towards the day when E. Gano's big brass knocker should be lifted by E. Gano's own hand.

School had been postponed, partly because Mrs. Gano was too anxious about her son's health, and too absorbed in the task of convincing him indirectly that life was worth living, to take the necessary steps for entering her granddaughter in the Primary Department of the Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies. But, besides this preoccupation, it was recognized that the fall term was already far advanced, and it might be as well—it was certainly more economical—to wait till after Christmas. However, the[Pg 130] growing discomfort and complication of having so objectionable a child about hastened the beginning of Val's school days.

With great misgiving, and full of suspicion, Val took her place at a little hacked and initialed desk in the down-stairs school one fine day towards the middle of November.

But we are forever being disappointed of our direst fears, as well as of our dearest hopes. She found that she soon got the "hang" of the lessons; that her next-door neighbor, Julia Otway, was the nicest girl in school, and very soon her "best friend"; that Val herself could run faster than anybody in the games at recess; and that she had fallen blissfully under the spell of pretty Miss Matson, the primary teacher, who, strange to say, seemed to like Val.

The bustling life at the Plymouth Seminary for Young Ladies, full, varied, delightful, would perhaps be considered by the professional biographer of vital importance in moulding a young person's character; for was this not the time and the place of her education? One is inclined, in Val's case, at any rate, to say no. She learned by rote, at that excellent institution, certain more or less useful things, and, more important still, she made two or three dear friends, who taught her much of value about the human heart; but for the most part she was educated at home. There, and not at school, she, in common with many young people, found the influences that made her what she ultimately became.

Her father, if he understood the matter so, naturally did not so express himself. Perhaps he thought this child of his had too little of the Gano love of books, and was over-fond of running breathless races, and playing ball with the neighbor's boy.

"You came here to go to school, you know. You've played all your life up to this. Now you must begin to work. This is a very important time in your life."

"Is it?"

Val sat up very straight, with shining eyes and an air of pleased responsibility.

[Pg 131]

"Oh, very important, indeed. For now you have still time to decide what kind of a woman you're going to make of Val Gano."

"Oh, have I?"

He nodded.

"You can make up your mind you won't be a dull, ignorant person, all your life bound in shallows and in miseries."