low and meagre sale
of the little book as if it had cost him nothing.

Eben Hilary had been a crank, too, in his day, so far as to have gone
counter to the most respectable feeling of business in Boston, when he
came out an abolitionist. His individual impulse to radicalism had
exhausted itself in that direction; we are each of us good for only a
certain degree of advance in opinion; few men are indefinitely
progressive; and Hilary had not caught on to the movement that was
carrying his son with it. But he understood how his son should be what
he was, and he loved him so much that he almost honored him for what he
called his balderdash about industrial slavery. His heart lifted when at
last he heard the scratching of the night-latch at the door below, and
he made lumbering haste down stairs to open and let the young people in.
He reached the door as they opened it, and in the momentary lightness of
his soul at sight of his children, he gave them a gay welcome, and took
his daughter, all a fluff of soft silken and furry wraps, into his arms.

"Oh, don't kiss my nose!" she called out. "It'll freeze you to death,
papa! What in the world are you up, for? Anything the matter with
mamma?"

"No. She was in bed when I came home; I thought I would sit up and ask
what sort of a time you'd had."

"Did you ever know me to have a bad one? I had the best time in the
world. I danced every dance, and I enjoyed it just as much as if I had
'shut and been a Bud again.' But don't you know it's very bad for old
gentlemen to be up so late?"

They were mounting the stairs, and when they reached the library, she
went in and poked her long-gloved hands well in over the fire on the
hearth while she lifted her eyes to the clock. "Oh, it isn't so very
late. Only five."

"No, it's early," said her father with the security in a feeble joke
which none but fathers can feel with none but their grown-up daughters.
"It's full an hour yet before Matt would be getting up to feed his
cattle, if he were in Vardley." Hilary had given Matt the old family
place there; and he always liked to make a joke of his getting an honest
living by farming it.

"Don't speak of that agricultural angel!" said the girl, putting her
draperies back with one hand and confining them with her elbow, so as to
give her other hand greater comfort of the fire. To do better yet she
dropped on both knees before it.

"Was he nice?" asked the father, with confidence.

"Nice! A