had never loved farming, compounded
for half the outlying land, which he sold very shrewdly, left his only
sister the farm, shook hands all 'round and sailed with Lilda, his
wife, for the United States of America.

On the voyage he made friends with the captain, who took a great liking
to him (and had no dislike, the passengers said, for Mistress Lilda),
and put him in the way of business with a thriving grain-merchant of
Boston, Massachusetts, whom, after twenty prosperous years, he bought
out, and founded the house of Appleyard. He had fondly hoped that this
house should outlast the century, but his only son was no merchant, and
all for the sea and its constant change and chance, and John was too
sensible to blame the lad's roving soul to any one but Nature. So with
a sigh and a thrill of how his old father must have felt, he bought a
fine trading-packet for young John and established his daughter's
husband (she was a steady, prudent girl) as his partner and heir.

John II did wonderfully well and found himself at fifty the owner of
the most flourishing packet line in the States, with his only son
prize-man at Harvard University and a daughter who nearly whitened his
hair by her mad plan for acting in public on the stage. The son went
early into buying and selling on 'Change, and was a weighty bank
president by the time his daughter had finished her schooling.

This was a trifle more elaborate and thorough-going than most girls of
twenty could boast at that time, and for three reasons. First, because
she had a brilliant mind and great powers of concentration; next,
because John III was not a little vain, in a quiet way, of all his
Greek and Latin and historical research; and had plenty of leisure for
imparting them; last, because his son--and only other child--had been a
disappointment to him in that line, not only failing to repeat his
father's brilliant college record, but proving actually slow at his
books and decidedly averse to study, though a steady, competent
accountant and investor.

So Lilda, named for her great-grandmother by John III's lady (who,
being of Knickerbocker descent, laid great stress on family names),
added to the somewhat doubtful accomplishments of a fashionable
finishing school a great part of what her own daughter, years later,
learned at the then popular woman's college. Nor was other and more
practical lore neglected, for her maternal grandmother, a notable
_hausfrau_ of the old s