cruelties to the
parent.

As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors if
brought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image of
them--the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, of
certain elements of character found of old in the stock and line. He
could not have understood how it was possible for him to transmit to
the boy a nature which he himself did not actively possess. And,
therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's mysterious
returns, after a long period of quiescence, to her suspended activities
and the perpetuation of an interrupted type, so that his son was but
another strong link of descent joined to himself, a weak one; instead
of this, he saw only with constant secret resentment that David was at
once unlike him and his superior.

These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; such
comradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again the
primeval bond of Man against Nature--the brotherhood, at least, of the
merely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat, hopes, and
disappointments, their minds had never met. The father had never felt
at home with his son; David, without knowing why--and many a sorrowful
hour it had cost him--had never accepted as father the man who had
brought him into the world. Each soon perceived that a distance
separated them which neither could cross, though vainly both should
try, and often both did try, to cross it.

As he sat in the chimney-corner to-night, his very look as he watched
the door made it clear that he dreaded the entrance of his son; and to
this feeling had lately been added deeper estrangement.

When David walked in, he took a seat in front of the fire. His mother
followed, bringing the sugar-bowl and the honey, which she locked in a
closet in the wall: the iron in her blood was parsimony. Then she
seated herself under the mantelpiece on the opposite side and looked
silently across at the face of her husband. (She was his second wife.
His offspring by his first wife had died young. David was the only
child of mature parents.) She looked across at him with the complacent
expression of the wife who feels that she and her husband are one, even
though their offspring may not be of them. The father looked at David;
David looked into the fire. There was embarrassment all round.

"How are you feeling to-night, father?" he asked affectionately, a
moment later, without lifting