d to do my Master's bidding: 'Bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.'"

"Fiddlestick-end!" said Mrs. Purchase.

"I assure you--"

"If you don't mean to get upsides with Tom Trevarthen, I'm a Dutchman.
'Forgive your enemies' may be gospel teaching, but I never knew a
Rosewarne to practise it. You're a clever fellow, nephew Sam, and that
speech saved your face, as the Yankees say; but somehow I've a notion its
cleverness didn't end there. I saw the schoolmistress watching you--did
she put you up to it?"

"I don't mind telling you that she had interceded with me."

"I like the cut of that girl's jib," Mrs. Purchase announced after a
pause. "She's good-looking, and she has pluck. But I don't take back
what I said, that it's a wrong you're doing to Clem and Myra, putting them
to school with all the riff-raff of the parish."

"That's the kind of objection one learns to expect from a Radical," her
nephew answered drily.

"'Tis a queer thing, now," she mused, "that ever since I married 'Siah the
family will have me to be a Radical; and 'tis the queerer, because ne'er
one of 'ee knows what a Radical is or ought to be. S'pose I do hold that
all mankind and all womankind has equal rights under the Lord--that don't
mean they're all alike, do it? or that I can't tell a man from a woman, or
my lord from a scavenger? D'ee reckon that we'm all-fellows-to-football
aboard the _Virtuous Lady_, and the fo'c'sle hands mess aft?"

"They would if you were consistent," answered Mr. Sam, with positiveness.

She sighed impatiently. "There's times you make me long to wring your
stiff neck. But I'll take your own consistency, as you call it.
I don't notice you send that precious boy o' yourn to the Board School;
and yet if 'tis good enough for Clem and Myra, 'tis good enough for any
Rosewarne."

"Calvin has received a superior education. Yet I don't mind telling you
that, if I find Miss Marvin competent, I propose asking her to teach him
privately."

"O--oh!" Mrs. Purchase pursed up her lips and eyed him askance.
"Such a nice-looking girl, too!"

Mr. Sam flushed beneath his sallow skin. He was about to command her
angrily to mind her own business, when the air between the hedgerows, and
even the road beneath his feet, shook with a dull and distant detonation.

"Sakes alive!" cried Mrs. Purchase. "Don't tell me that's the
powder-ship, up the river!"

"It di