may develop
it for much less worthy and more trivial causes than the exiling
themselves for a question of faith, even the carrying-out of personal
and petty aims and quarrels?

There lived in a New England village, at no very remote time, a man
who objected to the painting of the kitchen floor, and who quarrelled
furiously with his wife concerning the same. When she persisted, in
spite of his wishes to the contrary, and the floor was painted, he
refused to cross it to his dying day, and always, to his great
inconvenience, but probably to his soul's satisfaction, walked around
it.

A character like this, holding to a veriest trifle with such a
deathless cramp of the will, might naturally be regarded as a notable
exception to a general rule; but his brethren who sit on church steps
during services, who are dumb to those whom they should love, and
will not enter familiar doors because of quarrels over matters of
apparently no moment, are legion. _Pembroke_ is intended to portray a
typical New England village of some sixty years ago, as many of the
characters flourished at that time, but villages of a similar
description have existed in New England at a much later date, and
they exist to-day in a very considerable degree. There are at the
present time many little towns in New England along whose pleasant
elm or maple shaded streets are scattered characters as pronounced as
any in Pembroke. A short time since a Boston woman recited in my
hearing a list of seventy-five people in the very small Maine village
in which she was born and brought up, and every one of the characters
which she mentioned had some almost incredibly marked physical or
mental characteristic.

However, this state of things--this survival of the more prominent
traits of the old stiff-necked ones, albeit their necks were
stiffened by their resistance of the adversary--can necessarily be
known only to the initiated. The sojourner from cities for the summer
months cannot often penetrate in the least, though he may not be
aware of it, the reserve and dignified aloofness of the dwellers in
the white cottages along the road over which he drives. He often
looks upon them from the superior height of a wise and keen student
of character; he knows what he thinks of them, but he never knows
what they think of him or themselves. Unless he is a man of the
broadest and most democratic tendencies, to whom culture and the
polish of society is as nothing beside human