t my
father in the course of time, and in the course of time the two great
families were united in my small self. The Malcolms were a great
family, too. They were a proud people, though not in the same way as
my McLaurin kin. They had no fine traditions based on the fragments of
a Scotchman's kilt. Quite to the contrary, my father used to boast
that they had been just simple, God-fearing folk, Presbyterians in
every branch for generations, and sometimes he delighted in the idea
that he was a self-made man. As he always chose a large company to
make this boast in, it was to my mother a constant source of
irritation, and she would contradict him with heat, and point out that
his father before him had farmed three hundred acres of land, while his
grandfather on his mother's side had been for fifty years the pastor of
the Happy Hollow church.

Knowing this little of our family history, it is possible to realize
the consternation which prevailed when in the middle of a formal
dinner-party, in the presence of Mr. Pound, Squire Crumple, and that
most critical of women, Miss Agnes Spinner, in the presence of these
and a half-dozen others of the most important persons in the
neighborhood, in the silence which followed the appearance of the first
asparagus of spring, I, a small boy, suddenly projected my head from
the shadow of the good minister and asked: "Mother, what is a bumptious
Malcolm?"

Mr. Pound lowered his fork, turned half around, and looked at me. Miss
Agnes Spinner began to choke and had to cover her face with her napkin,
while Squire Crumple with great solicitude fell to patting her very
hard between the shoulders. Mrs. Pound glanced at my father, and then
found a sudden interest in her coffee, pouring it from her cup into her
saucer, and from her saucer into her cup, so often that she seemed to
be reducing it to a freezing mixture. Mrs. Crumple discovered
something awry with the lace of her gown, for she drew in her chin, and
one eye examined her vertical front while the other covertly circled
the table. Old Mr. Smiley, never an adroit man in society, crossed his
knife and fork on his plate, lifted his napkin half across his face
like a curtain, and over the top of it stared at my mother as though he
were waiting with me to learn just what a bumptious Malcolm could be.

My father never lost his self-command. He seemed not to have heard me,
for he leaned over the table, and in a voice designed to smoth