r American house-keepers. "Be gentle, but let them
know their place, my dear!" The class having its type and exponent in
Joel, stopped at the door, and hitched up its suspenders.

"That will DO, Joel," with a stern suavity.

Some idea was in Joel's head under the brush of red hair,--probably the
"anarchic element."

"Uh was wishin' toh read the G'zette." Whereupon he advanced into the
teeth of the enemy and bore off the newspaper, going before Margret, as
she went to the kitchen, and seating himself beside a flaring
tallow-candle on the table.

Reading, with Joel, was not the idle pastime that more trivial minds
find it; a thing, on the contrary, to be gone into with slow spelling,
and face knitted up into savage sternness, especially now, when, as he
gravely explained to Margret, "in HIS opinion the crissis was jest at
hand, and ev'ry man must be seein' ef the gover'ment was carryin' out
the views of the people."

With which intent, Joel, in company with five thousand other
sovereigns, consulted, as definitive oracle, "The Daily Gazette" of
Towbridge. The school-master need not have grumbled for the old time:
feodality in the days of Warwick and of "The Daily Gazette" was not so
widely different as he and Joel thought.

Now and then, partly as an escape-valve for his overcharged conviction,
partly in compassion to the ignorance of women in political economics,
he threw off to Margret divers commentaries on the text, as she passed
in and out.

If she had risen to the full level of Joel's views, she might have
considered these views tinctured with radicalism, as they consisted in
the propriety of the immediate "impinging of the President." Besides,
(Joel was a good-natured man, too, merciful to his beast,) Nero-like,
he wished, with the tiger drop of blood that lies hid in everybody's
heart, that the few millions who differed with himself and the
"Gazette" had but one neck for their more convenient hanging, "It's all
that'll save the kentry," he said, and believed it, too.

If Margret fell suddenly from the peak of outlook on life to the homely
labor of cooking supper, some of the healthy heroic flush of the
knightly days and the hearth-fire went down with her, I think. It
brightened and reddened the square kitchen with its cracked stove and
meagre array of tins; she bustled about in her quaint way, as if it had
been filled up and running over with comforts. It brightened and
reddened her face when she ca