n, he persisted in this with a tenacity
that Kate declared gave promise of a "Wellington." For many who had at
first adopted the foreign freak had been ridiculed out of it,
discouraged by the obstinate refusal of the generality to follow the
lead. In those sturdily primitive days the rich youth of the land had
not so universally gone abroad as they do now, and "the proper thing"
among the "well born" was not so distinctly laid down in the code of the
_elite_. The accent and manners that now mark "good form" seemed queer,
not to say _bouffe_, to even the first circles of home society, and the
first disciples of "Anglomania" had a very hard time polishing the raw
material. The home life of the Boones was something better and sincerer
than the impression made upon their neighbors by the father's invincible
push and high-handed ways. His daughter and son had been born to him in
middle age. They had the reverence for the parent marked in the conduct
of children who associate gray hairs with the venerable. With all her
strong sense and self-assertion, Kate was proud of the fact that she was
her father's daughter. It was a distinction to bear his name. His
solidity, his masterful will, his well-defined, if narrow, convictions,
were to her the sanctities one is apt to associate with lineage or
magistracy. Wesley, though less impressionable than his sister, shared
these secret devotions to the parent's parts, and bowed before his
father's behests, in the filial reverence of the sons of the patriarchs.
When Elisha Boone denounced the outbreak of John Brown at Harper's Ferry
as more criminal than Aaron Burr's treason, his children made his
prepossessions their own; when, three years later, the father proudly
eulogized the uprising he had so luridly condemned, his children saw no
tergiversation in the swift conversion. When to this full measure of lay
perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election
to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two
young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions
had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of
parent worship. Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the
influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually
tinctured her sentiments with a clearer insight into her father's
character. Oddly enough, it was through the rival house this came.
Olympia, a sort of ablegate in the