ommanding, as that of the old
aspirants for knighthood. She, too,--her quiet face stirred with a
simple, childish smile, like her father's.

"Why, mother!" she said, stroking down the gray hair under the cap,
"shall you sleep here all night?" laughing.

A cheery, tender laugh, this woman's was,--seldom heard,--not far from
tears.

Mrs. Howth roused herself. Just then, a broad, high-shouldered man, in
a gray flannel shirt, and shoes redolent of the stable, appeared at the
door. Margaret looked at him as if he were an accusing spirit,--coming
down, as every woman must, from heights of self-renunciation or bold
resolve, to an undarned stocking or an uncooked meal.

"Kittle's b'ilin'," he announced, flinging in the information as a
general gratuity.

"That will do, Joel," said Mrs. Howth.

The tone of stately blandness which Mrs. Howth erected as a shield
between herself and "that class of people" was a study: a success, I
think; the _resume_ of her experience in the combat that had devoured
half her life, like that of other American housekeepers. "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 Margaret,
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 Margaret, "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
schoolmaster need not have grumbled for the old time: feudality 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 Margaret