Ann, was laughing
and joking with him when I entered the court room."

"Yes," said his wife disdainfully--"that is girl-nature, all over the
earth! Just put a handsome young man before them, who has seen the
world, and is full of his smiles and flatteries and cajolements, and
the wisest of women can do nothing with them. But the cold years bring
them out of that!" she added bitterly. "They find what they call love,
is a folly and a snare."

Her husband looked out of the window into the dark night, and made no
reply to this outburst. He had always loved his wife, and he thought,
when he married her, that she loved him--although he was an excellent
match, so far as property and family were concerned. Still she would
occasionally talk in this way; and he hoped and trusted that it did not
mean much.

"I think myself," he said at length, "that it is quite as much the
pretty gifts he has made them, and has promised to send them from
England, as his handsome face and pleasant manners."

"Oh, of course, it all goes together. They are a set of mere giggling
girls; and that is all you can make of them. And our daughter Ann is as
bad as any of the lot. I wish she did not take so much after your
family, Thomas."

This roused her husband a little. "I am sure, Ann, that our family are
much stronger and healthier than your own are. And as to Ann's being
like the other girls, I wish she was. She is about the only delicate and
nervous one among them."

"Well, Thomas, if you have got at last upon that matter of the
superiority of the Putnams to everybody else in the Province, I think I
shall go to bed," retorted his wife. "That is the only thing that you
are thoroughly unreasonable about. But I do not think you ever had a
single minister, or any learned scholar, in your family, or ever owned a
whole island, in the Merrimack river as my family, the Harmons, always
have done, since the country was first settled--and probably always
shall, for the next five hundred years."

To this Thomas Putnam had no answer. He knew well that he had no
minister and no island in his family--and those two things, in his
wife's estimation, were things that no family of any reputation should
be without. He had not brought on the discussion, although his wife had
accused him of so doing, and had only asserted what he thought the truth
in stating that the Putnams were the stronger and sturdier race.

"I do not wish to hurt your feelings, Thomas, in re