. Kitty grew restless under it.

"Mr. Muller is talking of the class of books you keep, father," she
said, lowering her voice: "I'm sure of it. They are as unsavory in his
nostrils as to the reformers in the village. They'd all excommunicate
you if they could."

"Guinness, Book Agent, Kitty," finishing his tune with a complacent
scrape, "has been known for twenty years, while Berrytown belongs
to yesterday. But the intolerance of these apostles of toleration is
unaccountable. They mean well, though. I really never knew people
mean better; yet--" He finished the sentence with a shake of the head,
solemnly burying the fiddle in its case.

Both he and Catharine turned involuntarily to the window. Five years
ago there had been half a dozen old buildings like the Book-house
stretched along Indian Creek, the roofs curled and black, the walls
bulging with age and damp. Now, there was Berrytown.

Berrytown was the Utopia in actual laths, orchards and bushel-measures
of the advance-guard of the reform party in the United States. It was
the capital of Progress, where social systems and raspberries grew
miraculously together. Thither hied every man who had any indictment
against the age, or who had invented an inch-rule of a theory which
was to bring the staggering old world into shape. Woman-Suffrage,
Free-Love, Spiritualism, off-shoots from Orthodoxy in every sect, had
there food and shelter. Radical New England held the new enterprise
dear as the apple of her eye: Western New York stretched toward
it hands of benediction. As Catharine looked out, not a tree stood
between her and the sky-line. Row after row of cottages replete with
white paint and the modern conveniences; row after row of prolific
raspberry bushes on the right, cranberry bogs on the left--the great
Improved Canning-houses for fruit flanking the town on one side,
Muller's Reformatory for boys on the other. The Book-house behind its
walnut trees, its yellow walls clammy with lichen, was undeniably a
blot, the sole sign of age and conservatism in a landscape which, from
horizon to horizon, Reform swept with the newest of brooms. No wonder
that the Berrytownites looked askance at it, and at the book-fanciers
who had haunted the place for years, knowing old Guinness to be the
keenest agent they could put upon the trail of a pamphlet or relic.

The old man grew surly sometimes when sorely goaded by the new-comers.
"There's not a man of them, Kitty," he would say,