among them of course, though, for my
part, I have always had a horror of the way they treated the witches;
not that I approve of witchcraft, which is of course as wicked as
possible, and even the witch of Endor, I suppose, could hardly be
defended upon moral grounds, whatever you may do upon historical--which
are so much the fashion nowadays, though I, for one, can't abide
them--making out as they do that everything is a falsehood, and that
even Pocahontas was not a respectable person; I don't know what they
will attack next, I'm sure; Pocahontas was our _only_ interesting
Indian. Not that I care for Indians, don't fancy that; the Seminoles
particularly; I'm always so glad that they've gone down to live in the
Everglades, half under water; if anything could take down their
savageness, I should think it would be that. I know them very well, of
course--the Thornes, not the Seminoles--though perhaps I was never
_quite_ so intimate with them as Pamela Kirby was (she's dead now, poor
soul! _so_ sad for her!), for Pamela used to give Garda lessons; she
moulded her, as she called it, taught her to shoot--of course I mean the
young idea, and not guns. In fact, they have all had a hand in it--the
moulding of Garda; too many, I think, for _I_ believe in _one_
overruling eye, and if you get round that, there's the good old proverb
that remains pretty true, after all, I reckon, the one about too many
cooks, though in this case the broth has been saved by the little
mother, who is a very Napoleon in petticoats, and never forgets a thing;
she actually remembers a thing _before_ it has happened; Methuselah
himself couldn't do more, though, come to think of it, I suppose very
little had happened in the world before _his_ day--excepting trilobites,
that we used to read about in school. And Mistress Thorne knows all
about _them_, you may be sure, just as well as Methuselah did; for she
was a teacher, to begin with, a prim little New England school marm whom
poor Eddie Thorne met by accident one summer when he went north, and
fell in love with, as I have always supposed, from sheer force of
contrast, like Beauty and the Beast, you know--not that she was a
beast, of course, though poor Eddie _was_ very handsome, but still I
remember that everybody wondered, because it had been thought that he
would marry the sister of Madame Giron, who had hair that came down to
her feet. However, I ought to say that poor little Mistress Thorne has
certain