they
atoned for this defection by complaining of the children to each other,
and they united in giving way to them on all points concerning their
happiness, not to say their pleasure.

They had both been teachers in their youth before he went into the war,
and they had not married until he had settled himself in the practice
of the law after he left the army. He was then a man of thirty, and five
years older than she; five children were born to them, but the second
son died when he was yet a babe in his mother's arms, and there was an
interval of six years between the first boy and the first girl. Their
eldest son was already married, and settled next them in a house which
was brick, like their own, but not square, and had grounds so much less
ample that he got most of his vegetables from their garden. He had grown
naturally into a share of his father's law practice, and he had taken it
all over when Renton was elected to the bench. He made a show of giving
it back after the judge retired, but by that time Kenton was well on in
the fifties. The practice itself had changed, and had become mainly the
legal business of a large corporation. In this form it was distasteful
to him; he kept the affairs of some of his old clients in his hands, but
he gave much of his time, which he saved his self-respect by calling his
leisure, to a history of his regiment in-the war.

In his later life he had reverted to many of the preoccupations of his
youth, and he believed that Tuskingum enjoyed the best climate, on
the whole, in the union; that its people of mingled Virginian,
Pennsylvanian, and Connecticut origin, with little recent admixture of
foreign strains, were of the purest American stock, and spoke the
best English in the world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of
happiness, and had incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate
in the State. The growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had
increased only to five thousand during the time he had known it, which
was almost an ideal figure for a county-town. There was a higher average
of intelligence than in any other place of its size, and a wider and
evener diffusion of prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less
brilliant, perhaps, than that of some other localities, but it was
fully up to the general Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the
national achievement in the greatest war of the greatest people under
the sun. It, was Kenton's pride and g