ked. Mrs. Haydon
was all a compact and well hardened mass, even to her face, reddish
and darkened from its early blonde, with its hearty, shiny cheeks, and
doubled chin well covered over with the up roll from her short, square
neck.

The two daughters, who were fourteen and fifteen, looked like
unkneaded, unformed mounds of flesh beside her.

The elder girl, Mathilda, was blonde, and slow, and simple, and quite
fat. The younger, Bertha, who was almost as tall as her sister, was
dark, and quicker, and she was heavy, too, but not really fat.

These two girls the mother had brought up very firmly. They were well
taught for their position. They were always both well dressed, in the
same kinds of hats and dresses, as is becoming in two german sisters.
The mother liked to have them dressed in red. Their best clothes were
red dresses, made of good heavy cloth, and strongly trimmed with braid
of a glistening black. They had stiff, red felt hats, trimmed with
black velvet ribbon, and a bird. The mother dressed matronly, in a
bonnet and in black, always sat between her two big daughters, firm,
directing, and repressed.

The only weak spot in this good german woman's conduct was the way she
spoiled her boy, who was not honest and who was very hard to manage.

The father of this family was a decent, quiet, heavy, and
uninterfering german man. He tried to cure the boy of his bad ways,
and make him honest, but the mother could not make herself let the
father manage, and so the boy was brought up very badly.

Mrs. Haydon's girls were now only just beginning as young ladies, and
so to get her niece, Lena, married, was just then the most important
thing that Mrs. Haydon had to do.

Mrs. Haydon had four years before gone to Germany to see her parents,
and had taken the girls with her. This visit had been for Mrs. Haydon
most successful, though her children had not liked it very well.

Mrs. Haydon was a good and generous woman, and she patronized her
parents grandly, and all the cousins who came from all about to see
her. Mrs. Haydon's people were of the middling class of farmers. They
were not peasants, and they lived in a town of some pretension, but
it all seemed very poor and smelly to Mrs. Haydon's american born
daughters.

Mrs. Haydon liked it all. It was familiar, and then here she was so
wealthy and important. She listened and decided, and advised all of
her relations how to do things better. She arranged their present