is
and Michigan, common descendants of Ebenezer, the original immigrant, of
Dolton. Many of these western kinsmen answered: not so the magisterial
Bumpus who lived in Boston on the water side of Beacon, whom likewise
he had ventured to address,--to the indignation and disgust of his elder
daughter, Janet.

"Why are you so proud of Ebenezer?" she demanded once, scornfully.

"Why? Aren't we descended from him?"

"How many generations?"

"Seven," said Edward, promptly, emphasizing the last syllable.

Janet was quick at figures. She made a mental calculation.

"Well, you've got one hundred and twenty-seven other ancestors of
Ebenezer's time, haven't you?"

Edward was a little surprised. He had never thought of this, but his
ardour for Ebenezer remained undampened. Genealogy--his own--had
become his religion, and instead of going to church he spent his Sunday
mornings poring over papers of various degrees of discolouration, making
careful notes on the ruled block.

This consciousness of his descent from good American stock that had
somehow been deprived of its heritage, while a grievance to him, was
also a comfort. It had a compensating side, in spite of the lack of
sympathy of his daughters and his wife. Hannah Bumpus took the situation
more grimly: she was a logical projection in a new environment of the
religious fatalism of ancestors whose God was a God of vengeance. She
did not concern herself as to what all this vengeance was about; life
was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her
particular trap had a treadmill,--a round of household duties she kept
whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had
been the head of the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has
an incontrovertible belief in one's destiny,--which Hannah had not. But
she kept the little flat with its worn furniture,--which had known so
many journeys--as clean as a merchant ship of old Salem, and when it
was scoured and dusted to her satisfaction she would sally forth to
Bonnaccossi's grocery and provision store on the corner to do
her bargaining in competition with the Italian housewives of the
neighborhood. She was wont, indeed, to pause outside for a moment, her
quick eye encompassing the coloured prints of red and yellow jellies
cast in rounded moulds, decked with slices of orange, the gaudy boxes
of cereals and buckwheat flour, the "Brookfield" eggs in packages.
Significant, this modern pac