magistracy. Wesley, though less impressionable than his sister, shared
these secret devotions to the parent's parts, and bowed before his
father's behests, in the filial reverence of the sons of the patriarchs.
When Elisha Boone denounced the outbreak of John Brown at Harper's Ferry
as more criminal than Aaron Burr's treason, his children made his
prepossessions their own; when, three years later, the father proudly
eulogized the uprising he had so luridly condemned, his children saw no
tergiversation in the swift conversion. When to this full measure of lay
perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election
to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two
young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions
had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of
parent worship. Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the
influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually
tinctured her sentiments with a clearer insight into her father's
character. Oddly enough, it was through the rival house this came.
Olympia, a sort of ablegate in the social hierarchy of the village, had
been thrown much with Kate, and was greatly amused with her point of
view in many of the snarls arising in a provincial society. The intimacy
had been begun in the New York school, where both had been in the same
classes, and, though the families saw nothing of each other, the girls
did. Kate was soon led to see that the Spragues had none of the
patrician pretension her father attributed to them. Jack, too, had made
much of her, and seemed to delight in her sharp retorts to the inanities
of would-be wits. The episode in Elisha Boone's life, that all his
success, wealth, and after exemplary conduct had not condoned in the
village mind, was his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, I set
this down with something of the delight Carlyle expresses when in the
rubbish of history he found, among the shams called kings and nobles,
anything like a man.