present Chaney occupied his grandfather had stood a siege from Black Hawk
all one summer day and night, until relieved by the garrison of Fort
Edward. The family had not grown with the growth of the land. Like many
others of the pioneers, they had shown no talent for keeping abreast of
the civilization whose guides and skirmishers they had been. In the
progress of a half century they had sold, bit by bit, their section of
land, which kept intact would have proved a fortune. They lived very
quietly, working enough to secure their own pork and hominy, and regarding
with a sort of impatient scorn every scheme of public or private
enterprise that passed under their eyes.

The elder Chaney had married, some years before, at the Mormon town of
Nauvoo, the fair-haired daughter of a Swedish mystic, who had come across
the sea beguiled by dreams of a perfect theocracy, and who on arriving at
the city of the Latter-Day Saints had died, broken-hearted from his lost
illusions.

The only dowry that Seraphita Neilsen brought her husband, besides her
delicate beauty and her wide blue eyes, was a full set of Swedenborg's
later writings in English. These became the daily food of the solitary
household. Saul Chaney would read the exalted rhapsodies of the Northern
seer for hours together, without the first glimmer of their meaning
crossing his brain. But there was something in the majesty of their
language and the solemn roll of their poetical development that
irresistibly impressed and attracted him. Little Gershom, his only child,
sitting at his feet, would listen in childish wonder to the strange things
his silent, morose and gloomy father found in the well-worn volumes, until
his tired eyelids would fall at last over his pale, bulging eyes.

As he grew up his eyes bulged more and more: his head seemed too large for