He went home in a pettish fume. No sooner was he within and the door
fast shut, that none might behold save only those of his own household,
who were accustomed to the aberrations of his temper and who regarded
them with blended awe and respect, than he reft his cocked hat from his
head and flung it upon the floor. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang up so
precipitately at the dread sight that she overturned her stool and drew
a stitch awry in her sampler, longer than the women of her family were
accustomed to take. The children gazed spellbound. The weavers at the
loom were petrified; even the creak of the treadle and the noisy
thumping of the batten--those perennial sounds of a pioneer home--sunk
into silence. The two negroes at the end of the vista beyond the
shed-room, with the ox-yoke and plough-gear which they were mending
between them, opened wide mouths and became immovable save for the
whites of astonished rolling eyes. Then, and this exceeded all
precedent, Richard Mivane clutched his valued peruke and, with an inward
plaintive deprecation of the extremity of this act of desperation, he
cast it upon the hat, and looked around, bald, despairing, furious, and
piteous.

It was, however, past the fortitude of woman to behold without protest
this desecration of decoration. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang forward,
snatched the glossy locks from the puncheons, and with a tender hand
righted the structure, while the powder flew about in light puffs at her
touch, readjusting a curl here and a cleverly wrought wave there. The
valet's pious aspiration from the doorway, "Bress de Lord!" betokened
the acuteness of the danger over-past.

"Why, grandfather!" the girl admonished Mivane; "your beautiful
peruke!--sure, sir, the loveliest curls in the world! And sets you like