over. I don't know what became of them for a while, but it always
seemed to me as if poor Adeline must have had a touch of insanity,
which faded away as consumption developed itself. Her mother's people
were a fine, honest race, self-reliant and energetic, but there is a
very bad streak on the other side. I have heard that she was seen
begging somewhere, but I am not sure that it is true; at any rate she
would neither come here to her own home nor listen to any plea from
her husband's family, and at last came back to the farm one night like
a ghost, carrying the child in her arms across the fields; all in rags
and tatters, both of them. She confessed to me that she had meant to
drown herself and little Nan together. I could never understand why
she went down so fast. I know that she had been drinking. Some people
might say that it was the scorn of her husband's relatives, but that
is all nonsense, and I have no doubt she and the young man might have
done very well if this hadn't spoiled all their chances at the outset.
She was quite unbalanced and a strange, wild creature, very handsome
in her girlhood, but morally undeveloped. It was impossible not to
have a liking for her. I remember her when she was a baby."

"And yet people talk about the prosaic New England life!" exclaimed
Dr. Ferris. "I wonder where I could match such a story as that, though
I dare say that you know a dozen others. I tell you, Leslie, that for
intense, self-centred, smouldering volcanoes of humanity, New England
cannot be matched the world over. It's like the regions in Iceland
that are full of geysers. I don't know whether it is the inheritance
from those people who broke away from the old countries, and who ought
to be matched to tremendous circumstances of life, but now and then
there comes an amazingly explosive and uncontrollable temperament that
goes all to pieces from its own conservation and accumulation of
force. By and by you will have all blown up,--you quiet descendants of