which our virtues ripen, or something like that? I'm not quoting it
right, but I wish I'd said it. They were called wild when most of
their wildness was exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified,
their mad pranks exaggerated. If I'd been married to you, my dear,
while Dick was growing up, I wouldn't have let you keep him here in
this little backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement.
They wouldn't have been so down on him in Racine, Wisconsin!"

Mrs. Larrabee lighted her lantern, closed the door behind her, and
walked briskly down the lonely road that led from the parsonage at
Beulah Corner to Letitia Boynton's house. It was bright moonlight and
the ground was covered with light-fallen snow, but the lantern habit
was a fixed one among Beulah ladies, who, even when they were not
widows or spinsters, made their evening calls mostly without escort.
The light of a lantern not only enabled one to pick the better side of
a bad road, but would illuminate the face of any male stranger who
might be of a burglarious or murderous disposition. Reba Larrabee was
not a timid person; indeed, she was wont to say that men were so
scarce in Beulah that unless they were out-and-out ruffians it would
be an inspiration to meet a few, even if it were only to pass them in
the middle of the road.

There was a light in the meeting-house as she passed, and then there
was a long stretch of shining white silence unmarked by any human
habitation till she came to the tumble-down black cottage inhabited by
"Door-Button" Davis, as the little old man was called in the village.
In the distance she could see Osh Popham's two-story house brilliantly
illuminated by kerosene lamps, and as she drew nearer she even
descried Ossian himself, seated at the cabinet organ in his
shirt-sleeves, practicing the Christmas anthem, his daughter holding a