after forty it is apt to bring a bitterness which knows no attenuating
compensation in that coquetry, emulation, passionate appeal, or innocent
tenderness, which makes tolerable the jealous caprices of the younger
woman. The struggle for rivalry is felt to be hopeless, the power of
imitation is gone. Of her forgotten womanhood Mrs. McKinstry revived
only a capacity to suffer meanly and inflict mean suffering upon others.
In the ruined castle of her youth, and the falling in of banqueting hall
and bower, the dungeon and torture-chamber appeared to have been left,
or, to use her own metaphor, she had querulously complained to the
parson that, "Accordin' to some folks, she mout hev bin the barren
fig-tree e-lected to bear persimmums."

Her methods were not entirely different from those employed by her
suffering sisterhood in like emergencies. The unlucky Hiram, "worrited
by stock," was hardly placated or consoled by learning from her that it
was only the result of his own weakness, acting upon the 'cussedness of
the stock-dispersing Harrisons; the perplexity into which he was thrown
by the news of the new legal claim to his land was not soothed by the
suggestion that it was a trick of that Yankee civilization to which he
was meanly succumbing. She who had always been a rough but devoted nurse
in sickness was now herself overtaken by vague irregular disorders which
involved the greatest care and the absence of all exciting causes.
The attendance of McKinstry and Cressy at a "crazy quilting party" had
brought on "blind chills;" the importation of a melodeon for Cressy to
play on had superinduced an "innerd rash," and a threatened attack of
"palsy creeps" had only been warded off by the timely postponement of
an evening party suggested by her daughter. The old nomadic instinct,
morbidly excited by her discontent, caused her to lay artful plans for
a further emigration. She knew she had the germs of "mash fever" caught
from the adjacent river; she related mysterious information, gathered