and pasted down over the temples of her small head, looked like a
long-used wig. Her contracted face seemed to have accumulated the
wrinkles of the most drawn-out, careworn life. Yet she was not old;
and these were not the lines of care; for her years had been
singularly uneventful and--for her--happy. The markings were,
perhaps, inherited from the generations of her weather-beaten,
toiling, plain ancestors--with the added creases of her own
personal habits. For she lived in her house with the regularity and
contentment of an insect in a dead log. And few causes age the body
faster than such wilful indolence and monotony of mind as hers--the
mind, that very principle of physical youthfulness. Save only that
it can also kill the body ere it age it; either by too great
rankness breaking down at once the framework on which it has been
reared, or afterward causing this to give way slowly under the
fruitage of thoughts, too heavy any longer to be borne.

That from so dark a receptacle as this mother there should have
emerged such a child of light, was one of those mysteries that are
the perpetual delight of Nature and the despair of Science. This
did not seem one of those instances--also a secret of the great
Creatress--in which she produces upon the stem of a common rose a
bud of alien splendor. It was as if potter's clay had conceived
marble. The explanation of David did not lie in the fact that such
a mother had produced him.

One of the truest marks of her small, cold mind was the rigid
tyranny exercised over it by its own worthless ideas. Had she not
sat beside her son while he ate, had she not denied herself the
comfort of the fireside in the adjoining room, in order that she
might pour out for him the coffee that was unfit to be drunk, she