the best; perfect order and cleanliness of the immaculate type were
her pride. Excellent advice she frequently gave her husband about
finances and management, but otherwise she added no interest to his
life, and there was peace between husband and wife--because Sam was a
peaceable man. As a mother, she taught the two older children domestic
usefulness, with every care; they were always clad in good, clean
clothes, clad better than the neighbors' children, and education was
made to take first rank in their minds. Her sense of duty to them was
strong; she frequently said: "I live and save and slave for my
children." Fred, as we have seen, was her weakness. For him she broke
every rule and law of her life.

At forty-five she was thin, her face already deeply seamed with worry
lines, a veritable slave to her home, but an autocrat to servants,
agents and merchants. They said her will was strong; at least,
excepting Fred, she had never been known to give in to any one. We
have not spoken of Mary. Poor woman! She, too, was a slave--she was
the hired girl. Meek almost to automatism, a machine which never
varied from one year's end to another, faithful as the proverbial dog,
she noiselessly slipped through her unceasing round of duties for
twenty-three years--then catastrophe. "That fool hired man has
hoodwinked Mary." No wedding gift, no note of well-wishing, but a
rabid bundling out of her effects. Howbeit, Central Ohio could not
produce another Mary, and from then on a new interest was added to the
Claytons' table-talk as one servant followed another into the Mother's
bad graces. She was already worn to a feather-edge before Mary's
ingratitude. But the shock of Fred's death completed the
demoralization of wrongly lived years. For weeks she railed at a
society which did not protect its citizens, at a church which failed
to make men good, while she now recognized a God against whom she