a worn-out, deteriorating race.

Then, after two years, when a girl baby was born to David and his
wife, they couldn't, for the life of them, understand how it came
to pass that it wasn't a boy. There had been nothing but boys in
the Windom family for years and years. It appeared to be a Windom
custom. And here was this fair-haired outsider from across the
sea breaking in with a girl! They could not believe it possible.
David,--a great, strong, perfect specimen of a Windom,--the father
of a girl! Why, they emphasized, he was over six feet tall, strong
as an ox, broad-shouldered,--as fine a figure as you would see in
a lifetime. There was something wrong,--radically wrong.

The district suffered another shock when a nurse maid was added to
David's household,--a girl from the city who had nothing whatever
to do, except to take care of the baby while the unnatural mother
tinkered with the flower-beds, took long walks about the farm,
rode horseback, and played tennis with David and a silly crowd of
young people who had fallen into evil ways.

She died when her daughter was ten years old. Those who had
misunderstood her and criticized her in the beginning, mourned
her deeply, sincerely, earnestly in the end, for she had triumphed
over prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and a certain form of malice.
The whole district was the better for her once hateful innovations,
and there was no one left who scoffed at David Windom for the choice
he had made of a wife.

Her death wrought a remarkable, enduring change in Windom. He became
a silent, brooding man who rarely smiled and whose heart lay up