taste is law, and where decorous immorality is not unwelcome.

By-and-by, when the reform is established and has become traditional,
its pioneers become heroic and poetic. The Norman robber is then
discovered to be a kind of blue-blooded gentleman, or at least the
sturdy, aboriginal father of gentlemen. The rough and half-savage
Boone is the ideal frontiersman, with a smack of Arden and the sylvan
realm. And as for the coarse-toothed harrow--as my Lady Cavaliere sits
upon the porch and sees the peacock unfolding his glory upon the soft,
thick sward, do you see that my lady wears a delicate trinket around
her swan neck, and lo! it is a harrow exquisitely wrought in gold.

The feeling with which she breathed through her beaded veil her
dislike of pioneer reformers is as old as human nature. But it was not
the sigh of wisdom, but of weariness, in my lady. There is a certain
insight even in gentle youth which does not recoil from the pioneer,
and foresees the soft sward springing under the harrow as it tears the
heavy clods. Those in whom youth abides never outgrow that precious
insight and foresight. One such, not less fair than my Lady Cavaliere,
of the most tranquil and undemonstrative behavior, has long been to
how many good causes one of the most valuable and efficient friends.
She has not cared that Daniel Boone should recede into poetic distance
before he seemed to her a hero. In his cabin as he smoked, in the hard
winter day as he felled the forest tree, in the rough, unhandsome
experience of every hour, he has been to her the forerunner of
refinement and plenty and ease. If taste and imagination shrink from
the squalor of the frontier, she remembers the greater squalor and the
darker tragedy of the city slum. If the long-haired, shambling, shrill
fanatic upon the platform be a contemptuous jest to my Lady Cavaliere,
this fairer lady remembers John clad in goat-skins and crying in the