Europe; and over the roads of intercommunication unseen caravans bore back
to the elm-shaded House the tribute of an admiring world.

Fate seemed to have taken a direct share in fitting Paulina for her part as
the custodian of this historic dwelling. It had long been secretly regarded
as a "visitation" by the great man's family that he had left no son and
that his daughters were not "intellectual." The ladies themselves were the
first to lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the
gift of making the most of their opportunities. A profound veneration for
their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their
congenital incapacity to understand what he had written. Laura, who had her
moments of mute rebellion against destiny, had sometimes thought how much
easier it would have been if their progenitor had been a poet; for she
could recite, with feeling, portions of _The Culprit Fay_ and of the
poems of Mrs. Hemans; and Phoebe, who was more conspicuous for memory than
imagination, kept an album filled with "selections." But the great man
was a philosopher; and to both daughters respiration was difficult on the
cloudy heights of metaphysic. The situation would have been intolerable
but for the fact that, while Phoebe and Laura were still at school,
their father's fame had passed from the open ground of conjecture to the
chill privacy of certitude. Dr. Anson had in fact achieved one of those
anticipated immortalities not uncommon at a time when people were apt to
base their literary judgments on their emotions, and when to affect plain
food and despise England went a long way toward establishing a man's
intellectual pre-eminence. Thus, when the daughters were called on to
strike a filial attitude about their parent's pedestal, there was little
to do but to pose gracefully and point upward; and there are spines to
which the immobility of worship is not a strain. A legend had by this time
crystallized about the great Orestes, and it was of more immediate interest
to the public to hear what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off