care, and harvesting of crops; bought, bred, and sold the stock; watched
prices, dickered with travelling traders, provisioned the house--in a
word, grew to be the manager of all, and this when I was barely twenty.

Mr. Stewart bore his years with great strength, physically, but he readily
gave over to me, as fast as I could assume them, the details of out-door
work. The taste for sitting indoors or in the garden, and reading, or
talking with Daisy--the charm of simply living in a home made beautiful by
a good and clever young girl--gained yearly upon him.

Side by side with this sedentary habit, curiously enough, came up a second
growth of old-world, mediaeval notions--a sort of aristocratic aftermath.
It was natural, no doubt. His inborn feudal ideas had not been killed by
ingratitude, exile, or his rough-and-ready existence on the edge of the
wilderness, but only chilled to dormancy; they warmed now into life under
the genial radiance of a civilized home. But it is not my purpose to dwell
upon this change, or rather upon its results, at this stage of the story.

Social position was now a matter for consideration. With improved means of
intercourse and traffic, each year found some family thrifty enough to
thrust its head above the rude level of settlers' equality, and take on
the airs of superiority. Twenty years before, it had been Colonel Johnson
first, and nobody else second. Now the Baronet-General was still
preeminently first; but every little community in the Valley chain had its
two or three families holding themselves only a trifle lower than
the Johnsons.

Five or six nationalities were represented. Of the Germans, there were the
Herkimers up above the Falls, the Lawyers at Schoharie, the Freys (who
were commonly thus classed, though they came originally from Switzerland),