hem. The
crowd, the music, the firing of guns, produced an ineffaceable
impression upon Hetty's mind. While her grandfather's body lay in the
house, she had wept inconsolably. But as soon as the funeral services
began, her tears stopped; her eyes grew large and bright with
excitement; she held her head erect; a noble exaltation and pride shone
on her features; she gazed upon the faces of the people with a composure
and dignity which were unchildlike. No emperor's daughter in Rome could
have borne herself, at the burial of her most illustrious ancestor, more
grandly and yet more modestly than did little Hetty Gunn, aged twelve,
at the burial of this unfamed Massachusetts revolutionary soldier: and
well she might; for a greater than royal inheritance had come to her
from him. The echoes of the farewell shots which were fired over the old
man's grave were never to die out of Hetty's ears. Child, girl, woman,
she was to hear them always: signal guns of her life, they meant
courage, cheerfulness, self-sacrifice.

Of Hetty's father, the "young Squire," as to the day of his death he was
called by the older people in Welbury, and of Hetty's mother, his wife,
it is not needful to say much here. The young Squire was a lazy,
affectionate man to whom the good things of life had come without his
taking any trouble for them: even his wife had been more than half wooed
for him by his doting father; and there were those who said that pretty
Mrs. Gunn had been quite as much in love with the old Squire, old as he
was, as with the young one; but that was only an idle village sneer. The
young Squire and his wife loved each other devotedly, and their only
child, Hetty, with an unreasoning and unreasonable affection which would
have been the ruin of her, if she had been any thing else but what she
was, "the old Squire over again." As it was, the only effect of this
overweening affection, on their part, was to produce a slow reversal of
some of the ordinary relations between parents and children. As Hetty
grew into womanhood, she grew more and more to have a sense of
responsibility for her father's and mother's happiness. She was the most
filially docile of creatures, and obeyed like a baby, grown woman as she
was. It was strange to hear and to see.

"Hetty, bring me my overcoat," her father would say to her in her
thirty-fifth year, exactly as he would have said it in her twelfth; and
she would spring with the same alacrity and the same loo