and so inseparable, that they were only comparable to twins!

Father and Evan were present at the time,--I dared not look at
either,--and as soon as we were again alone, the room shook with
laughter, until Martha Corkle, who was then in temporary residence,
popped in to be sure that I was not being unduly agitated.

"The Old and New Testament, I wonder which is which?" gasped father,
going upstairs to look at the uninteresting if promising woolly bundles
by light of this startling suggestion.

Now, however, the joke has developed a serious side, as their two
characters, though in no wise precocious, have become distinctive. Ian
represents the Old, primitive and direct, the "sword of the Lord and
Gideon" type, while Richard is the New, the reconciler and peacemaker.

* * * * *

The various congratulations that the twins were boys, from my standpoint
I took as a matter of course, even though I had always heard that boys
gave the most worry and girls were referred to among our friends and
neighbours as the greatest comforts in a home unless they did something
decidedly unusual, fitting into nooks, and often taking up and bearing
burdens the brothers left behind. But when many people who had either
daughters or nieces of their own, and might be said to be in that mystic
ring called "Society," congratulated me pointedly about the boys, I began
to ponder about the matter mother-wise. Then, three years ago the New
York Colony seized upon the broad acres along the Bluffs, and dotted two
miles with the elaborate stone and brick houses they call cottages; not
for permanent summer homes (the very rich, the spenders, have no homes),
but merely hotels in series. These, for the spring and fall between
seasons and week-end parties and golfing, men and girls gay in red and
green coats, replaced the wild flowers in the shorn outlying fields. I
watched these girls, and, beginning to understand, wondered if I had
grown old before my time, or if I were too young to comprehend their
point of view, for, to their strange enlightenment I was practically as
yet unborn.

Lavinia Dorman says caustically that I really belong with her in the
middle of the last century, and she, born to what father says was really
the best society and privilege of New York life, like his college chum
Martin Cortright, is now swept quite aside by the swirl.

"Yes, dear child," she insists (how different this use of the word
sou