Harriet, was a Presbyterian. "If I had been
a better one," she lamented to her husband one evening, "I would know
how to meet his questions now. You don't take one bit of the
responsibility of his religious training, Captain Leroy."

The creed of King William's mamma, when she came to formulate it,
seemed a stern one, and it lost nothing in its setting forth by reason
of her determination to do her duty by her son.

"Thank Heaven I had to sit under these things when I was a child,
however I hated it then, or I could not do my part by him now," she
told the Captain. "I want him," fervently, "to be everything I am
not."

"Which might," suggested the Captain, "be a prig, you know."

But King William, listening, drank in these things. He had a garden
patch in the back yard and knew the nature and habits of every
vegetable in it, and being strictly a utilitarian, he weeded out
sickly plants and unknown cotyledons with a ruthless hand.

Alexina expostulated. "Maybe it hurts 'em," she feared.

"Maybe it does," said the inexorable William; "but they are like the
souls born to be damned. Put 'em on the brush pile there, and after a
while we'll burn 'em."

At other times the yard was a sea-girt coral reef and they the
stranded mariners. Generally Alexina accepted everything. The stories
were new to her. But when she did have knowledge of a thing she stood
firm; for instance, about the ocean, that you could not land every few
moments of your progress and throw out gang-planks.

"For I've been there," she insisted, "and you couldn't, you know."

At times they adjourned to the commons behind the stable, which, in
reality, were plains frequented by Indians, or, if the yard palled or
rain drove them in, there was fat, black, plausible Aunt Rose in the
basement kitchen to talk to, and if Aunt Rose proved fractious and
drove them out, together with her own brood generally skulking around,
before a threatening dish-rag or broom, there was Charlotte to be
beguiled from more serious occupation into doing her son's bidding.

Charlotte was always busy. The cottage and all in it had come to her
from her father's aunt. She had been accustomed to seeing the windows,
the furniture, the mirrors, the silver door knobs shining; therefore,
she knew such things ought to shine, and since there was no one in
these days but herself to do it, she cleaned, polished, rubbed, and
went to bed limp.

One afternoon in the late fall, when the child