e
cat-o'-nine-tails of conscience, and sent across the sea to stifle his
doubts in fighting savagery.

Probably the Puritan mother could stop thinking for a while about the
training of Thomas and Peace and Harmony, and the rest of the dozen and
a half of children which were the allotted portion of every Puritan
wife, while she selected out intervals of her long busy days, as one
selects out bits of color from bundles of uninteresting patches, and
devoted them to absolutely superfluous needlework.

What a joy it must have been to ponder whether she should use deep pink
or celestial blue for the flowers of her pattern, instead of remembering
how red poor baby Thomas's little cushions of flesh had grown under the
smart slaps of her corset board when he overcame his sister Faith in a
fair fight about nothing, and what a relief the making of crewel roses
must have been from the doubts and cares of a constantly increasing
family!

She sorted out her colors, three shades of green, three of cochineal
red, two of madder--one of them a real salmon color--numberless shades
of indigo, yellows and oranges and browns in goodly bunches, ready for
the long stretches of fair solid white linen split into valances or
sewed into a counterpane. Truly she was a happy woman, and she would
show Mistress Schuyler, with her endless "blue-and-white," what she
could do with _her_ colors! Then she had a misgiving, and reflected for
a moment on the unregeneracy of the human soul, and that poor Mistress
Schuyler's quiet airs of superiority really came from her Dutch blood,
for her mother was an English Puritan who had married a Hollander, and
her own husband revealed to her in the dead of night, when all hearts
are opened, his belief that "Brother Schuyler had been moved to emigrate
much more by greed of profitable trade with the savages than by longings
for liberty of conscience."

She went back to her "pattern," which she just now remembered had been
lent her by poor Mistress Schuyler, and was soon absorbed in making
long lines of pin pricks along the outlines of the pattern, so that she
could sift powdered charcoal through and catch the shapes of leaves and
curves on her fair white linen.

Her foot was on the rocker of the cradle all the time, and the last baby
was asleep in it. The hooded cherry cradle which had rocked the three
girls and four boys, counting the wee velvet-scalped Jonathan, against
whose coming the cradle had been polished