, the back-kitchen, out of
light into shade, out of the shadow into the broad firelight where
he could see and note her appearance. She wore the high-crowned
linen cap of that day, surmounting her lovely masses of golden brown
hair, rather than concealing them, and tied firm to her head by a
broad blue ribbon. A long curl hung down on each side of her neck--her
throat rather, for her neck was concealed by a little spotted
handkerchief carefully pinned across at the waist of her brown stuff
gown.

How well it was, thought the young girl, that she had doffed her
bed-gown and linsey-woolsey petticoat, her working-dress, and made
herself smart in her stuff gown, when she sate down to work with her
mother.

By the time she could sit down again, her father and Kinraid had
their glasses filled, and were talking of the relative merits of
various kinds of spirits; that led on to tales of smuggling, and the
different contrivances by which they or their friends had eluded the
preventive service; the nightly relays of men to carry the goods
inland; the kegs of brandy found by certain farmers whose horses had
gone so far in the night, that they could do no work the next day;
the clever way in which certain women managed to bring in prohibited
goods; in fact, that when a woman did give her mind to smuggling,
she was more full of resources, and tricks, and impudence, and
energy than any man. There was no question of the morality of the
affair; one of the greatest signs of the real progress we have made
since those times seems to be that our daily concerns of buying and
selling, eating and drinking, whatsoever we do, are more tested by
the real practical standard of our religion than they were in the
days of our grandfathers. Neither Sylvia nor her mother was in
advance of their age. Both listened with admiration to the ingenious
devices, and acted as well as spoken lies, that were talked about as
fine and spirited things. Yet if Sylvia had attempted one tithe of
this deceit in her every-day life, it would have half broken her
mother's heart. But when the duty on salt was strictly and cruelly
enforced, making it penal to pick up rough dirty lumps containing
small quantities that might be thrown out with the ashes of the
brine-houses on the high-roads; when the price of this necessary was
so increased by the tax upon it as to make it an expensive,
sometimes an unattainable, luxury to the working man, Government did
more to demoralis