tled in the wind with a grating noise that
seemed an accompaniment to the speaker in the kitchen.

"The Lord said that, an' I reckon He knew His own mind when He was
speakin' it," remarked Sarah Revercomb as she put down the coffeepot.

"I declare there's mother at it again," observed Abel to himself with
a frown--for it was Sarah's fate that an excess of virtue should have
wrought all the evil of a positive vice. From the days of her infancy,
when she had displayed in the cradle a power of self-denial at which her
pastor had marvelled, she had continued to sacrifice her inclinations
in a manner which had rendered unendurable the lives around her. Her
parents had succumbed to it; her husband had died of it; her children
had resigned themselves to it or rebelled against it according to the
quality of their moral fibre. All her life she had laboured to make
people happy, and the result of this exalted determination was a cowed
and resentful family.

"Yo' buckwheat cakes will be stone cold if you don't come along in,
Abel," she called now from the kitchen. "You've been lookin' kind of
sallow these last days, so I've got a spoonful of molasses and sulphur
laid right by yo' plate."

"For heaven's sake, take it away," he retorted irritably. "I don't need
it."

"I reckon I can tell by the look of you better than you can by the
feelin'," rejoined Sarah grimly, "an' if you know what's good for you,
you'll come and swallow it right down."

"I'll be hanged if I do!" exclaimed Abel without moving, and his tone
implied that the ceaseless nagging had got at last on his nerves. He
was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of
freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to
exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick,
dark and powdered usually with mill-dust. His eyes, of a clear bright
hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his
firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny.
A certain tenacity--a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the
final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance
of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class. An opinion once
embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded
to was transformed into a principle. Impulsive, generous, undisciplined,
he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial
submissio