In the first and last sentence, Colonel Fox indicated the ground of his dislike to the handsome young store-keeper, and his dread that Swan’s eyes would somehow interfere with his own cherished plans of a union between the Fox and Mower farms.  Whatever Colonel Fox determined on was done or to be done.  He had anticipated the French proverb; and the “impossibility” made not the slightest difference.  Therefore Dorcas had no notion of disobedience in her head, permanently.  She solaced herself by the occasional luxury of departure from set rules, and she intended to depart in that way to-morrow,—­for just five minutes,—­just to hear what that foolish fellow wanted of her; and what could it be? and why was it the last time?—­would he give her up?

Dorcas pondered the matter while the sun still crowned the heights, and glanced at her sleeping father in silence.  Why should Colonel Fox dislike Swan so very much because he was a Britisher?  All that was done with, long ago, and why not be peaceable?  Just then her father drew the breath sharply between his teeth, as if in pain.  It was the old wound, that had never been healed since the Battle of Bennington.  He had lain on the ground,—­Dorcas had often heard him tell the tale,—­and had striven to slake his deathly thirst with the blood that he scooped up in the hollow of his hand from the ground about him.  So terrible was the carnage where he lay.  “A d——­d Britisher had shot him,—­another had driven his horse over him, and afterwards, while he lay half-dead, had tried to rob him!” Would he ever forget it?  He would have continued, on the contrary, to fire and hack till the present day, but for the wound in his knee, which had disabled him for life, long before a peace was patched up with the mother-country.  So he had retired to Walton, and before Continental money had depreciated more than half had bought acres by the thousand, and become generalissimo of flocks and herds.  Through the admiration of his townsmen for his wounds, he rapidly and easily attained the rank of Colonel, without the discomfort of fighting for it; and from his excellent sense and the executive ability induced by military habits, became, in turn, justice of the peace, deacon of the church, town-clerk, and manager-general of Walton.

Nobody—­that is to say, nobody in the family—­spoke, when Colonel Fox was in the house, unless first spoken to,—­not even Dorcas.  Such were the domestic tactics of the last century, and Colonel Fox held fast to old notions.

The social ones were far more liberal,—­so very liberal, indeed, so very free and easy, in the rural districts especially, that only a knowledge of the primitive conditions under which such manners grew up could possibly reconcile with them any impressions of purity and discretion.  In hearing of manners, therefore, it is always necessary to remember that the children of country Puritans are and were wholly different in the grain from Paris or London