The third Spencer to own the business married a Yankee—­Patience Babcock—­but Patience’s only son married a French-Canadian girl—­for even then the Canadians were drifting down into our part of the country.

So by that time, as you can see—­and this is an important part of my preface—­the Spencer stock was a thrifty mixture of Yankee, Irish, Scotch, Dutch and French blood—­although you would never have guessed it if you had simply seen the name of one Josiah Spencer following another as the owner of the Quinebaug Wagon Works.

In the same year that the fourth Josiah Spencer succeeded to the business, a bridge was built to take the place of the ford and the waterfall was fortified by a dam.  By that time a regular little town had formed around the factory.

The town was called New Bethel.

It was at this stage of their history that the Spencers grew proud, making a hobby of their family tree and even possibly breathing a sigh over vanished coats-of-arms.

The fifth of the line, for instance, married a Miss Copleigh of Boston.  He built a big house on Bradford Hill and brought her home in a tally-ho.  The number of her trunks and the size of her crinolines are spoken of to this day in our part of the country—­also her manner of closing her eyes when she talked, and holding her little finger at an angle when drinking her tea.  She had only one child—­fortunately a son.

This son was the grandfather of our heroine.  So you see we are getting warm at last.

The grandfather of our heroine was probably the greatest Spencer of them all.

Under his ownership the factory was rebuilt of brick and stone.  He developed the town both socially and industrially until New Bethel bade fair to become one of the leading cities in the state.  He developed the water power by building a great dam above the factory and forming a lake nearly ten miles long.  He also developed an artillery wheel which has probably rolled along every important road in the civilized world.

Indeed he was so engaged in these enterprises that he didn’t marry until he was well past forty-five.  Then one spring, going to Charlestown to buy his season’s supply of pine, he came back with a bride from one of the oldest, one of the most famous families in all America.

There were three children to this marriage—­one son and two daughters.

I will tell you about the daughters in my first chapter—­two delightful old maids who later had a baby between them—­but first I must tell you about the seventh and last Josiah.

In his youth he was wild.

This may have been partly due to that irreducible minimum of Original Sin which (they say) is in all of us—­and partly due to his cousin Stanley.

Now I don’t mean to say for a moment that Stanley Woodward was a natural born villain.  I don’t think people are born that way at all.  At first the idea probably struck him as a sort of a joke.  “If anything happens to young Josiah,” I can imagine him thinking to himself with a grin, “I may own this place myself some day....  Who knows?”