“Very different, Kitty.  Don’t flatter yourself that you will ever be like him in any way.  William Muller is a Christian of the old type.  Though, as for grits, a man should not disregard the requirements of the stomach too much,” with an inward twinge as he smelt the oysters.  He began to play thoughtfully, while Kitty looked again through the book-shop to the room beyond.  The books about her always made unfamiliar pictures when one looked at them suddenly.  They lay now in such weights of age and mustiness on the floor, the counters, the beams overhead, the yellow walls of them were lost in such depths of cobwebs and gloom, that they made a dark retreating frame, in which she sat like a clear, fine picture in the doorway, the yellow sunset light behind her.  She could see her mother looking in at her, and the plump, neat little clergyman in his tight-fitting ribbed suit of brown and spotless shirt-front.  He gently stroked his small black imperial as he talked, but his eyes behind their gold eye-glasses never wavered in their mild regard of her.  Kitty grew restless under it.

“Mr. Muller is talking of the class of books you keep, father,” she said, lowering her voice:  “I’m sure of it.  They are as unsavory in his nostrils as to the reformers in the village.  They’d all excommunicate you if they could.”

“Guinness, Book Agent, Kitty,” finishing his tune with a complacent scrape, “has been known for twenty years, while Berrytown belongs to yesterday.  But the intolerance of these apostles of toleration is unaccountable.  They mean well, though.  I really never knew people mean better; yet—­” He finished the sentence with a shake of the head, solemnly burying the fiddle in its case.

Both he and Catharine turned involuntarily to the window.  Five years ago there had been half a dozen old buildings like the Book-house stretched along Indian Creek, the roofs curled and black, the walls bulging with age and damp.  Now, there was Berrytown.

Berrytown was the Utopia in actual laths, orchards and bushel-measures of the advance-guard of the reform party in the United States.  It was the capital of Progress, where social systems and raspberries grew miraculously together.  Thither hied every man who had any indictment against the age, or who had invented an inch-rule of a theory which was to bring the staggering old world into shape.  Woman-Suffrage, Free-Love, Spiritualism, off-shoots from Orthodoxy in every sect, had there food and shelter.  Radical New England held the new enterprise dear as the apple of her eye:  Western New York stretched toward it hands of benediction.  As Catharine looked out, not a tree stood between her and the sky-line.  Row after row of cottages replete with white paint and the modern conveniences; row after row of prolific raspberry bushes on the right, cranberry bogs on the left—­the great Improved Canning-houses for fruit flanking the town on one side, Muller’s Reformatory for boys on the other.  The Book-house