as a bedchamber also, since Thomas Macy confessed to “bein rather tender,” and to liking a warm room to sleep In, though his neighbors often insinuated that he was killing himself by the Indulgence.  And indeed the heat must have been stifling when we consider the size of the fireplace, nine feet wide by four deep, with a yawning throat, through which the rain poured freely down on stormy nights, putting out the best arranged mass of coals, ashes and peat, and, in spite of the little gutter purposely made round the broad brick hearth, sometimes overflowing and drenching a portion of the neat rag carpet, in which, with true Quaker consistency, no gay-colored fragment had been allowed a place.

In striking contrast to all this magnificence was the lowly home to which James Starbuck brought his happy bride.  This little house was “double” also—­that Is, it was entered in the centre by a small square passage just big enough for the outer door to swing in.  On one side of this entry was a tiny parlor, as dismal as rag carpet, fireless hearth, dingy paper and dark-green paper shades to the small windows could make it.  On the other side of the entry was the tiny and cold bedroom of the senior Starbucks.  In the centre of the house rose a massive chimney, big enough to retain all the heat from a dozen fires.  Across the rear of parlor, chimney and bedroom ran the long, low sunshiny kitchen.  At one end of this certain ladder-like stairs conducted to the loft, which had served Jim for a “roosting-place” ever since he had grown big enough to be trusted o’ nights so far away from his mother.  On Sarah’s advent into the family the dismal “best-room” was made habitable by the addition of a “four-poster”—­which Mrs. Starbuck senior regretted was only of cherry-wood and not carved—­and by sundry little feminine contrivances of Sarah’s own.

I said that for a time all seemed to go on happily in this humble home.  And the seeming would have been reality had Jim possessed the faith in his wife which she had in him.  True, he loved and believed in her after his fashion, and his mother was a strong ally on his wife’s side; but Jim had one fatal weakness of character.  He resented the slightest look that was anything but simple admiration on the part of his wife.  A strong nature is not afraid of censure, but a weak one, pleading sensitiveness, is easily roused to small retaliations, repaying what is good in intention with what is evil.  Jim, as his father had truly told him, was “not the pootiest-mannered feller a gal ever see,” and in the daily home-life this became apparent to Sarah as it had never been in all the years they had been near neighbors.  Naturally, she wished her husband to be pleasing to her father, and at last ventured to hint, as delicately as she could, at various little points in which improvements might be made.  At first Jim did not seem very restless under such reproofs, given, as they were, with many a loving kiss and winsome