Mrs. Brown came in and stood by the bed.  She did not speak.  She looked at me as if to say that sometimes desperate things have to be done.  I understood.  I acquiesced.  Did Mrs. Brown do it?  I never asked.  Zoe’s sufferings were very great.  All this for Lamborn’s drunken madness.  And then Zoe began to mend.  She was out of her difficulty.  She became herself in a few weeks.  But her spirit had changed.  She was wiser, more self-possessed.  She was more a woman.  A great load had been lifted from me; yet I now faced a new Zoe.  What would this mature Zoe do to me?

CHAPTER XVI

There was the law against Zoe taking this step, and against any one having any part in it.  Still would it be known?  I was content to wait for developments and meanwhile to put the whole thing behind me.  Work helped me to do this.

I had Sarah’s boy to interest me too.  They had named him Amos.  I had taken five twenty-dollar gold pieces and tied them in a package, bound them with a ribbon, and placed them in his tiny hand.  I could not foresee the time when I should touch his hand on an occasion of very different import and with Zoe standing by.  Zoe had made Amos some pretty little things and sent them by me.  Sarah’s only regret was that her grandmother could not see the boy.  Her great happiness was wholly beautiful.  And Reverdy seemed impressed with a greater dignity and a more gracious heart, if that were possible.  I had found Mrs. Brown well adapted to my household.  She liked the place; and the prospect was that she would be long in my service.  Life was moving on.

I kept in touch with affairs in England and Europe through the London Times.  I was also a subscriber to Greeley’s New Yorker; and I did not slight the local paper, which belabored Douglas in proportion as he increased in popularity and power.  I read many books as well.

For I felt the stir of a new age.  I saw the North, the country around me, growing in wealth and dominance.  I saw old despotisms giving way and new ones coming to take their place.  The factory system was arising, due to machinery.  Weaving and spinning processes had improved.  The cry of women and children crowded in the factories of Pennsylvania began to be heard.  The hours of toil were long.  And if the whip descended upon the back of the negro in the South, the factory overseer in Philadelphia flogged the laborer who did not work enough to suit him, or who was tardy at the task.  Women and children there were feeling the lash of the whip.  Just now there was talk of a machine which would cut as much grain in a day as six men could cut with scythes.  I ordered two of these machines for the next year, for I was farming more and more on a big scale.  But what seemed most wonderful to me was an instrument now being talked about which sent messages by electricity.  It was not perfected yet.  It was treated with skepticism.  But if it could be!  If I could get a message from St. Louis, a distance of more than a hundred miles, in a few minutes or an hour!