Sometimes, after one of these successful imaginings, when Ellen’s mother called her into the house she would stare at her little daughter uneasily, and give her a spoonful of a bitter spring medicine which she had brewed herself.  When Ellen’s father, Andrew Brewster, came home from the shop, she would speak to him aside as he was washing his hands at the kitchen sink, and tell him that it seemed to her that Ellen looked kind of “pindlin’.”  Then Andrew, before he sat down at the dinner-table, would take Ellen’s face in his two moist hands, look at her with anxiety thinly veiled by facetiousness, rub his rough, dark cheek against her soft, white one until he had reddened it, then laugh, and tell her she looked like a bo’sn.  Ellen never quite knew what her father meant by bo’sn, but she understood that it signified something very rosy and hearty indeed.

Ellen’s father always picked out for her the choicest and tenderest bits of the humble dishes, and his keen eyes were more watchful of her plate than of his own.  Always after Ellen’s mother had said to her father that she thought Ellen looked pindling he was late about coming home from the shop, and would turn in at the gate laden with paper parcels.  Then Ellen would find an orange or some other delicacy beside her plate at supper.  Ellen’s aunt Eva, her mother’s younger sister, who lived with them, would look askance at the tidbit with open sarcasm.  “You jest spoil that young one, Fanny,” she would say to her sister.

“You can do jest as you are a mind to with your own young ones when you get them, but you can let mine alone.  It’s none of your business what her father and me give her to eat; you don’t buy it,” Ellen’s mother would retort.  There was the utmost frankness of speech between the two sisters.  Neither could have been in the slightest doubt as to what the other thought of her, for it was openly proclaimed to her a dozen times a day, and the conclusion was never complimentary.  Ellen learned very early to form her own opinions of character from her own intuition, otherwise she would have held her aunt and mother in somewhat slighting estimation, and she loved them both dearly.  They were headstrong, violent-tempered women, but she had an instinct for the staple qualities below that surface turbulence, which was lashed higher by every gust of opposition.  These two loud, contending voices, which filled the house before and after shop-hours—­for Eva worked in the shop with her brother-in-law—­with a duet of discords instead of harmonies, meant no more to Ellen than the wrangle of the robins in the cherry-trees.  She supposed that two sisters always conversed in that way.  She never knew why her father, after a fiery but ineffectual attempt to quell the feminine tumult, would send her across the east yard to her grandmother Brewster’s, and seat himself on the east door-step in summer, or go down to the store in the winter.  She would sit at the window in her grandmother’s sitting-room,