Within the precincts of the yard, the tender conservatism of our great-hearted mother Nature, gently toned the savage stony features; and even under the chill frown of iron barred windows, golden sunshine bravely smiled, soft grasses wove their emerald velvet tapestries starred and flushed with dainty satin petals, which late Autumn roses showered in munificent contribution, to the work of pitying love.

In a comfortably furnished room situated in the second story of the main building, sat a woman apparently thirty-five years old, who was singing to a baby lying face downward on her lap, while with one hand she rocked the wicker cradle beside her, where a boy of four years was tossing.  Her hazel eyes were full of kindly light, the whole face eloquent with that patient, limitless tenderness, which is the magic chrism of maternity, wherewith Lucina and Cuba abundantly anoint Motherhood.  The blessed and infallible nepenthe for all childhood’s ills and aches, mother touch, mother songs, soon held soothing sway; and when the woman laid the sleeping babe on her own bed, and covered her with a shawl, she saw her husband leaning against the partly open door.

“Come here, Susie.  The kids are snug and safe for the present, and I want you.”

“For shame, Ned!  To call our darlings such a beastly name.  Kids, indeed!  My sweetest, loveliest lambs!”

“There!  Hear yourself!  If I can see any choice of respectability between kids and lambs, may I turn to a thoroughbred Southdown, and take the blue ribbon at the next Fair.  Beasts of the field, all of them.  The always-wide-awake-contrariness of womankind is a curious and fearful thing.  If I had called our beloved towheads, lambs, you would have sworn through blue ruin that they were the cutest, spryest pair of spotted kids, that ever skipped over a five-railed fence!”

“So much the worse for you, Ned Singleton, that you are such a hopeless heathen; you do not even know where the Elect are appointed to stand, at that great day when the sheep come up on the right hand of the Lord, and the goats go down to the left.  If you read your Bible more, I should have less to teach you.”

“Oh! but let me tell you, I thought of all that before I made up my mind to marry the daughter of a Presbyterian preacher.  I knew your dear little blue-nose would keep the orthodox trail; and being one of the Elect you could not get the points of the celestial compass mixed.  Don’t you forget, that it is part of the unspoken marriage contract, that the wife must not only keep her own soul white, but bleach her husband’s also; and no matter what a reprobate a man may be, he always expects his better-half, by hook or by crook, to steer him into heaven.”

He put his hands on his wife’s shoulders, shook her, in token of mastery, and kissed her.

“What do you want of my ‘always-wide-awake-contrariness’?  I have half a mind not to help you out of your scrape; for of course you have mired somewhere.  What is the matter now, Ned?”