“He was a smart man.  But he found things goin’ his way.  Didn’t have to move ’em.”

“Not at first;” she admitted; “but he had to move mountains later.  How far have you read?”

“One thing that helped him,” said Jethro, in indirect answer to this question, “he got a smart woman for his wife—­a smart woman.”

Cynthia looked down at the reins in her lap, and she felt again that wicked stirring within her,—­incredible stirring of minister’s daughter for tanner’s son.  Coniston believes, and always will believe, that the social bars are strong enough.  So Cynthia looked down at the reins.

“Poor Josephine!” she said, “I always wish he had not cast her off.”

“C-cast her off?” said Jethro.  “Cast her off!  Why did he do that?”

“After a while, when he got to be Emperor, he needed a wife who would be more useful to him.  Josephine had become a drag.  He cared more about getting on in the world than he did about his wife.”

Jethro looked away contemplatively.

“Wa-wahn’t the woman to blame any?” he said.

“Read the book, and you’ll see,” retorted Cynthia, flicking her horse, which started at all gaits down the road.  Jethro stood in his tracks, staring, but this time he did not see her face above the hood of the gig.  Presently he trudged on, head downward, pondering upon another problem than Napoleon’s.  Cynthia, at length, arrived in Brampton Street, in a humor that puzzled the good Miss Lucretia sorely.

CHAPTER II

The sun had dropped behind the mountain, leaving Coniston in amethystine shadow, and the last bee had flown homeward from the apple blossoms in front of Aunt Lucy Prescott’s window, before Cynthia returned.  Aunt Lucy was Cynthia’s grandmother, and eighty-nine years of age.  Still she sat in her window beside the lilac bush, lost in memories of a stout, rosy lass who had followed a stalwart husband up a broad river into the wilderness some seventy years agone in Indian days—­Weathersfield Massacre days.  That lass was Aunt Lucy herself, and in just such a May had Timothy’s axe rung through the Coniston forest and reared the log cabin, where six of her children were born.  Likewise in review passed the lonely months when Timothy was fighting behind his rugged General Stark for that privilege more desirable to his kind than life—­self government.  Timothy Prescott would pull the forelock to no man, would have such God-fearing persons as he chose make his laws for him.

Honest Captain Timothy and his Stark heroes, Aunt Lucy and her memories, have long gone to rest.  Little did they dream of the nation we have lived to see, straining at her constitution like a great ship at anchor in a gale, with funnels belching forth smoke, and a new race of men thronging her decks for the mastery.  Coniston is there still behind its mountain, with its rusty firelocks and its hillside graves.