 household came to a standstill, and her mother appeared, surprised and reproving, in the doorway.

"Peninnah Penelope Anne," she said with her peculiar exact deliberation and gift of circumlocution, "it is better to go and sew your sampler than to tease your grandfather."

"She does not tease me—I have not shed a tear! That was not the sound of my weeping!" he declared facetiously, one arm protectingly about the little sobbing figure.

"He does not like his grandchildren to climb about him like squirrels and wild cattle," the lady continued. Then irrelevantly, "Long stitches were always avoided in our family. The work you last did in your sampler has been taken out, child, and you can sew it again and to better advantage."

"And earn your name of Penelope," said Richard Mivane.

But he was putting on his hat and evidently had some effort in prospect, for how could he resist,—she looked so childish and appealing as she sat before the fire, weeping those large tears, and absently preparing to sew her sampler anew.

While Richard Mivane, by virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station, its ruling spirit was of far alien character. This was John Ronackstone, a stanch Indian fighter; a far-seeing frontier politician; a man of excellent native faculties, all sharpened by active use and frequent emergencies; skilled and experienced in devious pioneer craft; and withal infinitely stubborn, glorying in the fact of the unchangeableness of his opinions and his immutable abiding by his first statements. After one glance at his square countenance, his steady noncommittal black eyes, the upward bulldog cant of a somewhat massive nose, the firm compression of his long thin lips, one would no more expect him to depart from the conditions of a conclusion than that a signpost would enter into argument and in view of the fatigue of a traveler mitigate and recant its announcement.

Nevertheless Richard Mivane expected "some sense," as he phrased it, from this adamantine pioneer. Such a man naturally arrogated and obtained great weight among his fellows, and perhaps his lack of vacillation furthered this preëminence. He was a good man in the main as well as forceful, but an early and a very apt expression of the demagogue. And as he tolerated amongst his mental furniture no illusions and fostered no follies, his home life harbored no fripperies. His domicile was a contrast to the better ordered homes of the
