The journey beneath the maples proved such a pleasant one and was so easily made as to invite a certain familiarity of intercourse that the Cabots saw no good reason to discourage. Mrs. Judd, a strong-framed woman with a heavy chin, whose failing memory seemed her only weakness, was now about eighty years of age, and generally sat by a sunny window in the big dining-room, where she rocked and knitted from morning till night, paying little attention to what went on about her. If Amos had been her own son she could not have loved him more, and this affection was returned in full with an unceasing thoughtfulness and care. Both Molly and her father were gratified at finding in this young man a neighbor whose society it seemed safe to encourage. He proved a sensible, unpretending person, fond of fun and pleasure, but with plenty of convictions; these convictions, however, while a source of amusement to Mr. Cabot, were not always accepted by the daughter. They were often startling departures from his education and environment, and showed little respect for conventionalities. He never attended church, but owned a pew in each of the five temples at Daleford, and to each of these societies he was a constant and liberal contributor. For three of them he had given parsonages that were ornaments to the village, and as the sectarian spirit in that locality was alive and hot these generous gifts had produced alternating outbursts of thankfulness and rage, all of which apparently caused neither surprise nor annoyance to the young philosopher. When Molly Cabot told him, after learning this, that it would indicate a more serious Christian spirit if he paid for but a single pew and sat in it, he answered: “But that spirit is just the evil I try to escape, for your good Christian is a hot sectarian. It is the one thing in his religion he will fight and die for, and it seems to me the one thing he ought to be ashamed of. If any one sect is right and the others wrong it is all a hideous joke on the majority, and a proper respect for the Creator prevents my believing in any such favoritism.”