As he drew pen and paper towards him, there swept over him a sense of the oneness of humanity, and a vision of what the world might be, if man were tenderer, and woman held the wider vision. Such a training as hers, he wrote to Amy Bell, might give her something of both, might grant her a standpoint from which she could see clearer than most women, just because she saw life in larger outlines, undimmed by detail,--a life as different from that of the average woman as the sweep of the garments of the Greek caryatides from the fussy, beruffled gowns of the nineteenth-century women. The question, the vital pressing question in her case, was how she would use this freedom. Should it slip into the hardness of the new woman, on the one hand, or, on the other, allow itself to be fettered to the dulness of every-day decorum, her opportunity would be lost; but if she could hold the delicate equilibrium where she stood,--self-poised, and yet swaying to the influences which must work on every soul for its highest development, plastic yet firm,--then he believed, firmly believed, that there might lie in her a power for which the world would be the better and the richer. "There!" said he, as he blotted and sealed the letter. "That, I should say, is as prosy and didactic as a discourse of my venerated ancestor. I wonder if the tendency to sermonize runs in the blood. I dare say if I had the good fortune to have any religious convictions, I should dogmatize over them in the pulpit, and pound the cushions as vigorously as any itinerant evangelist. Well, well! heredity is a queer thing. We think we get away from it, but it is always cropping up in unexpected places. Our ancestors are like _atra cura_, and ride behind every man's saddle." The clock struck three as he finished his musings. He pushed away his chair, and set back the lamp on the mantel. The light, flaring a little in the draught from the open window, lent a startling look of life to the portrait above it. Flint seemed almost to hear the voice of the dying sea-captain whispering: "God bless you, Ruth--I wish I had understood you better!" Upon his exalted mood the morning voice of a barnyard cock broke mockingly. "Pshaw!" he exclaimed, "what a fool I am!--and at my age, too. I am ashamed. And, by the way, we never took back Dr. Beetle's--no--Dr. Cricket's spectacles. Well-to-morrow will answer as well." CHAPTER VI THE GLORIOUS FOURTH _Extract from the Journal of Miss Susan Standish. Nepaug, July 4, 189-._