It is impossible to write a story of New England life and manners for a thoughtless, shallow-minded person. If we represent things as they are, their intensity, their depth, their unworldly gravity and earnestness must inevitably repel lighter spirits, as the reverse pole of the magnet drives off sticks and straws. In no other country were the soul and the spiritual life ever such intense realities, and everything contemplated so much (to use a current New England phrase) “in reference to eternity.” * * * * * [Sidenote: New England theology.] The rigid theological discipline of New England is fitted to produce rather strength and purity than enjoyment. It was not fitted to make a sensitive and thoughtful nature happy, however it might ennoble and exalt. * * * * * [Sidenote: The kitchen.] The kitchen of a New England matron was her throne-room, her pride; it was the habit of her life to produce the greatest possible results there with the slightest possible discomposure; and what any woman could do, Mrs. Katy Scudder could do _par excellence_. Everything there seemed to be always done and never doing. Washing and baking, those formidable disturbers of the composure of families, were all over within those two or three morning hours when we are composing ourselves for a last nap,—and only the fluttering of linen over the green yard on Monday mornings proclaimed that the dreaded solemnity of a wash had transpired. A breakfast arose there as by magic; and in an incredibly short space after, every knife, fork, spoon, and trencher, clean and shining, was looking as innocent and unconscious in its place as if it never had been used and never expected to be.