The dogs lay about the hearth; one, a hound, in the shadow, with his muzzle stretched flat on the floor between his fore-paws, had saurian suggestions,—he was like an alligator. Leonidas and Lucinda had gone to bed, but the baby was still up and afoot. The fiat of nursery ethics that gentry of his age should be early asleep had been complied with only so far as getting him into his night-gown, which encased his increasing plumpness like a cylinder. He wore a queer night-cap, that made him look incongruously ancient and feminine. He plodded about the puncheon floor, in the joy of his newly acquired powers of locomotion, with reckless enthusiasm. His shadow accompanied him, magnified, elongated,—his similitude as he might be in years to come; he seemed in some sort attended by the presentiment of his future. The energy, however, with which he had started on his long journey through life would presently be abated. In good sooth, he would be glad to sit down often and be still, and would find solace in perching on fences and whittling, and would know that hustling through this world is not what one might hope. He had fallen under the delusion that he could talk as well as walk, and was inarticulately loquacious. Alethea’s errand outside was to gather chips from the wood-pile hard by, to kindle the morning’s fires. It had been long since rain had fallen, but the routine of spreading them upon the hearth, to dry during the night, was as diligently observed as if the reason that gave rise to the habit now existed. The splint baskets filled and redolent of the hickory bark, stood at her feet, yet she did not move. She was solitary in her isolated life, with her exalted moral ideal that could compromise with nothing less than the right. She had known no human being dominated by a supreme idea. The reformers, the martyrs, all who have looked upward, sacrificed in vain for her—not even as a tradition, an exemplar might they uphold when she failed. Religion was vague, distorted, uncomprehended, in the primitive expoundings to which she was accustomed. Her inherent conscience prevailed within her like some fine, ecstatic frenzy. It was of an essence so indomitably militant that in her ignorant musings it seemed that it must be this which marshals the human forces, and fights the battle of life, and is unconquered in death, and which the stumbling human tongue calls the soul. And yet so strange it was, she thought, that she could not always recognize the right,—that she must sedulously weigh and canvass what she had done and what she might have done, and what had resulted.