The ceremony was one I had watched many hundreds of times. Mrs. Beech was a tall, dark, silent woman, whom I could well believe to have been handsome in her youth. She belonged to one of the old Mohawk-Dutch families, and when some of her sisters came to visit at the farm I noted that they too were all dusky as squaws, with jet-black shiny curls and eyes like the midnight hawk. I used always to be afraid of them on this account, but I dare say they were in reality most kindly women. Mrs. Beech herself, represented to my boyish eyes the ideal of a saturnine and masterful queen. She performed great quantities of work with no apparent effort--as if she had merely willed it to be done. Her household was governed with a cold impassive exactitude; there were never any hitches, or even high words. The hired girls, of course, called her “M’rye,” as the rest of us mostly did, but they rarely carried familiarity further, and as a rule respected her dislike for much talk. During all the years I spent under her roof I was never clear in my mind as to whether she liked me or not. Her own son, even, passed his boyhood in much the same state of dubiety. But to her husband, Abner Beech, she was always most affectionately docile and humble. Her snapping black eyes followed him about and rested on him with an almost canine fidelity of liking. She spoke to him habitually in a voice quite different from that which others heard addressed to them. This, indeed, was measurably true of us all. By instinct the whole household deferred in tone and manner to our big, bearded chief, as if he were an Arab sheik ruling over us in a tent on the desert. The word “patriarch” still seems best to describe him, and his attitude toward us and the world in general, as I recall him sitting there in the half-darkened living-room, with his wife bending over his feet in true Oriental submission. “Do you know where Jeff is?” the farmer suddenly asked, without turning his head to where I sat braiding a whiplash, but indicating by the volume of voice that his query was put to me. “He went off about two o’clock,” I replied, “with his fish-pole. They say they are biting like everything down in the creek.” “Well, you keep to work and they won’t bite you,” said Abner Beech. This was a very old joke with him, and usually the opportunity of using it once more tended to lighten his mood. Now, though mere force of habit led him to repeat the pleasantry, he had no pleasure in it. He sat with his head bent, and his huge hairy hands spread listlessly on the chair-arms. Mrs. Beech finished her task, and rose, lifting the bowl from the floor. She paused, and looked wistfully into her husband’s face. “You ain’t a bit well, Abner!” she said. “Well as I’m likely ever to be again,” he made answer, gloomily. “Has any more of’em been sayin’ or doin’ anything?” the wife asked, with diffident hesitation.