“I was but a little boy, Margeret, when I listened to those words, but I shall remember them as long as ever I live. Here in the New England, where we are planting our fields and gardens with all of what we loved best in the Old, we are planting too, as I can see, something more than gardens, the seeds of a new country and a new life. Yet sometimes I fear that in our laws there is too much of harshness and severity, that our faith is more a terror of God’s wrath than a love for His kindness, that we also are planting deep the Gospel of Fear for a sorrowful reaping. It may be I am wrong and that man of fierce speech who cursed my garden was right after all. But, mistaken or not, we are doing a work that will some day prove to be a great one, so that we should all labour happily together like ‘singing masons building roofs of gold.’ That, to my mind, is what it is to be a Puritan. So shall we, Margeret, so easily grow weary of our task merely because the life seems bare and the labour long?” “No, no,” she cried, slipping from his knee and flinging her arms about his neck, “and if you will come in and mend my spinning wheel, I will set about doing my share this very minute. But do you think that my work for others might some day be a little greater than mere spinning and something not—not quite so dull? Must I wait until I am old to do more than that?” Her father laughed cheerily. “No, you need not wait until you are old,” he said, “but it does no harm to be spinning while the greater adventure is tarrying on the way. Who knows, it maybe in waiting for you only just around the corner of the next year.” The sun stood high overhead as they went up the path together, while through the drone of the bees and the subdued twitter of the birds in the drowsy noonday, Margeret could hear the whirr of her mother’s busy wheel. If all the toilers of hand and heart were like Mistress Radpath and Master Simon, the roofs of gold would soon be built to the very clouds. CHAPTER IV THE GOSPEL OF FEAR The higher task and the larger adventure were nearer to Margeret Radpath than she had thought. Neither she, nor her mother nor Master Simon as they went about their work through all those busy summer months had even a vague dream of what the first days of autumn would bring forth. Hopewell, falling ever into more placid ways with each year of quiet and prosperity, had begun to forget the excitements of its earlier history and to cease talking even of the strange vanishing of Jeremiah Macrae. It seemed, as it always does in peaceful times, as though nothing could ever again stir the calm order of the passing days.