“Agriculture is out of date in this State,” she had heard him say once, with her own ears, “Better let the old people live on their capital, as they go along. It’s no use throwing good money after bad. Farm land here in the East is bound to decrease in value, steadily.” This about the homestead--about the cradle of his ancestors! Poor old lady, had the Fairchilds been sending baronial roots down through all this soil for a thousand years, she couldn’t have been more pained or mortified over Albert’s callous view of the farm which her grandfather, a revolted cobbler from Rhode Island, had cleared and paid for at ten cents an acre. Then there was his marriage, too. In all the years of armed neutrality or tacit warfare which she and Cicely had passed together under one roof, they had never before or since come so near an open and palpable rupture as they did over a city-bred cousin of Cicely’s--a forward, impertinent, ill-behaved girl from New York, who had come to the farm on a visit some ten years before, and whose father was summoned at last to take her away because otherwise she, Sabrina, threatened to herself leave the house. There had been a desperate scene before this conclusion was reached. Sabrina had stormed and threatened to shake the dust of the homestead from off her outraged sandals. Cicely for the once had stood her ground, and said she fancied even worse things than that might happen without producing a universal cataclysm. Lemuel had almost wept with despair over the tumult. The two older boys, particularly John, had not concealed their exuberant hope that their maiden Aunt might be taken at her word, and allowed to leave. And the girl herself, this impudent huzzy of a Richardson, actually put her spoke in too, and said things about old cats and false teeth, which it made Sabrina’s blood still boil to recall. And it was this girl, of all others in the world, whom Albert must go and marry! Yet Sabrina, in her present despondent mood, felt herself able to rise above mere personal piques and dislikes, if there really was a hope for the family’s revival. She was not very sanguine about even Albert, but beyond him there was no chance at all. John, the second brother, had talent enough, she supposed. People said he was smart, and he must be, else he could scarcely have come in his twenty-eighth year to be owner and editor of the Thessaly _Banner of Liberty_, and put in all those political pieces written in the first person plural, as if he had the power of attorney for all Dearborn county. But then he was mortally shiftless about money matters, and they did say that since his wife’s death--a mere school-teacher she had been--he had become quite dissipated and played billiards. Besides she was at open feud with him, and never, never would speak to him again, the longest day _he_ lived! So that settled John.