"I don't like talking about such things," he answered; "but it came into my head to do my Master's bidding: 'Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.'" "Fiddlestick-end!" said Mrs. Purchase. "I assure you--" "If you don't mean to get upsides with Tom Trevarthen, I'm a Dutchman. 'Forgive your enemies' may be gospel teaching, but I never knew a Rosewarne to practise it. You're a clever fellow, nephew Sam, and that speech saved your face, as the Yankees say; but somehow I've a notion its cleverness didn't end there. I saw the schoolmistress watching you--did she put you up to it?" "I don't mind telling you that she had interceded with me." "I like the cut of that girl's jib," Mrs. Purchase announced after a pause. "She's good-looking, and she has pluck. But I don't take back what I said, that it's a wrong you're doing to Clem and Myra, putting them to school with all the riff-raff of the parish." "That's the kind of objection one learns to expect from a Radical," her nephew answered drily. "'Tis a queer thing, now," she mused, "that ever since I married 'Siah the family will have me to be a Radical; and 'tis the queerer, because ne'er one of 'ee knows what a Radical is or ought to be. S'pose I do hold that all mankind and all womankind has equal rights under the Lord--that don't mean they're all alike, do it? or that I can't tell a man from a woman, or my lord from a scavenger? D'ee reckon that we'm all-fellows-to-football aboard the _Virtuous Lady_, and the fo'c'sle hands mess aft?" "They would if you were consistent," answered Mr. Sam, with positiveness. She sighed impatiently. "There's times you make me long to wring your stiff neck. But I'll take your own consistency, as you call it. I don't notice you send that precious boy o' yourn to the Board School; and yet if 'tis good enough for Clem and Myra, 'tis good enough for any Rosewarne." "Calvin has received a superior education. Yet I don't mind telling you that, if I find Miss Marvin competent, I propose asking her to teach him privately." "O--oh!" Mrs. Purchase pursed up her lips and eyed him askance. "Such a nice-looking girl, too!" Mr. Sam flushed beneath his sallow skin. He was about to command her angrily to mind her own business, when the air between the hedgerows, and even the road beneath his feet, shook with a dull and distant detonation. "Sakes alive!" cried Mrs. Purchase. "Don't tell me that's the powder-ship, up the river!" "It didn't come up from the river--it came from Hall!" He gripped her arm with sudden excitement; then, as she began to protest, "Don't talk, woman, but help me along! It came from Hall, I tell you!" Master Calvin defied Myra bravely enough while she threatened, and even while she piled a little heap of gunpowder under the sycamore and ostentatiously sprinkled a train of it across the roadway. He supposed that she intended only to frighten him.