I learned other things of Nathan regarding his family that morning and in the day and week ensuing. The Forges had a cow, a grievance against the selectmen, a hard time to get along and a mortgage. Nathan’s mother was five years older than his father. The latter had once aspired to be a minister. A premature marriage, however, had sent him to the humbler calling of tapping and heeling shoes. Along with farming in a small way to help out with domestic expenses, Johnathan Forge now proposed to cobble shoes at his new residence in East Foxboro. On his father’s side the boy’s ancestry was English,—that bigoted, Quilpish English which contends that a man’s wife and children are his personal chattels and foot-scrapers. A neurasthenic Yankee wife resented the absurdity but was too weak-charactered to do much more than scream about it. It puzzled me in those days to hear him orate to my father about “every man’s house being his castle.” I could never discern evidences of a “castle” about the flat-roofed, drab-colored, hillside home for which Johnathan had paid the Browns five hundred dollars. Nevertheless, he ran his castle as he pleased, and all the neighbors could do was shrug their individual and collective shoulders and mind their own business. Johnathan was a short man with watery blue eyes. And his mouth never for a moment failed to register that the world “had it in” for him. His antidote for this mundane conspiracy was Religion. Religion completely strangled his sense of humor—if he ever possessed a sense of humor—and kept it strangled. As his children approached maturity, he went to and fro in the earth and moved up and down in it with a stuffed club in his clothes always loaded to the point of explosion, fearing that some one was treading on his authority. He took his religion seriously, Johnathan did, and it gave him a sickening amount of trouble. Nathan’s mother also took life and religion seriously. There was no other way to take it, with Johnathan for a husband. As Johnathan aged, he became stout. As Anna Forge aged, she became thin. But as I first recall her in those East Foxboro days, she was a fairly well-rounded woman with terribly work-reddened hands. She too had weak eyes,—greenish, pin-pointed eyes. Her neurasthenia and hard work ultimately “wore the flesh all off her”, and soon she had contracted the nervous affliction of a twitching face. She did her work in the hardest manner possible and was always tired. She had a sallow, jaundiced complexion and it flavored her days and nights. Nat’s little sister Edith was hardly more than a baby. Yet even at four years she had her father’s petulant mouth and her mother’s whine. Nathan bore no resemblance to either parent. He was just a freckle-faced, snub-nosed, wonder-eyed, good-natured, little country boy. Quickly I found myself attached to him and he became my chum.