Wesley grinned. He was no match for his sister in the humorous bouts waged over his head against his father's prejudices and cherished social schemes. During the vacation she put a heavy penalty of raillery upon his swelling pride and vanity, sarcasm that tried the paternal patience as well as his own. Wesley, however, had a large fund of the philosophy that comes from a high estimate of one's self. He was well favored in looks and build, though somewhat effeminate, with his small hands and carefully shod feet. He would have been called a "dude" had the word been known in its present significance; as it was, he was regarded as a coxcomb by the derisive group hostile to the father's social pretensions. He was the first of the golden youth of his set to adopt the then reviving mode of parting the hair on the middle of the head. In the teeth of the village derision, he persisted in this with a tenacity that Kate declared gave promise of a "Wellington." For many who had at first adopted the foreign freak had been ridiculed out of it, discouraged by the obstinate refusal of the generality to follow the lead. In those sturdily primitive days the rich youth of the land had not so universally gone abroad as they do now, and "the proper thing" among the "well born" was not so distinctly laid down in the code of the _élite_. The accent and manners that now mark "good form" seemed queer, not to say _bouffe_, to even the first circles of home society, and the first disciples of "Anglomania" had a very hard time polishing the raw material. The home life of the Boones was something better and sincerer than the impression made upon their neighbors by the father's invincible push and high-handed ways. His daughter and son had been born to him in middle age. They had the reverence for the parent marked in the conduct of children who associate gray hairs with the venerable. With all her strong sense and self-assertion, Kate was proud of the fact that she was her father's daughter. It was a distinction to bear his name. His solidity, his masterful will, his well-defined, if narrow, convictions, were to her the sanctities one is apt to associate with lineage or magistracy. Wesley, though less impressionable than his sister, shared these secret devotions to the parent's parts, and bowed before his father's behests, in the filial reverence of the sons of the patriarchs. When Elisha Boone denounced the outbreak of John Brown at Harper's Ferry as more criminal than Aaron Burr's treason, his children made his prepossessions their own; when, three years later, the father proudly eulogized the uprising he had so luridly condemned, his children saw no tergiversation in the swift conversion. When to this full measure of lay perfection the complexion of Levite godliness was superadded by election to the deaconate in the Baptist Church, it will readily be seen that two young people, in whom the hard worldliness of wealth and easy conditions