"No objection whatever to a _visit_, madam." "How soon should you consider such a move expedient?" "Ah, that depends," replied the wary gentleman--"depends so much on circumstances." "What kind of circumstances?" she inquired, stiffly. His look and tone said unmistakably, "Depends on your behavior, madam." "Depends on the child's health and-- Run away and play, Ethan," he said. As the little boy closed the door: "Then you do admit he is delicate?" Mrs. Gano spoke more coldly than when Ethan had been there to hear. "I admit the need to consider the health of _all_ children, and secondary only to that, their education." "What are your views as to Ethan's schooling?" "I shall expect him to go through the regular mill, as I did: a good primary school, then the preparatory at Andover, then Harvard." The woman felt a certain fainting of purpose at the cut-and-dried programme presented in that dry manner by the dry old man. It _was_ a "regular mill," and who could tell if the sensitive, fragile little Gano was the stuff to stand these machine-made processes? "I don't believe, myself," said Mr. Tallmadge, with decision, "in haphazard, shilly-shally ways of raising children, and leaving it to them to see what they'll take to." "I have little experience of shilly-shally methods," replied his visitor. "If you leave it to boys to decide, what they take to is mischief nine times out of ten." "I think you may make your mind easy about my grandson." Mr. Tallmadge looked at her in silence for a moment; then suddenly: "Yes, yes; _he'll_ turn out all right." He nodded, as if to say, "Trust me to see to that!" "My experience is, if you want a boy to do a particular thing, set that aim before him at the start. That's the way I was raised; that's the way I propose to raise my grandson." There was a slight pause. "And in what form of religious faith?" "We are all members of the Presbyterian Church." It was said as though it had been in obedience to an edict of the Everlasting from the foundation of the world. "You will appreciate the necessity of having my grandson raised under my own eye when I tell you it is my intention that, after he gets through Harvard, he shall succeed to the editorship of my paper." "My grandson edit an Abolitionist paper?" Mr. Tallmadge blinked in a slightly nervous fashion, but answered, steadfastly: "Abolition is abolished, madam; it has served its end. Ethan will naturally fall heir to my property and my profession." "Ethan is his father's heir first of all--heir to a man who gave his life at Bull Run for our rights, not for the abolition of them." "Abolition _was_ right, and _is_ law, by the sanction of the God of battles."