The usual American fashion of that time of giving double or treble names was not followed in the christening of the daughters of Gano, so that after marriage each girl might retain her patronymic, writing it after her Christian name and before her husband's. The eldest son of every daughter was called Gano, and Gano was given to each succeeding child for a middle name. This had been going on for some time, and yet neither Maryland nor any more favored spot was populous with Ganos. They had not been a prolific race, and but a single _mésalliance_ was set down to their discredit. A Gano had once married a New England school-mistress with a turn for preaching. This unpopular lady's offspring, John Gano--the only son of an only son--died eleven years before the Civil War, leaving a widow, two sons, and a daughter. These three survivors in the direct line of male descent, Ethan, John, and Valeria, were unmistakably delicate children. The neighbors had doubts if their mother would rear them. The widow, "one of the Calverts of Baltimore," held to be a very retiring and religious person, soon discovered a force of character and an energy not too common among women of her class in the slave-holding South. She managed her husband's estate and the education of her children with ability and judgment, albeit arbitrarily enough, save in matters of religion. Was it a breath wafted across the years of that old passion for religious liberty that had carried her ancestors over perilous seas--an echo of the Eve of St. Bartholomew, or of some Lollard wrong--that made so strangely tolerant this autocratic woman, turned Baptist in her strenuous youth, inclining now, through throes of spirit incommunicable, to the Episcopacy her dead husband had abandoned? The element of the grotesque in this battering in succession at the different doors of heaven is more apparent to those never storm-tossed souls that venture not from the haven, so content with being spiritually becalmed that striving after truth and faring far in pursuit of it seem childish and ignoble. Such people smile at Newman, and think themselves magnanimous if they accept his "Apology." Mrs. Gano had gone unflinchingly through those seasons of spiritual stress, common enough among the thoughtful of that time, and so difficult for some of us to-day even to imagine. In spite of her strong self-control and her great practical common-sense, her passionately religious nature had hurried her headlong through one doctrinal crisis after another. Her youth and early maturity had been one wide spiritual battle-field. Not that a moment of unbelief in revealed religion ever troubled her, but questions of the true interpretation, questions of dogma and of form, that might as well have been questions of life and death. And all the while, up and down the highway of her youth, raged the ancient dragons, renamed Election and Reprobation.