The bickerings between her father and mother had had not a little to do with the peculiar features of Barbara's life in the colony. As soon as she saw a cloud rising, having learned by frequent experience what it was sure to result in, she would creep away, mount one of the many horses at her choice, and race from the house like a dog in terror, till she was miles from the spot where her father and mother would by that time be writhing in fiercest wordy warfare. What the object of their wrangling might be, she never inquired. It was plain to her almost from the first that nothing was gained by it beyond the silence of fatigue; and as that silence was always fruitful of new strife, it brought a comfort known to be but temporary. Had she not been accustomed to it from earliest childhood, it would have been terrible to her to see human lives going off in such a foul smoke of hell! Not a sentence was uttered by the one but was furiously felt as a wrong by the other--to be remorselessly met by wrong as flagrant, rousing in its turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the injury he suffers absolute injustice. Yet such disputes turn seldom upon the main point at issue between the parties; it may not even once be mentioned, while some new trifle is fought over with all the bitterness of the alienation that lies gnawing and biting and burning beneath. War is raging between kingdoms for the possession of a hovel, which possessed, the quarrel were no nearer settlement than before! Hence it came that Barbara paid so little regard to her mother's challenge of the clergyman. Single combat of the sort she seemed to seek was an experience of Barbara's life too often recurrent to be interesting; the thunders of its artillery, near or afar, passed over her almost unheeded. She had indeed sufficient respect for the forms of religion to regret that her mother should make her behaviour in church the talk of the parish, and to be rather pleased that the clergyman should have had the best of it in his joust of arms with her, but further interest in the matter she scarcely took. On a certain day, Miss Brown wanting at least one pair of new shoes, and her mistress cherishing the idea of a lesson in shoeing her, for which lesson arrangement had not even yet been made, Barbara, having been all the afternoon in the house, went out toward sunset, to have a walk with a book.