One day, while sinking an exploratory shaft, Chalender came upon a vein of the snowflake marble that underlay that region. He bored a tunnel through this frost that had become stone; and laid a royal pavement for the rural Croton to march upon to town. The first slab of marble that Chalender cut served him as a pretext for a visit to Tuliptree Farm. He brought it across country in a wagon and laid it down at Patty’s feet. He said he had been writing a poem all the way over, but the jolting of the wagon had knocked the meter askew, and the sight of RoBards had knocked the whole thing out of his sconce. That was his way. He had hoped not to find RoBards at home. Finding him there, he was impudent enough to conceal his dismay in its own exaggeration. He pretended to be caught in a rendezvous and played the scene with an imitation of the bombast of the popular young actor, Edwin Forrest. Patty laughed equally at Chalender’s burlesque of guilt and at her husband’s efforts to pretend amusement. Then she insisted that the slab be set down before the fireplace as a hearthstone, to replace the old block of slate that had been quietly cracking and chipping for years. This whim of hers offended her husband exquisitely, but she thwarted him by a show of hysterics, and he dared not protest; for she was once more in one of those states of mind and body where she must not be crossed. She was like a rose-tree budding every year with a new flower. Her third baby had died in the spring following the great fire. Still Nature would not relent, and another was already aglow within her protesting flesh. And in the fall of 1837, that baby followed its brother to the grave. But that was to be expected. Nobody counted on raising more than half the children the Lord allotted. It was a woman’s duty to bear enough to have a few left to mature. Since nobody had discovered a preventive of disease, it was evidently Heaven’s pleasure to take back its loaned infants after running them through a brief hell of whooping cough, chicken pox, measles, fits, red gum, and scarlatina. Patty was an unheroic mother. She fought the doctor’s and the nurse’s orders to keep the babies bandaged tightly, and she was impatient with the theory that it was a good thing for a baby to cry all the time, and that it was well to have all the diseases and get them over with—or go under with them.