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 had not bred home agnosticism, were material for all the credulities of parent worship.  Kate, a year older than Wesley, soon encountered the influences which gave the first shock to her faith and gradually tinctured her sentiments with a clearer insight into her father’s character.  Oddly enough, it was through the rival house this came.  Olympia, a sort of ablegate in the social hierarchy of the village, had been thrown much with Kate, and was greatly amused with her point of view in many of the snarls arising in a provincial society.  The intimacy had been begun in the New York school, where both had been in the same classes, and, though the families saw nothing of each other, the girls did.  Kate was soon led to see that the Spragues had none of the patrician pretension her father attributed to them.  Jack, too, had made much of her, and seemed to delight in her sharp retorts to the inanities of would-be wits.  The episode in Elisha Boone’s life, that all his success, wealth, and after exemplary conduct had not condoned in the village mind, was his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, I set this down with something of the delight Carlyle expresses when in the rubbish of history he found, among the shams called kings and nobles, anything like a man.

It is worth the noting, this trait of Acredale, at a time when riches and success are looked upon as condoning every breach of the decalogue.  Just how the intimacy between the two men came about was not known.  It, however, was known that when Boone first came to Acredale he had been helped in his affairs by Dick Perley’s lavish means.  In a few years Boone was the patron and Perley the client.  As Boone grew rich Perley grew poor, until finally all was gone.  Then the fairest lands of the Perley inheritance passed to Boone.  It was the fireside history of the whole Caribee Valley that the rich contractor had encouraged the ruined gentleman in