as himself, would be part of the patrician caste.  The daughter looked upon all this good-humoredly; she shared none of her father’s morbid delusions on the subject.  She rallied the cadet a good deal on his mission.  When Wesley, after the June examinations, which he passed by the narrowest squeeze—­’twas said by outside influence—­came home to display his cadet buttons and his neat gray uniform in Acredale, Kate bantered the complacent young warrior jocosely.

“We shall all have to live up to your shoulder-straps and brass buttons after this, Wesley,” she cried, as the proud young dandy strutted over the arabesques of the library, where the delighted papa marched him, the better to survey the boy’s splendor.  “And think of the fate that awaits you if, in the esteem of Acredale, you should turn out less than a Napoleon.”

“Be serious, Kate, and don’t tease the boy.  Wesley knows what’s expected of him; he has an opportunity to show what is in his stock.  Thank God, men in the North can now come to their own without going down on their knees to the South!”

Wesley grinned.  He was no match for his sister in the humorous bouts waged over his head against his father’s prejudices and cherished social schemes.  During the vacation she put a heavy penalty of raillery upon his swelling pride and vanity, sarcasm that tried the paternal patience as well as his own.  Wesley, however, had a large fund of the philosophy that comes from a high estimate of one’s self.  He was well favored in looks and build, though somewhat effeminate, with his small hands and carefully shod feet.  He would have been called a “dude” had the word been known in its present significance; as it was, he was regarded as a coxcomb by the derisive group hostile to the father’s social pretensions.  He was the first of the golden youth of his set to adopt the then reviving mode of parting the hair on the middle of the head.  In the teeth of the village derision, he persisted in this with a tenacity that Kate declared gave promise of a “Wellington.”  For many who had at first adopted the foreign freak had been ridiculed out of it, discouraged by the obstinate refusal of the generality to follow the lead.  In those sturdily primitive days the rich youth of the land had not so universally gone abroad as they do now, and “the proper thing” among the “well born” was not so distinctly laid down in the code of the elite.  The accent and manners that now mark “good form” seemed queer, not to say bouffe, to even the first circles of home society, and the first disciples of “Anglomania” had a very hard time polishing the raw material.  The home life of the Boones was something better and sincerer than the impression made upon their neighbors by the father’s invincible push and high-handed ways.  His daughter and son had been born to him in middle age.  They had the reverence for the parent marked in the conduct of children who associate gray hairs with the venerable.