It is strange, Johnny, it really does seem to me very strange, how easy it is in this world to be always taking care of our rights. I’ve thought a great deal about it since I’ve been growing old, and there seems to me a good many things we’d better look after fust.

But you see I hadn’t found that out in ’41, and so I sat in the corner, and felt very much abused.  I can’t say but what Nancy had pretty much the same idea; for when the young ones were all in bed at last, she took her knitting and sat down the other side of the fire, sort of turning her head round and looking up at the ceiling, as if she were trying her best to forget I was there.  That was a way she had when I was courting, and we went along to huskings together, with the moon shining round.

Well, I kept on smoking, and she kept on looking at the ceiling, and nobody said a word for a while, till by and by the fire burnt down, and she got up and put on a fresh log.

“You’re dreadful wasteful with the wood, Nancy,” says I, bound to say something cross? and that was all I could think of.

“Take care of your own fire, then,” says she, throwing the log down and standing up as straight as she could stand.  “I think it’s a pity if you haven’t anything better to do, the last night before going in, than to pick everything I do to pieces this way, and I tired enough to drop, carrying that great crying child in my arms all day.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Aaron Hollis!”

Now if she had cried a little, very like I should have given up, and that would have been the end of it, for I never could bear to see a woman cry; it goes against the grain.  But your mother wasn’t one of the crying sort, and she didn’t feel like it that night.

She just stood up there by the fireplace, as proud as Queen Victory,—­I don’t blame her, Johnny,—­O no, I don’t blame her; she had the right of it there, I ought to have been ashamed of myself; but a man never likes to hear that from other folks, and I put my pipe down on the chimney-shelf so hard I heard it snap like ice, and I stood up too, and said—­but no matter what I said, I guess.  A man’s quarrels with his wife always make me think of what the Scripture says about other folks not intermeddling.  They’re things, in my opinion, that don’t concern anybody else as a general thing, and I couldn’t tell what I said without telling what she said, and I’d rather not do that.  Your mother was as good and patient-tempered a woman as ever lived, Johnny, and she didn’t mean it, and it was I that set her on.  Besides, my words were worst of the two.

Well, well, I’ll hurry along just here, for it’s not a time I like to think about; but we had it back and forth there for half an hour, till we had angered each other up so I couldn’t stand it, and I lifted up my hand,—­I would have struck her if she hadn’t been a woman.

“Well,” says I, “Nancy Hollis, I’m sorry for the day I married you, and that’s the truth, if ever I spoke a true word in my life!”