Her mother’s people were a fine, honest race, self-reliant and energetic, but there is a very bad streak on the other side.  I have heard that she was seen begging somewhere, but I am not sure that it is true; at any rate she would neither come here to her own home nor listen to any plea from her husband’s family, and at last came back to the farm one night like a ghost, carrying the child in her arms across the fields; all in rags and tatters, both of them.  She confessed to me that she had meant to drown herself and little Nan together.  I could never understand why she went down so fast.  I know that she had been drinking.  Some people might say that it was the scorn of her husband’s relatives, but that is all nonsense, and I have no doubt she and the young man might have done very well if this hadn’t spoiled all their chances at the outset.  She was quite unbalanced and a strange, wild creature, very handsome in her girlhood, but morally undeveloped.  It was impossible not to have a liking for her.  I remember her when she was a baby.”

“And yet people talk about the prosaic New England life!” exclaimed Dr. Ferris.  “I wonder where I could match such a story as that, though I dare say that you know a dozen others.  I tell you, Leslie, that for intense, self-centred, smouldering volcanoes of humanity, New England cannot be matched the world over.  It’s like the regions in Iceland that are full of geysers.  I don’t know whether it is the inheritance from those people who broke away from the old countries, and who ought to be matched to tremendous circumstances of life, but now and then there comes an amazingly explosive and uncontrollable temperament that goes all to pieces from its own conservation and accumulation of force.  By and by you will have all blown up,—­you quiet descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans, and have let off your superfluous wickedness like blizzards; and when the blizzards of each family have spent themselves you will grow dull and sober, and all on a level, and be free from the troubles of a transition state.  Now, you’re neither a new country nor an old one.  You ought to see something of the older civilizations to understand what peace of mind is.  Unless some importation of explosive material from the westward stirs them up, one century is made the pattern for the next.  But it is perfectly wonderful what this climate does for people who come to it,—­a south of Ireland fellow, for instance, who has let himself be rained on and then waited for the sun to dry him again, and has grubbed a little in a bit of ground, just enough to hint to it that it had better be making a crop of potatoes for him.  I always expect to see the gorse and daisies growing on the old people’s heads to match the cabins.  But they come over here and forget their idleness, and in a week or two the east winds are making them work, and thrashing them if they are slow, worse than any slave-driver who ever cracked his whip-lash.  I wonder how you stand it; I do, indeed!  I can’t take an afternoon nap or have my coffee in bed of a morning without thinking I must put into port at the next church to be preached at.”