The next generation had fallen away somewhat from their fathers’ standards.  It is not in human nature to stand such a strain as their families had been subjected to.  There is an innate yearning for joy and happiness, and even the sternest discipline cannot keep man forever in the gloomy bonds of fanaticism.  In most cases, the immediate descendants of Cromwell’s soldiers would gladly have made some sort of compromise, would have surrendered much of their outlying land to obtain secure and peaceful possession of the rest, and would have emerged from the life of gloomy seclusion, in which they found themselves; but no whisper of any such feeling as this would be heard in the household of Zephaniah Whitefoot, so long as he lived.

He was an old man now, but as hard, as gloomy, and as unlovable as he had been when in his prime.  His wife had died very many years before, of no disease that Zephaniah or the doctor he called in could discover, but, in fact, of utter weariness at the dull life of repression and gloom which crushed her down.  Of a naturally meek and docile disposition, she had submitted without murmuring to her husband’s commands, and had, during her whole married life, never shocked him so much as she did the day before her death, when, for the first time, she exhibited the possession of an opinion of her own, by saying earnestly: 

“You may say what you like, Zephaniah, but I do think we were meant to have some happiness and pleasure on earth.  If we were intended to go through life without laughing, why should we be able to laugh?  Oh, how I should like to hear one hearty, natural laugh again before I die, such as I used to hear when I was a girl!”

Jabez Whitefoot inherited his mother’s docility of disposition, and, even when he grew to middle age, never dreamt of disputing his father’s absolute rule, and remained strictly neutral when his wife, the daughter of an old comrade of his father, settled a few miles away, fought stoutly at times against his tyranny.

“You are less than a man, Jabez,” she would say to him, indignantly, “to put up, at your age, with being lectured as if you were a child.  Parental obedience is all very well, and I hope I was always obedient to my father; but when it comes to a body not being permitted to have a soul of his own, it is going too far.  If you had told me that, when I became your wife, I was to become the inmate of a dungeon for the rest of my existence, I wouldn’t have had you, not if you had been master of all the broad lands of Leinster.”

But, though unable to rouse her husband into making an effort for some sort of freedom, Hannah Whitefoot had battled more successfully in behalf of her son, John.

“You have had the management of your son, sir, and I will manage mine,” she said.  “I will see that he does not grow up a reprobate or a Papist, but at least he shall grow up a man, and his life shall not be as hateful as mine is, if I can help it.”