Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/150

 There was something aristocratic about her easy simplicity, yet she seemed not out of place in the homely room of that low-ceilinged farm-house. I guessed that she was responsible for its furnishings and decoration, because it was done in the flat tints and simple fittings of a sophisticated taste. I left with the conviction that she and her husband were a remarkable couple.

It was a conviction that did not endure. There was nothing in their past to support it. Imagine: he had been born on that farm some thirty-five years before; he had had no schooling until he was nine; then, a hulking, slow-minded boy, he had joined the infants' class at the Wauchock village school, down the valley, and, in the ordinary course of education, he had progressed to the public school at Centerbrook. When he left school he went to work in a grocery at Centerbrook, and he moved from there to New York City, where he became bookkeeper for the Perry-Felton Company on William Street. During the years that he lived in New York he returned to his home only once—when he came to the funeral of his parents and the trial of the hired man who was found guilty of having murdered them.

At the conclusion of that trial he sold all the farm stock and implements at auction, locked up the house, and returned to New York. Several