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 dreamy, like those of his son Bob. He always looked clean and wholesome and was circumspect about his tobacco spitting.

He was a veteran of the Civil War and loved to talk of those far off days when as a youth of twenty he had toted a musket in defiance of what was for him the right. In a deep bass voice vibrant with chest resonance he would tell again and again in the same words stories of the events of the war that had made the deepest appeal to the simple nobility of his nature: stories of romance of devotion and of heroism.

When he was not talking about the war he talked about the virtues of his dead wife. Late in life he had made a second marriage with a sister of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, Aunt Amanda Baxter, herself a widow of long standing. He remained, however, an unwilling victim. In the neighbors' houses he talked continually about the beauty and sweetness of his first wife, alluding to her always as "My wife." He never spoke disparagingly of Aunt Amanda, but when he had occasion to mention her it was always as "That woman I'm a-livin' with naow."

Uncle Amos was fond of Jerry and Judith and spent many hours of undisturbed quiet sitting by their stove talking of the old war and of the wife of his youth.

Once in a while Joe Barnaby came over to get away from the thick atmosphere of home. Joe was a son-in-law of Uncle Sam, having married one of the latter's nine children, Bessie Maud by name. Bessie Maud had not spoken to her mother and father since the occasion of a quarrel which had occurred shortly after her marriage. That was eight years ago. She had also quarreled with several of her brothers and sisters and stopped speaking to them. Such long sustained family feuds were common enough in Scott County where slight grievances dwelt upon in solitude grew like a rolling snowball. But of late years Bessie Maud's temper had become so uncertain and her habit of mind so strongly anti-social that few even of the near neighbors ever went near her house. It was whispered