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savages and overrun by ravenous
beasts, and she had found it populated instead by the gentlest sort of
men and equally gentle beasts.
She did a great deal for David Windom. He was a proud man and
ambitious. He saw the wisdom of her teachings and he followed them,
not reluctantly but with a fierce desire to refine what God had given
him in the shape of raw material: a good brain, a sturdy sense of honour,
and above all an imagination that lifted him safely,--if not always
sanely,--above the narrow world in which the farmer of that day spent
his entire life. Not that he was uncouth to begin with,--far from it. He
had been irritatingly fastidious from boyhood up. His thoughts had
wandered afar on frequent journeys, and when they came back to take
up the dull occupation they had abandoned temporarily, they were

broader than when they went out to gather wool. The strong,
well-poised English wife found rich soil in which to work; he grew
apace and flourished, and manifold were the innovations that stirred a
complacent community into actual unrest. A majority of the farmers
and virtually all of the farmers' wives were convinced that Dave
Windom was losing his mind, the way he was letting that woman boss
him around.
The women did not like her. She was not one of them and never could
be one of them. Her "hired girls" became "servants" the day she entered
the ugly old farmhouse on the ridge. They were no longer considered
members of the family; they were made to feel something they had
never felt before in their lives: that they were not their mistress's
equals.
The "hired girl" of those days was an institution. As a rule, she moved
in the same social circle as the lady of the house and it was customary
for her to intimately address her mistress by her Christian name. She
enjoyed the right to engage in all conversations; she was, in short, "as
good as anybody." The new Mrs. Windom was not long in transporting
the general housework "girl" into a totally unexampled state of
astonishment. This "girl,"--aged forty-five and a prominent member of
the Methodist Church,--announced to everybody in the community
except to Mrs. Windom herself that she was going to leave. She did not
leave. The calm serenity of the new mistress prevailed, even over the
time-honoured independence in which the "girl" and her kind
unconsciously gloried. Respect succeeded injury, and before the bride
had been in the Windom house a month, Maria Bliss was telling the
other "hired girls" of the neighbourhood that she wouldn't trade places
with them for anything in the world.
Greatly to the consternation and disgust of other householders, a
"second girl" was added to the Windom menage,--a parlour-maid she
was called. This was too much. It was rank injustice. General
housework girls began to complain of having too much work to
do,--getting up at five in the morning, cooking for half a dozen "hands,"
doing all the washing and ironing, milking, sweeping and so on, and

not getting to bed till nine or ten o'clock at night,--to say nothing of
family dinners on Sunday and the preacher in every now and then, and
all that. Moreover, Mrs. Windom herself never looked bedraggled. She
took care of her hair, wore good clothes, went to the dentist regularly
(whether she had a toothache or not), had meals served in what Maria
Bliss loftily described as "courses," and saw to it that David Windom
shaved once a day, dressed better than his neighbours, kept his "surrey"
and "side-bar buggy" washed, his harness oiled and polished, and wore
real riding-boots.
The barnyard took on an orderly appearance, the stables were repaired,
the picket fences gleamed white in the sun, the roof of the house was
painted red, the sides a shimmering white, and there were green
window shutters and green window boxes filled with geraniums. The
front yard was kept mowed, and there were great flower-beds encircled
by snow-white boulders; a hammock was swung in the shade of two
great oaks, and--worst of all! a tennis-court was laid out alongside the
house.
Tennis! That was a game played only by "dudes"! Passers-by looked
with scorn upon young David Windom and his flaxen-haired wife as
they played at the silly game before supper every evening. And they
went frequently to the "opera house" at the county seat, ten miles up the
river; they did not wait for summer to come with its circus, as all the
other farmers were content to do; whenever there was a good "show" at
the theatre in town they sent up for reserved seats and drove in for
supper at the principal hotel. Altogether, young Mrs. Windom was
simply "raising Cain" with