There has been a considerable army of State Senators since New York first took on the honors of a Commonwealth, and unto them a great troop of daughters have been born, but surely no other of all these girls ever exulted so fondly, nay, fiercely, in the paternal dignity as did Sabrina. She knew nothing of politics, and little of the outside world; her conceptions of social possibilities were of the most primitive sort; one winter, when she went to Albany with her father, and was passed in a bewildered way through sundry experiences said to be of a highly fashionable nature, it had been temporarily apparent to her own consciousness that she was an awkward, ignorant, red-armed country-girl—but this only for one wretched hour or so. Every mile-post passed on her homeward ride, as she looked through the stage window, brought restored self-confidence, and long before the tedious journey ended she was more the Senator's daughter than ever.
Through this very rebound from mortification she queened it over the simpler souls of the villago with renewed severity and pomp. The itinerant singing-master who thought to get her for the asking into his class in the schoolhouse, Wednesday evenings, was frozen by the amazed disdain of her refusal. When young Smith Thurber, the kiln-keeper's son, in the flippant spirit of fine buttons and a resplendent fob, asked her to dance a measure with him at the Wallaces' party, the iciness of her stare fairly took away his breath.
Something can be guessed of her emotions when the brother brought home his bride. With a half-cowardly, half-kindly idea of postponing the trouble certain to ensue, he had given Sabrina no warning of his intention, and, through the slow mails of that date, only a day's advance notice of his return with Mrs. Lemuel. The storm did not burst at once. Indeed it maybe said never to have really burst. Sabrina was not a bad woman, according to her lights, and she did nothing consciously to make her sister-in-law unhappy. The young wife had a light heart, a sensible mind, and the faculty of being cheerful about many things which might be expected to annoy. But she had some pride, too, and although at the outset it was the very simple and praiseworthy pride of a well-meaning individual, incessant vaunting of the Fairchilds quite naturally gave a family twist to it, and she soon was able to resent slights in the name of all the Richardsons.
After all, was she not in the right? for while the grass was scarcely green on the grave of the first Fairchild who had amounted to anything, there were six generations of Richardsons in Albany chronicles alone who had married into the best Dutch families of that ancient, aristocratic town, to say nothing of the New England record antedating that period. Thus the case appeared to her, and came gradually to have more prominence in her mind than, in her maiden days, she could have thought possible.
So this great Forty Years' War began, in which there was to be no single, grand, decisive engagement, but a thousand petty skirmishes and little raids, infinitely more vexatious and exhausting, and was waged until the weaker of the combatants, literally worn out in the fray, had laid down her arms and her life together, and was at peace at last, under the sheet in the darkened parlor.
The other veteran party to the feud, her thin, iron-gray hair half concealed under a black knit cap, her bold, sharp face red as with stains of tears, sat at the window of her own upper room, reading her Bible. If Milton and Alvira had known that she was reading in Judges, they might have been even more confident of a coming "flare-up."
CHAPTER III.
AUNT SABRINA.
Neighboring philosophers who cared, from curiosity or a loftier motive, to study the Fairchild domestic problem, in all its social and historic ramifications, generally emerged from the inquiry with some personal bias against Miss Sabrina, tempered by the conclusion that, after all, there was a good deal to be said on the old lady's side.
Certainly, as the grim old maid in the
