unfortunate. The mind grows by what it feeds upon, and Mrs. Hunter's
spirit had become so imbittered by dwelling upon her woes and losses that
she was incapable of thinking or speaking of much else. She had never been
a woman of warm, quick sympathies. She had seen little of the world, and,
in a measure, was incapable of seeing it, whatever advantages she might
have had. This would have been true of her, no matter where her lot had
been cast, for she was a born conservative. What she had been brought up
to believe would always be true; what she had been made familiar with by
early custom would always be right, and anything different would be viewed
with disapproval or intoleration. Too little allowance is often made for
characters of this kind. We may regret rigidity and narrowness all we
please, but there should be some respect for downright sincerity and the
inability to see both sides of a question.

It often happens that if natures are narrow they are correspondingly
intense; and this was true of Mrs. Hunter. She idolized her husband dead,
more perhaps than if he had been living. Her brother and nephew were
household martyrs, and little Mara had been taught to revere their
memories as a devout Catholic pays homage to a patron saint. Between the
widow and all that savored of the North, the author of her woes, there was
a great gulf, and the changes wrought by the passing years had made no
impression, for she would not change. She simply shut her eyes and closed
her ears to whatever was not in accord with her own implacable spirit. She
grew cold toward those who yielded to the kindly influences of peace and
the healing balm of time; she had bitter scorn for such as were led by
their interests to fraternize with the North and Northern people. In her
indiscrimination and prejudice they were all typified by the unscrupulous
adventurers who had made a farce of government and legally robbed the
South when prostrate and bleeding after the War. She and her niece had
been taxed out of their home to sustain a rule they loathed. Not a few