For
this forbearance he felt instinctive respect. He admitted force
as a form of right; he admitted even temper, under protest; but
the seeds of a moral education would at that moment have fallen
on the stoniest soil in Quincy, which is, as every one knows, the
stoniest glacial and tidal drift known in any Puritan land.
Neither party to this momentary disagreement can have felt
rancor, for during these three or four summers the old
President's relations with the boy were friendly and almost
intimate. Whether his older brothers and sisters were still more
favored he failed to remember, but he was himself admitted to a
sort of familiarity which, when in his turn he had reached old
age, rather shocked him, for it must have sometimes tried the
President's patience. He hung about the library; handled the
books; deranged the papers; ransacked the drawers; searched the
old purses and pocket-books for foreign coins; drew the
sword-cane; snapped the travelling-pistols; upset everything in
the corners, and penetrated the President's dressing-closet where
a row of tumblers, inverted on the shelf, covered caterpillars
which were supposed to become moths or butterflies, but never
did. The Madam bore with fortitude the loss of the tumblers which
her husband purloined for these hatcheries; but she made protest
when he carried off her best cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns
or peachstones that he might see the roots grow, but which, she
said, he commonly forgot like the caterpillars.
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