Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SAM THATCHER'S forefathers did not come to this country in the beginning years of its settlement, and establish a dynasty — or, if they did, local history has taken no note of them. The first Thatcher of whom any one here ever heard was Steven B., the same one who, not much more than thirty years ago, moved in from his dairy-farm and leased the old Boardman house. Sam himself could not remember that event; he was a baby at the time, the latest comer of all the brood, who ranged in ages from fifteen-year-old Susie down to his own scant six months, and so the gaunt barn of a house was the first home he knew. His mother did not regard it as a barn, nor did it ever occur to her that the neighbours might be objectionable. Neighbours of almost any sort were only too welcome to her, who had always lived at least three miles from everybody and everywhere. All her life she had yearned for town, for gas, sidewalks, fire-engines, policemen, noise, distraction, amusement — if churches and schools figured in the list, it was as incidentals; and now that her dreams and desires were to be realized, she was too happily dazzled to consider details. Moreover, the experience of spending money freely on the things dear to every woman's heart such as furnishings and decorations, was hers for the first time. The Hillside Avenue house afforded an ample background, yet scarcely ample enough, for the clutter of Brussels carpets, Nottingham lace curtains and chenille portieres, the department-store etchings, the bastard Wedgwood and Sevres and majolica bric-a-brac with which Mrs. Thatcher's simple taste crowded it. Finished, it was a gorgeous spectacle; there is something saddening in the knowledge that she had so short a while to enjoy it. She died very suddenly of pneumonia the followin...