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whose fine skin and clear features could be counted among her organizational gifts. She was beautiful but when she tasted the water from the glass on her lectern she smiled sadly as if it were bitter for, in spite of her civil zeal, she had a taste for melancholy—for the smell of orange rinds and wood smoke—that was extraordinary. She was more admired among the ladies than the men and the essence of her beauty may have been disenchantment (Leander had deceived her) but she had brought all the resources of her sex to his infidelity and had been rewarded with such an air of wronged nobility and luminous vision that some of her advocates sighed as she passed through the square as if they saw in her face a life passing by.

Then some hoodlum—it must have been one of the foreigners who lived across the river—set off a firecracker under the rump of Mr. Pincher’s old mare and she bolted. In recalling this disaster much later the people of St. Botolphs would recall its fortunate aspects. They would say how providential it had been that none of the women and children who lined the route of the parade had been trampled. The float had been only a few feet from the junction of Water and Hill streets and the horse took off hell for leather in this direction with old Mr. Pincher shouting whoaa, whoaa. The first marchers had their backs to the accident and while they could hear the cries of excitement and the noise of hoofs they did not guess the magnitude of the disaster and the fifes went on squealing. Mr. Starbuck went on bowing to the left and the right, the girls from the table silver company went on scattering coupons into the crowd. As the wagon heaved up Hill Street Sarah Wapshot’s lectern could be seen to go over and with it her water pitcher and glass; but none of the ladies of the Woman’s Club was cowardly or foolish and they took a firm hold on some nonportable part of the wagon and trusted in the Lord. Hill Street was then a dirt road and that being a dry summer the horse’s hoofs beat up such a pillar of dust that in a few minutes the float was gone.

CHAPTER TWO

The Harcourts and the Wheelwrights, the Coffins and the Slaters, the Lowells and the Cabots and the Sedgewicks and the Kimballs—yes, even the Kimballs—have all had their family histories investigated and published and now we come to the Wapshots, who would not want to be considered without some reference to their past. A cousin by marriage had had the name traced back to its Norman beginnings—Vaincre-Chaud. The declension from Vaincre-Chaud through Fanshaw, Wapeshaw, Wapshafftes, Wapshottes and Wapshot had been found in Northumberland and Dorsetshire parish records. In St. Botolphs it was given the catarrhal pronunciation “Warpshart.” The branch of the family that concerns us was founded by Ezekiel Wapshot, who emigrated from England aboard the Arbella in 1630. Ezekiel settled in Boston, where he taught Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and gave lessons on the flute. He was offered a post in the Royal Government but he judiciously refused, establishing a family tradition of thoughtful regret that would—three hundred years later—chaff Leander and his sons. Someone wrote of Ezekiel that he “abominated periwigs and had the welfare of the Commonwealth always upon his conscience.” Ezekiel begat David, Micabah and Aaron. Cotton Mather spoke the eulogy at Ezekiel’s grave.

David begat Lorenzo, John, Abadiah and Stephen. Stephen begat Alpheus and Nestor. Nestor—a leftenant in the war with England—was tendered a decoration by General Washington which he declined. This was in the tradition established by Ezekiel and while these regrets sprang in part from a candid assessment of the man’s self-knowledge there was also some Yankee shrewdness here, for to be conspicuous—to be a hero—might entail some untoward financial responsibilities. No man of the family had ever accepted an honor and in upholding this tradition of unworthiness the ladies of the family had so enlarged it that when they dined out they merely picked at their food, feeling that to refuse the sandwiches at tea or