Page:The Making of Americans, 1925.djvu/19

to him, and she was a good woman who with all her woe was strong to bear many children and always after she was strong to do her best for them and always strong to suffer with them.

And this harsh hard man and his good gentle little wife had many children, and one daughter had long ago married Henry Dehning. It was a happy marriage enough for both of them, their faults and the good things they each had in them made of them a man and wife to very well content all who had to do with them.

All the Dehnings were very fond of Bridgepoint. They had their city and their country house like all the people who were well to do in Bridgepoint.

The Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. It was surprising how completely they could shed there the straining luxury and uneasy importance of their city life. Their country house was one of those large commodious wooden double affairs with a wide porch all around and standing well back from the road. In front and at the sides were pleasant lawns and trees and beyond were green open marshes leading down to salt water. In back was a cleared space that spread out into great meadows of stunted oaks no higher than a man's waist, great levels glistening green in the summer and brilliantly red in the autumn stretching away under vast skies, and always here and there was a great tree waving in the wind and wading knee deep in the rough radiant leafy tide.

Yes the Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. There they were a contented joyous household. All day the young ones played and bathed and rode and then the family altogether would sail and fish. Yes the Dehnings in the country were simple pleasant people. The Dehning country house was very pleasant too for all young men and boys, the uncles and the cousins of the Dehning family, who all delighted in the friendly freedom of this country home, rare in those days among this kind of people, and so the Dehning house was always full of youth and kindly ways and sport and all altogether there they all always lead a pleasant family life.

The Dehning family itself was made up of the parents and three children. They made a group very satisfying to the eye, prosperous and handsome.

Mr. Dehning was a man successful, strong-featured, gentle tempered, joyous and carrying always his fifty years of life with the good-nature of a cheerful boy. He enjoyed the success that he could boast that he had won, he loved the struggle in which he had always been and always conquered, he was proud of his past and of his present worth, he was proud in his three children and proud that they could teach him things he did not know, he was proud of his wife who was proud of such very different things. "Oh Miss Jenny, she is the best girl I know,"