The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress Read Free Page B

we had to get along without her, and my father, he was an honest and a good man but he never knew much how to make a living, and so he never could help along any of his children. And so what we wanted we had to go out and find out how to get it. And now you children have it very different, you have everything you can ever think you can be needing, and you don't ever show that you can work hard to deserve it. Well you got your literary effect and your new fangled notions and all kinds of education and you all always explain to me how well you know how to do it, I say it will be soon now when I can see what all these new fangled notions and all your kinds of improvements will do for you. See if it can teach you more than we learned working hard and selling candy and anything else we could do to get some money. What, well alright, I say I am good and ready to sit still and watch you to see how you all do it. I am always waiting and if you are any good I will know it. I say I am always watching now to see,” and then he went away and left them followed by shouts from them, “Alright sir, you just wait and see.”
     The young Dehnings had all been born and brought up in the town of Bridgepoint. Their mother too had been born in Bridgepoint. It was there that they had first landed, her father, a harsh man, hard to his wife and to his children but not very good with all his fierceness at knowing how to make a living, and her mother a good gentle wife who never left him, though surely he was not worthy to have her so faithful 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