Jan Vedder's Wife

seaward she had raised from the past the brown-sailed ships, and the big yellow-haired men tugging at their oars; and in her heart there had been a supplication to their memory, which Peter, had he known it, would have denounced, with the sternest wrath, as neither more nor less than a service to Satan.</p> <p>But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart? Some ancestor who sailed with Offa, or who fought with the Ironsides, or protested with the Covenanters, or legislated with the Puritans, may, at this very hour, be influencing us, in a way of which we never speak, and in which no other soul intermeddles.</p> <p>Thora had one comfort. Her daughter was of a spirit akin to her own. Peter had sent her to Edinburgh, hoping that she would bring back to his northern home some of those lowland refinements of which he had a shadowy <span class='pagenum pncolor'><a id='page7' name='page7'></a>7</span> and perhaps exagger