Although Clotilde was not of Master Simon’s race and kindred, she loved his memory as dearly as though she were. There was not one story of the staunch old Puritan and his brave children and grandchildren that she had not heard Stephen tell a dozen times. And now to see perish that precious work of Master Simon’s own hands, the garden that had bloomed through four generations—it was seemingly a greater grief than she could bear. Gone was the bed of blazing tulips that every year renewed the memory of that first coming of the Indian ambassadors, gone were the rows of herbs that had soothed and healed so many ills, burned to a few blackened twigs was the huge hawthorn bush that Master Simon had grown from a tiny slip brought from England. Roses, hollyhocks, lilies, fair maids of France, all had their stories and all were dead. More than once Clotilde had slipped out, in the dusk of the autumn twilight, laid her cheek against the charred bark of the linden tree and sobbed out her grief alone.
“It was all the fault of that wicked Scotch minister,” she burst out one day to Stephen. “That his prophecy has been fulfilled and the garden destroyed and even his likeness burned, makes me think that he was, as people used to say, in league with the Devil!”
“No,” returned Stephen quietly, “he was a man trying to do good according to his own lights and he spoke with shrewd good sense, although perchance he knew it not. Such a person as Master Simon, who dared to stand against narrow public opinion when he knew himself to be right, who taught his children and his grandchildren to do the same, did he run so little risk of bringing danger upon himself and upon that which he left behind him? Master Simon loved freedom and justice, so do all of us who are of his blood, so do the children of those bold Puritans who lighted the fire of a new liberty upon our shores. It is that same fire, my child, that has burned through four generations, and has spread over our whole land. If, upon its way, it has scorched our hearts, and has robbed us of what we loved, let us not cry out, but rather blow the bellows and keep the flame bright so that our sacrifice may not be in vain.”
Clotilde pondered his answer long and found it both wise and comforting.