It is not in human nature to stand such a strain as their families had been subjected to.

There is an innate yearning for joy and happiness, and even the sternest discipline cannot keep man forever in the gloomy bonds of fanaticism.

In most cases, the immediate descendants of Cromwell's soldiers would gladly have made some sort of compromise, would have surrendered much of their outlying land to obtain secure and peaceful possession of the rest, and would have emerged from the life of gloomy seclusion, in which they found themselves; but no whisper of any such feeling as this would be heard in the household of Zephaniah Whitefoot, so long as he lived.
He was an old man now, but as hard, as gloomy, and as unlovable as he had been when in his prime.

His wife had died very many years before, of no disease that Zephaniah or the doctor he called in could discover, but, in fact, of utter weariness at the dull life of repression and gloom which crushed her down.

Of a naturally meek and docile disposition, she had submitted without murmuring to her husband's commands, and had, during her whole married life, never shocked him so much as she did the day before her death, when, for the first time, she exhibited the possession of an opinion of her own, by saying earnestly: "You may say what you like, Zephaniah, but I do think we were meant to have some happiness and pleasure on earth.