t.

As you have sat there on open-windowed Sundays, looking across purple
clover-fields to blue distant mountains, watching the palm-leaf fans
swaying to and fro in the warm stillness before sermon time, did not the
place seem full of memories, for has not the life of two villages ebbed
and flowed beneath that ancient roof? You heard the hum of droning bees
and followed the airy wings of butterflies fluttering over the
gravestones in the old churchyard, and underneath almost every moss-grown
tablet some humble romance lies buried and all but forgotten.

If it had not been for you, I should never have written this story, so I
give it back to you tied with a sprig from Ophelia's nosegay; a spring of
"rosemary, that's for remembrance."

K. D. W.

August, 1907

CHAPTER I

Edgewood, like all the other villages along the banks of the Saco, is
full of sunny slopes and leafy hollows. There are little, rounded, green-
clad hillocks that might, like their scriptural sisters, "skip with joy,"
and there are grand, rocky hills tufted with gaunt pine trees--these
leading the eye to the splendid heights of a neighbour State, where snow-
crowned peaks tower in the blue distance, sweeping the horizon in a long
line of majesty.

Tory Hill holds its own among the others for peaceful beauty and fair
prospect, and on its broad, level summit sits the white-painted Orthodox
Meeting-House. This faces a grassy common where six roads meet, as if
the early settlers had determined that no one should lack salvation
because of a difficulty in reaching its visible source.

The old church has had a dignified and fruitful past, dating from that
day in 1761 when young Paul Coffin received his call to preach at a
stipend of fifty pounds sterling a year; answering "that never having
heard of any Uneasiness among the people about his Doctrine or manner of
life, he declared himself pleased to Settle as Soon as might be Judged
Convenient."

But that was a hundred and fifty years ago, and much has happened since
those simple, strenuous old days. The chastening hand of time has been
laid somewhat heavily on the town as well as on the church. Some of her
sons have marched to the wars and died on the field of honour; some,
seeking better fortunes, have gone westward; others, wearying of village
life, the rocky soil, and rigours of farm-work, have become entangled in
the noise and competition, the rush and strife, of cities. When the
sex