a living joy.

Faith caught it; and all fear was gone. She could not shrink from the
great blessedness that was laid upon her, any more than Nature could
refuse to wear her coronation robes, that trailed their radiance in this
path they trod.

Life held them in a divine harmony.

The October sun, that mantled them with warmth and glory; the Indian
summer, that transfigured earth about them; all tints--all
redolence--all broad beatitude of globe and sky--were none too much to
breathe out and make palpable the glad and holy auspice of the hour.

* * * * *

Mr. Gartney had gradually relinquished his half-formed thought of San
Francisco. Already the unsettled and threatening condition of affairs in
the country had begun to make men feel that the time was not one for new
schemes or adventurous changes. Somehow, the great wheels, mercantile
and political, had slipped out of their old grooves, and went laboring,
as it were, roughly and at random, with fierce clattering and jolting,
quite off the ordinary track; so that none could say whether they should
finally regain it, and roll smoothly forward, as in the prosperous and
peaceful days of the past, or should bear suddenly and irretrievably
down to some horrible, unknown crash and ruin.

Henderson Gartney, however, was too restless a man to wait, with entire
passiveness, the possible turn and issue of things.

Quite strong, again, in health--so great a part of his burden and
anxiety lifted from him in the marriages, actual and prospective, of his
two daughters--and his means augmented by the sale of a portion of his
Western property which he had effected during his summer visit
thereto--it was little to be looked for that he should consent to
vegetate, idly and quietly, through a second winter at Cross Corners.

The first feeling of some men, apparently, when they have succeeded in
shuffling off a load of difficulty, is a sensation of the delightful
ease with which they can immediately shoulder another. As when one has
just cleared a desk or drawer of rubbish, there is such a tempting
opportunity made for beginning to stow away and accumulate again. Well!
the principle is an eternal one. Nature does abhor a vacuum.

The greater portion of the ensuing months, therefore, Mr. Gartney spent
in New York; whither his wife and children accompanied him, also, for a
stay of a few weeks; during which, Faith and her mother accomplished the
inevit