ed at the
letter. "Lem Hallowell' says there hain't nobody to take it."

"Jonah Winch's!" exclaimed Wetherell.

"Jonah made it go, but that was before all this hullabaloo about
Temperance Cadets and what not. Jonah sold good rum, but now you can't
get nothin' in Coniston but hard cider and potato whiskey. Still, it's
the place for somebody without much get-up," and he eyed his cousin by
marriage. "Better come and try it, William."

So much for dreams! Instead of a successor to Irving and Emerson,
William Wetherell became a successor to Jonah Winch.

That journey to Coniston was full of wonder to Cynthia, and of wonder
and sadness to Wetherell, for it was the way his other Cynthia had come
to Boston. From the state capital the railroad followed the same deep
valley as the old coach road, but ended at Truro, and then they took
stage over Truro Pass for Brampton, where honest Ephraim awaited them
and their slender luggage with a team. Brampton, with its wide-shadowed
green, and terrace-steepled church; home once of the Social Library and
Lucretia Penniman, now famous; home now of Isaac Dudley Worthington,
whose great mills the stage driver had pointed out to them on Coniston
Water as they entered the town.

Then came a drive through the cool evening to Coniston, Ephraim showing
them landmarks. There was Deacon Lysander's house, where little Rias
Richardson lived now; and on that slope and hidden in its forest nook,
among the birches and briers, the little schoolhouse where Cynthia had
learned to spell; here, where the road made an aisle in the woods, she
had met Jethro. The choir of the birds was singing an evening anthem now
as then, to the lower notes of Coniston Water, and the moist, hothouse
fragrance of the ferns rose from the deep places.

At last they came suddenly upon the little hamlet of Coniston itself.
There was the flagpole and the triangular green, scene of many a muster;
Jonah Winch's store, with its horse block and checker-paned
windows, just as Jonah had left it; Nathan Bass's tannery shed, now
weather-stained and neglected, for Jethro lived on Thousand Acre Hill
now; the Prescott house, home of the Stark hero, where Ephraim lived,
"innocent of paint" (as one of Coniston's sons has put it), "innocent
of paint as a Coniston maiden's face"; the white meeting-house, where
Priest Ware had preached--and the parsonage. Cynthia and Wetherell
loitered in front of it, while the blue shadow of the mountain dee