l these years."

The locket fell open in William Wetherell's hand, for the clasp had
become worn with time, and there was a picture of little Cynthia within:
of little Cynthia,--not so little now,--a photograph taken in Brampton
the year before. Wetherell laid it beside the daguerreotype.

"She looks like her," he said aloud; "but the child is more vigorous,
more human--less like a spirit. I have always thought of Cynthia Ware as
a spirit."

Jethro turned at the words, and came and stood looking over Wetherell's
shoulder at the pictures of mother and daughter. In the rosewood box
was a brooch and a gold ring--Cynthia Ware's wedding ring--and two small
slips of yellow paper. William Wetherell opened one of these, disclosing
a little braid of brown hair. He folded the paper again and laid it in
the locket, and handed that to Jethro.

"It is all I have to give you," he said, "but I know that you will
cherish it, and cherish her, when I am gone. She--she has been a
daughter to both of us."

"Yes," said Jethro, "I will."

William Wetherell lived but a few days longer. They laid him to rest at
last in the little ground which Captain Timothy Prescott had hewn out
of the forest with his axe, where Captain Timothy himself lies under
his slate headstone with the quaint lettering of bygone days.--That same
autumn Jethro Bass made a pilgrimage to Boston, and now Cynthia Ware
sleeps there, too, beside her husband, amid the scenes she loved so
well.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I

One day, in the November following William Wetherell's death, Jethro
Bass astonished Coniston by moving to the little cottage in the village
which stood beside the disused tannery, and which had been his father's.
It was known as the tannery house. His reasons for this step, when
at length discovered, were generally commended: they were, in fact, a
disinclination to leave a girl of Cynthia's tender age alone on Thousand
Acre Hill while he journeyed on his affairs about the country. The Rev.
Mr. Satterlee, gaunt, red-faced, but the six feet of him a man and
a Christian, from his square-toed boots to the bleaching yellow hair
around his temples, offered to become her teacher. For by this time
Cynthia had exhausted the resources of the little school among the
birches.

The four years of her life in the tannery house which are now briefly
to be chronicled were, for her, full of happiness and peace. Though the
young may sorrow, they do not often