eme western part of Ohio in the spring
of eighteen hundred and forty-nine. It was a valley surrounded by wooded
hills and threaded by a noisy brook which hastily made its way, as if
upon some errand of immense importance, down to the big Miami not many
miles distant. A road cut through a vast and solemn forest led into the
valley, and entering as if by a corridor and through the open portal of
a temple, the traveler saw a white farm-house nestling beneath a mighty
hackberry tree whose wide-reaching arms sheltered it from summer sun
and winter wind. A deep, wide lawn of bluegrass lay in front, and a
garden of flowers, fragrant and brilliant, on its southern side.
Stretching away into the background was the farm newly carved out of the
wilderness, but already in a high state of cultivation. All those
influences which stir the deepest emotion of the heart were silently
operating here--quiet, order, beauty, power, life. It affected one to
enter it unprepared in much the same way, only with a greater variety
and richness of emotion, as to push through dense brush and suddenly
behold a mountain lake upon whose bosom there is not so much as a
ripple, and in whose silver mirror surrounding forests, flying
water-fowl and the bright disk of the sun are perfectly reflected.

In this lovely valley, at the close of a long, odorous, sun-drenched day
in early May, the sacred silence was broken by a raucous blast from that
most unmusical of instruments, a tin dinner horn. It was blown by a
bare-legged country boy who seemed to take delight in this profanation.
By his side, in the vine-clad porch of the white farm-house stood a
woman who shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked toward a vague
object in a distant meadow. She was no longer young, but had exchanged
the exquisite beauty of youth for the finer and more impressive beauty
of maturity. As the light of the setting sun fell full upon her face it
seemed almost transparent, and even the unobserving must have perceived
that some deep experience of the sadness of life had added to her
character an indescribable charm.

"Thee will have to go and call him, Stephen, for I think he has fallen
into another trance," the woman said, in a low voice in which there was
not a trace of impatience, although the evening meal was waiting and the
pressing work of the household had been long delayed.

The child threw down his dinner horn, whistled to his dog and started.
Springing up from where