n estate a mighty farmer, owning that his relaxation and delight were
his turnips, his bullocks, and machines; and so content with them, and
with his guests, that Honora never recollected that walk in the pine
woods without deciding that to have monopolized him would have been an
injury to the public, and perhaps less for his happiness than this free,
open-hearted bachelor life. Seldom did she recall that scene to mind,
for she had never been by it rendered less able to trust to him as her
friend and protector, and she stood in need of his services and his
comfort, when her father's death had left him the nearest relative who
could advise or transact business for her and her mother. Then, indeed,
she leant on him as on the kindest and most helpful of brothers.

Mrs. Charlecote was too much acclimatized to the city to be willing to
give up her old residence, and Honor not only loved it fondly, but could
not bear to withdraw from the local charities where her tasks had
hitherto lain; and Woolstone-lane, therefore, continued their home,
though the summer and autumn usually took them out of London.

Such was the change in Honora's outward life. How was it with that
inmost shrine where dwelt her heart and soul? A copious letter writer,
Owen Sandbrook's correspondence never failed to find its way to her,
though they did not stand on such terms as to write to one another; and
in those letters she lived, doing her day's work with cheerful
brightness, and seldom seeming preoccupied, but imagination, heart, and
soul were with his mission.

Very indignant was she when the authorities, instead of sending him to
the interesting children of the forests, thought proper to waste him on
mere colonists, some of them Yankee, some Presbyterian Scots. He was
asked insolent, nasal questions, his goods were coolly treated as common
property, and it was intimated to him on all hands that as Englishman he
was little in their eyes, as clergyman less, as gentleman least of all.
Was this what he had sacrificed everything for?

By dint of strong complaints and entreaties, after he had quarrelled with
most of his flock, he accomplished an exchange into a district where red
men formed the chief of his charge; and Honora was happy, and watched for
histories of noble braves, gallant hunters, and meek-eyed squaws.

Slowly, slowly she gathered that the picturesque deer-skins had become
dirty blankets, and that the diseased, filthy, sophisticated