sank into a troubled slumber.

Those days, so full of hope and doubt and torture, seemed mercifully
unreal now, they lay so far back in the past--six or eight years, in
fact, which is a lifetime to the lad of twenty--and meantime he had
conquered many of the adverse circumstances that had threatened to cloud
his career.

Abijah Flagg was a true child of his native State. Something of the same
timber that Maine puts into her forests, something of the same strength
and resisting power that she works into her rocks, goes into her sons
and daughters; and at twenty Abijah was going to take his fate in his
hand and ask Mr. Perkins, the rich blacksmith, if, after a suitable
period of probation (during which he would further prepare himself for
his exalted destiny), he might marry the fair Emma Jane, sole heiress of
the Perkins house and fortunes.

III

This was boy and girl love, calf love, perhaps, though even that may
develop into something larger, truer, and finer; but not so far away
were other and very different hearts growing and budding, each in its
own way. There was little Miss Dearborn, the pretty school teacher,
drifting into a foolish alliance because she did not agree with her
stepmother at home; there was Herbert Dunn, valedictorian of his class,
dazzled by Huldah Meserve, who like a glowworm "shone afar off bright,
but looked at near, had neither heat nor light."

There was sweet Emily Maxwell, less than thirty still, with most of her
heart bestowed in the wrong quarter. She was toiling on at the Wareham
school, living as unselfish a life as a nun in a convent; lavishing the
mind and soul of her, the heart and body of her, on her chosen work.
How many women give themselves thus, consciously and unconsciously;
and, though they themselves miss the joys and compensations of mothering
their own little twos and threes, God must be grateful to them for
their mothering of the hundreds which make them so precious in His
regenerating purposes.

Then there was Adam Ladd, waiting at thirty-five for a girl to grow a
little older, simply because he could not find one already grown who
suited his somewhat fastidious and exacting tastes.

"I'll not call Rebecca perfection," he quoted once, in a letter to Emily
Maxwell,--"I'll not call her perfection, for that's a post, afraid to
move. But she's a dancing sprig of the tree next it."

When first she appeared on his aunt's piazza in North Riverboro and
insisted on selli