-hill valleys of the Alleghanies the sun pours its
hottest, most life-breeding glow, and even the wintry wind puts all its
vigor into the blast, knowing that there are no lachrymose, whey-skinned
city-dyspeptics to inhale it, but full-breasted, strong-muscled women and
men,--with narrow brains, maybe, but big, healthy hearts, and _physique_
to match. Very much the same type of animal and moral organization, as
well as natural, you would have found before the war began, ran through
the valley of Pennsylvania and Virginia.

One farm, eight or ten miles from the village where the Gurneys lived,
might be taken as a specimen of these old homesteads. It lay in a sort of
meadow-cove, fenced in with low, rolling hills that were wooded with oaks
on the summits,--sheep-cots, barns, well-to-do plum and peach orchards
creeping up the sides,--a creek binding it in with a broad, flashing band.
The water was frozen on this March evening: it had plenty of time to
freeze, and stay there altogether, in fact, it moved so slowly, knowing it
had got into comfortable quarters. There was just enough cold crispiness
in the air to-night to make the two fat cows move faster into the stable,
with smoking breath, to bring out a crow of defiance from the chickens
huddling together on the roost; it spread, too, a white rime over the
windows, shining red in the sinking sun. When the sun was down, the
nipping northeaster grew sharper, swept about the little valley, rattled
the bare-limbed trees, blew boards off the corn-crib that Doctor Blecker
had built only last week, tweaked his nose and made his eyes water as he
came across the field clapping his hands to make the blood move faster,
and, in short, acted as if the whole of that nook in the hills belonged to
it in perpetuity. But the house, square, brick, solid-seated, began to
glow red and warm out of every window,--not with the pale rose-glow of
your anthracite, but fitful, flashing, hearty, holding out all its hands
to you like a Western farmer. That's the way our fires burn. The very
smoke went out of no stove-pipe valve, but rushed from great mouths of
chimneys, brown, hot, glowing, full of spicy smiles of supper below. Down
in the kitchen, by a great log-fire, where irons were heating, sat Oth,
feebly knitting, and overseeing a red-armed Dutch girl cooking
venison-steaks and buttermilk-biscuit on the coal-stove beside him.

"Put jelly on de table, you, mind! Strangers here fur tea. Anyhow it or