stern Massachusetts, met
and fell in love with a New England girl, Miss Hannah Niles. She was
already engaged to a neighbor's son, but the Southerner cared naught
for a rival. He wooed earnestly, passionately. He soon swept away her
protests, won her heart and the two ran away and were married. But
tragic days were ahead. On her return her incensed father locked her
in her room and by threats and force compelled her to write a note to
her young husband renouncing him. He would accept no such message, but
sent a note imploring a meeting in a nearby schoolhouse at nightfall.
The letter fell into the father's hands. He compelled her to write a
curt reply bidding him leave her "forever." Then the father locked
the daughter safely in the attic, and with a mob led by the rejected
suitor, surrounded the schoolhouse and burnt it to the ground. The
husband, thinking he had been heartlessly forsaken, made a brave fight
against the odds, but seeing no hope of success, leaped from the
burning building, amid the shots fired at him, escaped down a rocky
embankment at the back of the schoolhouse, and under cover of the
woods, fled. They told his wife that he was dead.

A little son came to brighten her shadowed life, whom she named, after
him, Martin Conwell; and after seven years she married her early
lover. But Martin was the son of her first husband and always her
dearest child, and day after day when old and gray and again a widow,
she would come over the New England hills, a little lonely old woman,
to sit by his fireside and dream of those bygone days that were so
sweet.

Too proud to again seek an explanation, Martin Conwell, her husband,
returned to his Maryland home, living a lonely, bitter life, believing
to the day of his death, thirty years later, that his young wife had
repudiated and betrayed him.

Martin Conwell, the son, grew to manhood and in 1839 brought a bride
to a little farm he had purchased at South Worthington, up in the
Hampshire Highlands of the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. Here and
there among these hills, along the swift mountain streams, the land
sweeps out into sunny little meadows filled in summer with rich,
tender grasses, starred with flowers. It is not a fertile land. The
rocks creep out with frequent and unpleasing persistency. But Martin
Conwell viewed life cheerfully, and being an ingenious man, added to
the business of farming, several other occupations, and so managed to
make a living, a