beckoned. Two members of it came to America. Courage of a high
order, enthusiasm, faith, must they have had, or the call to cross
a perilous, pathless ocean, to brave unknown dangers in a new world
would have found no response in their hearts. They settled in Maryland
and into this fighting pioneer blood entered that strange magic
influence of the South, which makes for romance, for imagination, for
the poetic and ideal in temperament.

[Illustration: MIRANDA CONWELL]

Of this family came Martin Conwell, of Baltimore, hot-blooded, proud,
who in 1810, visiting a college chum in western 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.