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, and after many years to pay the mortgage on his home
which came with the purchase. The little farmhouse, clinging to the
bleak hillside, seemed daring to the point of recklessness when the
winter's winds swept down the valley, and the icy fingers of the storm
reached out as if to pluck it bodily from its exposed position.

But when spring wove her mantle of green over the hills, when summer
flung its leafy banners from a million tree tops, then in the