more important to the family than their extensive forest-holdings on the
foot-hills of the western watershed of the Alleghanies.

The country had long been well settled. The farmers thrived as the mills
and mines needed increasing supplies of food and the railway gave access
to market. The small village of Westways was less fortunate than the
county. Strung along the side of the road opposite to Penhallow's woods,
it had lost the bustling prosperity of a day when the Conestoga wagons
stopped over-night at the "General Wayne Inn" and when as yet no one
dreamed that the new railroad would ruin the taverns set at intervals
along the highway to Pittsburgh. Now that Westways Crossing, two miles
away, had been made the nearest station, Westways was left to live on the
mill-wages and such profits as farming furnished.

When Captain James Penhallow repaired the neglected house and kept the
town busy with demands for workmen, the village woke up for a whole
summer. In the autumn he brought to Grey Pine his wife, Ann Grey, of the
well-known Greys of the eastern shore of Maryland. A year or two of
discomfort at Western army-posts and a busy-minded, energetic
personality, made welcome to this little lady a position which provided
unaccustomed luxuries and a limitless range of duties, such as were to
her what mere social enjoyments are to many women. Grey Pine--the house,
the flower and kitchen-gardens, the church to be built--and the schools
at the mills, all were as she liked it, having been bred up amid the
kindly despotism of a great plantation with its many dependent slaves.

When Ann Penhallow put Grey Pine and the Penhallow crest on her
notepaper, her husband said laughing that women had no rights to crests,
and that although the arms were surely his by right of good Cornish
descent, he thought their use in America a folly. This disturbed Ann