Penhallow very little, but when they first came to Grey Pine the headings
of her notepaper were matters of considerable curiosity to the straggling
village of Westways, where she soon became liked, respected, and
moderately feared. A busy-minded woman, few things in the life of the
people about her escaped her notice, and she distributed uninvited
counsel or well-considered charity and did her best to restrain the more
lavish, periodical assistance when harvests were now and then bad--which
made James Penhallow a favourite in the county.

Late in the summer of 1855, John Penhallow's widow, long a wandering
resident in Europe, acquired the first serious illness of a
self-manufactured life of invalidism and promptly died at Vevey. Her only
child, John, was at once ordered home by his uncle and guardian, James
Penhallow, and after some delay crossed the sea in charge of his tutor.
The dependent little fellow hid under a natural reserve what grief he
felt, and accustomed to being sent here and there by an absent mother,
silently submissive, was turned over by the tutor to James Penhallow's
agent in Philadelphia. On the next day, early in November, he was put in
charge of a conductor to be left at Westways Crossing, where he was told
that some one would meet him.

The day was warm when in the morning he took his seat in the train,
but before noon it became clouded, and an early snow-storm with sudden
fall of temperature made the boy sensible that he was ill-clothed to
encounter the change of weather. He had been unfortunate in the fact
that his mother had for years used the vigilant tyranny of feebleness
to enforce upon the boy her own sanitary views. Children are easily
made hypochondriac, and under her system of government he became
self-attentive, careful of what he ate and extremely timid. There
had been many tutors and only twice long residence at schools in Vevey