of the valley, where a substantial bridge connected the two shores.

This settlement, called, from its position, North End, was quite a
thriving little village. North End was not only blessed with a mission
church, having a schoolroom in its basement, but it was provided with a
post-office, a telegraph, a drug store, kept by a regular physician, who
dispensed his own physic (advice and medicine, one dollar), and a
general store, where everything needed to eat, drink, wear or use
(except drugs), was kept for sale.

On this bright June morning, however, the great works were all stopped.
There was a general holiday, and as this was at the cost of the firm, it
gave general satisfaction. All the people of North End, except the aged,
infirm and infantile, were trooping down the valley, on the rough road
between the foot of the West Ridge and the side of the river, to a fete
to be given them at Rockhold on the occasion of the marriage of old
Aaron Rockharrt's granddaughter, Corona Haught, to Regulas Rothsay, the
governor-elect of the State.

It was a marriage of very rare interest to the workmen and their
families. To the men, because the governor-elect had been one of their
own class. The elders remembered him from the time when he was a
friendless orphan child, glad to run the longest errand or do the
hardest day's work for a dime, but also a very independent little
fellow, who would take nothing in the shape of alms from anybody. To the
women, because he was going to marry his first and only sweetheart, and
on the very day before his inauguration, so that she might take part in
the pageantry that was to be his first great success and triumph.

On one side of the river, at the foot of the East Ridge, stood Rockhold,