In the spring, when the new leaves were green on the slopes of Coniston,
Priest Ware ended a life of faithful service. The high pulpit, taken from
the old meeting house, and the cricket on which he used to stand and the
Bible from which he used to preach have remained objects of veneration in
Coniston to this day. A fortnight later many tearful faces gazed after
the Truro coach as it galloped out of Brampton in a cloud of dust, and
one there was watching unseen from the spruces on the hill, who saw
within it a girl dressed in black, dry-eyed, staring from the window.




CHAPTER VII

Out of the stump of a blasted tree in the Coniston woods a flower will
sometimes grow, and even so the story which I have now to tell springs
from the love of Cynthia Ware and Jethro Bass. The flower, when it came
to bloom, was fair in life, and I hope that in these pages it will not
lose too much of its beauty and sweetness.

For a little while we are going to gallop through the years as before we
have ambled through the days, although the reader's breath may be taken
away in the process. How Cynthia Ware went over the Truro Pass to Boston,
and how she became a teacher in a high school there;--largely through the
kindness of that Miss Lucretia Penniman of whom we have spoken, who wrote
in Cynthia's behalf to certain friends she had in that city; how she met
one William Wetherell, no longer a clerk in Mr. Judson's jewellery shop,
but a newspaper man with I know not what ambitions--and limitations in
strength of body and will; how, many, many years afterward, she nursed