that picture and that curl six long years.

[Illustration: The Picture her Mother gave me]

One May morning my own mother went to the stagecoach with me to see
me off on my long journey. Father stayed home. He was ever a man
who, with the tenderest of hearts, put on an appearance of great
sternness lest he betray it. God rest his soul! That nothing that
I have done caused him greater grief in his life than the separation
that day is sweet comfort to me now. He lived to take Elizabeth
to his heart, a beloved daughter. For me, I had been that morning,
long before the sun rose, under her window to bid her good-by, but
she did not know it. The servants did, though, and told her of it
when she got up. And she, girl-like, said, "Well, I didn't ask him
to come;" but in her secret soul I think there was a small regret
that she did not see me go.

So I went out in the world to seek my fortune, the richer for some
$40 which Ribe friends had presented to me, knowing that I had
barely enough to pay my passage over in the steerage. Though I had
aggravated them in a hundred ways and wholly disturbed the peace
of the old town, I think they liked me a little, anyway. They were
always good, kind neighbors, honest and lovable folk. I looked
back with my mother's blessing yet in my ears, to where the gilt
weather-vanes glistened on her father's house, and the tears brimmed
over again. And yet, such is life, presently I felt my heart bound
with a new courage. All was not lost yet. The world was before me.
But yesterday the chance befell that, in going to communion in the
old Domkirke, I knelt beside her at the altar rail. I thought of
that and dried my eyes. God is good. He did not lay it up against