She arose, still smiling, with her eyes turned
frankly on my own. And I must be excused when
I confess that as I bowed my thanks, taking the
proffered cup and lifting it to my lips, I stared
with an uncommon interest and pleasure at the
donor's face.

She was a woman of certainly not less than forty
years of age. But the figure, and the rounded grace
and fulness of it, together with the features and the
eyes, completed as fine a specimen of physical and
mental health as ever it has been my fortune to
meet; there was something so full of purpose and
resolve--something so wholesome, too, about the
character--something so womanly--I might almost
say manly, and would, but for the petty prejudice
maybe occasioned by the trivial fact of a locket
having dropped from her bosom as she knelt; and
that trinket still dangles in my memory even as it
then dangled and dropped back to its concealment
in her breast as she arose. But her face, by no
means handsome in the common sense of the word,
was marked with a breadth and strength of outline
and expression that approached the heroic--a face
that once seen is forever fixed in memory--a personage
once met one must know more of. And so it
was, that an hour later, as I strolled with the old
man about his farm, looking, to all intents, with the
profoundest interest at his Devonshires, Shorthorns,