I.

When Squire Gunn and his wife died, within three months of each other,
and Hetty their only child was left alone in the big farm-house,
everybody said, "Well, now Hetty Gunn'll have to make up her mind to
marry somebody." And it certainly looked as if she must. What could be
lonelier than the position of a woman thirty-five years of age sole
possessor of a great stone house, half a dozen barns and out-buildings,
herds of cattle, and a farm of five hundred acres? The place was known
as "Gunn's," far and wide. It had been a rich and prosperous farm ever
since the days of the first Squire Gunn, Hetty's grandfather. He was
one of Massachusetts' earliest militia-men, and had a leg shot off at
Lexington. To the old man's dying day he used to grow red in the face
whenever he told the story, and bring his fist down hard on the table,
with "damn the leg, sir! 'Twasn't the leg I cared for: 'twas the not
having another chance at those damned British rascals;" and the
wooden leg itself would twitch and rap on the floor in his impatient
indignation. One of Hetty's earliest recollections was of being led
about the farm by this warm-hearted, irascible, old grandfather, whose
wooden leg was a perpetual and unfathomable mystery to her. Where the
flesh leg left off and the wooden leg began, and if, when the wooden leg
stumped so loud and hard on the floor, it did not hurt the flesh leg at
the other end, puzzled little Hetty's head for many a long hour. Her
grandfather's frequent and comic references to the honest old wooden pin
did not diminish her perplexities. He was something of a wag, the old
Squire; and nothing came handier to him, in the way of a joke, than a
joke at his own expense. When he was eighty years old, he had a stroke
of paralysis: he lived six years after that; but he could not walk about
the farm any longer. He used to sit in a big cane-bottomed chair
close to the fireplace, in winter, and under a big lilac-bush, at the