hat was all.

Her experiences had been almost too terrible for belief, viewed at our
distance from them; she had passed through scenes of incredible horror
and suffering, but her nature had not been chilled, stunted or
hardened. In body and in temper her development had been sound and
beautiful. It was even thus that our great-grandmothers triumphed over
adversity, hardship, indescribable danger. We cannot say that the
strong, lithe, happy-hearted Alice of old Vincennes was the only one of
her kind. Few of us who have inherited the faded portraits of our
revolutionary forbears can doubt that beauty, wit and great lovableness
flourished in the cabins of pioneers all the way from the Edisto to the
Licking, from the Connecticut to the Wabash.

Beverley's advent could not fail to mean a great deal in the life of a
girl like Alice; a new era, as it were, would naturally begin for her
the moment that his personal influence touched her imagination; but it
is well not to measure her too strictly by the standard of our present
taste and the specialized forms of our social and moral code. She was a
true child of the wilderness, a girl who grew, as the wild prairie rose
grew, not on account of innumerable exigencies, accidents and
hardships, but in spite of them. She had blushed unseen, and had wasted
divine sweets upon a more than desert air. But when Beverley came near
her, at first carelessly droning his masculine monotonies, as the
wandering bee to the lonely and lovely rose, and presently striking her
soul as with the wings of Love, there fell a change into her heart of
hearts, and lo! her haunting and elusive dreams began to condense and
take on forms that startled her with their wonderful splendor and
beauty. These she saw all the time, sleeping or waking; they made
bright summer of the frozen stream and snapping gale, the snowdrifts
and the sleet. In her brave young heart, swelled the ineffable
song--the music never yet caught by syrinx or flute or violin, the
words no tongue can speak.

Ah, here may be the secret of that vigorous, brave, sweet life of our
pioneer maids, wives, and mothers. It was love that gave those tender
hearts the iron strength and heroic persistence at which the world must
forever wonder. And do we appreciate those women? Let the Old World
boast its crowned kings, its mailed knights, its ladies of the court
and castle; but we of the New World, we of the powerful West, let us
brim our cups with the