huge
sailing vessel while the shores of England slipped down into the
horizon and the great, grey Atlantic yawned desolately westward.
She was leaving so much behind her, taking so little with her, for
the child was grave and old even at the age of eight, and realized
that this day meant the updragging of all the tiny roots that clung
to the home soil of the older land. Her father was taking his wife
and family, his household goods, his fortune and his future to
America, which, in the days of 1829, was indeed a venturesome
step, for America was regarded as remote as the North Pole, and
good-byes were, alas! very real good-byes, when travellers set
sail for the New World in those times before steam and telegraph
brought the two continents hand almost touching hand.

So little Lydia Bestman stood drearily watching with sorrow-filled
eyes the England of her babyhood fade slowly into the distance--eyes
that were fated never to see again the royal old land of her birth.
Already the deepest grief that life could hold had touched her
young heart. She had lost her own gentle, London-bred mother when
she was but two years old. Her father had married again, and on her
sixth birthday little Lydia, the youngest of a large family, had
been sent away to boarding-school with an elder sister, and her
home knew her no more. She was taken from school to the sailing
ship; little stepbrothers and sisters had arrived and she was no
longer the baby. Years afterwards she told her own little children
that her one vivid recollection of England was the exquisite
music of the church chimes as the ship weighed anchor in Bristol
harbor--chimes that were ringing for evensong from the towers of
the quaint old English churches. Thirteen weeks later that sailing
vessel entered New York harbor, and life in the New World began.

Like most transplanted Englishmen, Mr. Bestman cut himself
completely off from the land of his fathers; his interests and
his friends henceforth were all in the country of his adoption,
and he chose Ohio as a site for his new home. He was a man of
vast peculiarities, prejudices and extreme ideas--a man of
contradictions so glaring that even his own children never
understood him. He was a very narrow religionist, of the type
that say many prayers and quote much Scripture, but he beat his
children--both girls and boys--so severely that outsiders were
at times compelled to interfere. For years these unfortunate
children carried