e trouble
began. During the few years following, the New Englanders were three
times driven out of the valley, and the men, women, and children were
obliged to tramp for two hundred miles through the unbroken wilderness
to their old homes. But they rallied and came back again, and at last
were strong enough to hold their ground. About this time the mutterings
of the American Revolution began to be heard, and the Pennsylvanians and
New Englanders forgot their enmity and became brothers in their struggle
for independence.

Among the pioneers from Connecticut who put up their old fashioned log
houses in Wyoming were George Ripley and his wife Ruth. They were young,
frugal, industrious, and worthy people. They had but one child--a boy
named Benjamin; but after awhile Alice was added to the family, and at
the date of which I am telling you she was six years and her brother
thirteen years old.

Mr. Ripley was absent with the continental army under General
Washington, fighting the battles of his country. Benjamin, on this
spring day, was visiting some of his friends further down the valley;
so that when Alice came forth to play "Jack Stones" alone, no one was in
sight, though her next neighbor lived hardly two hundred yards away.

I wish you could have seen her as she looked on that summer afternoon.
She had been helping, so far as she was able, her mother in the house,
until the parent told her to go outdoors and amuse herself. She was
chubby, plump, healthy, with round pink cheeks, yellow hair tied in a
coil at the back of her head, and her big eyes were as blue, and clear,
and bright as they could be.

She wore a brown homespun dress--that is to say, the materials had
been woven by the deft fingers of her mother, with the aid of the old
spinning wheel, which in those days formed a part of every household.
The dark stockings were knitted by the same busy fingers, with the help
of the flashing needles; and the shoes, put together by Peleg Quintin,
the humpbacked shoemaker, were heavy and coarse, and did not fit any too
well.

The few simple articles of underwear were all homemade, clean, and
comfortable, and the same could be said of the clothing of the brother
and of the mother herself.

Alice came running out of the open front door, bounding off the big flat
stone which served as a step with a single leap, and, running to a spot
of green grass a few yards away, where there was not a bit of dirt or
a speck of dust, s