musical professor, and here we
lived very comfortably until he died of congestion of the lungs.
Uncle Orme at that time was in feeble health, and unable to
contribute toward our maintenance, and soon after father's death he
went out to California to the mining region. I was about ten years
old when he left, and recollect him as a pale, thin, delicate man.
In those days it cost a good deal of money to reach the gold mines,
and this alone prevented him from taking us with him.

"We were very poor, but grandmother was foolishly, inconsistently
proud, and though compelled to sew for our daily bread, she dressed
me in a style incompatible with our poverty, and contrived to send me
to school. Finally her eyes failed, and with destitution staring
open-jawed upon us, she reluctantly consented to do the washing and
mending for three college boys. She was well educated, and
inordinately vain of her blood, and how this galling necessity
humiliated her! We of course could employ no servant, and once when
she was confined to her bed by inflammatory rheumatism, I was sent to
the college to carry the clothes washed and ironed that week. It was
the only time I was ever permitted to cross the campus, but it
sufficed to wreck my life. On that luckless day I first met Cuthbert
Laurance, then only nineteen, while I was not yet fifteen. Think of
it, my darling; three years younger than you are now, and you a mere
child still! While he paid me the money due, he looked at and talked
to me. Oh, my daughter! my daughter! as I see you at this instant,
with your violet eyes, watching me from under those slender, black
arches, it seems the very same regular, aristocratic, beautiful face
that met me that wretched afternoon, beneath the branching elms that
shaded the campus! So courteous, so winning, so chivalric, so
indescribably handsome did he present himself to my admiring eyes. I
was young, pretty, an innocent, ignorant, foolish child, and I
yielded to the fascination he exerted.

"Day by day the charm deepened, and he sought numerous opportunities
of seeing me again; gave me books, brought me flowers, became the
king of my waking thoughts, the god of my dreams. In a cottage near
us lived a widow, Mrs. Peterson; whose only child Peleg, a rough
overgrown lad, was a journeyman carpenter, and quite skilful in
carving wooden figures. We had grown up together, and he seemed
particularly fond of and kind to me, rendering me many little
services wh