, heard me preach. There was much in both the tone and
matter of the sermon, that made it seem, afterwards, as if it had been
written in full view of the approaching sorrow. A good deal of the day
at home was spent in getting ready for her Bible-reading on the ensuing
Thursday. At four o'clock in the afternoon she and the girls, M. and H.,
usually drove in the phaeton over to the Rev. Mr. Reed's, on the West
road, to attend a neighborhood prayer-meeting; but to-day, on account of
a threatening thunder-shower, they did not go. She enjoyed this little
meeting very much.

_Monday, Aug. 5th._--Soon after breakfast, she and the girl--"we three
girls," as she used to say--started off, carrying each a basket, for
the Cheney woods in quest of ferns; it having been arranged that at ten
o'clock I should come with the phaeton to fetch her and the baskets
home. The morning, although warm, was very pleasant and all three were
in high spirits. Before leaving the house, she ran up to her "den"--so
she called the little room where she wrote and painted--to get
something; and on passing out of it through the chamber, where just
then I was shaving, she suddenly stopped, and pointing at me with
her forefinger, her eye and face beaming with love and full of sweet
witchery, she exclaimed in a tone of pretended anger: "How dare you,
sir, to be shaving in my room?" and in an instant she was gone! A minute
or two later I looked after her from the window and saw her, with her
two shadows, hurrying towards the woods. At the time appointed, I went
for her. She awaited me sitting on the ground on the further side of
the woods, near the old sugar-house. The three baskets, all filled with
beautiful ferns, were placed in the phaeton and we drove home.

The Cheney woods, as we call them, form one of the attractions of
Dorset. They are quite extensive, abound in majestic sugar-maples, some
of which have been "tapped," it is said, for more than sixty successive
seasons, and at one point in them is a water-shed dividing into two
little rivulets, one of which, after mingling with the waters of the
Battenkill and the Hudson, finds its way at last into the Atlantic
Ocean; while the other reaches the same ocean through Pawlet River, Lake
Champlain and the St. Lawrence River. These woods and our own, together
with the mountain and waterfall and groves beyond Deacon Kellogg's,
where she often met her old friend "Uncle Isaac," [8] were her favorite
resorts.