e before they knew it; and Cynthia, all unaided, sprang out of the
buggy and ran in, alone. She found Jethro sitting outside of the kitchen
door with a volume on his knee, and she saw that the print of it was
large, and she knew that the book was "Robinson Crusoe."

Cynthia knelt down on the grass beside him and caught his hands in hers.

"Uncle Jethro," she said, "I am going to marry Bob Worthington."

"Yes, Cynthy," he answered. And taking the initiative for the first time
in his life, he stooped down and kissed her.

"I knew--you would be happy--in my happiness," she said, the tears
brimming in her eyes.

"N-never have been so happy, Cynthy,--never have."

"Uncle Jethro, I never will desert you. I shall always take care of you."

"R-read to me sometimes, Cynthy--r-read to me?"

But she could not answer him. She was sobbing on the pages of that book
he had given her--long ago.

I like to dwell on happiness, and I am reluctant to leave these people
whom I have grown to love. Jethro Bass lived to take Cynthia's children
down by the brook and to show them the pictures, at least, in that
wonderful edition of "Robinson Crusoe." He would never depart from the
tannery house, but Cynthia went to him there, many times a week. There is
a spot not far from the Coniston road, and five miles distant alike from
Brampton and Coniston, where Bob Worthington built his house, and where
he and Cynthia dwelt many years; and they go there to this day, in the
summer-time. It stands in the midst of broad lands, and the ground in
front of it slopes down to Coniston Water, artificially widened here by a
stone dam into a little lake. From the balcony of the summer-house which
overhangs the lake there is a wonderful view of Coniston Mountain, and
Cynthia Worthington often sits there with her sewing or her book,
listening to the laughter of her children, and thinking, sometimes, of
bygone days.

AFTERWORD

The reality of the foregoing pages has to the author, at least, become so
vivid that he regrets the necessity of having to add an afterword. Every
novel is, to some extent, a compound of truth and fiction, and he has
done his best to picture conditions as they were, and to make the spirit
of his book true. Certain people who were living in St. Louis during the
Civil War have been mentioned as the originals of characters in "The
Crisis," and there are houses in that city which have been pointed out as
fitting descriptions in t