ed principles of Rousseau, of
Pestalozzi, of Froebel, and of Herbert Spencer. And you--you only
graduated at Yale, an old fogy mediaeval institution! No, sir! not till
I meet a philosopher whose mind has been symmetrically developed can I
consent for my Emilia to marry."

And the old man became so frantic, that, to save him from the madhouse,
Emilia wrote a letter, at his dictation, to young Brown, peremptorily
breaking off all relations; and he, a sensitive, romantic man, was
heartbroken, and left the village. He only sent a farewell to his
friends the day before he was to sail from New Bedford on a whaling
voyage. He carried with him the impression that an unaccountable change
of mind in Emilia had left no hope for him.

To prevent a recurrence of such an untoward accident as this, and, as
he expressed it, "to bring his daughter's mind into intimate relations
with nature," the fanatical philosopher established the town of
Lindsleyville, determined that no family in which there was a young man
should settle on his town plot, unless, indeed, the young man should
prove to be the paragon he was looking for.

Emilia's motherless life had not been a cheerful one, subjected to the
ever-changing whims of a visionary father, with whom one of her
practical cast of mind could have no point of sympathy. And since she
came to Lindsleyville it was harder than ever, for there was no
neighbor nearer than Gager's, ten miles away, and there was not a woman
within fifty miles. There is no place so lonesome as a prairie; the
horizon is so wide, and the earth is so empty!

Lindsley had spent all his own money long ago, and it was only the
small annuity of his daughter, inherited from her mother's family, the
capital of which was tied up to keep it out of his reach, that
prevented them from starving. Emilia was starving indeed, not in body,
but in soul. Cut off from human sympathy, she used to sit at the gable
window of the cabin and look out over the boundless meadow until it
seemed to her that she would lose her reason. The wild geese screaming
to one another overhead, the bald eagles building in the solitary elm
that grew by the river, the flocks of great white pelicans that were
fishing on the beach of Swan Lake, three miles away, were all objects
of envy to the lonesome heart of the girl; for they had companions of
their kind--they were husbands and wives, and parents and children,
while she--here she checked her thoughts, lest sh