ent to
Coniston, I had a strange experience. I left the brook at a tannery, and
a most singular fellow was in the shed shovelling bark. I tried to get
him to talk, and told him about some new tanning machinery I had seen.
Suddenly he turned on me and asked me if I was 'callatin' to set up a
mill.' He gave me a queer feeling. Do you have many such odd characters
in Coniston, Miss Cynthia? You're not going?"

Cynthia had risen, and all of the laugher was gone from her eyes. What
had happened to make her grow suddenly grave, Isaac Worthington never
knew.

"I have to get my father's supper," she said.

He, too, rose, puzzled and disconcerted at this change in her.

"And may I not come to Coniston?" he asked.

"My father and I should be glad to see you, Mr. Worthington," she
answered.

He untied her horse and essayed one more topic.

"You are taking a very big book," he said. "May I look at the title?"

She showed it to him in silence. It was the "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte."

CHAPTER V

Isaac Worthington came to Coniston not once, but many times, before the
snow fell; and afterward, too, in Silas Wheelock's yellow sleigh through
the great drifts under the pines, the chestnut Morgan trotting to one
side in the tracks. On one of these excursions he fell in with that
singular character of a bumpkin who had interested him on his first
visit, in coonskin cap and overcoat and mittens. Jethro Bass was plodding
in the same direction, and Isaac Worthington, out of the goodness of his
heart, invited him into the sleigh. He was scarcely prepared for the
bumpkin's curt refusal, but put it down to native boorishness, and
thought no more about it then.

What troubled Mr. Worthington infinitely more was the progress of his
suit; for it had become a snit, though progress is a wrong word to use in
connection with it. So far had he got,--not a great distance,--and then
came to what he at length discovered was a wall, and apparently
impenetrable. He was not even allowed to look over it. Cynthia was kind,
engaging; even mirthful, at times, save when he approached it; and he
became convinced that a certain sorrow lay in the forbidden ground. The
nearest he had come to it was when he mentioned again, by accident, that
life of Napoleon.

That Cynthia would accept him, nobody doubted for an instant. It would be
madness not to. He was orthodox, so Deacon Ira had discovered, of good
habits, and there was the princely four hundre