outh"--steadfast hills holding mystery
and fascination in green depths and purple distances, streams rushing
with noisy joy over stony beds, sweet violet gloom of night with
brilliant stars moving silently across infinite space; tender moss,
delicate fern, creeping vine, covering the brown earth with living
beauty--a fascinating world of loveliness for boyish eyes to look upon
and wonder about.

The home inside was as unpretentious as its exterior suggested. The
tiny hall admitted on one side to a bedroom, on the other to a living
room, from which opened a room used as a store. Above was an attic.
The living room was the bright, cheery heart of the house. The morning
sun poured in through two windows which faced the east; a window and
door on the south claimed the same cheery rays as the sun journeyed
westward. The big open fireplace made a glowing spot of brightness.
The floor was uncarpeted, the walls unpapered, the furnishing of the
simplest, yet cheerfulness and homely comfort pervaded the room as
with an almost tangible spirit.

A brother three years older and a sister three years younger made a
trio of bright, childish faces about the hearth on winter evenings
as the years went by, while the mother read to them such tales as
childish minds could grasp. It was a loving little circle, one that
riveted sure and fast the ties of family affection and which helped
one boy at her knee in after life to enter with such sure sympathy
into the plain, simple lives of the humblest people he met. He had
lived that same life, he knew the family affection that grows with
such strength around simple firesides, and those of like circumstances
felt this knowledge and opened their hearts to him.

That Miranda Conwell was an unusual woman for those times and
circumstances is shown in those readings to her children. Not only
did she read and explain to them the beautiful stories of the Bible,
implanting its truths in their impressionable natures to blossom forth
later in beautiful deeds; but she read them the best literature of the
ancient days as well as current literature. Into this poor New England
home came the "New York Tribune" and the "National Era." The letters
of foreign correspondents opened to their childish eyes another world
and roused ambitions to see it. Henry Ward Beecher's sermons, and
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," when it came out as a serial, all such good and
helpful literature, she poured into the eager childish ears. Th