most men have forgotten ye very fashion of
laughter. Joy seemes killed out of them, as by a bitter frost, yet _he_
hath ever kept ye clear peale of merriment in his voice and its flash in
his eye and ye smile that showes his white teeth."

Somehow the girl seemed to see that face as though it had a more direct
presentment before her eyes than this faded portraiture of words penned
by a hand long ago dead.

He must have been, she romantically reflected, a handsome figure of a
man. Then naively the writer had passed on to a second description: "If
I have any favour of comeliness it can matter naught to me save as it
giveth pleasure to my deare husbande, yet I shall endeavour to sette
downe truly my own appearance alsoe."

The girl read and re-read the description of this ancestress, then
gasped.

"Why, hit mout be _me_ she was a-writin' erbout," she murmured, "save
only I hain't purty."

In that demure assertion she failed of justice to herself, but her eyes
were sparkling. She knew that hereabout in this rude world of hers her
people were accounted both godly and worthy of respect, but after all it
was a drab and poverty-ridden world with slow and torpid pulses of
being. Here, she found, in indisputable proof, the record of her
"fore-parents". Once they, too, had been ladies and gentlemen familiar
with elegant ways and circumstances as vague to her as fable. Henceforth
when she boasted that hers were "ther best folk in ther world" she would
speak not in empty defiance but in full confidence!

But as she rose at length from her revery she wondered if after all she
had not been actually dreaming, because a sound had come to her ears
that was unfamiliar and that seemed of a piece with her reading. It was
the laugh of a man, and its peal was as clear and as merry as the note
of a fox horn.

The girl was speedily at the window looking out, and there by the
roadside stood her grandfather in conversation with a stranger.

He was a tall young man and though plainly a mountaineer there was a
declaration of something distinct in the character of his clothing and
the easy grace of his bearing. Instead of the jeans overalls and the
coatless shoulders to which she was accustomed, she saw a white shirt
and a dark coat, dust-stained and travel-soiled, yet proclaiming a
certain predilection toward personal neatness.

The traveller had taken off his black felt hat as he talked and his
black hair fell in a long lock over his b