We were living then in a very new place in Michigan, which I shall call Maysville.  My husband, an ex-army officer, had resigned the sword for the saw-mill.  Our house was the oldest in the village, which does not speak much for its antiquity, as five years before Maysville had been unbroken forest.  The house stood outside the cluster of houses that formed the little settlement:  it was a quarter of a mile to our nearest neighbor.

Now, Maysville calls itself a city, has an academy and a college, and a great quantity of church in proportion to its population.  Then, we “went to meeting” in a little white-painted, pine box of a thing, like a barn that had risen in life.  The stumps stood about the street:  the cows wandered at will and pastured in the “public square,” an irregular clearing running out into indefinite space.  Here also the Indians would encamp when they came to town from their reservation about five miles away, and here also, I regret to say, they would sometimes get drunk, and add what Martha Penney calls “a revolving animosity to the scenery.”  The squaws, however, would generally secure the knives and guns before the quarrelsome stage was reached.  Not unfrequently the ladies would bring the weapons to Mrs. Moore or myself to hide away till their lords and masters should be sober.  Then, feeling secure that no great harm could happen, they would look on with the utmost placidity at the antics of their better halves until they dropped down to sleep off their liquor.

There were no Indians in town that night, however, and if there had been, I was not at all afraid of them, for we were on excellent terms with the whole reservation.  My feeling about staying alone was merely one of those unreasonable sensations that sometimes overtake people of ill-regulated minds.

I went to the door and looked out at the gray, angry sky.  It was not cold, but chill.  The wind howled and shivered among the leafless branches:  everything promised a storm.

I was not at all sorry to see Mr. and Mrs. Moore drive up in their light buggy, with their two high-stepping, little brown horses.  Mrs. Moore had in her arms a bundle in a long blue embroidered cloak—­a baby, in short.  She and her husband firmly believed this infant to be the most beautiful, most intelligent and altogether most charming creature which the world had ever seen.  They had been married three years, and little Carry was their first child.

Mr. and Mrs. Moore were by no means ordinary people.  Mrs. Moore—­born Minny or Hermione Adams—­was a very small woman, exceedingly pretty, with light brown curly hair, dark blue eyes and a complexion like an apple blossom.

Mr. Moore was the son of a Seneca mother and Cherokee father, with not a drop of white blood in his veins.  So he thought, at least, but I never could quite believe it, because he could and did work, and never so much as touched even a glass of wine.  His parents had died when he was very young, and he had been brought up and educated by a missionary, a gentle, scholarly old Presbyterian minister, whose memory his adopted son held in loving reverence.