When Captain James Penhallow repaired the neglected house and kept the town busy with demands for workmen, the village woke up for a whole summer.  In the autumn he brought to Grey Pine his wife, Ann Grey, of the well-known Greys of the eastern shore of Maryland.  A year or two of discomfort at Western army-posts and a busy-minded, energetic personality, made welcome to this little lady a position which provided unaccustomed luxuries and a limitless range of duties, such as were to her what mere social enjoyments are to many women.  Grey Pine—­the house, the flower and kitchen-gardens, the church to be built—­and the schools at the mills, all were as she liked it, having been bred up amid the kindly despotism of a great plantation with its many dependent slaves.

When Ann Penhallow put Grey Pine and the Penhallow crest on her notepaper, her husband said laughing that women had no rights to crests, and that although the arms were surely his by right of good Cornish descent, he thought their use in America a folly.  This disturbed Ann Penhallow very little, but when they first came to Grey Pine the headings of her notepaper were matters of considerable curiosity to the straggling village of Westways, where she soon became liked, respected, and moderately feared.  A busy-minded woman, few things in the life of the people about her escaped her notice, and she distributed uninvited counsel or well-considered charity and did her best to restrain the more lavish, periodical assistance when harvests were now and then bad—­which made James Penhallow a favourite in the county.

Late in the summer of 1855, John Penhallow’s widow, long a wandering resident in Europe, acquired the first serious illness of a self-manufactured life of invalidism and promptly died at Vevey.  Her only child, John, was at once ordered home by his uncle and guardian, James Penhallow, and after some delay crossed the sea in charge of his tutor.  The dependent little fellow hid under a natural reserve what grief he felt, and accustomed to being sent here and there by an absent mother, silently submissive, was turned over by the tutor to James Penhallow’s agent in Philadelphia.  On the next day, early in November, he was put in charge of a conductor to be left at Westways Crossing, where he was told that some one would meet him.

The day was warm when in the morning he took his seat in the train, but before noon it became clouded, and an early snow-storm with sudden fall of temperature made the boy sensible that he was ill-clothed to encounter the change of weather.  He had been unfortunate in the fact that his mother had for years used the vigilant tyranny of feebleness to enforce upon the boy her own sanitary views.  Children are easily made hypochondriac, and under her system of government he became self-attentive, careful of what he ate and extremely timid.  There had been many tutors and only twice long residence at schools in Vevey and for a winter in Budapest.  The health she too sedulously