“Love the haunts of nature,
    Love the sunshine of the meadow,
    Love the shadow of the forest,
    Love the wind among the branches
    And the rushing of great rivers
    Through their palisades and pine trees;
    And the thunder of the mountains,
    Whose innumerable echoes
    Flap like eagles in their eyries.”

To these I must revert to the many beauteous haunts and hidden retreats of nature, whose varied phases of quiet sweetness and sublime grandeur are heightened and intensified by the charm of legend and of song.

I visited the falls of “Minne-ha-ha,” and could almost fancy the silvery song and light laughter of the Indian girl in the happy purling music of the waterfall, and, as it glided off into the gentler murmur of the stream, below, I could imagine the still sadder song of the spirit speeding to rest in

    “The Islands of the Blessed,
    To the Land of the Hereafter.”

Minneapolis and St. Paul were visited, but they are all too celebrated to need note.

Back again to the “Garden City,” and to the one who had so patiently waited for the sunshine of success and the consummation of our plans for the future; but, as “the best made plans of mice and men aft gang aglee,” we found ourselves no nearer the goal.  One day he said to me:  “Mary, we have waited to be richer, but have still grown poorer; so is it not best that, in defiance of our apparently adverse fate, we unite our interests and our lives?” So hand in hand we resolved to share the joys and sorrows of life, each catching the burden of the old refrain—­

    “Thy smile could make a summer
    Where darkness else would be.”

We repaired to the house of Dr. O.H.  Tiffany, and, in the presence of a few friends, were quietly married, after which we made an unostentatious wedding trip to Wisconsin to visit some of his family friends.

With them all the “wonder grew” why it was that, among the many smiles hitherto lavished upon him from beautiful eyes, he should have chosen the blind girl.  His reiterated assertion of faith in the purity and unselfishness of the life, and the inner light of the soul, found in them a ready acceptance of his choice, and they warmly extended to her all the confidence and affection of kindred hearts.

CHAPTER XVI.

    “To know, to esteem, to love, and then to part,
    Makes up life’s tale to many a feeling heart.”

A short time after our marriage Mr. Arms was offered a contract to superintend the construction of a mill at Woodbine, Iowa, which it seemed best for him to accept; and finding there were no comfortable accommodations for a lady in that place, he left me in a boarding house in Chicago, with Hattie for a companion.  It was indeed hard for us to part so soon, and the pang was rendered more bitter by the fact of his impaired health, for he had never entirely recovered from the effects of the malarial fever contracted in a miasmatic district in Indiana.