From that time a sort of friendship sprang up between George Hammond and myself.  Every morning I rowed him across the river, and, in the early morning light, before the workmen were out of bed, he talked over, partly to himself and partly to me, his plans for the day and his vexations of the day before, until I began to offer advice and make suggestions, which made him laughingly call me his little counsellor.

Then in the evenings (he slept at my father’s) he would pick up my books and amuse himself with talking to me about them, laugh at my crude enthusiasms, clear up some difficult passage, prune away remorselessly the trash that had crept into my little collection, until, one day, returning from Cincinnati, where business had called him, he brought with him a store of books inexhaustible to my inexperienced eyes, and declared himself my teacher for the winter.

“Never mind Janet’s knitting and mending, Mrs. Boarders,” said he, in reply to my mother’s complaints; “she is a smart girl, and may be a school-mistress yet, and earn more money than any woman on Sandy.”

“But I am afraid,” my step-mother answered, “that the books she reads are not godly, and have no grace in them.  They look to me like players’ trash.  I’ve tried to do my duty to Janet,” she continued, plaintively; “but I hope the Lord won’t hold me accountable for her headstrong ways.”

Meantime, as I read in one of my books, and repeated to myself over and over again in my fulness of content,—­

  “How happily the days
  Of Thalaba went by!”

How rapidly fled that winter, and how soon came the spring, that would bring me, I thought, new hopes, new interests, new companions!

How changed a scene did I look upon, that bright April morning, when I went over the river to see that all was in readiness for the boats from below which were to bring Esther Hammond to her new home!  She was to keep her brother’s house; and furniture, books, and pictures, such as I had never dreamed of, had been sent up by the last-returning boatmen, all of which I had helped Mr. Hammond to arrange in the little two-story cottage which stood on the first rise of the hill behind the store.

A little plat of ground was hedged in with young Osage-orange shrubs, and within it one of the miners, who had formerly been an under-gardener in a great house in Scotland, had already prepared some flower-beds and sodded carefully the little lawn, laying down the walks with bright-colored tan, which contrasted pleasantly with the lively green of the grass.  From the gate one might look up and down the road, bordered on one side by the trees that hung over the river, and on the other by the miners’ houses, one-story cottages, each with its small inclosure, and showing every degree of cultivation, from the neat vegetable-patch and whitewashed porch of the Scotch families to the neglected waste ground and slovenly potato-patch of the Irishmen.  There