one of the first to sound the clarion note for the intellectual independence of American women; who wrote the “Hymn to Coniston”; who, to the awe of her townspeople, went out into the great world and became editress of a famous woman’s journal, and knew Longfellow and Hawthorne and Bryant.  Miss Lucretia it was who started the Brampton Social Library, and filled it with such books as both sexes might read with profit.  Never was there a stricter index than hers.  Cynthia, Miss Lucretia loved, and the training of that mind was the pleasantest task of her life.

Curiosity as a factor has never, perhaps, been given its proper weight by philosophers.  Besides being fatal to a certain domestic animal, as an instigating force it has brought joy and sorrow into the lives of men and women, and made and marred careers.  And curiosity now laid hold of Cynthia Ware.  Why in the world she should ever have been curious about Jethro Bass is a mystery to many, for the two of them were as far apart as the poles.  Cynthia, of all people, took to watching the tanner’s son, and listening to the brief colloquies he had with other men at Jonah Winch’s store, when she went there to buy things for the parsonage; and it seemed to her that Jock had not been altogether wrong, and that there was in the man an indefinable but very compelling force.  And when a woman begins to admit that a man has force, her curiosity usually increases.  On one or two of these occasions Cynthia had been startled to find his eyes fixed upon her, and though the feeling she had was closely akin to fear, she found something distinctly pleasurable in it.

May came, and the pools dried up, the orchards were pink and white, the birches and the maples were all yellow-green on the mountain sides against the dark pines, and Cynthia was driving the minister’s gig to Brampton.  Ahead of her, in the canon made by the road between the great woods, strode an uncouth but powerful figure—­coonskin cap, homespun breeches tucked into boots, and all.  The gig slowed down, and Cynthia began to tremble with that same delightful fear.  She knew it must be wicked, because she liked it so much.  Unaccountable thing!  She felt all akin to the nature about her, and her blood was coursing as the sap rushes through a tree.  She would not speak to him; of that she was sure, and equally sure that he would not speak to her.  The horse was walking now, and suddenly Jethro Bass faced around, and her heart stood still.

“H-how be you, Cynthy?” he asked.

“How do you do, Jethro?”

A thrush in the woods began to sing a hymn, and they listened.  After that a silence, save for the notes of answering birds quickened by the song, the minister’s horse nibbling at the bushes.  Cynthia herself could not have explained why she lingered.  Suddenly he shot a question at her.

“Where be you goin’?”

“To Brampton, to get Miss Lucretia to change this book,” and she held it up from her lap.  It was a very large book.