ever wandered through a more wondrous realm of pleasance—­to quote the words of the poet.  Spots in it are like a park, laid out by that peerless landscape gardener, nature:  dark, symmetrical pine trees on the sward, and maples in the fulness of their leaf, and great oaks on the hillsides, and, coppices; and beyond, the mountain, the evergreens massed like cloud-shadows on its slopes; and all-trees and coppice and mountain—­flattened by the haze until they seemed woven in the softest of blues and blue greens into one exquisite picture of an ancient tapestry.  I, myself, have seen these pictures in that country, and marvelled.

So they drove on through that realm, which was to be their realm, and came all too soon to Coniston green.  Lem Hallowell had spread the well-nigh incredible news, that Cynthia Wetherell was to marry the son of the mill-owner and railroad president of Brampton, and it seemed to Cynthia that every man and woman and child of the village was gathered at the store.  Although she loved them, every one, she whispered something to Bob when she caught sight of that group on the platform, and he spoke to the trotters.  Thus it happened that they flew by, and were at the tannery house before they knew it; and Cynthia, all unaided, sprang out of the buggy and ran in, alone.  She found Jethro sitting outside of the kitchen door with a volume on his knee, and she saw that the print of it was large, and she knew that the book was “Robinson Crusoe.”

Cynthia knelt down on the grass beside him and caught his hands in hers.

“Uncle Jethro,” she said, “I am going to marry Bob Worthington.”

“Yes, Cynthy,” he answered.  And taking the initiative for the first time in his life, he stooped down and kissed her.

“I knew—­you would be happy—­in my happiness,” she said, the tears brimming in her eyes.

“N-never have been so happy, Cynthy,—­never have.”

“Uncle Jethro, I never will desert you.  I shall always take care of you.”

“R-read to me sometimes, Cynthy—­r-read to me?”

But she could not answer him.  She was sobbing on the pages of that book he had given her—­long ago.

I like to dwell on happiness, and I am reluctant to leave these people whom I have grown to love.  Jethro Bass lived to take Cynthia’s children down by the brook and to show them the pictures, at least, in that wonderful edition of “Robinson Crusoe.”  He would never depart from the tannery house, but Cynthia went to him there, many times a week.  There is a spot not far from the Coniston road, and five miles distant alike from Brampton and Coniston, where Bob Worthington built his house, and where he and Cynthia dwelt many years; and they go there to this day, in the summer-time.  It stands in the midst of broad lands, and the ground in front of it slopes down to Coniston Water, artificially widened here by a stone dam into a little lake.  From the balcony of the summer-house which overhangs the lake there is a wonderful view of Coniston Mountain, and Cynthia Worthington often sits there with her sewing or her book, listening to the laughter of her children, and thinking, sometimes, of bygone days.