She arose, still smiling, with her eyes turned frankly on my own.  And I must be excused when I confess that as I bowed my thanks, taking the proffered cup and lifting it to my lips, I stared with an uncommon interest and pleasure at the donor’s face.

She was a woman of certainly not less than forty years of age.  But the figure, and the rounded grace and fulness of it, together with the features and the eyes, completed as fine a specimen of physical and mental health as ever it has been my fortune to meet; there was something so full of purpose and resolve—­something so wholesome, too, about the character—­something so womanly—­I might almost say manly, and would, but for the petty prejudice maybe occasioned by the trivial fact of a locket having dropped from her bosom as she knelt; and that trinket still dangles in my memory even as it then dangled and dropped back to its concealment in her breast as she arose.  But her face, by no means handsome in the common meaning, was marked with a breadth and strength of outline and expression that approached the heroic—­a face that once seen is forever fixed in memory—­a personage once met one must know more of.  And so it was, that an hour later, as I strolled with the old man about his farm, looking, to all intents, with the profoundest interest at his Devonshires, Shorthorns, Jerseys, and the like, I lured from him something of an outline of his daughter’s history.

“There’re no better girl ’n Marthy!” he said, mechanically answering some ingenious allusion to her worth.  “And yit,” he went on reflectively, stooping from his seat in the barn door and with his open jack-knife picking up a little chip with the point of the blade—­“and yit—­you wouldn’t believe it—­but Marthy was the oldest o’ three daughters, and hed—­I may say—­hed more advantages o’ marryin’—­and yit, as I was jest goin’ to say, she’s the very one ’at didn’t marry.  Hed every advantage—­Marthy did.  W’y, we even hed her educated—­her mother was a-livin’ then—­and we was well enough fixed to afford the educatin’ of her, mother allus contended—­and we was—­besides, it was Marthy’s notion, too, and you know how women is thataway when they git their head set.  So we sent Marthy down to Indianop’lus, and got her books and putt her in school there, and paid fer her keepin’ and ever’thing; and she jest—­well, you may say, lived there stiddy fer better’n four year. 0’ course she’d git back ever’ once-an-a-while, but her visits was allus, some-way-another, onsatisfactory-like, ’cause, you see, Marthy was allus my favorite, and I’d allus laughed and told her ’at the other girls could git married if they wanted, but she was goin’ to be the ‘nest-egg’ of our family, and ’slong as I lived I wanted her at home with me.  And she’d laugh and contend ’at she’d as lif be an old maid as not, and never expected to marry, ner didn’t want to.  But she had me sceart onc’t, though!  Come out from the city one time, durin’ the army,