“From the first hour father saw him he was drawn to him, and when he left after this conversation, and returned to Whitingsville, father said: ‘Boy as he seems, he will be true to Eunice; I have no fear on that score.’ Just before your father came to teach _several branches_ he went a few miles out from Amherst and gave a lecture, I think on temperance (am not quite sure), for which he received five dollars. With it, among other things, he bought me Baxter’s ‘Saint’s Rest’—not a usual love-token—and some paper that was for me if his suit prospered. On the fly-leaf of the little book, in pencil, were the following lines: ‘Take it; ’tis a gift of love That seeks thy good alone; Keep it for the giver’s sake, And read it for thine own.’ “Before his next vacation he walked to Brattleboro’, Vermont, gave a lecture, received ten dollars, and then bought our engagement-ring, a plain gold ring, which was also my wedding-ring. With the remainder he bought books. “The three years in college soon passed. We only met once in three months—vacations—and there was nothing unusual to record. The ‘young boy,’ ‘too young to know what he was about,’ as we were so often told, went on toward manhood, unshaken by opposition, laughing at all prophecies of inconstancy or change, and then we bade farewell for four years while Henry went to Lane Seminary, Walnut Hills, Ohio, for his theological course.” Somewhere Father Beecher has described a “Saxon courtship” as “a grave and serious thing. It is a matter of consideration. I have known a proposal of love to be stated like a proposition, and calmly argued for and against with far less warmth than Luther would have felt in debating a thesis. Indeed, many courtships are like attempts at kindling fires with green wood—a few starveling coals are heaped together, a mere spark dances in and out upon the inhospitable charcoal, and disappears on one side as fast as it appears on the other. But by all manner of shavings and bits of paper—mere trinkets, as it were, and billet-doux—a slight flame is got up, which strives, with doubtful prospect, to convert the smoke into blaze. The bellows are called in, the fire is fairly driven up to its work, the green sticks begin to sizzle at either end; and though at last, when the heat triumphs, the fire is large and lasting, the poor fellow that kindled it had to work for it.” Now, we never could bring ourselves to asking direct questions, and we do not suppose that we should ever have been any wiser if we had; but, from the references sometimes made to riding through covered bridges, from the comical look that would come to his face and the blushes that would be sure to come to her cheeks when the raillery around the table became hot and personal, we were led to believe that this was not their kind.