“Now, to come to time—James is a widower. He has sweet children and needs a wife and mother for them. Though there are plenty of western women, and some that have hoards of money, out in Corntown, where his canning business is, he was always particular and peckish, preferring a refined eastern woman to influence his family. Knowing that I am living in Boston in the midst of opportunities, so to speak, our home being halfway between Bunker Hill Monument and Harvard University, he has intrusted me to select him a wife. Your face appeared to me. Putting aside more pressing claimants, I wrote to him of the girl he once declared fit to be ‘a bride,’ and sent him your last picture—at least it’s the last I’ve seen. He answered by return post. He has not forgotten, and he will, if you consent, come here the first of May to meet you and be married. “Now, dear Keith, why not put your place on the market, and when winter sets in come here to me in Boston and see the world, spend a season of relaxation, hear lectures and music, and be thus attuned for matrimony in the sweet spring, when the horse-chestnut buds yield to the sun and drop their glossy shields in the Public Gardens? “Your friend and sister-in-law to be, “JUDITH W. DOW.” Straightway Miss Keith, the strong of body and heretofore of mind, the adviser of both men and women for miles around, Miss Keith, the capable, who, with help “on shares,” made the little farm pay and lived a life of bustling content that was the opposite of somnolent vegetation, began mentally to chafe and rebel against the confinement and loneliness of her lot, and yearn for change,—she who had always preached and practised that one’s work is that which lies nearest to hand. She ignored the freckle thrust and the phrase taking for granted that the farm was hers to sell. The words _music_ and _lectures_ seemed italicized, yet the strongest appeal in the crafty letter was its promise of human companionship, for she had often yearned for kin.