"This is a pleasant home, Gerald," said Mrs. Devoe, on the day she took possession of her small but neat cottage, as she stood with him beneath a porch embowered with honey-suckle, and looked out upon a scene to which hill and dale and river combined to give enchantment. "If you can be well and happy in it, love, I will try and forget that I had a right to a better," said Gerald Devoe, with a grave yet tender smile, as he drew his invalid wife close to his side. Grave, Gerald Devoe always was; and none wondered at it who knew his early history. His family belonged to the gentry of England, and he had been born to an inheritance sufficient to support him respectably in that class. His mother, from whom he derived a sound judgment, and a firm and vigorous mind, died while he was yet a child, leaving his weak and self-indulgent father to the management of a roguish attorney, by whose aid he made the future maintain the present, till, at his death, little was left to Gerald beyond the bare walls of his paternal home and the small park by which it was surrounded. He had been, for two years before this time, married to one who had brought him little wealth, and whose delicate health seemed to demand the luxuries which he could no longer afford. For her sake, far more than for his own--even more than for that of his cherished child--he shrank from the new condition under which life was presenting itself to him. When at length his resources utterly failed, and he could no longer veil the truth from his wife, her gentle tender smile, her confiding caress, and above all, her ready inquiry into his plans for the future, and her earnest effort to aid him in bringing the chaos of his mind into order, taught him that there lies in woman's affections a source of strength equal to all the requirements of those who have won their way to that hidden fountain. It was by her advice that, instead of wasting his energies in the vain struggle to maintain his present position, he determined to carve out for himself a new life in another land. The first step towards the fulfilment of this resolution was also the most painful. It was the sacrifice of his home, the home of his childhood, his youth, his manhood, with which all that was dear in the present or tender in the past was associated. And yet higher claims it had. It had been the home of his fathers. For three hundred years those walls had owned a Devoe for their master, and now they must pass into a stranger's hands, and he and his must go forth with no right even to a grave in that soil which had seemed ever an inalienable part of himself. It was a stern lesson, but life teaches well, and it was learned. He could not turn to the liberal professions for support, because he had no means of maintaining himself and his family during the preparatory studies. Of farming he knew already something, and spent some months in acquiring yet further information respecting it, before he sailed from England.