Meeta Werner was the daughter of industrious, honest Germans, who had emigrated to the western part of Pennsylvania when she was a child of only seven years old. Only a quarter of a mile from the spot on which Carl Werner had fixed his residence lived a brother German, Franz Rainer. Franz was a widower, with one child, a son, named Ernest. He was a hard, stern man, and the first smiles which had lighted the existence of the young Ernest were caught from the sprightly Meeta and her kind-hearted mother. The children became playfellows and friends. It was a wild country in which they lived. A very short walk from their own doors brought them into a forest which seemed to their young imaginations endless; where gigantic trees interlaced their branches, and with their green foliage shut out the sun in summer, or in winter reflected it in dazzling brightness, and a thousand gorgeous colors, from the icicles which cased their leafless branches and pendent twigs. There was not a footpath, a sunny hill or flowery dell, for miles around their homes, which had not been trodden together by Meeta Werner and Ernest Rainer before their acquaintance was a year old. Now they would come home laden with wood-flowers, and now they might be seen treading wearily back from some distant spot, with baskets filled with blackberries, or with the dark-blue whortleberries. There were no schools in the neighborhood, but they had been taught by their fathers to read and write their own language, and Ernest afterwards acquired some knowledge of English from the good pastor who had accompanied the emigrants from Germany, and who acted as their interpreter when they required one. Having access to few books, they seemed likely to grow up with little more learning than might be gathered from their own observation of the world around them; but when Ernest was eighteen and Meeta fifteen years of age, circumstances occurred which gave an entirely new coloring to their lives.