"Who _would have thought_ that the deacon's Mary would ever have grown up such a fine woman?" said Aunty Gould, as she wiped her spectacles upon the corner of her new gingham apron. "The deacon himself ain't got much sperit in him, and as for _Miss Gordon_, I don't believe she ever whipped one of them children in her life. She always let 'em have their own way a great deal too much to suit me. Jest think of her letting Mary go off to Lowell, in the midst of that city of iniquity, and stay three or four years, jest because James must be college larned. As if it warn't as respectable to stay to home and be a farmer, as his father and his grandfather was before him. I haven't much 'pinion of _him_, but Stephen Gordon is going to make the man. Steddy and industrious a'most as the deacon himself." So we see the differences of opinion which exist in the narrowest community; for Mrs. Hall, as she turned toward her own bright home, said to her husband that Mary Gordon was a pattern to the young girls now growing up in the village. But for her honest independence and hardihood in braving the opinion of the world, her family might have been living without education, and without refinement. Now she had won for herself the love of a noble heart--could see her brother successful through her efforts, and knew that their parents were happy in feeling that they were so. "She has been the sun of that household," replied her husband, "and I doubt not will ever be the happiness of her own." They were sitting alone--the newly made husband and wife--on the eve of their marriage-day. They were in their home, which was henceforth to be the scene of all their love and labors. The last kind friend had gone, and for the first time that day they could feel the calm, unclouded serenity which the end of a long and often wearisome toil had brought. The moonlight trembled through the shaded casement, and surrounded as with a halo the sweet, serious face that looked out upon the night; and far around, even to the rugged mountains that rose as sentinels over the green valley, earth and air were bathed in that pure and tender radiance. The flowering shrubs that twined about the little porch seemed to give forth a more delicious perfume than when scorched by the sun's warm kiss. The neighboring orchards almost bending beneath the clusters of buds and blossoms that covered the green boughs, waved gently in the light breeze that showered the sunny petals as it passed upon the freshly springing grass beneath. The low cry of the whippo-wil came now and then from a far-off wood; save that, and the rustle of the vines clinging about the casement, no sound broke the sabbath-like repose. The church--scarce a stone's throw from the little parsonage--stood boldly relieved by the dark trees which rose beside it; and not far away--not too far for them to see by day the loved forms of its inmates--they could distinguish the sloping roofs and brown walls of Mary's early home.