It was a happy week spent at Terrace Hill; but one heart ached to its very core when, at its close, Irving Stanley went back to where duty called him, trusting that the God who had succored him thus far, would shield him from future harm, and keep him safely till the coming autumn, when, with the first falling of the leaf, he would gather to his embrace his darling beautiful Adah. * * * * * On the white walls of a handsome country seat just on the banks of the Connecticut, the light of the April sunset falls, and the soft April wind kisses the fair cheek and lifts the golden curls of the young mistress of Spring Bank—for so, in memory of the olden time, Hugh and Alice have named their new home. Arm in arm they walk up and down the terraced garden, talking softly of the way they have been led, and gratefully ascribing all praise to Him who rules and overrules, but doeth nought save good to those who love Him. Down in the meadow-land and at the rear of the building, dusky forms are seen—the negroes, who have come to their Northern home, and with them the runaway. Ashamed of his desertion he has returned to his former master, resenting the name of _contraband_, and denouncing the ultra-abolitionist as humbugs, who deserved putting in the front of every battle. Hugh knows it will be hard accustoming these blacks to Northern usages but as he has their good in view, he feels sure that in time he will succeed, and cares but little for the opinion of those who wonder what he “expects to do with that lazy lot of niggers.” On a rustic seat, near a rear door, white-haired old Sam is sitting, listening intently, while dusky Mug, reads to him from the book of books, the one he prizes above all else, stopping occasionally to expound, in his own way, some point which he fancies may not be clear to her, likening every good man to “Massah Hugh,” and every bad one to the leader of the “Suddern Federacy,” whose _horse_ he declares he held once in “ole Virginny,” telling Mug, in an aside, “how, if ’twant wicked, not agin de scripter, he should most wish he’d put beech-nuts under Massah Jeffres’ saddle, and so broke his fetch-ed neck, ’fore he raise sich a muss, runnin’ calico so high that Miss Ellis ’clar she couldn’t ’ford it, and axin’ fifteen cents for a paltry spool of cotton.”