The reader may well judge that my emotions were not of a faint nature, but such as it would be less improper for me to express here, perhaps, had I not at that time been a married man, with one of the best of soulful wives at home, longing for my return "from the country." But strange thoughts sometimes rise in the greedy souls of men, and we would love to possess, in order to make them happy, all the good beings of both sexes in the world. Mrs. Stevens--for so we will call her for the sake of a name--announced to the family, with whom she was stopping a day or two before I was to leave, that she was necessitated to return to New York in a day or two. The family were astonished, because she had previously declared her intention to remain a month longer. Of course everybody in the village soon heard of her intended departure, and all begged her to stay. I was a little surprised; but I said to my brother, "Her leaving so suddenly has some connection with that grief which we remarked in her face. She'll probably go by the same stage with me, and I'll learn more of her." The morning of my departure came, and brother said he would ride down to Litchfield with me, and we took the lumbering stage together, confident that we should "take up" Mrs. Stevens on our way; but the stage passed the house at which she boarded, without her! The driver said she had started out before him, in a private wagon, with a neighbor, who was going to Litchfield, and I felt easier; that I should, in short, still be able to keep my eye on her, and learn her evidently mysterious history, and possibly yet have the gratifying opportunity of being of service to her. We rode on. Stage-drivers in the country, with their two-horse teams, have a peculiar pride in out-driving the one-horse vehicles which they may come upon on the road, and our ordinarily slow old driver became quite a Jehu that morning, and drove past two or three teams which we overtook on the way, one of them being that which bore the beautiful widow and her no less beautiful child, and we arrived in Litchfield before them, alighting at the "Mansion House," the chief hotel of that centre of country aristocracy--a centre once of the best talent in the land, when Calhoun, and many other great men of the nation, were students there, under such other great men as Judges Reeve and Gould, of the once famous Law School. Mrs. Stevens had received letters nearly every day, it was said, while in Goshen, and it had been remarked that she had had letters as often as every other day from somebody, evidently a man, who wrote a peculiar hand, as the superscriptions showed. This, the family with whom she boarded, and who brought the letters from the post office to her, had said. My brother had occasion to carry up the letters for that family once or twice, and had remarked the peculiar style of writing in the address of letters to Mrs. Stevens.