LYDIA KNIGHT'S HISTORY. THE FIRST BOOK OF THE NOBLE WOMEN'S LIVES SERIES By "Homespun." JUVENILE INSTRUCTOR OFFICE Salt Lake City, Utah. 1883. PREFACE. The growing demand for our own literature among the youth of this people has induced us to undertake the publication of a new series of books. The general satisfaction which the books of the Faith-Promoting Series have given, encourages us in the hope that this new series, which is designed to contain various items of interest and instruction from the lives of our noble sisters, will also be worthy of the perusal of the Saints. We present, as the first book of the Noble Women's Lives Series, the history of a lady who early joined the Church, and remained faithful through the various trials and hardships to which the early Saints were subjected. And now, when in the evening of life, her influence is still being felt for good in Zion. The history of such persons should be written that the young may be stimulated to emulate their noble examples. That this little work may prove both entertaining and instructive to those into whose hands it may come is the earnest desire of The Publisher. LYDIA KNIGHT'S HISTORY. CHAPTER I. A little girl with light-blue eyes and fair hair sat under the shade of the forest trees pulling a sheep-skin. One by one her brothers and sisters, older and younger than she, had grown weary of the work and wandered off to play. "Oh, Lydia, how can you sit there over that tiresome work. Look at the shadows under the trees, and the squirrels calling to us to come and chase them from limb to limb. Let's have a play," said the last little boy as his patience at length had ebbed away. "No," replied the fair-haired maiden, and the firm little mouth took another line of determination as she spoke, "I shall not leave the sheepskin till the last lock is pulled." A "clearing" in the forest of the western part of New York State, a large comfortable cabin on a rise of ground near the center of the space, with wide-open doors and floors of gleaming white, waving grain on one side of the house and a large vegetable garden on the other side constituted the scene of a home in the forest wilds, which was a common one in those days--the years between 1810 and 1820. The circle of high waving trees gave a grandeur and beauty to the view that nothing else could possibly do. The little girl who sat so steadily at work had been brought by her parents two years previously to this wild western home. She was born in 1812, in Sutton, Worcester Co., Mass., and eight happy years had been spent in her earliest home.