It was brought out while I was in Boston that summer, under the title of _The Hidden Path_. I anticipate dates in jotting down here that I had my first taste of professional envy in connection with this book. My journeying homeward in September was broken by a fortnight’s stay at the hospitable abode of the Derbys in Yonkers. I was at a reception in New York one evening, when my unfortunately acute hearing brought to me a fragment of a conversation, not intended for my edification, between my publisher and a literary woman of note. Mr. Derby was telling her, after the tactless manner of men, how well _The Hidden Path_ had “done” at the Trade Sales just concluded. “Ah!” said the famous woman, icily. “And I suppose she is naturally greatly elated?” Mr. Derby laughed. “She hides it well if she is. Have you read the book?” “Yes. You were good enough to send me a copy, you know. It is quite a creditable school-girl production.” I moved clean out of hearing. I told Mr. Derby, afterward, what I had heard, adding that my chief regret was at the lowering of my ideal of professional generosity. Up to that moment I had met with indulgent sympathy and such noble freedom from envious hypercriticism, as to foster the fondly-cherished idea that the expression of lofty sentiment presupposes the ever-present dwelling of the same within the soul. In simpler phrase, that the proverb—“Higher than himself can no man think,” had its converse in—“Lower than himself can no man be.” In this I erred. I grant it, in this one instance. I had judged correctly of the grand Guild to which I aspired, with yearnings unutterable, to belong. It was an eventful summer. My father and I had gone on to Boston from New York, setting out, the same week, for a tour through the White Mountains. I was the only woman in the party. Our friend, Ned Rhodes, a distant cousin, Henry Field, of Boston, and my father completed the quartette. Ten days afterward, we two—my father and I—met a larger travelling party in New York. Mr. and Mrs. William Terhune, Mrs. Greenleaf, the widow of Doctor Hoge’s friend; “Staff” Little, the brother of Mrs. William Terhune, and Edward Terhune, now the pastor of a church at Charlotte C. H., Virginia, composed the company which joined itself to us, and set forth merrily for Niagara and the Lakes. The trip accomplished, I settled down comfortably and happily in Boston and the charming environs thereof for the rest of the season. Another halcyon summer! If I have made scant mention of my father’s kindred in the land of his birth, it is because this is a story of the Old South and of a life that has ceased to be, except in the hearts of the very few who may take up the boast of the Grecian historian—“Of which I was a part.”