"Yes, only she was prettier," he answers. "I have been thinking of her so much lately, Rachel. I am going to do something that would please her. I have bought that pretty little place of Perry's, and I will put Martha and her husband on it. Dick's a good industrious fellow; but it's hard to make anything on a rented farm, and Martha's worried too much. You don't think any of the children will object?" and he looked anxiously in her face. "Object? Why, they will be glad, father!" And dropping her head on his shoulder, she puts her arm around him for the first time in her life; and as she slips the little daguerreotype in his hand a sweet peace fills her heart and she thinks: "The bitterness is gone, and love fills its place." After awhile she joins the group in the parlor. They are singing to Susy's accompaniment on the organ. "Sing 'Coronation,' Susy," she says, as she sits down beside her husband and glances lovingly in his face. "What is it?" he whispers. "You are unusually happy." "Yes," she answers. "I have had a vision of the land of Beulah, where Love is king." [Illustration] CHAPTERS FROM A LIFE. BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS, AUTHOR OF "THE GATES AJAR," "A SINGULAR LIFE," ETC. THE BURNING OF THE PEMBERTON MILLS.--THE STORY OF "THE TENTH OF JANUARY."--WHITTIER AND HIGGINSON.--THE WRITING AND PUBLICATION OF "THE GATES AJAR." The town of Lawrence was three miles and a half from Andover. Up to the year 1860 we had considered Lawrence chiefly in the light of a place to drive to. To the girlish resources which could, in those days, only include a trip to Boston at the call of some fate too vast to be expected more than two or three times a year, Lawrence offered consolations in the shape of dry goods and restaurant ice-cream, and a slow, delicious drive in the family carryall through sand flats and pine woods, and past the largest bed of the sweetest violets that ever dared the blasts of a New England spring. To the pages of the gazetteer Lawrence would have been known as a manufacturing town of importance. Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see the "hands" pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a patient, throng; used, in those days, to standing eleven hours and a quarter--women and girls--at their looms, six days of the week, and making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence, and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at which the factory people had not arrived when they left school.