The woman did not alter her rigid attitude, and kept her eyes cast down; but the passing of the stage awakened a noticeable interest in the two men on the front seat. The elder gazed with surprise and curiosity at the freight that the top of the stage-coach bore--three or four traveling trunks of unusual size, shape and color, clamped with iron and studded with heavy nails. “Be them trunks?” he inquired, staring open-mouthed at the sight. “I never seen trunks like them before.” [Illustration] Neither of his companions answered him; but a curious new expression came into the young man’s face. He sat up straight for the first time; and, as the wagon drew back into the narrow road, he began to whistle softly and melodiously. * * * * * When Samantha Spaulding was left a widow with a little boy, she got, as one of her neighbors expressed it, “more politeness than pity.” In truth, in so far as the condition has any luck about it, Samantha was lucky in her widowhood. She was a young widow, and a well-to-do widow. Old man Spaulding had been a good provider and a good husband; but he was much older than his wife, and had not particularly engaged her affections. Now that he was dead, after some eighteen months of married life, and had left her one of the two best farms in the county, everybody supposed that Mis’ Spaulding would marry Reuben Pett, who owned the other best farm, besides a saw-mill and a stage-route. That is, everybody thought so, except Samantha and Pett. They calmly kept on in their individual ways, and showed no inclination to join their two properties, though these throve and waxed more and more valuable year by year. They were good friends, however. Reuben Pett was a sagacious counselor, and a prudent man of affairs; and when Samantha’s boy became old enough to work, he was apprenticed to Mr. Pett, to the end that he might some day take charge of the saw-mill business, which his mother stood ready to buy for him. [Illustration] But the youthful Baxter Spaulding had not reached the age of twenty when he cast down his mother’s hopes in utter ruin by coming home from a business trip to Augusta and announcing that he was going to marry, and that the bride of his choice was a young lady of the variety stage who danced for a living, her specialty being known as “hitch-and-kick.”