The brief spring day had faded into night. Nathan Blyth raked out his smithy fire, laid aside his leather apron, locked up the forge, and after an extensive and enjoyable ablution, was seated by the little round table in the cosy kitchen, discussing the tea and muffins which Lucy had prepared for their joint repast. That young lady presented a very piquant and attractive picture. In what her winsomeness consisted it would be difficult to say: certainly, she was possessed of unusual charms of face and form, but it is equally certain that these constituted only a minor element in the glamour of a beauty which commanded unstinted admiration. With much wisdom and at much self-sacrifice, Nathan Blyth had sent his daughter to a distant and noted school for several years, and thanks to this and her own clear intellect and singular diligence, she had obtained an education altogether in advance of most girls of her age in a much higher rank of social life. Her pleasant manners and maidenly behaviour made her justly popular among the villagers, and many a farmer’s son in and around Nestleton would have gone far and given much for a preferential glance from her lustrous hazel eyes, and for the reward of a smile and a word from lips which had no parallels amid the budding beauties of Waverdale. Lucy’s mother, a quiet, unpretentious woman, whose solid qualities and amiable disposition her daughter had inherited, had died some five years before the opening of my story; but the well-kept grave, the perpetual succession of flowers planted there, and the fresh-cut grave-stone at its head, gave proof enough that the widower and orphan kept her memory green. For a long time after his wife’s death Nathan Blyth had lived a lonely and a shadowed life. His anvil rang as loudly, because his hammer was wielded as lustily as before, but his grand, clear, tenor voice was seldom lifted in cheerful song. Time, however, that merciful healer of sore hearts, had gradually extracted the sting of his bereavement, and loving memories, sweet and tender, took the place of the aching vacuum which had been so hard to bear. In his blooming daughter, lately returned from school in all the fair promise of beautiful womanhood, Nathan saw the express image of his sainted wife. So now again his home was lighted up with gladness, and from the hearthstone, long gloomy in its solitude, the shadows flitted: for as Lucy tripped around, performing her domestic duties with pleasant smile and cheery song, Nathan waxed content and happy, and no words can describe the joy the sweet girl felt as she heard the old anvil-music ringing at the forge and saw the olden brightness beaming on his face. And so it should ever be:-- Be sure that those we mourn, whom God has taken, Have added joys, the more our sorrows die; They would not have us live of peace forsaken, While they are joysome in their home on high.