Hetherton Place was nearly a mile distant from the village, and on the side of a hill, the ascent of which was so gradual that on reaching the top one was always surprised to find himself so far above the surrounding country, of which there were most delightful views. Turn which way you would the eye was met with lovely landscape pictures of grassy meadows and plains, of wooded hill-sides, sloping down to the river’s brink and stretching away to the sandy shores of the ponds or little lakes, which, when the morning sun was shining on them, sparkled like so many diamonds, in the sunny valley of Merrivale, where our story opens. Merrivale was not a very large or very stirring town, for its sons and daughters had a habit of turning their backs upon the old home and seeking their fortunes in the larger cities or in the West, where nature seems to be kinder and more considerate to her children, in that her harvests there yield richer stores with less of that toil of the hands and sweat of the brow so necessary among the rocky hills of New England. There were no factories in Merrivale, for the waters of the lazily-flowing Chicopee were insufficient for that, but there were shoe-shops there, and the men who worked in them lived mostly in small, neat houses on Cottage Row, or on the new streets which were gradually creeping down the hill to the river and the railroad track, over which almost every hour of the day heavily-laden trains went rolling on to the westward. Years and years ago, when the Indians still lurked in the woods around Merrivale, and bears were hunted on Wachuset Mt., and the howl of the wolf was sometimes heard in the marshy swamp around old Cranberry Pond, the entire town, it is said, was owned by the Hethertons, who traced their ancestry in a direct line back as far as the Norman conquest. Theirs of course was the bluest blood in Merrivale, and theirs the heaviest purse, but purses will grow light in time, and blood grow weak as well, and the Hetherton race had died out one by one, until, so far as anybody knew, there was but a single member remaining, and he as good as dead, for any good he did to the people of Merrivale. For nearly twenty-three years Frederick Hetherton had lived abroad, and during that time, with one exception, he had never communicated with a single individual except his lawyers, the Beresfords—first Henry, the elder, who had been his friend and colleague, and, after his death, with Arthur, who succeeded to his brother’s business.