She went back to Vermont to her family, and he followed her. I have often amused myself by walking around over the roads and paths and fields he must have trod during his wooing, and trying to imagine his impatience of the cribbed and cabined superfluity and conventionality of the Vermont life, which looked so primitive and bare to my other grandfather. He endured it for some months, till his wooing was successful, and, just after her twenty-first birthday, the gentle, home-loving girl put her hand upon his sinewy arm and followed him out into the wilds. This was in 1838 when the wilds were very wild indeed. My great-uncle, who was her little brother at that time conceived a lifelong admiration and affection for the great, strapping, warm-hearted hero who came to take away his big sister. He used to tell me stories of that impetuous wooing, and of the strange impression left on the deeply-rooted mountain-people by the meteor-like appearance and disappearance of this startling, unreliable, dangerously alive personality, living so immorally free from all the rules and possessions and standards which bore them down to the earth, and to which they so tenaciously clung. My great-uncle always ended these stories of his brother-in-law (whom he never saw but on that occasion) by saying, “He was a talented man, with a powerful personality, who could have done anything he chose.” He also told me, “Our minister said of Albert that he was a wild, free son of Nature.” I take it the minister had had some contact with the romantic-school phraseology so much in fashion at that date. It was a bitterly hard life which the Vermont girl had chosen, full of extravagant hardships and privations of which she could never have dreamed. They lived here and there, always from hand to mouth, always as far beyond the edge of the settlements as it was possible to take a family of young children, for they had five little girls by the time they had been married a decade. Once or twice her husband made an attempt to enter regular life, to run a store in a frontier settlement, to take an everyday job; but these trials never lasted long, and their old life was taken up, log-cabin after log-cabin, rough clearings in the primeval forest, days when there was nothing but corn-meal in the pantry, long treks in covered wagons to escape from the fever-and-ague which burned and ravaged them; never more possessions than could be drawn by a team of lean horses, ... and always unbroken love and devotion between the two wayfarers. Wherever their caravan halted for a few months was home to the woodsman’s wife, because he was there; his vitality, his free-hearted zest in whatever came to them, bore her along like a tidal wave. And to the end of her days she worshipped the memory of his deep, never-wavering passion for her.