They drank their wine and joined the ladies. Before Mrs. Malherb and Grace, politics were not spoken, and intercourse between Stark, his hostess and her daughter was of the friendliest description. The women dispelled his mournful horror of life, brightened existence, and made it a good, desirable, hopeful thing again. They much softened the bitterness of his outlook and appealed to the generosity and gentleness of his nature. To them he spoke of his circumstances, since they showed a lively and ingenuous interest concerning them. He told how that he was an orphan, that he had an uncle of great wealth and importance in his native state of Vermont, and that he was heir to Allen Stark's lands and moneys. He described his youth beside Lake Champlain; he explained his pleasures and ambitions, the customs of his country and the social life of his order. Cecil Stark's home interested Grace; the people in it attracted her mother. He told them of the Green Mountains and declared that his native land had something in common with their own wild Dartmoor. "Our great hills gather the water in their moss beds even as do yours," he said. "Problems like these of the Moor on a larger scale occupy the Vermont settlers. The intervales are a boon to us--low, fertile lands about the rivers. Great floods overrun them in spring and make them rich. But there is a wide difference in other ways. We fight with forests, you with naked wastes. We fell trees that the earth may receive the sun again and grow warm and sweet; you plant them to shelter your lands and homesteads. We hope in time to better our climate, make it more equal and moderate and lessen the awful snows of winter." "Then your hills are clothed, not naked as ours?" inquired Mrs. Malherb. "The Green Mountains are covered with aged forests of dwarf evergreens; pine, spruce and hemlock, that spring above stone and moss and winter grass," replied the sailor. "They rise green into the blue sky; their great gorges and valleys are full of blue, mysterious shadows; falling waters glimmer upon their sides and make music there in summer and thunder in winter time." "We have our Wistman's Wood," said Grace; "but no forests now; and no lakes such as the glorious sheets of water that you tell us of." "The rivers leap down to them. My earliest childhood's memory is a little boat on Champlain. Even then my small soul longed for the greater sea. Other children would not believe in it. I always did." Stark told Grace of the natural things her soul loved. "The brown beaver of North Vermont is a wonder of wonders," he declared. "'Tis the most social of living things. It regulates and governs its ideal republic in a manner so marvellous, that I think a beaver had been the best image for our banner and emblem of our hopes. A pure and perfect constitution obtains amongst 'em. Such harmony men will never know, but must always covet."