Hair snow-white, the drifts of many a winter, eyes sunken amid a network of wrinkles, hands hardened and veinous, shoulders bent, and step laggard and feeble, the old lovers were as beautiful to each other, and as enthralled by mutual devotion, as on their wedding-day forty-five years before. They were beautiful also to more discerning eyes--to a wandering artist in quest of material, who painted them both in divers poses, and carried off his canvases. As a recompense of some sort, he left a masterly depiction of the god of love burned in the wood of the broad, smooth board of the mantelpiece above the hearth, where the fickle little deity, though furnished with wings for swiftest flight, had long presided in constancy. Doubtless some such sentiment had prompted the pyrography, but its significance failed to percolate through the dense ignorance of the old mountain woman. “Folks from the summer hotel over yander nigh the bluffs air always powerful tickled over that leetle critter,” she was wont to reply to an admiring comment, “but he ‘pears ter me some similar ter a flying-squirrel. I never seen no baby dee-formed with wings nohow, an’ I tol’ the painter-man at the time that them legs war too fat ter be plumb genteel. But, lawsy! I jes hed ter let him keep on workin’. He war powerful saaft-spoken an’ perlite, though I war afeared he’d disfigure every plain piece o’ wood about the house afore he tuk hisself away.” Years before, the romance of the old couple had been the idyl of the country-side. They had indeed been lovers as children. They had made pilgrimages to their trysting-place when the breadth of the dooryard was a long journey. They had plighted their vows as they sat in juvenile content, plump, tow-headed, bare-footed among the chips of the wood pile. As they grew older it was the object of their lives to save their treasures to bestow on each other. A big apple, a chunk of maple-sugar, a buckeye of abnormal proportions, attained a certain dignity regarded as _gages d’amour_. They were never parted for a day till Editha was seventeen years old, when she was summoned to the care of a paralytic aunt who dwelt in Shaftesville, twelve miles distant, and who, in the death of her husband, had been left peculiarly helpless and alone. The separation was a dreary affliction to the lovers, but it proved the busiest year of Benjamin Casey’s life, signalized by his preparations for the home-coming of the bride to be. All the country-side took a share in the “house-raising,” and the stanch log cabin went up like magic on the rocky bit of land on the bluff, thus utilized to reserve for the plow the arable spaces of the little farm. Every article of the rude furniture common to the region was in its appropriate place when Editha first stood on her own threshold and gazed into the glowing fire aflare upon her own hearth; and humble though it was, she confronted the very genius of home.