you appreciate high worth when you see it. I may, besides, tell you anything—you are my only companion—I tell you that my dear mother was one in ten thousand. She was a true heroine, a heroine of domestic life. Abandoning all her habits of elegance and refinement, despising luxury, ease and comfort, disdaining the sneers of the world, and giving herself to toil and hardship, and weariness of body and mind, that she might win from the desert an independent home for her family! My dear mother had no reason to suppose, and never admitted the possibility that my uncle would not be blessed with a male heir, that _I_, her son, for whom she toiled to secure a rugged farm, would be the inheritor of entailed Clifton! And so she toiled, year after year, until at the end of the war, when the army was reduced, and my father came home, he found a comfortable house, and a productive farm.” Clifton seemed to have fallen into one of his fits of reminiscence; scarcely conscious that he was talking to his true but volatile friend, scarcely conscious that he was talking _at all_, he went on— “My first recollection of my dearest mother, is of a very noble looking lady, of dark complexion, black hair, and gray eyes. I recollect, when an infant of four years old, being brought out from the mansion-house of Clifton every morning, to the back road gate, where she sat upon her horse awaiting me, with a little basket, containing our dinner, hanging on the horn of the saddle. I used to be lifted to the saddle before her, and while her left arm encircled me, with her right hand she would guide her horse around the base of the cliff, and take the winding bridle-path that led up the Rocky Ridge, upon which lay her sterile farm of Hardbargain. Oh! I remember how she used to ride from field to field, making investigations, and giving directions to her rude workmen—and with what deference the rough men were used to address her—hat in hand. I remember, too, our cold dinners, taken under the shade of an elm tree, whose lowest branches sheltered a fine spring—the head waters of that very torrent, which, in course of time and space, swells into the mighty river I told you of. Oh! my noble mother! how few would have displayed her courage and fortitude!—not one in a million but would have rather sat down in the luxurious ease and abundance of Clifton, where she had a long welcome for as long as she should choose to stay—rather than have dared the toil and hardship that she endured. The land was at last cleared up, the farm laid off in order, and brought under the best possible cultivation. A comfortable house was built, and my mother moved into it to receive my father when he should come home, at the disbanding of his company. He came at last—it was a happy time—and well I remember how my mother’s young, but stern and weather-beaten face, bloomed and softened again into youth and beauty and womanhood, by her soldier’s side.