This was Pansy, child of plain, poor, farmer folk, immemorially dwelling close to the soil; unlettered, unambitious, long-lived, abounding in children, without physical beauty, but marking the track of their generations by a path lustrous with right-doing. For more than a hundred years on this spot the land had lessened around them; but the soil had worked upward into their veins, as into the stalks of plants, the trunks of trees; and that clean, thrilling sap of the earth, that vitality of the exhaustless mother which never goes for nothing, had produced one heavenly flower at last--shooting forth with irrepressible energy a soul unspoiled and morally sublime. When the top decays, as it always does in the lapse of time, whence shall come regeneration if not from below? It is the plain people who are the eternal breeding grounds of high destinies. In the long economy of nature, this, perhaps, was the meaning and the mission of this lofty child who now lay sleepless, shaken to the core with thoughts of the splendid world over into which she was to journey to-morrow. At ten o'clock next morning she set out. It had been a question with her whether she should go straight across the fields and climb the fences, or walk around by the turnpike and open the gates. Her preference was for fields and fences, because that was the short and direct way, and Pansy was used to the short and direct way of getting to the end of her desires. But, as has been said, she had already fallen into the habit of considering what was due her and becoming to her as a young Mrs. Meredith; and it struck her that this lady would not climb field fences, at least by preference and with facility. Therefore she chose the highroad, gates, dust, and dignity. It could scarcely be said that she was becomingly raimented. Pansy made her own dresses, and the dresses declared the handiwork of their maker. The one she wore this morning was chiefly characterized by a pair of sleeves designed by herself; from the elbow to the wrist there hung green pouches that looked like long pea-pods not well filled. Her only ornament was a large oval pin at her throat which had somewhat the relation to a cameo as that borne by Wedgwood china. It represented a white horse drinking at a white roadside well; beside the shoulder of the horse stood a white angel, many times taller, with an arm thrown caressingly around the horse's neck; while a stunted forest tree extended a solitary branch over the horse's tail. She had been oppressed with dread that she should not arrive in time. No time had been set, no one knew that she was coming, and the forenoons were long. Nevertheless impatience consumed her to encounter Mrs. Meredith; and once on the way, inasmuch as Pansy usually walked as though she had been told to go for the doctor, but not to run, she was not long in arriving.