"My mother, oh, sir, she is with him--she is surely with my father." Enoch Sharp turned away his head. "That is a good girl, Mary," he said at last. "But here we are at your new home. Wipe up your tears and look cheerful." Mary obeyed, and her effort to smile was a pleasant tribute to her noble friend, as he lifted her tenderly from the carriage. CHAPTER XXVIII THE OLD HOMESTEAD. 'Twas a picturesque old homestead, With a low moss-covered roof; And trumpet vines flung over it Their green and crimson woof. The house at which Judge Sharp stopped was long, low, and terribly weather-beaten. Once a coating of red paint had ornamented it, but time had beaten this off in some places, and washed it together in others, till the color was now a dull brown, with patches of red here and there, visible beneath the eaves and around the windows. The highway separated this dwelling from the river, which took a bold, graceful curve just below the house; leaving a broad expanse of meadow-land and some fine clumps of trees in full view on the opposite shore. Directly in front, ran a picket-fence, old, uneven and dilapidated, but in picturesque keeping with the building. The gate hung loosely on its hinges, just opposite an old-fashioned porch, that shot over the front door, much after the fashion of that hideous thing called a poke, with which English women disfigure their pretty travelling bonnets and protect themselves from the sun. An immense trumpet-flower overran this porch, whose antique massiveness harmonized with the building, for the straggling branches shot out in all directions, and its coarse blossoms, then in season, seemed to have drank up all the red paint as it vanished from the clapboards. Long, uncut grass, set thick with dandelions, filled the narrow strip between the front fence and the house, except just under the eaves, where it was worn away into a little, pebble-lined gutter, by the water-drops that poured from the roof every rainy day. A few of those old-fashioned roses, broad and red, but almost single, so common about old houses beyond the reach of nursery gardens, struggled up through the grass, along the lower portions of the fences, and on each side the porch. A garden, at one end of the house, was red with love-lies-bleeding and coxcombs, their deep hues contrasting with great clumps of marigolds and bachelor's-buttons, all claiming a preemption right over innumerable weeds and any amount of ribbon grass, that struggled hard to drive them out.