At the close of the war the Ganos were ruined. The rambling, verandaed house was sold for a song to the Gano-Lees, and the question was, where could John with his delicate health, his interrupted and insufficient schooling, make a livelihood? Where could Mrs. Gano live most inexpensively, and with least annoyance to sensibilities so outraged by the issue of the war? Certainly not in Virginia--not anywhere in the despoiled, prostrate South. Certainly not in the hated North. But the West-- Far off in the wilds of one of the Middle States, Mrs. Gano's father, William Calvert, had once held property, and in her early youth she had been taken from Baltimore in a stage-coach over the Alleghany Mountains to visit him during one of his long absences from home on business in connection with these Western lands. He had bought a queer, grim house in a little town on a river among the Mioto Hills, and made himself there a temporary home or headquarters for these yearly Western pilgrimages. The State where he had his interests was the first one carved out of the great Northwestern Territory, and though later on a much farther West robbed this mid-America of its early century associations of adventure and of danger, it was far remoter from the Atlantic seaboard then than the Pacific is to-day. The house that Mrs. Gano inherited from her father had been built in times of Indian warfare for a fortress and ammunition centre. With the retreat of the Indians to the Western Reservation, the settlement's need of a fort was less than the need of a school. The solid and spacious rectangular building of stone on the height above the river was turned into an academy for boys. A rival school sapped its prosperity in time; it declined into bankruptcy, and came upon the market. William Calvert bought it, made it into a dwelling-house, ultimately adding a wooden L, and establishing his partner's family there. This house in the small but growing town of New Plymouth was all that was left to his eldest daughter when his shrunken estate was divided at his death. Through former acquaintances of William Calvert, the position of teller in the principal bank of the town was obtained for John Gano; and hither at the close of the war came Mrs. Gano with her son of twenty and her daughter, Valeria, nineteen. New Plymouth was not looked upon by its inhabitants as at all beyond the pale of a most advanced civilization. Founded by stout New-Englanders, it was one of the oldest settlements in this part of the world. It had its churches, its court-house, its excellent academy for boys and its unparalleled seminary for young ladies, when the present capital of the State was a wild unpeopled plain, crossed by winding cow-paths.