"Yes, and well you may be; but it is his early life that interests me most, and the part he loves best to recall. Nor of this have you heard the half—the dear, soft-hearted, modest man!" she answered, taking his face in both her hands and kissing him as women will those they greatly love. Afterward, when I had written out the story and came to ask Mr. Holmes’s permission to put it in print, I should by no means have succeeded except for the intercession of his sweet wife, who rightly believed the world could never know too much of so good and honest a gentleman. "Surely, Gilbert, there is nothing in it you would not have told, and it will please me more than I can tell if you will let him have his way in this," the dear lady remonstrated; and he, saying nothing, assented, as he did to everything she proposed. I have had much inclination to prolong the story, but this I have restrained, lest it prove tiresome; though how that could be I cannot see. In the telling I shall follow on with the reader, but more slowly, it being to me worthy of greater regard than he can give it; and this because in every word I shall detect a presence or hear again voices that will be dear to me forever. This pleasure the reader cannot share, nor see as I shall the loving couple, first one and then the other, take up the story on this page and on that as, in the telling, some halt or embarrassment of speech clogs the other’s utterance. [Illustration: Chapter I tailpiece] *CHAPTER II* *GILBERT HOLMES’S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF* I was born on the borders of a rolling prairie in the great state of Illinois, near the spot where the Big and Little Sandy mingle their shallow waters to form the wandering Mauvaise Terre. This last, hesitating long as to the course it would pursue, or indeed whether it would move at all or not, finally making up its mind, takes its way to the west, there at last to be swallowed up in the turbid waters of the Illinois. This in 1826, when the state was just born and men lived far apart, and wolves uttered their doleful cries beyond the sheepfold and in the edges of the great forests at night and in the gray of the early morning. Of the county in which I was born, I am not sure, because of the uncertainty as to the boundary-lines in the early days, but this is not a matter of any account, as it in no wise concerns the subject of my story. My mother, for family reasons, wished I should be called Job, but dissuaded, though why I do not know, she named me Gilbert, after a gentleman of amiable disposition she had once known. This, she said, because she traced in me a resemblance to him in this important particular. "Did you ever see milder eyes or softer ways?" she would say aside to visitors, with an air of motherly pride, when I was scarce able to walk.