“’Tis a thing almost against nature for a woman to try to part true lovers,” answered the yeoman’s wife, after a pause; “but I’ll speak as truly to you as if these were my dying words. Though my husband told you some of our troubles, he didn’t mention the greatest, and that which makes all the rest so hard to bear. If you and your sweetheart marry, you’ll be kind and pleasant to each other for a year or two, and while that’s the case, you never will repent; but, by and by, he’ll grow gloomy, rough, and hard to please, and you’ll be peevish, and full of little angry fits, and apt to be complaining by the fireside, when he comes to rest himself from his troubles out of doors; so your love will wear away by little and little, and leave you miserable at last. It has been so with us; and yet my husband and I were true lovers once, if ever two young folks were .” As she ceased, the yeoman and his wife exchanged a glance, in which there was more and warmer affection than they had supposed to have escaped the frost of a wintry fate, in either of their breasts. At that moment, when they stood on the utmost verge of married life, one word fitly spoken, or perhaps one peculiar look, had they had mutual confidence enough to reciprocate it, might have renewed all their old feelings, and sent them back, resolved to sustain each other amid the struggles of the world. But the crisis passed and never came again. Just then, also, the children, roused by their mother’s voice, looked up, and added their wailing accents to the testimony borne by all the Canterbury pilgrims against the world from which they fled. “We are tired and hungry!” cried they. “Is it far to the Shaker village?” The Shaker youth and maiden looked mournfully into each other’s eyes. They had but stepped across the threshold of their homes, when lo! the dark array of cares and sorrows that rose up to warn them back. The varied narratives of the strangers had arranged themselves into a parable; they seemed not merely instances of woful fate that had befallen others, but shadowy omens of disappointed hope and unavailing toil, domestic grief and estranged affection, that would cloud the onward path of these poor fugitives. But after one instant’s hesitation, they opened their arms, and sealed their resolve with as pure and fond an embrace as ever youthful love had hallowed. “We will not go back,” said they. “The world never can be dark to us, for we will always love one another.”