"Every cloud has a silver lining." The hardest and saddest lives have their hours of softness, their gleams of sunshine. It is a wise and beautiful arrangement in the economy of Divine Providence that the law of physical and moral compensation is always operating to equalize the pains and the pleasures, the hardships and the comforts, the joys and the sorrows of human life. Before continuous, patient, and conscientious endeavors, the obstacles that fill the pathway of the pioneer through the wilderness are surmounted, the rough places are made smooth, and the last days of the dwellers in the desert and forest become like the latter days of the patriarch, "more blessed than the beginning." We may truly say of Mrs. Dalton, that her "latter days were more blessed than the beginning." A happy marriage which she entered into the following spring, and a long life of prosperity and peace after her escape from the last great danger, as we have narrated, were the fitting reward of the courage, diligence, and devotion displayed during the two first summers and winters which she passed in the northern wilderness. The wide region, lying between the sources of the Mississippi and the bends of the Missouri in Dakota, and stretching thence far up to the Saskatchewan in the north, has been appropriately styled "the happy hunting ground." The _rendezvous_ to which the mighty nimrods of the northwest return from the chase are huge cabins, built to stand before the howling blasts, and give shelter against the arctic regions of the winter. In these abodes dwell the wives and children of many of those rugged men, and create even there, by their devoted toils and gentle companionship, at least the semblance of a home. Almost whelmed in the snow, and when even the mercury freezes in the bulb of the thermometer, these anxious and loving housewives feed the lamp and keep the fire burning on the hearth. Dressing the skins of the deer, they keep their husbands well shod and clothed. The long winter of eight months passes monotonously away; the men, accustomed to a life of excitement, chafe and grow surly under their enforced imprisonment; but the women, by their kind offices and sweet words, act as a constant sedative upon these morose outbreaks. The hunters, it is said, grow softer in their manners as the winter wanes. They are unconscious scholars in the refining school of woman.