he had such an instinctive taste and power of expression, that his song of
penitence or praise was far more devotional than the labored efforts of
many more highly cultivated singers. Music and poetry flowed smoothly and
naturally from his lips, but in uttering the common prose of daily life
his organs were rebellious. The truth must be spoken,--he stammered badly,
incurably. Whether it was owing to the attempt to overcome his impediment
by making his speech musical, or to the cadences of his hammer beating
time while his brain was shaping its airy fancies, his thoughts ran
naturally in verse.

Do not smile at the thought of Vulcan's callused fingers touching the
chords of the lyre to delicate music. The sun shone as lovingly upon the
swart face of the blacksmith in his shop-door, as upon the scholar at his
library-window. "Poetry was an angel in his breast," making his heart glad
with her heavenly presence; he did not "make her his drudge, his maid-of-
all-work," as professional verse-makers do.

Mr. Hardwick's younger sister was married to a hard-working, stern,
puritanical man named Davenport, (not her first love,) who removed to a
Western State when it was almost a wilderness, cleared for himself a farm,
and built a log-house. The toil and privations of frontier life soon
wrought their natural effects upon Mrs. Davenport's delicate constitution.
She fell into a rapid decline and died. Her husband was seized with a
fever the summer after, and died also, leaving two children, Mark and
Anna. The blacksmith had six motherless children of his own; but he set
out for the West, and brought the orphans home with him. He thenceforth
treated them like his own offspring, manifesting a woman's tenderness as
well as a father's care for them.

Mark was a comely lad, with the yellow curling hair, the clear blue eyes,