times driven out of the valley, and the men, women, and children
were obliged to tramp for two hundred miles through the unbroken
wilderness to their old homes. But they rallied and came back
again, and at last were strong enough to hold their ground. About
this time the mutterings of the American Revolution began to be
heard, and the Pennsylvanians and New Englanders forgot their enmity
and became brothers in their struggle for independence.

Among the pioneers from Connecticut who put up their old fashioned
log houses in Wyoming were George Ripley and his wife Ruth. They
were young, frugal, industrious, and worthy people. They had but
one child--a boy named Benjamin; but after awhile Alice was added
to the family, and at the date of which I am telling you she was
six years and her brother thirteen years old.

Mr. Ripley was absent with the continental army under General
Washington, fighting the battles of his country. Benjamin, on
this spring day, was visiting some of his friends further down the
valley; so that when Alice came forth to play "Jack Stones" alone,
no one was in sight, though her next neighbor lived hardly two
hundred yards away.

I wish you could have seen her as she looked on that summer afternoon.
She had been helping, so far as she was able, her mother in the
house, until the parent told her to go outdoors and amuse herself.
She was chubby, plump, healthy, with round pink cheeks, yellow hair
tied in a coil at the back of her head, and her big eyes were as
blue, and clear, and bright as they could be.

She wore a brown homespun dress--that is to say, the materials