should love to go up to Stone Ridge and wear out my old clothes. Did any
one tell me that place would some day be yours?"

"It will be my wife's on the day we are married."

"That is where your wife, sir, would like to live."

"It is a stony Garden, dear! The summer people have their places nearer
the river. Our land lies back, with no view but hills. For one who has the
world before her where to choose, it strikes me she has picked out a very
humble Paradise."

"Did you think my idea was to travel--a poor army girl who spends her life
in trunks? Do we ever buy a book or frame a picture without thinking of
our next move? As for houses, who am I that I should be particular? In the
Army's House are many mansions, but none that we can call our own. Oh, I'm
very primitive; I have the savage instinct to gather sticks and stones,
and get a roof over my head before winter sets in."

To such a speech as this there was but one obvious answer, as she rode at
his side, her appealing slenderness within reach of his arm. It did not
matter what thousands he proposed to spend upon the roof that should cover
her; it was the same as if they were planning a hut of tules or a burrow
in the snow.

"It is a poor man's country," he said; "stony hillsides, stony roads lined
with stone fences. The chief crop of the country is ice and stone. In one
of my grandfather's fields there is a great cairn which Adam Bogardus,
they say, picked up, stone by stone, with his bare hands, and carted there
when he was fourteen years old. We will build them into the walls of our