besides, he desired that they should go, and she was not able to offer
any valid objection. So, after breakfast, the two best horses of the
team were very carefully groomed, saddled, and--Sam having been sent off
on a visit to his father, with the house-key in his pocket--the mother
and son took the road up the creek.

Both were plainly, yet very respectably, dressed, in garments of the
same home-made cloth, of a deep, dark brown color, but Mary Potter wore
under her cloak the new crape shawl which Gilbert had brought to her
from Wilmington, and his shirt of fine linen displayed a modest ruffle
in front. The resemblance in their faces was even more strongly marked,
in the common expression of calm, grave repose, which sprang from the
nature of their journey. A stranger meeting them that morning, would
have seen that they were persons of unusual force of character, and
bound to each other by an unusual tie.

Up the lovely valley, or rather glen, watered by the eastern branch of
Redley Creek, they rode to the main highway. It was an early spring, and
the low-lying fields were already green with the young grass; the
weeping-willows in front of the farm-houses seemed to spout up and fall
like broad enormous geysers as the wind swayed them, and daffodils
bloomed in all the warmer gardens. The dark foliage of the cedars
skirting the road counteracted that indefinable gloom which the
landscapes of early spring, in their grayness and incompleteness, so
often inspire, and mocked the ripened summer in the close shadows which
they threw. It was a pleasant ride, especially after mother and son had
reached the main road, and other horsemen and horsewomen issued from the
gates of farms on either side, taking their way to the meeting-house.
Only two or three families could boast vehicles,--heavy, cumbrous
"chairs," as they were called, with a convex canopy resting on four