Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
By MARY J. HOLMES,
Author of "Lena Rivers," "Tempest and Sunshine," "English Orphans,"
"Dora Deane," etc., etc.
"Lead us not into temptation."
'Mid the New England hills, and beneath the shadow of their dim oldwoods, is a running brook whose deep waters were not always as merryand frolicsome as now; for years before our story opens, pent up andimpeded in their course, they dashed angrily against their prisonwalls, and turned the creaking wheel of an old sawmill with a sullen,rebellious roar. The mill has gone to decay, and the sturdy men whofed it with the giant oaks of the forest are sleeping quietly in thevillage graveyard. The waters of the mill-pond, too, relieved fromtheir confinement, leap gayly over the ruined dam, tossing for amoment in wanton glee their locks of snow-white foam, and then flowingon, half fearfully as it were, through the deep gorge overhung withthe hemlock and the pine, where the shadows of twilight ever lie, andwhere the rocks frown gloomily down upon the stream below, which,emerging from the darkness, loses itself at last in the waters of thegracefully winding Chicopee, and leaves far behind the moss-coveredwalls of what is familiarly known as the "Old House by the Mill."
'Tis a huge, old-fashioned building, distant nearly a mile from thepublic highway, and surrounded so thickly by forest trees that thebright sunlight, dancing merrily midst the rustling leaves above,falls but seldom on the time-stained walls of dark gray stone, wherethe damp and dews of more than a century have fallen, and where nowthe green moss clings with a loving grasp, as if 'twere its rightfulresting-place. When the thunders of the Revolution shook the hills ofthe Bay State, and the royal banner floated in the evening breeze,the house was owned by an old Englishman who, loyal to his king andcountry, denounced as rebels the followers of Washington. Againstthese, however, he would not raise his hand, for among