Russell H. Conwell | Page 5

swept away her protests, won her heart and the two ran away and were married. But tragic days were ahead. On her return her incensed father locked her in her room and by threats and force compelled her to write a note to her young husband renouncing him. He would accept no such message, but sent a note imploring a meeting in a nearby schoolhouse at nightfall. The letter fell into the father's hands. He compelled her to write a curt reply bidding him leave her "forever." Then the father locked the daughter safely in the attic, and with a mob led by the rejected suitor, surrounded the schoolhouse and burnt it to the ground. The husband, thinking he had been heartlessly forsaken, made a brave fight against the odds, but seeing no hope of success, leaped from the burning building, amid the shots fired at him, escaped down a rocky embankment at the back of the schoolhouse, and under cover of the woods, fled. They told his wife that he was dead.
A little son came to brighten her shadowed life, whom she named, after him, Martin Conwell; and after seven years she married her early lover. But Martin was the son of her first husband and always her dearest child, and day after day when old and gray and again a widow, she would come over the New England hills, a little lonely old woman, to sit by his fireside and dream of those bygone days that were so sweet.
Too proud to again seek an explanation, Martin Conwell, her husband, returned to his Maryland home, living a lonely, bitter life, believing to the day of his death, thirty years later, that his young wife had repudiated and betrayed him.
Martin Conwell, the son, grew to manhood and in 1839 brought a bride to a little farm he had purchased at South Worthington, up in the Hampshire Highlands of the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. Here and there among these hills, along the swift mountain streams, the land sweeps out into sunny little meadows filled in summer with rich, tender grasses, starred with flowers. It is not a fertile land. The rocks creep out with frequent and unpleasing persistency. But Martin Conwell viewed life cheerfully, and being an ingenious man, added to the business of farming, several other occupations, and so managed to make a living, and after many years to pay the mortgage on his home which came with the purchase. The little farmhouse, clinging to the bleak hillside, seemed daring to the point of recklessness when the winter's winds swept down the valley, and the icy fingers of the storm reached out as if to pluck it bodily from its exposed position.
But when spring wove her mantle of green over the hills, when summer flung its leafy banners from a million tree tops, then in the wonderful panorama of beauty that spread before it, was the little home justified for the dangers it had dared. Back of the house the land climbed into a little ridge, with great, gray rocks here and there, spots of cool, restful color amid the lavish green and gold and purple of nature's carpeting. To the north swept hills clothed with the deep, rich green of hemlock, the faint green flutter of birch, the dense foliage of sugar maples. To the east, in the valley, a singing silver brook flashed in and out among somber boulders, the land ascending to sunny hilltop pastures beyond. But toward the south from the homestead lay the gem of the scenery; one of the most beautiful pictures the Berkshires know. Down the valley the hills divided, sweeping upward east and west in magnificent curves; and through the opening, range on range of distant mountains, including Mount Tom, filled the view with an ever-changing fairyland of beauty--in the spring a sea of tender, misty green; in the summer, a deep, heaving ocean of billowy foliage; in the fall, a very carnival of color--gold, rich reds, deep glowing browns and orange. And always, at morning, noon and night, was seen subtle tenderness of violet shadows, of hazy blue mists, of far-away purple distances.
Such was the site Martin Conwell chose for a home, a site that told something of his own character; that had marked influence on the family that grew up in the little farmhouse.
A mixture of the practical, hard common sense of New England and the sympathetic, poetic temperament of the South was in this young New England farmer--the genial, beauty-loving nature of his Southern father, the rigid honesty, the strong convictions, the shrewd sense of his Northern mother. Quiet and reserved in general, he was to those who knew him well, kind-hearted, broad-minded, fun-loving. He not only took an active interest in the affairs of the little mountain community,