Russell H. Conwell | Page 5

have
had, or the call to cross a perilous, pathless ocean, to brave unknown
dangers in a new world would have found no response in their hearts.
They settled in Maryland and into this fighting pioneer blood entered
that strange magic influence of the South, which makes for romance,
for imagination, for the poetic and ideal in temperament.
[Illustration: MIRANDA CONWELL]
Of this family came Martin Conwell, of Baltimore, hot-blooded, proud,

who in 1810, visiting a college chum in western Massachusetts, met
and fell in love with a New England girl, Miss Hannah Niles. She was
already engaged to a neighbor's son, but the Southerner cared naught
for a rival. He wooed earnestly, passionately. He soon 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