The Thorn in the Nest

BY MARTHA FINLEY,
Author of The Elsie Books, Signing the Contract, Wanted a Pedigree, The Mildred Series, etc., etc.
He puts a thorn in our nest to drive us to the wing, that we may not be grovellers forever.
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY Publishers

COPYRIGHT, 1886, BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY.

THE THORN IN THE NEST.
A malady
Preys on my heart, that medicine cannot reach.
Our story opens in spring of 1797, in a sequestered valley in Western Pennsylvania. On a green hillside dotted here and there with stately oaks and elms, and sloping toward the road, beyond which flowed the clear waters of a mountain stream, stood a brick farm-house—large, roomy, substantial; beautiful with climbing vines and flowering shrubs. Orchard, meadow, wheat and corn fields stretched away on either hand, shut in by dense forests and wooded hills; beyond and above which, toward the right, towered the giant Alleghenies; their summits, still white from the storms of the past winter, lying like a bank of snowy clouds against the eastern horizon.