It was June, in the year 1848—
The flush of the summer evening, lay broad and warm upon the river, when an old man came from the cottage door, and passing through the garden gate, bent his steps toward the oak, which, standing by the shore, caught upon its rugged trunk and wide-branching limbs, the golden rays of the setting sun.
He stood there, with uncovered brow, the breeze tossing his snow-white hairs, and the evening flush warming over his venerable face. By his side, grasping his hand, was a boy of some three years, with a glad, happy face, and sunny hair.
Before the old man and child spread the river, warm with golden light, and white with sails. Yonder the palisades rose up into the evening sky; and behind them, was the cottage, leaning against the cliff, with boughs above its steep roof, vines about its pointed windows, and before its door a garden, from whose beds of flowers a cool fountain sent up its drops of spray, into the evening air. The cottage of Cornelius Berman, just as it was in other days.
Presently the father and the mother of the child came from the garden gate, and approached the oak. A man of twenty-five years, with head placed firmly on his shoulders, and a face whose clear gray eyes, and forehead shaded by brown hair, indicate the artist, the man of genius,—a woman who may be seventeen, who may be twenty, but whose rounded form and pure wifely face, link together the freshness of the maiden, the ripe maturity of the woman.
Beside the young wife, walks a young woman, whose form is not so full and rounded in its beauty, but whose pale face, tinted with bloom on the lips and cheek, is lighted by eyes that gleam with a sad, spiritual light. Altogether, a face that touches you with its melancholy beauty, and compares with the face of the wife, as a calm starlit night, with a rosy summer morn.
It is Carl Raphael, his wife, Mary, and his sister, now called Alice, who come to join old Martin Fulmer on the river bank. Declining to touch one dollar of the Van Huyden estate, and determined to earn his bread by the toil of his hand, Carl still had fortune thrust upon him,—for Mary was the only heir of the merchant prince, Evelyn Somers.
"Doctor, I have a letter from father, who is now in Rome," said Carl, as he stood by: the old man's side,—and he placed the letter from his father, the Legate, in Martin Fulmer's hand.
Martin seized the letter, and reading it eagerly, his eye brightening up with the light of the olden time—