LYDIA KNIGHT'S HISTORY.
CHAPTER I.
A little girl with light-blue eyes and fair hair sat under the shade of the forest trees pulling a sheep-skin. One by one her brothers and sisters, older and younger than she, had grown weary of the work and wandered off to play.
"Oh, Lydia, how can you sit there over that tiresome work. Look at the shadows under the trees, and the squirrels calling to us to come and chase them from limb to limb. Let's have a play," said the last little boy as his patience at length had ebbed away.
"No," replied the fair-haired maiden, and the firm little mouth took another line of determination as she spoke, "I shall not leave the sheepskin till the last lock is pulled."
A "clearing" in the forest of the western part of New York State, a large comfortable cabin on a rise of ground near the center of the space, with wide-open doors and floors of gleaming white, waving grain on one side of the house and a large vegetable garden on the other side constituted the scene of a home in the forest wilds, which was a common one in those days—the years between 1810 and 1820. The circle of high waving trees gave a grandeur and beauty to the view that nothing else could possibly do.
The little girl who sat so steadily at work had been brought by her parents two years previously to this wild western home.
She was born in 1812, in Sutton, Worcester Co., Mass., and eight happy years had been spent in her earliest home.
Shall I tell you about her father, whose name was Jesse Goldthwait? He was a medium-sized, well-built New Englander, prudent, industrious and the possessor of a firm will. Her mother was a quiet-spoken woman, but she bad an ardent temperament and a great deal of natural refinement. She had had some scholastic advantages and was exceedingly ambitious for her children. Five sisters and six brothers had Lydia, and a very happy and peaceful family they were.
Don't you know what "wool-pulling" is? Well, while my little girl is finishing her work I will tell you: