A COLONIAL WOOING
as to who these people were, this mother and daughter who apparently agreed only to disagree. It stands recorded in the minutes of an English Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends that in the year 1666 Edmund Davenport, of Ayton, and Anne Pearson, of Monthorp, were married at Kirby Grindale. Their daughter Ruth was born twelve years after; and it is further on record that her mother, widowed but a year, married Matthew Watson, and in 1682 emigrated to America, and thirteen years later, having weathered all the privations of those primitive times, Ruth was a well-grown girl of seventeen and her mother a well-preserved woman of fifty. Constant toil, some anxiety, and a scarcely concealed longing for her old home across the sea had told upon the mother, and she would have been judged to be older than she really was when seen, as she was this bright October afternoon, busy with the much needed mending of various garments, for there were now two boys to care for. Thus occupied, Anne Watson was more disposed to look backward and recall the
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