Bonny Jean, and A Severe Threat — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

BONNY JEAN, — 11 Conway on’ the first day of his arrival, and soon obtained per- mission to board at the Conway cabin. He liked the old man, with his bluff, honest good humor ; he liked little, timid, shrinking Mrs. Conway-—a Kentucky lady by birth, who, hay- ing married the backwoodsman, had accepted her lot philsoph- ically, and settled down to life in the pine woods; but he loved the daughter—sole heiress of the house of Conway—bonny Jean, as every one called her. When Philip first became an inmate of the Conway house, Jean had been passing her vacation at home ; but a short time previous to the opening of my story, she had returned to the seminary in New Orleans, where she was being educated. Jean was likea fairy, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, a perfect little beauty, destined to turn men’s heads and derange their hearts, Withal, she was good and pure as an angel, and every man and woman in the camp would have lain down their lives in her defense. Old Conway had been ailing long, but the last sudden stroke, which had taken him from them, had come quite unexpectedly. Jean had been sent for at once, and her mother had ridden to ‘the station, some ten miles distant, to receive her daughter, and break the news as gently as possible. And they had arrived just in time ; a few moments later and they would have been too late. And so, it was all over; and all that remained of the old man, kind husband and tender father, was the long, red, clay- covered mound on the river-bank, beneath the wide-spreading branches of a huge live oak, from whose drooping boughs the long, gray moss trailed, like funeral badges of faded crape, over the old man’s grave; while a mocking-bird, whose nest was near, sang all day long in a neighboring magnolia, K *K ¥ a *K * * Mrs. Conway and her daughter sat alone in their lonely cabin home the morning after the funeral. The world was all before them, and their life in the pine woods was ended, for they could Ecomichooks (eo) =)