John Conwell, the English Ancestor who fought for the Preservation of the English Language. Martin Conwell of Maryland. A Runaway Marriage. The Parents of Russell Conwell.

When the Norman-French overran England and threatened to sweep from out the island the English language, many time-honored English customs, and all that those loyal early Britons held dear, a doughty Englishman, John Conwell, took up cudgels in their defence. Long and bitter was the struggle he waged to preserve the English language. Insidious and steady were the encroachments of the Norman-French tongue. The storm centre was the Castle school, for John Conwell realized that the language of the child of to-day is the language of the man of to-morrow. Right royal was the battle, for it was in those old feudal days of strong feeling and bitter, bloody partisanship. But this plucky Briton stood to his guns until he won. Norman-French was beaten back, English was taught in the schools, and preserved in the speech of that day.

It was a tale that was told his children and his children's children. It was a tradition that grew into their blood—the story of perseverance, the story of a fight against oppression and injustice. "Blood" is after all but family traditions and family ideals, and this fighting ancestor handed down to his descendants an inheritance of greater worth than royal lineage or feudal castle. The centuries rolled away, a new world was discovered, and the progressive, energetic Conwell family were not to be held back when adventure beckoned. Two members of it came to America. Courage of a high order, enthusiasm, faith, must they have had, or the call to cross a perilous, pathless ocean, to brave unknown dangers in a new world would have found no response in their hearts. They settled in Maryland and into this fighting pioneer blood entered that strange magic influence of the South, which makes for romance, for imagination, for the poetic and ideal in temperament.

[Illustration: MIRANDA CONWELL]

Of this family came Martin Conwell, of Baltimore, hot-blooded, proud, who in 1810, visiting a college chum in western Massachusetts, met and fell in love with a New England girl, Miss Hannah Niles. She was already engaged to a neighbor's son, but the Southerner cared naught for a rival. He wooed earnestly, passionately. He soon swept away her protests, won her heart and the two ran away and were married. But tragic days were ahead. On her return her incensed father locked her in her room and by threats and force compelled her to write a note to her young husband renouncing him. He would accept no such message, but sent a note imploring a meeting in a nearby schoolhouse at nightfall. The letter fell into the father's hands. He compelled her to write a curt reply bidding him leave her "forever." Then the father locked the daughter safely in the attic, and with a mob led by the rejected suitor, surrounded the schoolhouse and burnt it to the ground. The husband, thinking he had been heartlessly forsaken, made a brave fight against the odds, but seeing no hope of success, leaped from the burning building, amid the shots fired at him, escaped down a rocky embankment at the back of the schoolhouse, and under cover of the woods, fled. They told his wife that he was dead.

A little son came to brighten her shadowed life, whom she named, after him, Martin Conwell; and after seven years she married her early lover. But Martin was the son of her first husband and always her dearest child, and day after day when old and gray and again a widow, she would come over the New England hills, a little lonely old woman, to sit by his fireside and dream of those bygone days that were so sweet.

Too proud to again seek an explanation, Martin Conwell, her husband, returned to his Maryland home, living a lonely, bitter life, believing to the day of his death, thirty years later, that his young wife had repudiated and betrayed him.

Martin Conwell, the son, grew to manhood and in 1839 brought a bride to a little farm he had purchased at South Worthington, up in the Hampshire Highlands of the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. Here and there among these hills, along the swift mountain streams, the land sweeps out into sunny little meadows filled in summer with rich, tender grasses, starred with flowers. It is not a fertile land. The rocks creep out with frequent and unpleasing persistency. But Martin Conwell viewed life cheerfully, and being an ingenious man, added to the business of farming, several other occupations, and so managed to make a living, and after many years to pay the mortgage on his home which came with the purchase. The little farmhouse, clinging to the bleak hillside, seemed daring to the point of recklessness when the winter's winds swept down the valley, and the icy fingers of the storm reached out as if to pluck it bodily from its exposed position.

But when spring wove her mantle of green over the hills, when summer flung its leafy banners from a million tree tops, then in the wonderful panorama of beauty that spread before it, was the little home justified for the dangers it had dared. Back of the house the land climbed into a little ridge, with great, gray rocks here and there, spots of cool, restful color amid the lavish green and gold and purple of nature's carpeting. To the north swept hills clothed with the deep, rich green of hemlock, the faint green flutter of birch, the dense foliage of sugar maples. To the east, in the valley, a singing silver brook flashed in and out among somber boulders, the land ascending to sunny hilltop pastures beyond. But toward the south from the homestead lay the gem of the scenery; one of the most beautiful pictures the Berkshires know. Down the valley the hills divided, sweeping upward east and west in magnificent curves; and through the opening, range on range of distant mountains, including Mount Tom, filled the view with an ever-changing fairyland of beauty—in the spring a sea of tender, misty green; in the summer, a deep, heaving ocean of billowy foliage; in the fall, a very carnival of color—gold, rich reds, deep glowing browns and orange. And always, at morning, noon and night, was seen subtle tenderness of violet shadows, of hazy blue mists, of far-away purple distances.

Such was the site Martin Conwell chose for a home, a site that told something of his own character; that had marked influence on the family that grew up in the little farmhouse.

A mixture of the practical, hard common sense of New England and the sympathetic, poetic temperament of the South was in this young New England farmer—the genial, beauty-loving nature of his Southern father, the rigid honesty, the strong convictions, the shrewd sense of his Northern mother. Quiet and reserved in general, he was to those who knew him well, kind-hearted, broad-minded, fun-loving. He not only took an active interest in the affairs of the little mountain community, but his mind and heart went out to the big problems of the nation. He grappled with them, sifted them thoroughly, and having decided what to him was the right course to pursue, expressed his convictions in deed as well as word. His was no passive nature. The square chin denoted the man of will and aggression, and though the genial mouth and kindly blue eyes bespoke the sympathetic heart, they showed no lack of courage to come out in the open and take sides.

The young wife, Miranda Conwell, shared these broader interests of her husband. She came from central New York State and did not have that New England reserve and restraint that amounts almost to coldness. Her mind was keen and vigorous and reached out with her husband's to grasp and ponder the higher things of life. But the beauty of her character lay in the loving, affectionate nature that shone from her dark eyes, in the patient, self-sacrificing, self-denying disposition which found its chief joy in ministering to her husband and children. Deeply religious, she could no more help whispering a fervent little prayer, as she tucked her boys in bed, that the Father above would watch over and protect them, than she could help breathing, her trust in God was so much a part of her nature. Such a silent, beautiful influence unconsciously permeates a child's whole character, moulding it, setting it. Unconscious of it at the time, some day a great event suddenly crystalizes it like a wonderful chemical change, and the beauty of it shines evermore from his life. Miranda Conwell built better than she knew when in the every-day little things of her life, she let her faith shine.

Not a usual couple, by any means, for the early 40's in rugged New England. Yet their unusualness was of a kind within every one's reach. They believed the making of a life of more importance than the making of a living, and they grasped every opportunity of those meagre days to broaden and uplift their mental and spiritual vision. Martin Conwell's thoughts went beyond his plow furrow, Miranda's further than her bread-board; and so the little home had an atmosphere of earnest thought and purpose that clothed the uncarpeted floors and bare walls with dignity and beauty.