He Fell in Love with His Wife

A widower with a farm needs a housekeeper, and a girl with nowhere to go needs a roof; they marry as a business arrangement, on terms, with the terms stated. Roe was a Presbyterian minister who had been a chaplain at Gettysburg and turned novelist after the Chicago fire; he outsold every American novelist of the 1870s, and the farming here is as carefully done as the courtship.