Kindred said, “We didn’t want to come over until both of us were here. For about ten days I’ve been living in a lean-to in the woods by myself, cutting some smaller trees and girdling the big ones where I’ll be planting crops. But Mavis came out with me yesterday so we could pick out a place for our cabin. It’s on a small knoll but near a spring so we won’t need to dig a well. We’ve been working together gathering some flat foundation rocks and dragging the straight logs to the house site, but before we start to notch any out for the walls, we thought we’d best look and see how you did yours.”

The two younger people had already spoken more words than the Pratts usually exchanged in an entire day.

Epsey finally said, “Well, we’ve been hoping for some neighbors, and we’re glad to have you move out here. Come on inside and sit for a while.”

The Morrises, particularly Mavis, were eager to talk and soon revealed a lot about themselves. They had both grown up in Philadelphia. Kindred had been born in 1752, was twenty years old when he married, but looked younger than his age. He was a small man, slender but wiry, with delicate features. Except for Mavis’s bonnet, neither she nor her husband seemed to care about how they looked. Kindred’s long black hair tended to fall forward in front of his light gray eyes, and he had a habit of brushing it back every few minutes.

Mavis was bright-eyed, talkative, and surprisingly frank with her comments. She was quite pretty, somewhat buxom but athletic, with curly yellow hair, disheveled and not quite encompassed in her bonnet. Mavis said that she was barely sixteen years old when she married. Her parents had died of typhus fever when she was twelve, and she was taken in by a relative and assigned to work in the home of Dr. John Bartram, under the supervision of a stern and dominant housekeeper. One day, she related with a laugh, Dr. Bartram had found her in his library making sketches of some of his specimens, and she was promoted “from sweeping floors to drawing bugs.” She met Kindred when he came to the house to attend some talks on botany.

She paused for breath, and they all looked at Kindred.

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve been interested in plants and animals, and I saved up my money for the Bartram lecture series. He is the king’s botanist, you know, and is famous both in the colonies and in England. I met Mavis there, and we got along well with each other. I like to study and also enjoy working outdoors, even including fieldwork. What I really want is to make enough on our farmland to let me concentrate on studying biology, both in books and in the woods—”