Complete and unabridged, with 55 full-page plates by Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer and George Inness. 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 an army chaplain in the Civil War 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. Fifty-five plates of farm scenes, harvests and farmyards by painters including Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, dating from 1832 to 1927, picture the rural world this marriage is worked out in.