bear to have them change! As she thought of how dreadful it would be, she almost renounced her plan. She would stay with them every minute, forget everything in the comfort of being just Grace Ann.

"I think Grace Ann's working too hard, mother." Mr. Parker had guessed the origin of the cake, and now he smiled expansively upon his family. "You better pick her up at the library and take her to a movie. I've some business to attend to; but I might join you later." "No, daddy. I can't go, possibly." Revolt stiffened Grace Ann. Crazy to think she could give things up. Nan would be waiting and the boys-and the river slipping under the moonlight, lapping against the boat. Then dancing, and the ride home with long silences. Nothing could keep her! Nothing! "When I get through at the libarry I got to go to Lucy's and do some work."

All right, baby. School won't last much longer now.' Mrs. Parker's heart was in her throat. She would be alone for an hour. She could see the "Hummer" leave, and be sure

Some way she got them out of the house, saw them down the steps, down the walk, and then the shade-trees hid them. She waited till eight o'clock before she herself hurried out into the summer dusk.

Across the park she went, past the grand stand, past benches filled with young people. She was only half conscious of them, meaningless voices, figures made of shadow. What had they to do with her?

It was near train time when she reached the station. Baggage was hurried forward, groups of men and women talked under the arc-lights, stray ones wandered up and down impatiently. She couldn't see Monty! The train came roaring in, long lines of lighted windows, noises, peering faces. There he was, in his brown suit and derby, a suitcase in either hand. He was climbing aboard. The train was starting.

"Oh, thank you, God," she half whispered. "Thank you!"

Jubilantly, tirelessly now, she started toward home. On the way she passed within ten feet of Grace Ann.

Grace Ann walked with a boy, her hand on his arm; and as they moved, their young shoulders touched and their talk and laughter broke. When they reached a lonely corner his arms went about her, roughly, hungrily. Through the thin summer darkness she could see his face, changed, alive. Something in her answered him, something frightened, retreating, but never withdrawing. A moment later they sauntered down to the river-bank.

At home Mrs. Parker waited for Edward. It was after ten before he came; he, too, had walked jubilantly, with the taste of victory on his lips. Only when he reached her did he realize that he was tired.

"We'll go right to bed," said Mrs. Parker firmly. "Working all day and all evening is too much."

Mr. Parker agreed, and as he lay stretched beside his wife he smiled in the darkness. It was just a question of handling it right, as he had thought. He slept heavily, and only half awakened when Grace Ann came in.

No one saw her tiptoe down the hall, her hands over her flushed cheeks, her eyes shining, starlike.

"It's just Grace Ann going to bed," said Mrs. Parker.

"That's good." His voice was indistinct with sleep. "Always like to have her in early."

Breakfast next morning was like every other breakfast. Grace Ann was fresh for school and Mr. Parker read aloud from the out-of-town paper. From behind the percolator Mrs. Parker smiled at the two of them happily. Sometimes she stopped to sniff the fragrance of honeysuckle which drifted in through the open window. It was like a benediction.

"Get your work done last night, baby?" Mr. Parker put down the paper.

"Yes, daddy." Grace Ann bent over her plate. Last night! Had it really happened? The wonder of it, and the terrifying sweetness! It seemed unreal now, like a dream. They would never know, these two beside her; and they couldn't ever understand. She was sorry for them, suddenly.

"What say we all go to a movie tonight?" Mr. Parker beamed on them

both. "Or would you rather do something else?"

"I'd like to stay home." Grace Ann's voice was soft. "I'd like to just stay home with you and mother."

The Parkers smiled at each other, knowingly.

Grace Ann jumped up. She kissed her mother, sweetly, for the pity she had felt.

"Right on the bald spot, daddy." In the doorway she whirled. "Too-deloo dears, and also pip-pip."

A flutter of skirts and she was gone. "Blessed baby." Mr. Parker cleared

his throat as he followed his wife to the porch. "Going to have your coffee here?”

"Yes. It's so nice and cool." Mr. Parker bent and kissed her. "Come home as early as you can, dear.” "Of course." On the top step he turned. "Say, it was pretty nice, her wanting to just stay home with us."

Mrs. Parker nodded and her eyes filled with sudden tears. She wiped them away to watch Edward down the walk.

At the gate he waved and she waved back. Then with a sigh of utter content she picked up her coffee.

I

T was in a soft and open meadow just behind the river hills in Iowa-a country hardly twenty years earlier won from the Indians -and yet it seemed to me, a child of six, immeasurably old. The level Western sunbeams slanted through a forest to the old board house, unpainted, weather-stained -to fall on the few acres of home-grown grass, where the water came from the mossy wooden pipe, let in the hillside. The low hills encircled it, and it was quiet. MacKnight, my father told me, had long since gone away, and the farm was abandoned. High hollyhocks were in the dooryard, but the wild things were already creeping in. I drank of the water, and dreamed, as a child can dream-more easily than a man, for life is still so dreamy -of who was MacKnight, and why had he gone, and had he come before the Indians. I did not know the word, romantic, but I felt the thing. The window was already gone, the roof partly fallen in, and no wreck of tower or ivied window gave me, in later days, on Rhine or Tiber, a deeper VOL. LXXXII.—47

sense of immemorial age. I remember that I hated to leave, but the night was falling.

We had twenty miles to go, with the span of black horses, through grass-grown track in forest, then along the still Maquoketa River, so different from a New England clear brown water, black and silent between its high muddy banks, beneath the giant tree-trunks that fell across it dying of old age. No one ever cut them, and so we forded the river and came through a glen between the bluffs to the outer liberties of the city, where the Indians were camped-they were Sioux— and so to the Main Street, where a regiment of soldiers were marching to the "slew" to get the ferry-they were a Minnesota regiment, my father told me, splendid men, "going to save the Union" for the war between the States was on. I had not yet known a time when there was not war, or talk of war, my father and my uncle Ben having conducted a vigorous conversation upon it at Detroit that very last month as we were coming home to Iowa from our summer East. The talk began at supper and continued through most of the night, as I judged from sounds below, and might conceivably have ended

in direct action (for my uncle was a bluff sailor, companion of Richard H. Dana on his famous trip-"Two Years before the Mast") but that he hurried off at dawn to secure the reinstatement of a railroad clerk whose discharge he had insisted upon the afternoon before for failing to expedite a freight-car, my uncle having been, as he explained later, "unable to sleep for thinking of his wife and family." For Ben Stimson, after his two years before the mast, having before that time twice tried to run away to sea and being finally sent off by my grandfather with young Dana to give him his full of it, had got so completely full of it that he settled as far as he could then be from the Atlantic Ocean, which was in those days, Detroit; but the fondness for ships persisted and he had become a shipper on the Great Lakes.

Seeing that my uncle had not been able to sleep, my father magnanimously forbore to clench his conclusion that the Abolitionists were a pack of hasty fanatics determined to break up the Union, or my uncle his conviction that the underground railway to Windsor, Canada, was but an imperfect remedy for the evils of slavery. In those days people who were Unionists were called copperheads, in Boston; yet it was only twenty years since my wife's great-grandfather, Josiah Bradlee, meeting Mr. Edmund Quincy coming out of an Abolitionist meeting in Faneuil Hall, had pulled his ear, with the admonition "never to let him see him come out of such a place again!"

Indian camps were not unusual in the vacant lots outlying Dubuque, which lay at the base of the high bluff where our house stood. I do not remember their having regular teepees-usually common tents, or, in the summer, a pair of crossed poles with a bar across, whence hung their blankets or buffalo-skins. The faces, in the city, were seldom painted, though I remember occasional head-feathers and fringed leggings. There was no shade where they camped, only scanty bushes with a large purple and white bell-shaped flower: I think it was "jimson-weed"Datura stramonium? No one told me it was poisonous and I am no botanist. (I think with Ruskin of Oxford, that Harvard "might have taught me that fritil

laries grew in Iffley meadows," but of course it was my fault. I might have elected botany, geology, natural history; which would have delighted one's life on earth; but I chose to elect metaphysics instead, futile gropings into the Beyond.) But I had as a child no fear, only a friendly interest, for these Indians.

In the spring of 1862 my father made a party for his "house-guests" (what other variety does journalese dialect count?) to go up the river. Up the riverto the very navigable head of Mississippi, the Falls of St. Anthony, St. Paul already named, but still called "Fort Snelling. Four hundred and fifty miles of voyaging, on a lofty, tall smoke-stacked steamboat-not even a stern-wheeler-but open from stem to stern, with a grand saloon of stained-glass windows and all the inward machinery lying frankly open on the forward main deck, for a boy's delightwith the roaring flames fed under the boilers, the great thrust of the pitman and the slide of the piston and the turning of the great mainshaft-and the paddles churning the tawny water-colored like a lion's mane, my New York cousin said. Most of all I watched to see the flames coming out of the two tall chimneys, as I had often seen in pictures; but alas! we had no race; and I suspect that only occurs in the grand moments. So we went up by Dunleith and Eagle Point and La Crosse and Lake Pepin and then bang! and a dull thump, a shock, a strain-and we were upon a sand-bar; but this was best of all-it gave Mississippi steam-voyaging all the charm of a canoe trip-we boys rushed forward to help; two great thrusting poles were hung at the bow all ready; swinging down like catapults, we all lent our weight-even to Eric's and my seven years (but I suspect the kindly mate only permitted this when we were well off the bar)-the great paddle-wheels churned the brown flood to chocolate and we slid back and off-from four feet of water safely into five-which was what we drew. And Eric and I went back to the ladies with all the swagger of achievement.

Eric was seven and had blue eyes-all I remember of him now-save that he was going with his family-father, mother, perhaps a grandmother, and many sisters to settle on their farm-ninety miles

"in" from St. Paul. He was my playmate for a week-for we stopped at many a river town, Prairie du Chien, Winonathese, with the long Lake Pepin, all of the scenery I now remember. But I well remember the smell of the old landing-sheds -where nothing but clean and wholesome wheat had ever yet been stored or shipped -no ore, nor coal, nor slag-the sweet, hard wheat, so wholesome to the taste, so clean to touch! The Northland smelt of it and nothing else in those far days. And my father told me stories of the upper river; of the explorers and the priests and Winona, the Indian maid. (Did she dive off the cliff into the river for love of some one? I suppose so. The plot has gone from me.) But most I liked to hear, like all children, the truth-how he had driven up to St. Paul alone in a sleigh, over the frozen river; and camped with the Indians, who were friendly, usually on the southern point of some wooded island in the Mississippi. He showed me the very place of one or two such camps (it must have been in the early 50's, just after the Black Hawk War-yet the Indians treated him like a brother). But he told me he had taken with him a case of the finest French cordials (anisette? chartreuse? fine champagne?) as the most condensed and portable form of courtesy to extend to the Indians; and they had never dreamed of such spirits. One drink of each would make an Indian chief my father's friend through life, he said; and I can now well believe it.

But we came to St. Paul one Saturday night. Eric said good-by and went with all his family to settle on what was to be their home-I think the place was called Mankato. But on the Monday morning we heard that on the very night before, Eric, with all his family, his grandmother and his sisters, had been killed and scalped by the Indians. I was sorry, but I do not think I fully knew what killing was. But the ladies from New York were anxious to get away-St. Paul, already a large town, seemed hardly safe to them-and we dropped down the river late that night. Of the return trip I have no memory. I hope I missed poor Eric. Only the sand-bars interested me. They are worse when you go head on down-stream; and so are the snags and sawyers.

But my great interest, after my father's railroad, was the river-leaving out, of course, the dogs. Of them presently. Did ever boy have finer toys? Our house stood high on the bluff-Seminary Hill, I think they called it, and from our piazza and many parlor windows, we overlooked the town and saw full twenty miles straight down the broad Mississippi. Beyond the city were the "slews" (sloughs?), the backwaters, "bogans" of the great river-to the left, the steamboat landing; in those days often a dozen steamboats at a time nosing the beach and their crews rolling hogsheads down planks to the earthen quay. Only a few favored ones had a wooden landing. I think I knew all the steamboats at sight and some by hearing; but the War Eagle was always my favorite. She had wonderful, tall stacks, with Corinthian fretted tops and a golden eagle swung between. And from our lawn (whereon one might shoot quail before breakfast) you could see across the Mississippi to Dunleith in Illinois-a town I was told my mother had named. It is called East Dubuque now.

For my father was president of the railroad. It was his child and my pride and joy. He had fathered it from the time he had brought cargoes of rails upriver from New Orleans and spiked them hastily down in one night-one spike per rail-so that they became real estate and passed safely under the mortgage before the "floating" creditors could attach them next day. Like all Western railroads, it aimed to run to the Pacific; and was so entitled "Dubuque and Pacific”— but it never got beyond Sioux City on the Missouri-or, under its own name, Iowa Falls, one hundred and forty-six miles "out"-when it was gobbled, to my father's disgust, by the mighty I. C. Thirty years afterward, in England, I found investments in this, my father's road, in old ledgers of my English friends. I am proud to say that under him, they lost no money. I knew every station on that road, and the three conductors and five engineers, the latter intimately. We had two passenger-locomotives. We were proud of these the Platt Smith and the Edward Stimson-of thirty-two tons, no less! and two or three big, sluggish freight-engines and a "shirt-tail" or two

-the Vixen, I think. When running "wild" (without a train) the engineers would often let me go with them. Can there be greater glory for a boy of eight than to sit in the engineer's seat and be allowed (perhaps with some assistance) to open the throttle? Or to whistle (this was the fireman's job), but whistling "never did no harm" and I could pull the rope to my heart's content-saluting every trestle or fence, particularly when the fireman was climbing out over the engine with his oil-can.

Twenty miles west of Dubuque runs the hill-country-the bluffs of the river riddled with the shafts of ancient lead prospectors-then the prairie begins, carpeted still with wild flowers and grasseshardly a corn-field as I first remember itwherever there was a settler, we made a station. The novel "Vandemark's Folly" so well describes just what I can remember! Especially one day-spent by me on a farm near Waterloo, whither my father had gone on business-where I first saw farming life. The boys who played with me were called "Israel" and "Jacob"so they perhaps were not Vandemarks -and as we came home tired, after what seemed a very long day in the corn-fields and the infant orchards, I remember again how the farm, the barn with its weather-beaten boards, not joined quite close, the mossy well-curb, gave me again -as on that day, beyond the Maquoketa a feeling of something that was not new, but very, very old. I wonder why? I was tired and the sun was setting; and Israel buoyed me up with the promise of a wonderful refreshing drink when we got to the barn. It was my first-and lasttaste of buttermilk.

That cannot have been the day, for I was with my father and on a passenger train. But my most vivid recollection of the railroad was the day we were out on the Platt Smith nearly to Cedar Falls and returning were chased by a prairie fire. It came up about dusk-we may have started it with our great open inverted cone of a smoke-stack, and burning wood-and it caught us up as we stopped to water. As it grew dark the smoke of it veiled the sunset, and the flames from their pink or fireweed color had turned to crimson and then yellow, and we heard

the roar of it beyond the rush of our locomotive. It seemed to gain on us. I got out of the seat, and Jim Northrop, the engineer, jammed the throttle lever back as far as it would go, but I knew it was only marked to 22" miles. I think still it was the greatest natural spectacle I have ever witnessed. I don't think I was afraid. I had confidence in our engine and Jim; nor did I suppose the thing unusual. The fireman pointed downward to the track before us. Our engine was reeling and swaying like a drunken skater; and there ahead of us ran, steadier than we, a lean, black porker. He was running from the fire too; he would not leave the track; we chased him for what seemed miles. I think Jim felt ashamed his locomotive could not catch a pig, and I saw him take another pull at the throttle. But just then, we came to a trestle-bridge across a little run; the pig still would not desert the rails, and I saw him plainly drop to the river between the ties. "He will cut his own throat," said Jim. It seemed to me a sad ending, but I asked no questions, for just then we passed Dyersville, the last prairie siding, and came to Peosta and Julien and the hillcountry, where the fire stopped and we were safe.

Julien! Peosta! He was a French trapper-or was it a Jesuit priest?—and she a local Indian princess. There was some romance about them, of course; it is embedded, shrivelled, and hid, like a leaf in an herbarium, in the report of some early case in the Supreme Court of the United States. It was not Gelpcke vs. Dubuque— he won out in that court finally against a State law impairing the city's debts, fighting stubbornly like any Teuton to the bitter end, and exacting the last penny. I remember him well, a blond German with a pointed beard, sitting in a parlor of the Lorimer House and recklessly twisting a window-shade-wishing, I now suppose, for the court decision. Mathilde lived on Lorimer Avenue, up the long hill beyond the hotel; she was a competent French girl, and must have been our maid, for I used to go to see her often. Was old Julien the reason there were still French in Dubuque? The Germans came in later and choked them out

"Jo" Rhomberg, who kept a beer