Silently she crept toward the center of the room, turning her eyes from this and to that unearthly splendor, yet always bringing them back to rest upon the faces of the dollies, sitting so still and so radiant beneath the glittering boughs. At last with a little gasping cry of joy she seized the largest and most splendid of these wondrous beings and clasped it to her breast, while Constance sat silent with her awe.

Their Christmas was complete. Another shining mark had been set in the upward slope of their happy march! Nothing, not even Death himself, can rob me of that precious memory.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Old Homestead Suffers Disaster

The summer of 1912, so stormy in a political sense was singularly serene and happy for us. The old house had been received back into favor. It was beloved by us all but especially was it dear to my children. To Mary Isabel it possessed a value which it could not have to any of us, for it was her birth-place and she knew every stick and stone of it. To her it had all the glamor of a childhood home in summer time.

On Sunday, October 6, we began to plan our return to the city, and as we sat about our fire that night the big room never looked so warm, so homelike, so permanent. The deep fireplace was ablaze with light, and the walls packed with books and hung with pictures spoke of a realized ideal. On the tall settee (which I had built myself), lay a richly-colored balletta Navajo blanket, one that I had bought of a Flathead Indian in St. Ignatius. Others from Zuni and Ganado covered the floor. Over the piano "Apple Blossom Time," a wedding present from John Ennecking glowed like a jewel in the light of the quaint electric candles which had been set in the sockets of hammered brass sconces. In short, the place had the mellow charm of a completed home, and I said to Zulime "There isn't much more to do to it. It is rude and queer, a mixture of Paris, Boston, and the Wild West; but it belongs to us." It was in truth a union of what we both represented, including our poverty, for it was all cheap and humble.

My father, white-haired, eighty-two years of age was living with us again, basking in the light of our fire and smiling at his grandchildren, who with lithe limbs and sweet young voices were singing and circling before him. I was glad to have him back in mother's room, and to him and to those who were to be his care-takers for the winter I gravely repeated, "I want everything kept just as it is. I want to feel that we can come back to it at any time and find every object in place, including the fire."

To which father replied, "I don't want to change it. It suits me."

The children, darting out of the music-room (which was the "dressing-room" of their stage), swung their Japanese lanterns, enacting once again their pretty little play, and then our guests rose two by two and went away. Zulime led the march to bed, the lights were turned out and the clear, crisp, odorous October night closed over our scene.

As I was about to leave the low-ceiled library, I took another look at it saying to myself, "It seems absurd to abandon this roomy, human habitation for a cramped little dwelling on a city lot." But with a sense of what the city offered by way of compensation, I climbed the old-fashioned, crooked, narrow stairway to my bed in the chamber over the music-room, content to say good-by for the winter....

It was dusky dawn when I awoke, with a sense of alarm, unable to tell what had awakened me. For several seconds I lay in confusion and vague suspense. Then a cry, a strange cry—a woman's scream—arose, followed by a rush of feet. Other cries, and the shrieks of children succeeded close, one upon the other.

My first thought was, "Constance has fallen." I sprang from my bed and was standing in the middle of the room when I heard Zulime cross the floor beneath me, and a moment later she called up the stairway, "Hamlin, Fan has set the house on fire!"

My heart was gripped as if by an icy hand for I knew how inflammable the whole building was, and without stopping to put on coat or slippers, I ran swiftly down the stairs. As I entered the sitting-room so silent, so peaceful, so undisturbed, it seemed that my alarm was only a part of a dream till the sobbing of my daughters and my wife's voice at the telephone calling for help, convinced me of the frightful reality. I heard, too, the ominous crackling of flames in the kitchen.

Pushing open the swinging door I confronted a wall of smoke. One-half of the floor was already consumed, and along the linoleum a sharply-defined line of fire told that it rose from burning oil—and yet I could not quite believe it, even then. It was like a scene in a motion picture play.

My first thought was to check, to hold back the flames, till help came. The garden hose was lying out under a tree (I had put it there the day before) and with desperate haste I hurried to attach it to the water pipes. I saw father in the yard, but he uttered no word. We were each thinking the same thought—"The old homestead is doomed. Our life here is ended."

The hose was heavy and sanely perverse, and it seemed an age before I had the water turned on. Catching up the nozzle I approached the kitchen door. The thin stream had no effect, and the heat was so intense I could not face it. Throwing down the hose I reentered the house.

The children, hysterical with fright, were just leaving by the east door and Zulime was upstairs. Opening the front door I stepped out upon the porch to call for help. The beauty of the morning, its stillness, its serenity, its odorous opulence, struck upon my senses with a kind of ironic benignancy, as if to say, "Why agonize over so small a thing?"

I shouted "Fire!" and my voice went ringing far up the street. I cried out again, a third time, a fourth, but no one answered, no one appeared, and behind me the crackling roar of the flames increased. In despair I turned back into the sitting-room.

It had been arranged between Zulime and myself that in case of fire (once the children were safe), she was to secure the silverware and her jewelry whilst I flew to collect my manuscripts.

With this thought in my mind, and believing that I had but a few minutes in which to work, I ran up the stairs to my study and began gathering such of my manuscripts as had no duplicates. As I thought of the hundreds of letters from my literary friends, of the many family records, of the innumerable notes, pictures, keepsakes, souvenirs and mementoes which had been assembling there for a quarter of a century, I became confused, indecisive. It was so hard to choose. At last I caught up a sheaf of unpublished stories which filled one drawer, and beating off the screen of the north window threw the manuscripts out upon the grass.

A neighbor's wife, quick to understand the meaning of my anxiety about these sheets, ran to her home across the way and bringing a valise, began to stuff them into it. Having cleared my desk of its most valuable papers I hurried to my dressing-room to secure shoes and trousers; but by this time the hall was full of the most nauseating smoke. The fire having swept entirely through the library, was burning the front porch. My escape by way of the stairway was cut off. Blinded and gasping I gave up the search for clothes and turned back into my study.

I was not in the least scared; on the contrary, I was filled with a kind of fatalistic rage. In imagination I saw the old house, with all that it meant to me, in ruins. I saw the great elms and maples scorched, dead, the tall black locust burned to a ship's mast. As I peered from the window, a neighbor called earnestly, "You'd better get off there; the whole house is going."

From the window I could see the villagers rapidly assembling, and not knowing how far advanced the flames might be I yielded to the advice of my friend, and swinging myself from the window dropped to the ground.

My next care was for the children. I could hear them crying frantically for "papa!" and I hurried to where they stood cowering in the door of the barn. "O, papa, put it out. I don't want it to burn. Put it out!" moaned Mary Isabel with passionate intensity.

Her faith in her father had an infinite pathos at the moment. She loved the house. It was a part of her very brain and blood. To have it burn was a kind of outrage. Little Connie, five years old, with chattering teeth, joined her pleading cry, "Can't you put it out, papa?" she asked piteously.

"No," I answered sadly. "Papa can not put it out. Nobody can. You must say good-by to our dear old home."

Wrapping a quilt about her I started across the road toward my neighbor's porch. The yard was full of my fellow-citizens, and young men were heroically dragging out smoking furniture from the lower floor, while over in the Sander's yard piles of books, bedding and furniture were accumulating. It was all curiously familiar and typical.

In the full belief that the homestead would soon be a heap of charcoal, we took the children back into our friend's dining-room. "Pull down the curtain," entreated Zulime, "we don't want to see the old place go."

Helpless for lack of street clothing, with my children on my knees, I sat in silence, noting the flickering glare of the light on the walls, and hearing the shouts of the firemen and the sound of their axes.

Huldah, our neighbor's daughter, entered. "They're checking it!" she exclaimed. "It is under control."

This seemed incredible, but it was confirmed by George Dudley, who came in bringing my shoes and a suit of my clothing.

When at last I was fully clothed and could go out into the street I was amazed to find a part of the house standing. Most of the east wing seemed quite untouched, except of smoke and water. The west wing and front porch were in black disarray, but the roof held its place and the trees seemed scarcely scorched. A few firemen, among them the village plumber, the young banker, and a dentist, were on guard, watchfully intent that the flames should not break out again. The sun was rising gloriously over the hills. The fire, my fire, was over.

No doubt this event appeared most trivial to the travelers in a passing train. From the car windows it was only a column of smoke in the edge of a small village. Our disaster offered, indeed, only a mild sensation to the occupants of an early automobile party, but to my father, to Zulime and to the children, it was a desolate and appalling ruin. They had grown to love this old house foolishly, illogically, for it was neither beautiful nor historic, nor spacious. It was only a commonplace frame cottage, inwrought with memories and associations, but it was home—all we had.

The yard was piled with furniture, half-burned, soaked and malodorous, but none of my manuscripts were in sight. I had expected to find them scattered like feathers across the garden or trampled into the muddy sward. In reply to my question my friend Dudley replied, "They're all safe. I had the boys carry them down in blankets. You'll find them in the barn."

As I moved about silently, studying the ruins, the kindliest of my neighbors said, "You'll have to entirely rebuild." And to this a carpenter, a skilled and honest workman, agreed. "The cheapest thing to do is to tear it all down and start from the foundation."

Slowly, minutely, I studied the ruin. Surely here was gruesome change! Black, ill-smelling, smoking debris lay where our pretty dining-room had been. The library with all my best books (many of them autographed) was equally desolate, heaped with steaming, charred masses of tables, chairs, rugs and fallen plaster. I thought of it as it had been the night before, with the soft lights of the candles falling upon my children dancing with swinging lanterns. I recalled Ennecking's radiant spring painting, and Steele's "Bloom of the Grape," which glowed above the mantle, and my heart almost failed me—"Is this the end of my life in Wisconsin?"

For twenty years this little village had been the place of my family altar, not because it was remarkable in any way, but because since 1850 it had been the habitat of my mother's people and because it was filled with my father's pioneer friends. "Is it worth while to rebuild?" I asked myself. For the time I lost direction. I had no plan.

The sight of my white-haired father wandering about the yard, dazed, bewildered, his eyes filled with a look of despair at last decided me. Realizing that this was his true home; that no other roof could have the same appeal, and he could not be transplanted, I resolved to cover his head; to make it possible for him to live out his few remaining years under this roof with his granddaughters. "For his sake and the children's sake," I announced to Zulime, "I shall begin at once to clear away and restore. Before the winter comes you shall all be back in the old House. Perhaps we can eat our Thanksgiving dinner in the restored dining-room."

Whether she fully shared my desire to rebuild or whether she believed in my ability to carry out my plan so quickly I can not say. In such matters she was not decisive—she rested on my stubborn will.

The day came on—glorious, odorous, golden—but we saw little of its beauty. Engaged in digging the family silver out of the embers, and collecting my scattered books and papers I had no time to look at the sky. Occasionally, as I looked up from my work I saw my little daughters playing with childish intentness among the fallen leaves in my neighbor's yard, and in mistaken confidence I remarked what a blessing it is that childhood can so easily forget disaster.

I did not realize then, nor till many months after, how profound the shock had been to them. For years after the event they started at every unusual sound and woke at night screaming of fire.

All that day and all the days of the week which followed they played with the same singular insect-like absorption and at last I began to get some notion of their horror. They refused to enter the yard. "I don't want to see it," Mary Isabel wailed. Then she asked, "Will it ever be home for us again?"

"Yes," I answered with final determination. "I'll put it back just as it was before the fire came. It shall be nicer than ever when I am done."

Before night I had engaged a crew of men to clear away. Thereafter I lived like a man in a tunnel. I saw almost nothing of the opulent, golden sunshine, nothing of the exquisite foliage, nothing of the far hills, purple with Indian summer haze. Busily sorting my burned books or spreading out my treasured rugs, I toiled as long as light lasted. There were a few pleasant surprises. From one charred frame the face of Frank Norris, miraculously fresh and handsome and smiling, looked out through smoked and broken glass. In one corner of the sideboard (decorated by Thompson-Seton), a part of the silver bearing my mother's initials lay quite unharmed, though all of the pieces on the top were melted into a flat mass of bullion. Autographed books from Howells, Riley, Gilbert Parker, Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, fell to pieces in my hand, or showed so deep a stain of smoke as to make their rebinding impossible. My best Navajo rug, a fine example of the ancient weaving, was a frail cinder on the back of the charred settee, and a Hopi ceremonial dress which hung upon the wall was a blackened shred.

All these things had small money value, and to many men, would have represented no interest whatsoever, but to me they were precious. They were a part of my life. To burn them was to char a section of my brain. Pitiful possessions! Worthless rags! And yet they were the best I could show after thirty years of labor with the pen!

My father's condition troubled me most. To have him rendered homeless at eighty-two with winter coming on seemed to me an intolerable cruelty, and so with a driving haste I set to work with my own hands to clear away and restore. Wielding the wrecking bar and the spade each day, I toiled like a hired man—even after the carpenters were gone at night I scraped paint and shoveled rubbish.

Let no one pity me! A curious pleasure came with all this, for it seemed to advance the reconstruction with double swiftness.

At the end of the week I sent my wife and the children back to their city home, and thereafter I had but one interest, one diversion—to plan and execute my rebuilding. To close the walls, to make the rooms secure against wind and rain was imperative.

The insurance inspector came pleasantly to the rescue, and with a small balance in the bank I hired roofers, plumbers, carpenters, masons, till the street resounded with their clamor. In a week I had the rooms cleared, the doors and windows closed, and my father living in one corner of the house, whilst I camped down in my study. Water-soaked, ill-smelling, but inhabitable, the old house again possessed a light and a hearth.

"The children and their grandsire shall eat Thanksgiving dinner in the rebuilt dining-room," was my secret sentimental resolution. "To do that will turn a wail into a song—a disaster into a poem."

All very foolish, you say. No doubt, but it interested me and I was of an age when very few things interested me vitally. With clothing black as soot, with hands brown with stain and skinned and swollen and feverish, I kept to my job without regard to Sundays or the ordinary hours of labor. I was not seeking sympathy,—I was renewing my youth. I was both artist and workman. My muscles hardened, my palms broadened, my appetite became prodigious. I lost all fear of indigestion and ate anything which my friend Dudley was good enough to provide. I even drank coffee at every opportunity, and went so far as to eat doughnuts and pancakes at breakfast! To be deliciously hungry as of old was heartening.

The weather continued merciful. Each day the sun rose red and genial, and at noon the warm haze of Indian summer trailed along the hills—though I had little time in which to enjoy it. Each sunset marked a new stanza in my poem, a completed phrase, a recovered figure. "Our small affairs have shut out the light of the sun," I said to father, "the political situation has lost all interest for me."

Bare, clean and sweet, the library and music-room at last were ready for furniture. All these must be replaced. A hurried trip to the city, three days of determined shopping with Zulime, and a stream of new goods (necessary to refurnish), began to set toward the threshold. The draymen plied busily between the station and the gate.

By November first my father and I were camping in the library and cooking our own food in the dining-room. We rose each day before dawn and ate our bacon and coffee while yet the stars twinkled in the west, and both of us were reminded of the frosty mornings on our Iowa farm, when we used to eat by candle-light in order to husk corn by starlight. My hands felt as they used to feel when, worn by the rasping husks, they burned with fever. Heavy as hams, they refused to hold a pen, and my mind refused to compose even letters—but the pen was not needed. "My poem is composed of wood and steel," I remarked to Dudley.

At last the yard was cleared of its charred rubbish, the porch restored to its old foundation, and the new metal roof, broad-spreading and hospitable, gleamed like snow in dusk and dawn, and from the uncurtained windows our relighted lamps called to the world that the Garland household was about to reassemble and the author permitted himself to straighten up. Changing to my city garments I took the train for Chicago, promising to bring the children with me when our Thanksgiving turkey was fatted for the fire.

My daughters listened eagerly to my tale of the new house, but expressed a fear of sleeping in it. This fear I determined to expel.

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving I rejoined my workmen, finding the house in a worse state of disarray than when I had last seen it. The floors were littered with dust and shavings, and in the dining-room my father, deeply discouraged, was gloomily cooking his breakfast on an oil stove set in the middle of the floor. "It'll take another month to finish the job," he said.

"Oh, no it won't," I replied. "It won't take a week."

Fortunately the stain on the floor was dry and with the aid of two good men I finished the woodwork and beat the rugs. In a couple of days the lower house was livable.

On Wednesday at five o'clock I went to the train, leaving the electric lights all ablaze and the fire snapping in the chimney. It looked amazingly comfortable, restored, settled, and I was confident the children would respond to its cheer.

"Is it all made new?" they asked wistfully.

"Wait and see!" I confidently replied.

The night was cold and dark but as they neared the old house its windows winked a cheery welcome. "Why, it looks just as it used to!" exclaimed Mary Isabel.

"There are lights in our room!" exclaimed Constance.

"Run ahead, and knock," I urged.

She hung back. "I'm afraid," she said.

"So am I," echoed Connie.

The new metal roof gleaming like frost interested them as they entered the gate.

"Why, the porch is all here!" shouted Constance.

"But the screens are off," commented Mary Isabel.

"Knock!" I commanded.

Reaching up to the shining old brass knocker she banged it sharply.

The house awoke! White-haired old father came to the door and, first of all, the children sprang to his arms.

Then as they looked around they shouted with joy. "Why, it's just as it was—only nicer," was their verdict.

While Zulime looked keenly and smilingly around, Connie ran from settee to bookcase. "Everything is here—our books, the fireplace."

"Isn't it wonderful!" Mary Isabel exclaimed.

After greeting father Zulime surveyed the result of my six weeks' toil with critical but approving eyes. "I like it. It's much better than I expected. It is wonderful. But we must have new curtains for the windows," she added, with the housewife's attention to details.

The children danced through the brilliantly lighted rooms, but declined to go into the dining-room or to open the door to the kitchen which they remembered only as a mass of black embers and steaming ashes. I did not urge them to do so. On the contrary, I gathered them round me on the restored hearth and talked of the Thanksgiving dinner of the morrow.

As the hour for bedtime came Connie's eyes grew big and dark, and every small unusual sound startled her. Daddy's presence at last reassured them both and they went to sleep and, with only one or two restless intervals, slumbered till daylight.

Two of our neighbors—two capable women, came in next morning to help, and in a few hours the windows were curtained, the linen laid out and the turkey in the oven. Under Zulime's hands the rooms bloomed into homeliness. The kitchen things fell into orderly array. Pictures took their places on the walls, little knick-knacks which had been brought from the city were set on the mantels and bookcases, and when our guests arrived they each and all exclaimed, "No one would ever know you'd had a fire!"

At one o'clock the cooks, the children and Zulime all agreed that the fowl was ready for the carver and so we all assembled in the new and larger dining-room. No formal Thanksgiving was spoken, but vaguely forming in my mind was a poem which should express our joy and gratitude. My brother's seat was empty and so were those of other loved ones, but we did not dwell upon these sad things. I was living, working and planning now for the vivid souls of my daughters whose glowing cheeks and laughing eyes repaid me for all my toil. For them I had rebuilt this house—for them and their grandsire—whose trail was almost at its end. How happy he was in their presence! They, too, were happy because they were young, the sun was shining and their home was magically restored.

The happiest time of all was at night, when the evening shadows closed round the friendly walls, and the trees sighed in the chill wind—for beside the fire we gathered, the Garlands and McClintocks, in the good old fashion, while our neighbors came in to congratulate and rejoice. All the black terror of the dismantled house, all the toil and worry of the months which lay between, were forgotten as the children, without a care, sang and danced in the light of our new and broadened hearth.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Darkness Just Before the Dawn

In going back over the records of the years 1912 and 1913, I can see that my life was lacking in "drive." It is true I wrote two fairly successful novels which were well spoken of by my reviewers and in addition I continued to conduct the Cliff Dwellers' Club and to act as one of the Vice Presidents of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, but I was very far from a feeling of satisfaction with my position. My life seemed dwindling into futility. I was in physical pain much of the time and tortured by a fear of the future.

Naturally and inevitably the burden of my increasing discontent, worse health, fell with sad reiteration upon my wife, who was not only called upon to endure poverty, but to bear with a sick and disheartened husband. The bravery of her smile served to increase my sense of unworthiness. Her very sweetness, her cheerful acceptance of never-ending household drudgery, was an accusation.

She no longer touched brush or clay, although I strongly urged her to sketch or model the children. She had no time, even if she had retained the will, to continue her work as an artist. With a faculty for entertaining handsomely and largely, with hosts of friends who would have clustered about her with loyal admiration, she remained the mistress of a narrow home and one more or less incompetent housemaid. All these considerations added to my sense of weakness and made the particular manuscript upon which I was spending most of my time, a piece of selfish folly.

For ten years I had been working, from time to time, on an autobiographical manuscript which I had called by various names, but which had finally solidified into A Son of the Middle Border. Even in my days of deepest discouragement I turned most of my energy to its revision. In the belief that it was my final story and with small hope of its finding favor in any form, I toiled away, year after year, finding in the aroused memories of my youthful world a respite from the dull grind of my present.

My duties as head of the Cliff Dwellers and as Secretary of The Theater Society tended to keep me in Chicago. My lecture engagements became fewer and I dropped out or Eastern Club life, retaining only long distance connection with the world of Arts and Letters. In losing touch with my fellows something vital had gone out of me.

In spite of all my former protestations, the city began to take on the color of Henry Fuller's pessimism. My youthful faith in Chicago's future as a great literary center had faded into middle-aged doubt. One by one its writers were slipping away to Manhattan. The Midland seemed farther away from publishers than ever, "The current is all against us," declared Fuller.

As a man of fifty-two I found myself more and more discordant with my surroundings. With sadness I conceded that not in my time would any marked change for the better take place. "Such as Chicago now is, so it will remain during my life," I admitted to Fuller.

"Yes, if it doesn't get worse," was his sad reply.

I would have put my Woodlawn house on sale in 1912 had it not been for my father's instant protest. "Don't take Zulime and the children so far away," he pleaded. "If you move to New York I shall never see any of you again. Stay where you are. Wait till I am 'mustered out'—it won't be long now."

There was no resisting this appeal. With a profound sense of what Zulime and the children meant to him, I gave up all thought of going East and settled back into my groove. "We will remain where we are so long as father lives," I declared to my friends.

My wife, who had perceived with alarm my growing discontent with Chicago, was greatly relieved by this decision. To her the thought of migration even to the North Side was disturbing, for it would break her close connection with the circle whose center was in her brother's studio. I am not seeking to excuse my recreancy to The Middle West; I am merely stating it as a phase of literary history, for my case is undoubtedly typical of many other writers who turned their faces eastward.

The plain truth is I had reached an age where I no longer cared to pioneer even in a literary sense. Desirous of the acceptances proper to a writer with gray hair and a string of creditable books, I wished to go where honor waited. I craved a place as a man of letters. That my powers were deteriorating in the well-worn rut of my life in Woodlawn I knew too well, and my need of contact with my fellow craftsmen in the East sharpened. The support and inspiration which come naturally to authors in contact with their kind were being denied me. Age was bringing me no "harvest home." In short, at the very time when I should have been most honored, most recompensed, in my work, I found myself living meanly in a mean street and going about like a man of mean concerns, having little influence on my art or among my fellows.

That Chicago was still on the border in a literary sense was sharply emphasized when the National Institute of Arts and Letters decided (after much debate), to hold its Annual Meeting for 1913 in the midland metropolis. "It is a long way out to Chicago," its Secretary wrote, "and I don't know how many members we can assemble, but I think we shall be able to bring twenty-five at least. You have been appointed chairman of the Committee of Arrangements, with full powers to go ahead."

The honor and responsibility of this appointment spurred me to action. I decided to accept and make the meeting a literary milestone in western history. My first thought was to make the Cliff Dwellers' Club the host of the occasion, but on further consideration, I reckoned that the City's welcome would have greater weight if all its literary and artistic forces could be in some way combined. To bring this about I directed letters to the heads of seventeen clubs and educational organizations, asking them to meet with me and form a joint Reception Committee.

This they did, and in a most harmonious session elected Hobart Chatfield-Taylor chairman. To this Committee I then said, "If we are to have any considerable number of our distinguished eastern authors and artists at this dinner we must make it very easy for them to travel. We should have a special train for them or at least special sleeping cars so that they can come as if in a moving club."

In this plan I had instant support. The sturdy group of men who had been so ready to aid me in building up the Cliff Dwellers (men like Hutchinson, Logan, Glessner, Ryerson, Aldis, and Heckmen), all took vital interest in the arrangements for the reception and dinner. The necessary funds were immediately subscribed, and my report to the Institute Council created a fine feeling of enthusiasm in the ranks of both organizations. The success of the meeting was assured. Some of the oldest members wrote, "It is a long way out there but we are coming."

The press of the city responded generously and some of its editors perceived and stated the historical significance of this pilgrimage of poets, artists, and historians to "the sparsely settled Border of Esthetic Culture." A trainload of men who painted, sculptured and composed, men who were entirely concerned with the critical or esthetic side of life, an academy of arts and letters rolling westward, was a new and wondrous phase of national exploration. The invasion was also capable of comic interpretation and a few graceless wags did allude to it as "a missionary expedition to Darkest Illinois."

To Fuller, to Chatfield-Taylor and to me, this joke was not altogether pleasant. We knew all too well the feeling of some of the writers who were coming. Several of them were seeing "the West" for the first time in their lives, others had not been in Chicago since the World's Fair in '93. All were conscious of the effort involved in reaching the arid and unknown frontier.

The entire Middle West had only ten resident members of the Institute although a large proportion of its membership was drawn from the Southern and Central Western States, "All trails lead to New York and there are no returning footsteps," commented Fuller. "Once a writer or painter or illustrator pulls his stakes and sets out for Manhattan, Chicago sees him no more."

All this was disheartening to those of us who, twenty years before, had visioned Chicago as a shining center of American art, but we went forward with our preparations, hoping that a fairly representative delegation could be induced to come.

Some thirty-five arrived safely, and the Dinner of Welcome in Sculpture Hall not only set a milestone in the progress of the city, but was in itself a beautiful and distinctive event.

The whole panorama of western settlement and its city building unrolled before me, as Charles L. Hutchinson, President of the Art Institute, rose in his place, and in the name of the most aspiring of Chicago's men and women, welcomed the members of the American Academy and the National Institute as representatives of American Art and American Literature. Once again and for the moment our city became a capital in something like the character of Boston a generation before. This conception was illusory, of course, but we permitted ourselves the illusion and accepted the praise which our visitors showered upon us with a belief that we had gained, at last, a recognized place in the Nation's esthetic history.

During the weeks of preparation for this event I had been happy and content, but a few days later, after the clubs had fallen back to their normal humdrum level I acknowledged with a sense of hopeless weariness that our huge city had a long way to go before it could equal the small Boston of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Howells. My desire to rejoin my fellows in New York was intensified. "As there is only one London for England so there is only one New York for America."

All through the autumn of 1913 I ground away at my story of the Middle Border, conscious of the fact that—in a commercial sense—I was wasting my time, for several of my editorial friends had assured me of that fact—but each morning as I climbed to my study I forgot my drab surroundings. Closing the door of the bitter present and turning my back on the stormy future I relived my audacious youth and dreamed of the brave days of old.

Thanksgiving Day in West Salem was misty, dark and still, but the children—bless their shining faces—regarded it as just the right kind of weather for our festival. They were up early and running of errands for their mother who was chief cook. Our only guests were three lonely old women, and it gave me a pang of pity for the children who were forced thus to tolerate a group of gray-heads to whom life was a closing, mournful dirge. Happily, my daughters had the flame of invincible youth in their blood and danced and sang as if the world were new and wholly beautiful, which it was, to them.

Dear little daughters! They didn't know that Daddy was worried about his future and theirs, and no sooner were we back in our Chicago home than they began to look away toward Christmas. "Poppie!"—Mary Isabel would repeat—"only three weeks till—you know what! Remember!"

I remembered. Once again their stockings were stuffed to the hem, and their tree, a marvel of light, touched the ceiling with its pliant tip on which sparkled a golden star. To them I was still a wonder-worker. For a week I put aside my dark musings and rejoiced with them in their fairy world.

Now it chanced that the University Club of Pittsburg had booked me for a lecture early in January and in taking account of this, I planned to invade Manhattan once again, in a desperate attempt to dispose of my rewritten Son of the Middle Border, and to offer, also, one or two short stories which I had lately put into clean copy. Humbly, sadly, unwillingly I left my home that cold, bleak, dirty day, staggering under the weight of my valises, for I was not in good health and my mood was irresolute.

Change was in my world and change of an ominous kind was in my brain. Subjects which once interested me had lost their savor, and several tales in which I had put my best effort had failed to meet my own approval and had been thrown aside. No mechanic, no clerk, would have envied me as I boarded a filthy street car on my way to the Englewood station. That I had reached a fork in my trail was all too evident. The things for which I had labored all my days were as ashes in my hand. I walked with a stoop and the bag containing my manuscript dragged at my shoulder like a fifty-pound weight as I painfully climbed the steps leading to the waiting-room of the grimy, noisy, train station. I was a million miles from being a "distinguished man of letters" at that moment, and with a sense of my poverty and declining health, took a seat in the crowded day coach and rode all day in gloomy silence. At noon I dined on a sandwich. Dollars looked as large as dinner plates that day. "Your only way to earn money is to save it," I accused myself.

At the University Club in Pittsburg I recovered slightly. The lecture having been announced to take place in the dining-room could not be staged till nine o'clock—a fact which worried me for I had arranged to take the night train for the East—and this alarm, this fear of losing my train led me to begin by address while my audience was assembling, and my hurried utterance led to weariness on the part of my hearers. My performance was a failure, and to complete my disheartenment I reached the station about five minutes after the last eastern train had pulled out.

Dismayed by this mishap, I took a seat in a corner and darkly ruminated. "What shall I do now? Shall I go back to Chicago? Or shall I go on?"

Decision was in reality taken out of my hands by the baggageman who said in response to inquiry, "I put your trunk on the 8:40 train. It is well on its way to New York."

Accepting this as a mandate to go on, I returned to my room in the University Club and went to bed, but not to sleep. For hours I tossed and turned in self-questioning, self-accusing fury.

"What a fool you have been to waste years of labor on a book which nobody wants and which has put you—temporarily at least—out of conceit with fiction. Why go on? Why spend more time and money on a vain attempt to dispose of this manuscript?"

Falling asleep at last, I regained a part of my courage, and at breakfast a faint glow of hope crept into my thinking. At nine o'clock I took the day train and in silence rode for nearly twelve hours, retracing the thirty years which lay between my first view of Manhattan and this my hundredth reentrance. With no thrill of excitement I crossed the ferry and having registered at a small hotel on Thirty-fourth Street, went to bed at nine o'clock completely worn out with my journey.

A long night's sleep and a pot of delicious coffee for breakfast put so much sunshine into my world that I set out for Franklin Square with a gambler's countenance, resolute to conceal my dismay from my friends and especially from my publisher. There was something in the very air of Broadway which generated confidence.

Harpers' editors were genial, respectful, but by no means enthusiastic concerning my autobiographic manuscript, although I assured Duneka that I had vastly improved it since he had read it a year before.

"That may be," he granted, "but it is not fiction and nothing serializes but fiction. We'll be glad to schedule it as a book, but I don't see any place for it in our magazine." And then—more to get rid of me than for any other reason, he added, "You might see Collier's. Mark Sullivan is the editor up there now; it might be that he could use something of yours."

Duneka's indifference even more than his shunting my precious manuscript into the street brought back my cloud of doubt, for it indicated a loss of faith in me. To him I was a squeezed lemon. Nevertheless I took his hint. Sullivan, I knew and liked, and while I had small hope of interesting him in The Middle Border, I did think he might buy one or two of my short stories.

The Collier's plant humming with speed, prosperous and commercial, was not reassuring to me, but I kept on through the maze until I reached Sullivan's handsome room, where I was given an easy chair and told to wait, "the editor will see you in a few minutes."

Alert, kindly, cordial, Mark greeted me and taking a seat, fixed his keen blue, kindly eyes upon me. "I'm glad to see you," he said, and I believed he meant it. He went on, "This is the psychological moment for us both. I am looking for American material and I want something of yours. What have you to show me?"

Thus encouraged I told him of A Son of the Middle Border.

He was interested. "Where is the manuscript? Is it complete?"

"It is. I have it with me at the hotel."

"Send it down to me," he said quickly, "I'll read it and give you a verdict at once."

In an illogical glow of hope I hastened to fetch the manuscript, and in less than two hours it was in his hands.

I speak of my hope as "illogical" for if the literary monthly of my own publishers could not find a place for it, how could I reasonably expect a hustling, bustling popular weekly like Collier's to use it?

Nevertheless something in Sullivan's voice and manner restored my confidence, and when I called on the editor of the Century I was able to assume the tone of successful authorship. The closer I got to my market the more assured I became. I counted for something in New York. My thirty years of effort were remembered in my favor.

On Tuesday Sullivan, who had been called to the West, wired me from Chicago that A Son of the Middle Border would make an admirable serial and that his assistants would take the matter up with me. "I predict a great success for it."

That night I sent a message to my wife in which I exultantly said, "Rejoice! I've sold The Middle Border to Collier's Weekly. Our troubles are over for a year at least."

Two days later Collier's took a short story at four hundred dollars and the Century gave me three hundred for an article on James A. Herne, and when I boarded the train for Chicago the following week I was not only four thousand dollars better off than when I came—I had regained my faith in the future. My task was clearly outlined. For the seventh time I set to work revising A Son of the Middle Border, preparing it for serial publication.

* * * * *

My father, who knew that I had been writing upon this story for years, stared at me in silent amazement when I told him of its sale. That the editor of a great periodical should be interested in a record of the migrations and failures of the McClintocks and Garlands was incredible. Nevertheless he was eager to see it in print—and when in March the first installment appeared, he read it with absorbed attention and mixed emotions. "Aren't you a little hard on me?" he asked with a light in his eyes which was half-humorous, half-resentful.

"I don't think so, Father," I replied. "You must admit you were a stern disciplinarian in those days."

"Well maybe I was—but I didn't realize it."

My first understanding of the depths this serial sounded came to me in the letters which were written to the editor by those who could not find words in which to express their longing for the bright world gone—the world when they were young and glad. "You have written my life," each one said—and by this they meant that the facts of my family history, and my own emotional experiences were so nearly theirs that my lines awoke an almost intolerable regret in their hearts—an ache which is in my own heart to-day—the world-old hunger of the gray-haired man dwelling upon the hope and illusions of youth.

These responses which indicated a wider and more lasting effect than I had hoped to produce, led me to plan for the publication of the book close on the heels of the concluding installment of the serial but in this I was disappointed. The Mexican war suddenly thrust new and tremendously exciting news articles into the magazine, separating and delaying the printing of my story. Had it not been for the loyalty of Mark Sullivan it would have been completely side-tracked, but he would not have it so; on the contrary he began to talk with me about printing six more installments, and this necessarily put off the question of finding a publisher for the book.

Nevertheless I returned to my desk in the expectation that the Mexican excitement was only a flurry and that the magazine would be able to complete the publication of the manuscript within the year. My harvest was not destroyed; it was only delayed.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A Spray of Wild Roses

Although for several years my wife and children had spent four months of each year in West Salem, and notwithstanding the fact that my father was free to come down to visit us at any time, I suffered a feeling of uneasiness (almost of guilt), whenever I thought of him camping alone for the larger part of the year in that big, silent house. His love for the children and for Zulime made every day of his lonely life a reproach to me, and yet there seemed no way in which I could justly grant him more of our time. The welfare of my wife and the education of the children must be considered.

He was nearing his eighty-fourth birthday, and a realization that every week in which he did not see his granddaughters was an irreparable loss, gave me uneasiness. It was a comfort to think of him sitting in an easy chair in the blaze of a fireplace which he loved and found a solace and yet he was a lonely old man—that could not be denied. He made no complaint in his short infrequent letters although as spring came on he once or twice asked, "Why don't you come up? The best place for the children is on the lawn under the maples."

In one note to me he said, "My old legs are giving out. I don't enjoy walking any more. I don't stand the work of the garden as well as I did last year. You'd better come up and help me put in the seed."

This confession produced in me a keen pang. He who had marched so tirelessly under the lead of Grant and Thomas; he who had fearlessly cruised the pine forests of Wisconsin, and joyously explored the prairies of Iowa and Minnesota, was now uncertain of his footing. Alarmed more than I cared to confess, I hurried up to help him, and to tell him of the success of The Middle Border, which was in truth as much his story as mine.

The air was thick with bird songs as I walked up the street, for it was late April, and I came upon him at work in the garden, bareheaded as usual, his white hair gleaming in the sunlight like a silver crown.

Outwardly serene, without a trace of bitterness in his voice, he spoke of his growing weakness. "Oh, the old machine is wearing out, that's all." Aware of his decline he accepted it as something in the natural course of human life and was content.

Several of his comrades had dropped away during the winter and he was aware that all of his generation were nearing their end. "There's only one more migration left for us," he said composedly, yet with a note of regret. Not on the strength of any particular religious creed but by reason of a manly faith in the universe he faced death. He was a kind of primitive warrior, who, having lived honorably, was prepared to meet what was to come. "I've no complaint to make," he said, "I've had a long life and on the whole a happy life. I'm ready for the bugle."

This was the faith of a pathfinder, a philosophy born of the open spaces, courage generated by the sun and the wind. "I find it hard to keep warm on dark days," he explained. "I guess my old heart is getting tired," and as he spoke I thought of the strain which that brave heart had undergone in its eighty years of action, on the battlefield, along the river, in the logging camps, and throughout all the stern, unceasing years of labor on the farm. His tireless energy and his indomitable spirit came back, filling my mind with pictures of his swift and graceful use of axe and scythe, and when I spoke of the early days, he found it difficult to reply—they were so beautiful in retrospect.

The next day was Sunday, and Sunday afternoon was for him a period of musing, an hour of dream, and as night began to fall he turned to me and with familiar accent called out, "Come, Hamlin, sing some of the songs your mother used to love," and I complied, although I could play but a crude accompaniment to my voice. First of all I sang "Rise and Shine" and "The Sweet Story of Old" in acknowledgment of the Sabbath, then passed to "The Old Musician and His Harp," ending with "When You and I Were Young, Maggie," in which I discerned a darker significance—a deeper pathos than ever before. It had now a personal, poignant application.

Tears misted his eyes as I uttered the line, "But now we are aged and gray, Maggie, the trials of life are nearly done," and at the close he was silent with emotion. He, too, was aged and gray, his trials of life nearly done, and the one who had been his solace and his stay had passed beyond recall.

To me, came the insistent thought, "Soon he must go to join Mother in the little plot under the pines beyond Neshonoc." In spite of my philosophy, I imagined their reunion somehow, somewhere.

Tender and sweet were the scenes which the words of my songs evoked—pictures which had nothing to do with the music except by association, forms and faces of far-off days, of Dry Run Prairie and its neighbors, and of the still farther and dimmer and more magical experiences of Green's Coulee, before the call to war.

I sang the song my uncle Bailey loved. A song which took him back to his boyhood's home in Maine.

"The river's running just the same, The willows on its side Are larger than they were, dear Tom, The stream appears less wide, And stooping down to take a drink, Dear Heart, I started so, To see how sadly I was changed Since forty years ago!"

His songs, his friends, his thoughts were all of the past except when they dwelt on his grandchildren—and they, after six months' absence, were shadowy, fairy-like forms in his memory. He found it difficult to recall them precisely. He longed for them but his longing was for something vaguely bright and cheerful and tender. David and William and Susan and Belle were much more vividly real to him than Constance or Mary Isabel.

* * * * *

On Monday morning he was up early. "Now let's get to work," he said. "I can't hoe as I used to do, and the weeds are getting the start of me." To him the garden was a battlefield, a contest with purslane and he hated to be worsted.

"Don't worry about the garden," I said. "It is not very important. What does it matter if the 'pussley' does cover the ground?"

He would not have this. "It matters a good deal," he replied with hot resentment, "and it won't happen so long as I can stand up and shove a hoe."

To relieve his anxiety and to be sure that he did not overwork, I hired Uncle Frank McClintock to come down for two or three days a week to help kill the weeds. "The crop is not important to me," I said to him privately, "but it is important that you should keep a close watch on Father while I am away. He is getting feeble and forgetful. See him every day, and wire me if he is in need of anything. I must go back to the city for a few weeks. If you need me send word and I'll come at once."

He understood, and I went away feeling more at ease. I relied on Uncle Frank's interest in him.

Now, it chanced that just before the date of our return to the Homestead, Lily Morris, wife of the newly-appointed ambassador to Sweden, invited my wife and children to accompany her on a trip to the Big Horn Mountains and we were all torn between opposing duties and desires.

Eager to see "Papa's Mountains," yet loath to lose anything of dear old West Salem, Mary Isabel was pathetically perplexed. Connie was all for West Salem but Zulime who knew the charm of the West decided to go, and again I visited Father to tell him the news and to explain that we would all be with him in August. The fear of disappointing him was the only cloud on the happy prospect.

With a feeling of guilt I met him with the news of our change of plan, softening the blow as best I could. He bore it composedly, though sadly, while I explained that I could not possibly have shown the children the mountains of my own accord. "I have some lectures in Colorado," I explained, "but I shall not be gone long."

"I had counted on seeing Zulime and the children next week," was all he said.

Just before my return to the city, he sent for a team, and together we drove down to the little Neshonoc burying ground. "I want to inspect your mother's grave," he explained.

On the way, as we were passing a clump of wild roses, he asked me to stop and cut some of them. "Your mother was fond of wild roses," he said, "I'd like to put a handful on her grave."

The penetrating odor of those exquisite blooms brought to my mind vistas of the glorious sunlit, odorous prairies of Iowa, and to gather and put into his hand a spray of them, was like taking part in a poem—a poignant threnody of age, for he received them in silence, and held them with tender care, his mind far away in the past.

Silently we entered the gate of the burial ground, and slowly approached the mound under which my mother's body rested, and as I studied the thin form and bending head of my intrepid sire, I realized that he was in very truth treading the edge of his own grave. My eyes grew dim with tears and my throat ached with a sense of impending loss, and a pity for him which I could conceal only by looking away at the hills.

Nevertheless, he was calmer than I. "Here is where I want to lie," he said quietly and stooping, softly spread his sprays of roses above the mound. "She loved all the prairie flowers," he said, "but she specially liked wild roses. I always used to bring them to her from the fields. We had oceans of them in Dakota in those days."

It was a commonplace little burial ground with a few trees and here and there a bed of lilies or phlox, yet it had charm. It was a sunny and friendly place, a silent acre whose name and history went back to the beginning of the first white settlement in the valley. On its monuments were chiseled the familiar names of pioneers, and it was characteristic of the time and deeply characteristic of the McClintocks, to be told, by my father, that in some way the exact location of my grandmother's grave had been lost and that no stone marked the spot where my grandfather was buried.

We wandered around among the graves for half an hour while Father spoke of the men and women whose names were on the low and leaning stones. "They were American," he said. "These German neighbors of ours are all right in their way, but it isn't our way. They are good citizens as far as they know how to be, but they don't think in our words. Soon there won't be any of the old families left. My world is just about gone, and so I don't mind going myself, only I want to go quick. I don't want to be bedridden for months as Vance McKinley was. If I could have my wish, I'd go out like a candle in a puff of wind,—and I believe that's the way I shall go."

It was a radiant June afternoon and as we drove back along the familiar lane toward the hills softened by the mist, we looked away over a valley throbbing with life and rich with the shining abundance of growing grain—a rich and peaceful and lovely valley to me—but how much more it all meant to my father! Every hill had its memories, every turn in the road opened a vista into the past. The mill, the covered bridge, the lonely pine by the river's bank,—all, all spoke to him of those he had loved and lost.

With guilty reluctance I confessed that the return of the children had again been postponed. "Mrs. Morris cannot tell just when she will return—I fear not before the first of September. It is a wonderful opportunity for the children to see the mountains. I could not afford to take them on such a trip—much as I should like to do so—and there is no telling when such another opportunity will offer. Mary Isabel is just at the right age to remember all she sees and a summer in the mountains will mean much to her in after life. Even Constance will be profoundly changed by it. Zulime is sorry to disappoint you but she feels that it would be wrong to refuse such an opportunity."

He made no complaint, offered no further opposition, he only said gently and sadly, "Don't let them stay away too long. I want them here part of the summer. I miss them terribly—and you must remember my time on earth is nearly ended."

"We shall all be here in August," I assured him, "and I may return late in July."

This was the twelfth of June and as I left the house for the train the picture of that lonely, white-haired man, sitting at the window, took away all the anticipation of pleasure with which our expedition had filled my mind. I was minded to decline the wondrous opportunity and send the children to the old Homestead and their grandsire.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

A Soldier of the Union Mustered Out

On my return to Chicago, I made good report of Father's condition and said nothing of his forebodings, for I wanted Zulime to start on her vacation in entire freedom from care. Had it not been for my lecture engagements I might not have gone with them, but as certain dates were fixed, I bought tickets for myself on the same train which Mrs. Morris had taken, and announced my intention to travel with the party at least as far as Sheridan. "I want to watch the children's faces and hear their words of delight when they see the mountains," I explained to Mrs. Morris. "My lectures at the Colorado Normal School do not begin till the second week in July—so that I can be with you part of the time."

My decision gave the final touch to the children's happiness. They liked their shaggy father—I don't know why, but they did—and during the days of preparation their voices were filled with bird-like music. They were palpitant with joy.

On the day appointed the Morris automobile called for us and took us to the train, and when the children found that they were to travel in a private pullman and that the stateroom was to be their own little house they were transported with pride. Thereafter they knew nothing of heat or dust or weariness. Their meals came regularly, and they went to bed in their berths with warbles of satisfaction.

The plains of the second day's travel absorbed them. The prairie dogs, the herds of cattle, the cactus blooms all came in for joyous recognition. They had read about them: now here they were in actuality. "Are those the mountains?" asked Mary Isabel as we came in sight of the buttes of Eastern Wyoming. "No, only hills," I replied.

Then, at last, came the Big Horns deep blue and lined with snow. Mary Isabel's eyes expanded with awe. "Oh, they are so much finer than I expected them to be," she said, and from that moment, she gave them her adoration. They were papa's mountains and hence not to be feared. "Are we really going up there?" she asked. "Yes," I replied pointing out Cloud Peak, "we shall go up almost directly toward that highest mountain of all."

At a camp just above Big Horn City we spent a month of just the sort of riding, trailing and camping which I was eager to have my children know, and in a few days under my instruction, they both learned to sit a horse in fearless confidence. Mary Isabel, who was eleven, accompanied me on a ride to Cloud Peak Lake, a matter of twenty miles over a rough trail, and came into camp almost unwearied. She was a chip of the old block in this regard, and as I listened to her cheery voice and looked down into her shining face I was a picture of shameless parental pride. For several weeks I was able to remain with them and then at last set forth for Colorado on my lecture tour.

Meanwhile, unsuspected by Americans, colossal armies were secretly mobilizing in Europe, and on August first, whilst we were on our way home, the sound of cannon proclaimed to the world the end of one era and the beginning of another. Germany announced to the rulers of the Eastern Hemisphere that she intended to dominate not merely the land but the seas, and in my quiet hotel in a Colorado college town this proclamation found amazed readers. I, for one, could not believe it—even after my return to Chicago in August, while the papers were shouting "War! War!" I remained unconvinced. Germany's program seemed monstrous, impossible.

The children and their mother arrived two days later and to Zulime I said "Father is patiently waiting for us and in the present state of things West Salem seems a haven, of rest. We must go to him at once." She was willing and on August six, two days after England declared war, the old soldier met us, looking thin and white but so happy in our coming that his health seemed miraculously restored.

With joyous outcry the children sprang to his embrace and Zulime kissed him with such sincerity of regard that he gave her a convulsive hug. "Oh, but I'm glad to see you!" he exclaimed while tears of joy glistened on his cheeks.

"Well, Father, what do you think about the European situation?" I asked.

"I don't know what to think," he gravely answered. "It starts in like a big war, the biggest the world has ever seen. If you can believe what the papers say, the Germans have decided to eat up France."

Although physically weaker, he was mentally alert and read his Tribune with a kind of religious zeal. The vastness of the German armies, the enormous weight and power of their cannons, and especially the tremendous problem of their commissariat staggered his imagination. "I don't see how they are going to maintain all those troops," he repeated. "How can they shelter and clothe and feed three million men?"

To him, one of Sherman's soldiers, who had lived for days on parched corn stolen from the feedboxes of the mules, the description of wheeled ovens, and hot soup wagons appeared mere fiction. Although appalled by the rush of the Prussian line, he was confident that the Allies would check the invasion. Sharply resenting the half-veiled pro-Germanism of some of his neighbors, he declared hotly: "They claim to be loyal to America, but they are hoping the Kaiser will win. I will not trade with such men."

How far away it all seemed on those lovely nights when with my daughters beside me I lay on their broad bed out on the upper porch and heard the crickets sleepily chirping and the wind playing with the leaves in the maples. To Connie's sensitive ears the rustle suggested stealthy feet and passing wings—but to me came visions of endless rivers of helmeted soldiers flowing steadily remorselessly through Belgium, and Mary Isabel said, "Papa, don't you think of going to war. I won't let you."

"They wouldn't take me anyway," I replied, "I'm too old. You needn't worry."

I could not conceal from myself the fact that my father's work was almost done. That he was failing was sorrowfully evident. He weeded the garden no more. Content to sit in a chair on the back porch or to lie in a hammock under the maples, he spent long hours with me or with Zulime, recalling the battles of the Civil War, or relating incidents of the early history of the valley.

He still went to his club each night after supper, but the walk was getting to be more and more of a task, and he rejoiced when we found time to organize a game of cinch at home. This we very often did, and sometimes, even in the middle of the afternoon I called him in to play with me; for with a great deal of time on his hands he was restless. "I can't read all the time," he said, "and most of the fellows are busy during the middle of the day."

Each morning regular as the clock he went to the post-office to get his paper, and at lunch he was ready to discuss the news of the battles which had taken place. After his meal he went for a little work in the garden, for his hatred of weeds was bitter. He could not endure to have them overrun his crops. They were his Huns, his menacing invaders.

In this fashion he approached his eighty-fourth birthday. His manner was tranquil, but I knew that he was a little troubled by some outstanding notes which he had signed in order to purchase a house for my brother in Oklahoma, and to cure this I bought up these papers, canceled them and put them under his breakfast plate. "I want him to start his eighty-fifth year absolutely clear of debt," I said to Zulime.

He was much affected by the discovery of these papers. It pleased him to think that I had the money to spare. It was another evidence of my prosperity.

Nearly half of A Son of the Middle Border had now been printed and while he had read it he was shy about discussing it. Something almost sacred colored the pictures which my story called up. Its songs and sayings vibrated deep, searching the foundation chords of his life. They told of a bright world vanished, a landscape so beautiful that it hurt to have some parts of it revealed to aliens—and yet he was glad of it and talked of it to his comrades.

Zulime made a birthday cake for him and the children decorated it, and when Mary Isabel brought it in with all its candles lighted, and we lifted our triumphant song, he was overwhelmed with happiness and pride.

"I never had a birthday cake or a birthday celebration before in all my life," he said, and we hardly knew whether to laugh or to cry at that confession.

We ended the day by singing for him—that was the best of it all; for both the children could now join with me in voicing the tunes which he loved. They knew his enthusiasms and were already faithful heirs of his traditions. Singers of the future, they loved to hear him recount the past.

All through the month of September as we walked our peaceful way in Wisconsin the Germans were pounding at the gates of Paris. It comforts me at this moment to recall how peaceful my father was. He heard of the war only as of a far-off storm. He had us all, all but Franklin, and there was no bitterness in his voice as he spoke of his increasing uselessness. "I'm only a passenger now," he said. "I've finished my work."

As the Interstate Fair came on, he quietly engaged a neighbor to take us all down to La Crosse in an automobile. "This is my treat," he said, and knowing how much it meant to him I gladly accepted. With a fine sense of being up-to-date he reverted to the early days as we went whirling down the turnpike, and told tales of hauling hay and grain over these long hills. He pointed out the trail and spoke of its mud and sand. "It took us six hours then. Now, see, it's just like a city street."

He was greatly pleased to find an aeroplane flying above the grounds as we drew near. "They say the Germans are making use of these machines for scouting—and they are building others to fight with. I can't understand how they make a ton of iron fly."

Once inside the gates we let him play the host. He bought candy for the children, paid for our dinners at the restaurant and took us to the side-shows. It wearied him, however, and about three o'clock he said "Let's go home by way of Onalaska. I want to visit the cemetery and see if Father's lot is properly cared for." It seemed a rather melancholy finish to our day, but I agreed and as we were crossing the sandy stretch of road over which I limped as a child, I remarked "How short the distance seems." He smiled like a conqueror, "This is next thing to flying," he said.

This lonely little burial ground, hardly more impressive than the one at Neshonoc, contained the graves of all the Garlands who had lived in that region. "There is a place here for me," he said, "but I want you to put me in Neshonoc beside your mother."

On the way home he recovered his cheerfulness with an almost boyish resiliency. The flight of the car up the long hill which used to be such a terror to his sweating team, gave a satisfaction which broke out in speech. "It beats all how a motor can spin right along up a grade like this—and the flies can't sting it either," he added in remembering the tortured cattle of the past. When I told him of an invitation to attend a "Home Coming of Iowa Authors" which I was considering, he expressed his pleasure and urged me to accept. Des Moines was a real city to him. It possessed the glamour of a capital and to have me claimed by the State of Iowa pleased him more than any recognition in New York.

The following day he watched while the carpenter and I worked at putting my study into shape. Ever since the fire two years before its ceiling had needed repair, and even now I was but half-hearted in its restoration. As I looked around the square, bare, ugly room and thought of the spacious libraries of Longfellow, Lowell and Holmes, I realized my almost hopeless situation. I was only a literary camper after all. My life was not here—it couldn't be here so far from all that makes a writer's life worth while. "Soon for the sake of the children I must take them from this pleasant rut," I said to Zulime. "It is true an author can make himself felt from any place, but why do it at a disadvantage? If it were not for Father, I would establish our winter home in New York, which has the effect of increasing my power as well as my happiness."

On the twentieth of October Father called me to his room. "I'm getting near the end of my trail," he said, "and I want to talk to you about my will. I want you two boys to share equally in all I've got and I'd like to have you keep this property just as it is, then you'll be safe, you'll always have a home. I'm ready to go—any time, only I don't like to leave the children—" His voice failed him for a moment, then he added, "I know I can't last long."

Though refusing to take a serious view of his premonition I realized that his hold on life was loosening and I answered, "Your wishes shall be carried out."

He did not feel like going up to the club that night, and so we played cards with him. Wilson Irvine, a landscape painter, who was visiting us chose Constance as a partner against Mary Isabel and her grandsire. Luck was all in Constance's favor, she and Irvine won, much to the veteran's chagrin. "You little witch," he said, "what do you mean by beating your granddad?" He was very proud of her skill, for she was only six years old.

To end the evening to his liking, we all united in singing some old war songs and he went away to his bed in better spirits than he had shown for a week or more.

He was at the breakfast table with me next morning, but seemed not quite awake. He replied when I spoke to him, but not alertly, not as he should, and a few minutes later rose with effort. This disturbed me a little, but a few minutes later he left the house as if to do some work at the barn, and I went to my writing with a feeling that he was quite all right.

It was a glorious October morning and from my desk as I looked into the yard I could see him standing in the gate, waiting for the man and team. He appeared perfectly well and exhibited his customary impatience with dilatory workmen. He was standing alertly erect with the sunshine falling over him and the poise of his head expressed his characteristic energy. He made a handsome figure. My eyes fell again to my manuscript and I was deep in my imaginary world when I heard the voice of my uncle Frank calling to me up the stairs:

"Hamlin! Come quick. Something has happened. Come, quick, quick!"

There was a note in his voice which sent a chill through my blood, and my first glance into his eyes told me that he had looked upon the elemental. "Your father is lying out on the floor of the barn. I'm afraid he's gone!"

He was right. There on the rough planking of the carriage way lay the old pioneer, motionless, just as he had fallen not five minutes before. The hat upon his head and his right hand in his pocket told that he had fallen while standing in the door waiting for the drayman. His eyes were closed as if in sleep, and no sign of injury could be seen.

Kneeling by his side I laid my hand on his breast. It was still! His heart invincible through so many years had ceased to beat. His breath was gone and his empty left hand, gracefully lax, lay at his side. The veteran pioneer had passed to that farther West from whose vague savannahs no adventurer has ever returned.

"He must have died on his feet," said my uncle gravely, tenderly.

"Yes, he went the way he wished to go," I replied with a painful stress in my throat.

Together we took him up and bore him to the house, and placed him on the couch whereon he had been wont to rest during the day.

I moved like a man in a dream. It was all incredible, benumbing. Tenderly I disposed his head on its pillow and drew his hands across his breast. "Here is the end of a good man," I said. "Another soldier of the Union mustered out."

His hands, strong, yet singularly refined, appealed to me with poignant suggestion. What stern tasks they had accomplished. What brave deeds they had dared. In spite of the hazards of battle, notwithstanding the perils of the forests, the raft, the river, after all the hardships of the farm, they remained unscarred and shapely. The evidence of good blood was in their slender whiteness. Honorable, skilful, indefatigable hands,—now forever at rest.

My uncle slipped away to notify the coroner, leaving me there, alone, with the still and silent form, which had been a dominant figure in my world. For more than half a century those gray eyes and stern lips had influenced my daily life. In spite of my growing authority, in spite of his age he had been a force to reckon with up to the very moment of his death. He was not a person to be ignored. All his mistakes, his weaknesses, faded from my mind, I remembered only his heroic side. His dignity, his manly grace were never more apparent than now as he lay quietly, as though taking his midday rest.

A breath of pathos rose from the open book upon his table. His hat, his shoes, his gloves all spoke of his unconquerable energy. I thought of the many impatient words I had spoken to him, and they would have filled me with a wave of remorse had I not known that our last day together had been one of perfect understanding. His final night with us had been entirely happy, and he had gone away as he had wished to go, in the manner of a warrior killed in action. His unbending soul had kept his body upright to the end.

All that day I went about the house with my children like one whose world had suddenly begun to crumble. The head of my house was gone. Over and over again I stole softly into his room unable to think of him as utterly cold and still.

For seventy years he had faced the open lands. Starting from the hills of Maine when a lad, he had kept moving, each time farther west, farther from his native valley. His life, measured by the inventions he had witnessed, the progress he had shared, covered an enormous span.

"He died like a soldier," I said to the awed children, "and he shall have the funeral of a soldier. We will not mourn, and we will not whisper or walk tip-toe in the presence of his body."

In this spirit we called his friends together. In place of flowers we covered his coffin with the folds of a flag, and when his few remaining comrades came to take a last look at him, my wife and I greeted them cordially in ordinary voice as if they had come to spend an evening with him and with us.

My final look at him in the casket filled my mind with love and admiration. His snowy hair and beard, his fair skin and shapely features, as well as a certain firm sweetness in the line of his lips raised him to a grave dignity which made me proud of him. Representing an era in American settlement as he did I rejoiced that nothing but the noblest lines of his epic career were written on his face.

This is my consolation. His last days were spent in calm content with his granddaughters to delight and comfort him. In their young lives his spirit is going forward. They remember and love him as the serene, white-haired veteran of many battles who taught them to revere the banner he so passionately adored.



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AFTERWORD

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Afterword

At this point I make an end of this chronicle, the story of two families whose wanderings and vicissitudes (as I conceive them) are typical of thousands of other families who took part in the upbuilding of the Middle Western States during that period which lies between the close of the Civil War and the Great War of Nineteen Fourteen. With the ending of the two principal life-lines which bind these pages together my book naturally closes.

In these two volumes over which I have brooded for more than ten years, I have shadowed forth, imperfectly, yet with high intent, the experiences of Isabel McClintock and Richard Garland, and the lives of other settlers closely connected with them. For a full understanding of the drama—for it is a drama, a colossal and colorful drama—I must depend upon the memory or the imagination of my readers. No writer can record it all or even suggest the major part of it. At the end of four years of writing I go to press with reluctance, but realizing that my public, like myself, is growing gray, I have consented to publish my manuscript with its many imperfections and omissions.

My Neshonoc is gone. The community which seemed so stable to me thirty years ago, has vanished like a wisp of sunrise fog. The McClintocks, the Dudleys, the Baileys, pioneers of my father's generation, have entered upon their final migration to another darkly mysterious frontier. My sunset World—all of it—is in process of change, of disintegration, of dissolution. My beloved trails are grass-grown. I have put away my saddle and my tent-cloth, realizing that at sixty-one my explorations of the wilderness are at an end. Like a captive wolf I walk a narrow round in a city square.

With my father's death I ceased to regard the La Crosse Valley even as my summer home. I decided to make my permanent residence in the East, and my wife and daughters whose affections were so deeply inwound with the Midland, loyally consented to follow, although it was a sad surrender for them. As my mother, Isabel McClintock, had given up her home and friends in the Valley to follow Richard Garland into the new lands of the West, so now Zulime Taft, A Daughter of the Middle Border, surrendered all she had gained in Illinois and Wisconsin to follow me into the crowded and dangerous East. It was a tearing wrench, but she did it. She sold our house in Woodlawn, packed up our belongings and joined me in a small apartment seven stories above the pavement in the heart of Manhattan.

The children came East with a high sense of adventure, with no realization that they were leaving their childhood's home never to return to it. They still talk of going back to West Salem, and they have named our summer cabin in the Catskills "Neshonoc" in memory of the little pioneer village whose graveyard holds all that is material of their paternal grandparents. The colors of the old Homestead are growing dim, and yet they will not permit me to deed it to others. We still own it and shall continue to do so. It has too many memories both sweet and sacred,—it seems that by clinging to its material forms we may still retain its soul.

We think of it often, and when around our rude fireplace in Camp Neshonoc in a room almost as rough as a frontier cabin, we sit and sing the songs which are at once a tribute to our forebears and a bond of union with the past, the shadows of the heroic past emerge. David and Luke, Richard and Walter, and with them Susan and Lorette—all—all the ones I loved and honored——.

My daughters are true granddaughters of the Middle Border. Constance at fourteen, Mary Isabel at eighteen, are carrying forward, each in her distinctive way, the traditions of the Border, with the sturdy spirit of their forebears in the West. To them I am about to entrust the work which I have only partially completed.

Too young at first to understand the reasons for my decision, they are now in agreement with me that we can never again live in the Homestead. They love every tree, every shrub on the old place. The towering elms, the crow's nest in the maples, the wall of growing woodbine, the gaunt, wide-spreading butternut branches,—all these are very dear to them, for they are involved with their earliest memories, touched with the glamour which the imagination of youth flings over the humblest scenes of human life. To them the Fern Road, The Bubbling Spring, and the Apple Tree Glen, scenes of many camping places, are all a part of childhood's fairy kingdom. The thought of never again walking beneath those familiar trees or sitting in those familiar rooms, is painful to them, and yet I am certain that their Neshonoc, like my own, is a realm remembered, a region to which they can return only on the wings of memory or of dream.

Happily the allurement of art, the stimulus of ambition and the promise of love and honor already partly compensate them for their losses. Their faces are set to the future. On them I rest my hopes. By means of them and their like, Life weaves her endless web.

THE END