nd it was another mystery, just as deep, how
the strange bird, which her mother said was no larger than a blue crane,
was able, on leaving, to carry her father away with him to some family,
a long, long distance off, that needed a grown-up man as badly as her
three big brothers needed a little sister.

She often tried to remember the stork, his broad nest of pussy-willows
on the chin of the new moon, and the long trip down through the wind and
snow to the open window of the farm-house. But though she never forgot
her christening, and could even remember things that happened before
that, her wonderful journey, she found, had slipped entirely from her
mind. But her mother and the three big brothers, ever reminded by the
stone-piled mound on the carnelian bluff, never forgot that day:

An icy blizzard, carrying in its teeth the blinding sleet that neither
man nor animal could breast, was driving fiercely across the wide
plains; and the red, frame dwelling and its near-lying buildings of sod,
which only the previous morning had stood out bravely against the
dreary, white waste, were wrapped and almost hidden in great banks that
had been caught up from the river heights and hurled with piercing roars
against them.

The storm had begun the day before, blowing first in fitful gusts that
whistled under the eaves, sent the hay from the stacks flying through
the yard, and lifted the ends of the roof shingles threateningly. It had
gradually strengthened to a gale toward midday, and the steady downfall
of flakes had been turned into a biting scourge that whipped up the soft
cloak from the face of the open, treeless prairie and sent it lashing
through the frigid air. Long before night had begun to settle down, no
eye could penetrate the scudding snow a foot beyond the window ledges,
except when a sudden stilling of the tempest disclosed the writhing
cottonwood break to the north, and the double row of ash saplings
leading south to the blotted, printless highway.

With darkness, the fury of the blizzard had redoubled, and the house had
rocked fearfully as each fresh blast struck it, so that the nails in the
sheathing had snapped from time to time, and rung in the tense atmosphere
like pistol shots. Momentary lulls--ominous breathing-spells--had
interrupted the blizzard; but they had served only to intensify it when
it broke again. As it rose from threatening silence to rending shrieks,
the bellowing of the frightened cattle, tied