that fails to lead to liberty? This morning I caught sight of
Dinky-Dunk in his fur coat, climbing into the buckboard. I shall always
hate to see him in that rig. It makes me think of a certain night. And
we hate to have memory put a finger on our mental scars. When I was a
girl Aunt Charlotte's second fiend of a husband locked me up in that
lonely Derby house of theirs because I threw pebbles at the swans. Then
off they drove to dinner somewhere and left me a prisoner there, where I
sat listening to the bells of All Saints as the house gradually grew
dark. And ever since then bells at evening have made me feel lonely and
left me unhappy.

But the renaissance of the buckboard means that spring is here again.
And for my Dinky-Dunk that means harder work. He's what they call a
"rustler" out here. He believes in speed. He doesn't even wait until the
frost is out of the ground before he starts to seed--just puts a drill
over a two-inch batter of thawed-out mud, he's so mad about getting
early on the land. He says he wants early wheat or no wheat. But he has
to have help, and men are almost impossible to get. He had hoped for a
gasoline tractor, but it can't be financed this spring, he has confessed
to me. And I know, in my secret heart of hearts, that the tractor would
have been here if it hadn't been for my piano!

There are still hundreds and hundreds of acres of prairie sod to "break"
for spring wheat. Dinky-Dunk declares that he's going to risk everything
on wheat this year. He says that by working two outfits of horses he
himself can sow forty acres a day, but that means keeping the horses on
the trot part of the time. He is thinking so much about his crop that I
accused him of neglecting me.

"Is the varnish starting to wear off?" I inquired with a secret gulp of
womanish self-pity. He saved the day by declaring I was just as crazy
and just as adorable as I ever was. Then he asked me, rather sadly, if I
was bored. "Bored?" I said, "how could I be bored with all these
discomforts? No one is ever bored until they are comfortable!" But the
moment after I'd said it I was sorry.

_Tuesday the Sixth_

Spring is here, with a warm Chinook creeping in from the Rockies and a
sky of robin-egg blue. The gophers have come out of their winter
quarters and are chattering and racing about. We saw a phalanx of wild
geese going northward, and Dinky-Dunk says he's seen any number of
ducks. They go in drifting V's, and I lov