oing to tell me about Mr. and Mrs. Masters?"

"Oh, was I? Well, they're the salt of the earth, too. They don't count
any cost and the harder the work, the better it seems to suit. Mr.
Masters can live on eighteen dollars a month and board himself. There
isn't anything he can't do, from making a windmill out of a bushel of
old tin cans to preaching seven times on Sunday. And Mrs. Masters is a
prize winner for making trouble feel ashamed of itself. She never
complains about anything. One week last summer we had eight days of
continuous wind. You never saw a desert wind, did you? Or taste one?
Well, you have one of the times of your life coming to you. The sand
cavorts around like spring lamb and peas. You can't shut it out of a
hardboiled egg. It drifts into the house and covers the dishes and the
beds and the books and the chairs and the floors and does the work of
blotting paper while you're writing letters to the Agricultural
Department in Washington asking them to irrigate the Little Colorado so
we can raise garden truck in the channel between the rainy seasons. At
the dinner table the custard pie looks as if it was dusted with
pulverised sugar and you eat so much sand that you begin to feel the
need of a gizzard like a hen. It fills your pockets, and at night you
can shake a pint out of each ear, if your ears are big enough. It drifts
up on the porch like snow and sifts through a pane of glass like a
sieve.

"Well, all through that eight-day week, Mrs. Masters was so cheerful it
was actually depressing. She couldn't have looked more cheerful if she
had been going over to Flagstaff to sit for her photograph on her
birthday. The rest of us just groaned and bore it. We lost our temper
with one another and never found it again till the wind quit. We were
ornery and fractious. We just couldn't help it. But Mrs. Masters went
around the house nursing the baby and a toothache and singing so loud
you could hear her way out to the graveyard:

"'The sands of Time are sinking,
The dawn of heaven breaks,
The summer morn I've sighed for,
The fair sweet morn awakes.'

"My! I used to think to myself if the man that wrote that hymn knew how
the sands of Tolchaco were sinking into our hair and spirits, he'd a
written another verse, to cheer us on our sandy way. But any woman that
can keep up her spirits during a desert sand storm is more than a half
sister to a cherubim. I don't want to know anyone better than tha