--I had laid my breast
to the rain.

Nothing physical appalled me, and no labor really wearied me.

Oh, the wealth of that day's sunlight, the opulence of those nearby
fields--the beauty of those warmly-misted hills! In the evening, as I
mounted Ladrone and rode him down the lane, I had no desire to share
Burton's perilous journey down the Hotalinqua.

As my mother's excitement over my return passed away, her condition was
disturbing to me. She was walking less and less and I began at once to
consider a course of treatment which might help her. At my aunt's
suggestion I wrote to a physician in Madison whose sanitarium she had
found helpful, and as my brother chanced to be playing in Milwaukee, I
induced mother to go with me to visit him. She consented quite readily
for she was eager to see him in a real theater and a real play.

We took lodging in one of the leading hotels, which seemed very splendid
to her and that night she saw Franklin on the stage as one of "the three
Dromios" in a farce called "Incog," a piece which made her laugh till
she was almost breathless.

Next day we took her shopping. That is to say she went along with us a
helpless victim, while we purchased for her a hat and cloak, at an
expense which seemed to her almost criminal. They were in truth very
plain garments, and comparatively inexpensive, but her tender heart
overflowed with pride of her sons and a guilty joy in their
extravagance. Many times afterward I experienced, as I do at this
moment, a sharp pang of regret that I did not insist on a better cloak,
a more beautiful hat. I only hope she understood!

In this way, or some other way, I bribed her to go with me to Madison,
to the Sanitarium. "You must not run home," I said to her. "Make a fair
trial of the Institution."

To this she uttered no reply and as she did not appear homesick or
depressed, I prepared to leave, with a feeling that she was in good
hands, and that her health would be greatly benefited by the regimen. "I
must go to the city and look up that new daughter," I said to her in
excuse for deserting her, and this made her entirely willing to let me
go.

Chicago brilliantly illuminated, was filled with the spirit of the Peace
Jubilee, as I entered it. State Street, grandly impressive under the
sweep of a raw east wind, was gay with banners and sparkling with
looping thousands of electric lights, but I hurried at once to my study
on Elm Street. In half an hour I was dee