uld have been happy, and in my sour, big-fisted way I was
happy. I tried, honestly, to grasp and hold the ecstasy which these days
offered. I who had lived for twelve years on railway trains, in camp, on
horse-back or in wretched little city hotels, was now a portly
householder, a pampered husband and a prospective parent. And yet--such
is my perverse temperament--I could not overlook the fact that this
tranquil village like thousands of others scattered over the West, was
but a half-way house, a pleasant hospital into which many of the
crippled, worn-out and white-haired farmers and their wives had come to
rest for a little while on their way to the grave.

As I walked the shaded street, perceiving these veterans of the hoe and
plow, digging feebly in the earth of their small gardens, or sitting
a-dream on the narrow porches of their tiny cottages my joy was
embittered. Age, age was everywhere. Here in the midst of the flowering
trees the men of the Middle Border were withering into dust.

In the city one does not come into anything like this close relationship
with a dying generation. The tragedy is obscured. Here Zulime and I,
young and strong, were living in the midst of an almost universal
senility and decay. There was no escape from these grim facts.

Looked at from a distance there was comfort in the thought of these
pioneers, released from the grind of their farm routine, dozing at ease
beneath the maple trees, but closely studied they became sorrowful. I
knew too much about them. Several of them had been my father's
companions in those glorious days in fifty-five. Yonder white-haired
invalid, sitting in the sun silently watching his bees, had been a
famous pilot on the river, and that bushy-haired giant, halting by on a
stick, was the wreck of a mighty hunter. The wives of these men equally
worn, equally rheumatic and even more querulous, had been the rosy,
laughing, dancing companions of Isabel McClintock in the days when
Richard Garland came a-courting. All, all were camping in lonely
cottages while their sons and daughters, in distant cities or far-off
mountain valleys, adventuring in their turn, were taking up the
discipline and the duties of a new border, a new world.

As a novelist I could not fail to observe these melancholy features of a
life which on its surface seemed idyllic. In New York, in Chicago I was
concerned mainly with happy, busy people of my own age or younger,--here
I was brought into c