lose contact daily--almost hourly--with the passing
of my father's generation and, also, I was made aware of the coming in
of an alien, uninspiring race. The farms of the Dudleys, the McKinleys,
the Coburns were being taken by the Smeckpeffers, the Heffelfingers, and
the Bergmans! Already the pages of the village newspaper were peppered
with such names, and a powerful Congregation was building a German
church on the site of the old-time Methodist meeting house of my
boyhood. My strain was dying out--a new and to my mind less admirable
America was coming on.

As June deepened my father (who realized something of the changes going
on) proposed a trip to the town in Iowa near which we had lived for
twelve years, and to this I consented, feeling that this visit could not
safely be postponed another year.

He had never been back to our prairie farm in Mitchell County since
leaving it, over twenty years before, and now (with money and leisure)
he was eager to go, and as my old Seminary associates had asked me to
speak at their Commencement, we rode away one lovely June day up along
the Mississippi to Winona, thence by way of a winding coulee, to the
level lands, and so across to Mitchell County, our old home. The
railroad, which was new to us, ran across Dry Run prairie within half a
mile of our school-house, but so flat and monotonous did the whole
country now appear, we could not distinguish any familiar landmarks. The
"hills" along the creek were barely noticeable from the car, and all the
farm-steads were hidden by groves of trees. We passed our former home
without recognizing it!

Osage, we soon discovered, was almost as much of an asylum for the aged
as West Salem. It, too, was filled with worn-out farmers, men with whom
my father had subdued the sod in the early days. Osmond Button, William
Frazer, Oliver Cole, David Babcock were all living "in town" on narrow
village lots, "taking it easy" as they called it, but they were by no
means as contented as they seemed to the casual onlooker. Freed from the
hard daily demands of the farm, many of them acknowledged a sense of
uselessness, a fear of decay.

As fast as they learned of our presence, scores of loyal friends swarmed
about us expressing a sincere regard for my father, and a kind of
wondering respect for me. Some of them clung to my father's hand as
though in hope of recovering through him some gleam of the beauty, some
part of the magic of the brave days gone--d