his old neighbor went to the train with us, knowing full well that he
and my father would never meet again.

Thus it happened--curiously, yet most naturally--that the last man we
saw as we left Osage was our first neighbor on Dry Run prairie in the
autumn of Seventy-one.

From this melancholy review of the bent forms of ancient friends and
neighbors, dreaming of the past, I returned to my wife, who was
concerned entirely with the future. What had she to do with elderly
folk? Life to her was sweet and promiseful. Intently toiling over the
adornment of tiny caps, socks and gowns, joyful as a girl of seven
making dresses for a doll, she insisted on displaying to me all of that
lilliputian wardrobe. A dozen times each day she called on me to admire
this or that garment, and I was greatly relieved to find that the
growing wonder of the experience through which she was about to pass,
prevented her from giving way to fear of it. Over me, at times, an icy
shadow fell. Suppose--suppose----!

One night she dreamed that a babe had come to us, and that the nurse
had carelessly allowed it to chill and die, but I had no such disturbing
premonitions. Contrary to the statements of sentimental novelists and
poets I almost never dreamed of my wife. I more often dreamed of Howells
or Roosevelt or some of my editorial friends, indeed I often had highly
technical literary dreams wherein I prepared manuscripts for the press
or composed speeches or poems, and sometimes my mother or Jessie came
back to me--but Zulime had never up to this time entered my sleep.

One afternoon during this period of waiting and just after I had
finished the writing of _Hesper_ we joined our good friends the Eastons
on an excursion up the Mississippi on their house-boat, a glorious
outing which I mention because it was the farthest removed from my
boyhood life on Dry Run prairie whose scenes had just been vividly
brought to mind.

Here was the flawless poetry of recreation, the perfection of travel. To
sit in a reclining chair on the screened-in forward deck of a beautiful
boat, what time it was being propelled by some invisible silent
machinery, up a shining river, reflecting wooded bluffs, was like taking
flight on the magic carpet of my boyhood's story book. The purple
head-lands projecting majestically into the still flood took on once
more the poetry and the mystery of the prehistoric. One by one those
royal pyramids ordered and adorned themselves for ou