ch my father's wheat was uprooted. It was frightful. From this I
passed almost at once to the bloom, the green serenity, and the
abundance of my native valley. It was a kind of paradise by contrast to
the South-west and to take my little daughter to my bosom, to look into
her eyes, to feel her little palms patting my cheeks, was a pleasure
such as I had never expected to own. Every father who reads this line
will understand me when I declare that she had "developed wonderfully"
in the month of my absence. To me every change in my first born was
thrilling--and a little sad--for the fairy of to-day was continually
displacing the fairy of yesterday.

Believing that this had ended my travels for the summer, I began to work
on a novel which should depict the life of a girl, condemned against her
will to be a spiritualistic medium,--forced by her parents to serve as a
"connecting wire between the world of matter and the world of spirit."

This theme, which lay outside my plan to depict the West, had long
demanded to be written, and I now set about it with vigor. As a matter
of fact, I knew a great deal about mediums, for at one time I had been a
member of the Council of the American Psychical Society, and as a
special committee on slate writing and other psychical phenomena had
conducted many experiments. I had in my mind (and in my notebooks) a
mass of material which formed the background of my story, _The Tyranny
of the Dark_. It made a creditable serial and a fairly successful book,
but it will probably not count as largely in my record as "Martha's
Fireplace," a short story which I wrote at about the same time. I do not
regret having done this novel, because at the moment it seemed very much
worth while, but I was fully aware, even then, that it had a much
narrower appeal than either _Hesper_ or _The Captain of the Gray Horse
Troop_.

In the midst of my work on this book our good friends, Mary and Fred
Easton, invited us to go with them, in their houseboat, on a trip to the
World's Fair in St. Louis. Mrs. Easton offered to take Mary Isabel and
her nurse into her own lovely home during our absence, and as Zulime
needed the outing we joined the party.

It was a beautiful experience, a kind of dream journey, luxurious,
effortless, silent and suggestive,--suggestive of the great river as it
was in the time of Dubuque. Sometimes for an hour or more we lost sight
of the railway, and the primitive loneliness of the stream awe