have moved me as it
did, but it blurred my eyes for a moment. My little daughter was face to
face with the great mystery.

O those magical days! Knowing all too well that they could not last and
that to lose any part of them was to be forever cheated, I gave my time
to her. Over and over again as I met her deep serene glance, I asked (as
other parents have done), "Whence came you? From what dusky night rose
your starry eyes? Out of what unillumined void flowered your fairy face?
Can it be, as some have said, that you are only an automaton, a physical
reaction?"

She was the future, my father the past. Birth and death, equally
inexplicable, were expressed to me in these two beings, so vital to me,
so dependent upon me, and beside me, suffering, joying with me, walked
the mother with unfaltering steps.

I was in the midst of a novel at this time, another story of Colorado,
which I called _Money Magic_, and without doubt all this distraction and
travel weakened it, although Howells spoke well of it. "It is one of
your best books," he said, when we next met.

[Mary Isabel reads the book at intervals and places it next to _Hesper_
and _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_.]

Marriage, paternity, householding, during these years unquestionably put
the brakes on my work as a writer, but I had no desire to return to
bachelorhood. Undoubtedly I had lost something, but I had gained more.
As a human being I was enriched beyond my deserving by a wife and a
child.

Perhaps I would have gone farther and mounted higher as a selfish
solitary bachelor, but that did not trouble me then, and does not now.
Concerned with the problem of providing a comfortable winter home for my
family, and happy in maintaining the old house in West Salem as a
monument to the memory of my mother, I wrote, committed carpentry and
lectured.

My frequent absences from home soon made a deep impression on my
daughter's mind, and whenever she was naughty I had but to say, "If you
do that again Papa will go away to New York," and she would instantly
say, "I'm doodie now papa, I'm doodie----" and yet my mention of going
to New York could not have been altogether a punishment for I always
brought to her some toy or book. Nothing afforded me keener joy than the
moment when I showed her the presents I had brought.

The fact that she loved to have her heavy-handed old Daddy near her, was
a kind of miracle, a concession for which I could not be too grateful.