ways of a Sunday we sang for him and sometimes Uncle Frank, the last
of the McClintocks, gray haired and lean and bent, came in with his
fiddle and played while the children danced in the light of our fire, so
lithe, so happy, so fairy-like in their loveliness that he and Lorette
sat in silence, a silence which was at once tender and tragic. There was
something alien as well as marvelous in the dramatic movements of those
small forms.

Witnessing such scenes, moved by something elemental in their decay, I
continued to brood over the manuscript which was to be a kind of
autobiography, the blended story of the vicissitudes of the Garlands and
the McClintocks. At times I worked upon it to the exclusion of all else,
and when I read a part of the tale to Mary Isabel and found that she
understood it and liked it, I was heartened.

Consider this! I now had a daughter to whom I could read my manuscript!
Where did that personality come from? Was her soul merely the automatic
reaction of a material organism against a material environment? Was her
spirit dependent on the life of its little body or could it live on
independent of the flesh? Acknowledging the benumbing, hopeless mystery
of it all, I continued to live for my children, finding in them my
comfort and my justification.

I have never known anything more perfect than some of those mid-August
days when on some woodland slope, we gathered the luscious musky fruit
of wild blackberry vines and at our camp fire broiled our steak and made
our coffee for our evening, open-air meal.

There were no flies, no mosquitoes, no snakes, and the hillsides were
abloom with luscious shining berries, berries so ripe they fell into our
hands with the slightest touch, and so tender that they melted in our
mouths. The wind filled with the odor of yellowing corn, and the smell
of nuts and leaves, carried our songs to the mist-filled valley below
us, and the children playing on the smooth sward found our world a
paradise.

As the cool dusk began to cover the farms below us, we sang "Juanita"
and "Kentucky Home" and told our last stories while the children lay at
our feet, silent with rapture as I used to be, in similar circumstances,
forty years before.

And then when the fire had died down and sleepy babies were ready to
turn their faces bedward, we drove slowly down the winding lane to the
dust-covered bridge, past the small cemetery where mother was sleeping,
back to where the broad-ro