he open lands. Starting from the hills
of Maine when a lad, he had kept moving, each time farther west, farther
from his native valley. His life, measured by the inventions he had
witnessed, the progress he had shared, covered an enormous span.

"He died like a soldier," I said to the awed children, "and he shall
have the funeral of a soldier. We will not mourn, and we will not
whisper or walk tip-toe in the presence of his body."

In this spirit we called his friends together. In place of flowers we
covered his coffin with the folds of a flag, and when his few remaining
comrades came to take a last look at him, my wife and I greeted them
cordially in ordinary voice as if they had come to spend an evening with
him and with us.

My final look at him in the casket filled my mind with love and
admiration. His snowy hair and beard, his fair skin and shapely
features, as well as a certain firm sweetness in the line of his lips
raised him to a grave dignity which made me proud of him. Representing
an era in American settlement as he did I rejoiced that nothing but the
noblest lines of his epic career were written on his face.

This is my consolation. His last days were spent in calm content with
his granddaughters to delight and comfort him. In their young lives his
spirit is going forward. They remember and love him as the serene,
white-haired veteran of many battles who taught them to revere the
banner he so passionately adored.

[Illustration: The art career which Zulime Taft abandoned (against my
wish) after our marriage, is now being taken up by her daughter
Constance who, at fourteen, signs herself C. Hamlin Garland, Artist.]

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AFTERWORD

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[Illustration: To Mary Isabel, who, as a girl of eighteen, still loves
to impersonate the majesty of princesses, I entrust the future literary
history of Neshonoc.]

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Afterword

At this point I make an end of this chronicle, the story of two families
whose wanderings and vicissitudes (as I conceive them) are typical of
thousands of other families who took part in the upbuilding of the
Middle Western States during that period which lies between the close of
the Civil War and the Great War of Nineteen Fourteen. With the ending of
the two principal life-lines wh