r paternal grandparents. The colors of the old Homestead are growing
dim, and yet they will not permit me to deed it to others. We still own
it and shall continue to do so. It has too many memories both sweet and
sacred,--it seems that by clinging to its material forms we may still
retain its soul.

We think of it often, and when around our rude fireplace in Camp
Neshonoc in a room almost as rough as a frontier cabin, we sit and sing
the songs which are at once a tribute to our forebears and a bond of
union with the past, the shadows of the heroic past emerge. David and
Luke, Richard and Walter, and with them Susan and Lorette--all--all the
ones I loved and honored----.

My daughters are true granddaughters of the Middle Border. Constance at
fourteen, Mary Isabel at eighteen, are carrying forward, each in her
distinctive way, the traditions of the Border, with the sturdy spirit of
their forebears in the West. To them I am about to entrust the work
which I have only partially completed.

Too young at first to understand the reasons for my decision, they are
now in agreement with me that we can never again live in the Homestead.
They love every tree, every shrub on the old place. The towering elms,
the crow's nest in the maples, the wall of growing woodbine, the gaunt,
wide-spreading butternut branches,--all these are very dear to them, for
they are involved with their earliest memories, touched with the glamour
which the imagination of youth flings over the humblest scenes of human
life. To them the Fern Road, The Bubbling Spring, and the Apple Tree
Glen, scenes of many camping places, are all a part of childhood's fairy
kingdom. The thought of never again walking beneath those familiar trees
or sitting in those familiar rooms, is painful to them, and yet I am
certain that their Neshonoc, like my own, is a realm remembered, a
region to which they can return only on the wings of memory or of dream.

Happily the allurement of art, the stimulus of ambition and the promise
of love and honor already partly compensate them for their losses. Their
faces are set to the future. On them I rest my hopes. By means of them
and their like, Life weaves her endless web.

End of Project Gutenberg's A Daughter of the Middle Border, by Hamlin Garland

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAUGHTER OF THE MIDDLE BORDER ***

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