promised
Asher of old. It was a hard, hard way, but it was His way. I am glad we
walked through it all. It made the soil of Kansas sacred to us two
forevermore."

One March day spring came up the Grass River Valley with a glory all its
own, and sky and headland and low level prairie were baptized with a new
life. A month later a half-dozen prairie schooners moved out on the old
sunflower-bordered trail. Then following down the Grass River trail, the
schooner folk saw that the land, which Darley Champers had denounced, was
very good. And for Asher and Virginia Aydelot, the days of lonely solitude
were ended.

But the prairie had no gifts to bestow. It yielded slowly to its
possessors only after they had paid out time and energy and hope and
undying faith in its possibilities. The little sum of money per acre
turned over to the Government represented the very least of the cost.
There were no forests to lay waste here, nor marshes to be drained.
Instead, forests must be grown and waters conserved. What Francis Aydelot
with the Clover Valley community had struggled to overcome on the Ohio
frontier, his son, Asher, with other settlers now strove to develop in
Kansas. But these were young men, many of them graduates, either in the
North or the South, from a four years' course in the University of the
Civil War. No hardship of the plains could be worse than the things they
had already endured. These men who held the plow handles were State
builders and they knew it. Into the State must be builded schools and
churches, roads and bridges, growing timber and perpetual water
reservoirs; while fields of grain and orchard fruitage, and the product of
flock and herd must be multiplied as the sinews of life and larger
opportunity. For all these things the Kansas plains offered to Asher
Aydelot and his little company of neighbors only land below, crossed by a
grass-choked river, and sky overhead, crossed but rarely by blessed
rain-dropping clouds. And yet the less the wilderness voluntarily gave up,
the more these farmer folk were determined to win from it. Truly, they
had need not only for large endurance in the present, but for large vision
of a future victory, and they had both.

The weight of pioneer hardship, however, fell heaviest on the women of
whom Virginia Aydelot was a type. Into the crucible out of which a state
is moulded, she cast her youth and strength and beauty; her love of
luxury, her need for common comforts, her