inter season passed with the passing of the blizzard. The warm spring
air was delicious and all the prairies were presently abloom with a wild
luxuriance of flowers.

Asher carried Virginia to the sunshine at the west window from which she
could see the beautiful outdoor world.

"We wouldn't leave here now if we could," she declared as she beheld all
the glory of the springtime rolling away before her eyes.

"Bank accounts bring comforts, but they do not make all of life nor
consecrate death. We have given our first-born back to the prairie. It is
sacred soil now," Asher replied.

And then they talked of many things, but mostly of Dr. Carey.

"I have known him from childhood," Virginia said. "He was my very first
sweetheart, as very first sweethearts go. He went into the war when he was
young. I didn't know much that happened after that. He was at home, I
think, when you were in that hospital where I first saw you, and--oh, yes,
Asher, dear, he was at home when your blessed letter came, the one with
the old greasy deuce of hearts and the sunflower. It was this same Bo
Peep, Carey's boy, who brought it to me up in the glen behind the big
house. Horace left Virginia just after that." Virginia closed her eyes and
lived in the past again.

"I wonder you never cared for Dr. Carey, Virgie. He is a prince among
men," Asher said, as he leaned over her chair.

"Oh, I might, if my king had not sent me that sunflower just then. It made
a new world for me."

"But I am only a common farmer, Virgie, just a king of a Kansas claim,
just a home-builder on the prairie," Asher insisted.

"Asher, if you had your choice this minute of all the things you might be,
what would you choose to be?" Virginia asked.

"Just a common farmer, just a king of a Kansas claim," Asher replied. Then
looking out toward the swell of ground beside the Grass River schoolhouse
where the one little mound of green earth marked his first-born's grave,
he added, "Just a home-builder on the prairies."

The second generation of grasshoppers tarried but briefly, then all
together took wing and flew away, no man knew, nor cared, whither. And the
Grass River settlers who had weathered the hurricane of adversity, poor,
but patient and persistent still, planted, sometimes in tears to reap in
joy, sometimes in hope to reap only in heartsick hope deferred, but failed
not to keep on planting. Other settlers came rapidly and the neighborhood
thickened and broadened