r new home, Mrs.
Aydelot. The house is in order and supper is ready. I congratulate you,
Asher," he said, as he turned away to take the ponies.

"You will come in and eat with us," Virginia said cordially.

"Not tonight. I must put this stock away and hurry home."

Asher opened his lips to repeat his wife's invitation, but something in
Jim's face held the words, so he merely nodded a good-by as he led his
wife into the sod cabin.

Two decades in Kansas saw hundreds of such cabins on the plains. The walls
of this one were nearly two feet thick and smoothly plastered inside with
a gypsum product, giving an ivory-yellow finish, smooth and hard as bone.
There was no floor but the bare earth into which a nail could scarcely
have been driven. The furniture was meager and plain. There was only one
picture on the wall, the sweet face of Asher's mother. A bookshelf held a
Bible with two or three other volumes, some newspapers and a magazine.
Sundry surprising little devices showed the inventive skill of the
home-builder, but it was all home-made and unpainted. It must have been
the eyes of love that made this place seem homelike to these young people
whose early environment had been so vastly different in everything!

Jim Shirley had a supper of fried ham, stewed wild plums, baked sweet
potatoes, and hot coffee, with canned peaches and some hard little
cookies. Surely the Lord meant men to be the cooks. Society started wrong
in the kitchen, for the average man prepares a better meal with less of
effort and worry than the average or super-average woman will ever do. It
was not the long ride alone, it was this appetizing food that made that
first meal in the sod mansion one that these two remembered in days of
different fortune. They remembered, too, the bunch of sunflowers that
adorned the table that night. The vase was the empty peach can wrapped
round with a piece of newspaper.

As they lingered at their meal, Asher glanced through the little west
window and saw Jim Shirley sitting by the clump of tall sunflowers not far
away watching them with the eager face of a lonely man. A big
white-throated Scotch collie lay beside him, waiting patiently for his
master to start for home.

"I am glad Jim has Pilot," Asher thought. "A dog is better than no company
at all. I wish he had a wife. Poor lonely fellow!"

Half an hour later the two came outside to the seat by the doorway. The
moon was filling the sky with its radiance. A c