as in John Barclay's mother. For
often she paused at her work, looking up from her wash-tub toward the
highway, when a prairie schooner sailed by, and lifting her face
skyward for an instant, as her lips moved in silence. As a man the boy
knew she was thinking of her long journey, of the tragedy that came of
it, and praying for those who passed into the West. Then she would
bend to her work again; and the washerwoman's child who took the
clothes she washed in his little wagon with the cottonwood log wheels,
across the commons into the town, was not made to feel an inferior
place in the social system until he was in his early teens. For all
the Sycamore Ridge women worked hard in those days. But there were
Sundays when the boy and his mother walked over the wide prairies
together, and she told him stories of Haverhill--of the wonderful
people who lived there, of the great college, of the beautiful women
and wise men, and best of all of his father, who was a student in the
college, and they dreamed together--mother and child--about how he
would board at Uncle Union's and work in the store for Uncle
Abner--when the boy went back to Haverhill to school when he grew up.

On these excursions the mother sometimes tried to interest him in Mr.
Beecher's sermons which she read to him, but his eyes followed the
bees and the birds and the butterflies and the shadows trailing across
the hillside; so the seed fell on stony ground. One fine fall day they
went up the ridge far above the town where the court-house stands now,
and there under a lone elm tree just above a limestone ledge, they
spread their lunch, and the mother sat on the hillside, almost hidden
by the rippling prairie grass, reading the first number of the
_Atlantic Monthly_, while the boy cleared out a spring that bubbled
from beneath a rock in the shade, and after running for a few feet
sank under a great stone and did not appear again. As the mother read,
the afternoon waned, and when she looked up, she was astonished to see
John standing beside the rock, waist deep in a hole, trying to back
down into it. His face was covered with dirt, and his clothes were wet
from the falling water of the spring that was flowing into the hole he
had opened. In a jiffy she pulled him out, and looking into the hole,
saw by the failing sunlight which shone directly into the place that
the child had uncovered the opening of a cave. But they did not
explore it, for the mother was afraid,