older years can see clearly enough to understand the
bigness of their meaning to the child who lives through them.

All of my life I had heard stories of the East, of New York and St.
Louis, where there were big houses and wonderful stores. And of
Washington, where there was a President, and a Congress, and a strange
power that could fill and empty Fort Leavenworth at will. I had heard of
the Great Lakes, and of cotton-fields, and tobacco-plantations, and
sugar-camps, and ships, and steam-cars. I had pictured these things a
thousand times in my busy imagination and had longed to see them. But
from that day they went out of my life-dreams. Henceforth I belonged to
the prairies of the West. No one but myself took account of this, nor
guessed that a life-trend had had its commencement in the small events
of one unimportant day.

II

A DAUGHTER OF CANAAN

One stone the more swings to her place
In that dread Temple of Thy worth;
It is enough that through Thy grace
I saw naught common on Thy earth.

The next morning I was wakened by the soft voice of Aunty Boone, our
cook, saying:

"You better get up! Revilly blow over at the fort long time ago. Wonder
it didn't blow your batter-cakes clear away. Mat and Beverly been up
since 'fore sunup."

Aunty Boone was the biggest woman I have ever seen. Not the tallest,
maybe--although she measured up to a height of six feet and two
inches--not the fattest, but a woman with the biggest human frame,
overlaid with steel-hard muscles. Yet she was not, in her way, clumsy or
awkward. She walked with a free stride, and her every motion showed a
powerful muscular control. Her face was jet-black, with keen shining
eyes, and glittering white teeth. In my little child-world she was the
strangest creature I had ever known. In the larger world whither the
years of my manhood have led me she holds the same place.

She had been born a princess of royal blood, heir to a queenship in her
tribe in a far-away African kingdom. In her young womanhood, so the tale
ran, the slave-hunter had found her and driven her aboard a slave-ship
bound for the American coast. He never drove another slave toward any
coast. In Virginia her first purchaser had sold her quickly to a Georgia
planter whose _heirs_ sent her on to Mississippi. Thence she soon found
her way to the Louisiana rice-fields. Nobody came to take her back to
any place she had quitted. "Safety first," is not a recent prac