, and having partaken of his eleventh flap-jack, escaped to
the stable and the matutinal task of harnessing Calamity Kate.

_Sunday the Second_

Summer is here, in earnest, and the last few days have been hot and
windless. School is over, for the next eight weeks, and I shall have
my kiddies close beside me. Gershom, after a ten-day trip down to
Minneapolis for books and clothes, is going to come back to Casa
Grande and help Dinky-Dunk on the land, as long as the holidays last.
He thinks it will build him up a bit. He is also solemnly anxious to
study music. He feels it would round out his accomplishments, which,
he acknowledged, have threatened to become overwhelmingly scientific.
So I'm to give Gershom music lessons in exchange for his tutoring
Dinkie. They will be rather awful, I'm afraid, for Gershom has about
as much music in his honest old soul as Calamity Kate. I may not teach
him much. But all the time, I know, I will be learning a great deal
from Gershom. He informed me, last night, that he had carefully
computed that the Bible mentioned nineteen different precious stones,
one hundred and four trees or plants, six metals, thirty-five
animals, thirty-nine birds, six fishes, twenty insects, and eleven
reptiles.

As I've already said, summer is here. But it doesn't seem to mean as
much to me as it used to, for my interests have been taken away from
the land and more and more walled up about my family. Dinky-Dunk's
grain, however, has come along satisfactorily, and there is every
promise of a good crop. Yet this entirely fails to elate my husband.
Every small mischance is a sort of music-cue nowadays to start him
singing about the monotony of prairie-life. Ranching, he protests,
isn't the easy game it used to be, now that cattle can't be fattened
on the open range and now that wheat itself is so much lower in price.
One has to work for one's money, and watch every dollar. And my
Diddums keeps railing about the government doing so little for the
farmer and driving the men off the land into the cities. He has fallen
into the habit of protesting he can see nothing much in life as a
back-township hay-tosser and that all the big chances are now in the
big centers. I had been hoping that this was a new form of
spring-fever which would eventually work its way out of his system.
But I can see now that the matter is something more mental than
physical. He hasn't lost his strength, but he has lost his driving
pow