er. He is healthy enough, Heaven knows. Indeed, he impresses me as
being a bit too much that way, for he has quite lost his old-time lean
and hungry look and betrays a tendency to take on a ventral contour
unmistakably aldermanic. He may be heavy, but he is hard-muscled and
brown as an old meerschaum. There is a canker, however, somewhere
about the core of his heart. And I can see him more clearly than I
used to. He is a strong man, but he is a strong man without
earnestness. And being such, I vaguely apprehend in him some splendid
failure. For the wings that soar to success in this world are plumed
with faith and feathered with conviction.

It did not surprise me this morning when Dinky-Dunk announced that he
felt a trifle stale and suggested that the family take a holiday on
Tuesday and trek out to Dead-Horse Lake for the day. We're to hitch
Tumble-Weed and Tithonus to the old prairie-schooner--for we'll be
taking side-trails where no car could venture--and pike off for a
whole blessed day of care-free picnicking. So to-morrow Struthers and
I will be solemnly busy in the kitchen concocting suitable dishes to
be taken along in the old grub-box, and when that is over we'll patch
together something in the form of bathing-suits, for there'll be a
chance for a dip in the slough-water, and our kiddies have arrived at
an age imposing fit and proper apparel on their sadly pagan but
chastened parents.

_Wednesday the Fifth_

We have had our day at Dead-Horse Lake, but it wasn't the happy event
I had anticipated. Worldly happiness, I begin to feel, usually dies
a-borning: it makes me think of wistaria-bloom, for invariably one end
is withering away before the other end is even in flower. At any rate,
we were off early, the weather was perfect, and the sky was an
inverted tureen of lazulite blue. Dinkie drove the team part of the
way, his dad smoked beside him up on the big driving-seat, and I
raised my voice in song until Pauline Augusta fell asleep and had to
be bedded down in the wagon-straw and covered with a blanket.

Dead-Horse Lake is really a slough, dolorously named because a near-by
rancher once lost eight horses therein, the foolish animals wandering
out on ice that was too thin to hold them up.

We were hungry by the time we had hobbled out our teams and gathered
wood and made a fire. And after dinner Dinky-Dunk fell asleep and the
children and I tried to weave a willow basket, which wasn't a
success. P