God's message in the sun,
'Thou poor blind spinner, work is done."

After this came two other small books, _Bits of Travel_ and _Bits of
Talk about Home Matters_. She paid for the plates of the former. Fame
did not burst upon Helen Hunt; it came after years of work, after it
had been fully earned. The road to authorship is a hard one, and only
those should attempt it who have courage and perseverance.

Again her health failed, but not her cheerful spirits. She travelled
to Colorado, and wrote a book in praise of it. Everywhere she made
lasting friends. Her German landlady in Munich thought her the kindest
person in the world. The newsboy, the little urchin on the street
with a basket full of wares, the guides over the mountain passes, all
remembered her cheery voice and helpful words. She used to say, "She
is only half mother who does not see her own child in every child. Oh,
if the world could only stop long enough for one generation of mothers
to be made all right, what a Millennium could be begun in thirty
years!" Some one, in her childhood, called her a "stupid child" before
strangers, and she never forgot the sting of it.

In Colorado, in 1876, eleven years after the death of Major Hunt, she
married Mr. William Sharpless Jackson, a Quaker and a cultured banker.
Her home, at Colorado Springs, became an ideal one, sheltered under
the great Manitou, and looking toward the Garden of the Gods, full
of books and magazines, of dainty rugs and dainty china gathered
from many countries, and richly colored Colorado flowers. Once, when
Eastern guests were invited to luncheon, twenty-three varieties of
wildflowers, each massed in its own color, adorned the home. A friend
of hers says: "There is not an artificial flower in the house, on
embroidered table-cover or sofa cushion or tidy; indeed, Mrs. Jackson
holds that the manufacture of silken poppies and crewel sun-flowers
is a 'respectable industry,' intended only to keep idle hands out of
mischief."

Mrs. Jackson loved flowers almost as though they were children. She
writes: "I bore on this June day a sheaf of the white columbine,--one
single sheaf, one single root; but it was almost more than I could
carry. In the open spaces, I carried it on my shoulder; in the
thickets, I bore it carefully in my arms, like a baby.... There is a
part of Cheyenne Mountain which I and one other have come to call 'our
garden.' When we drive down from 'our garden,' there is seldom room